“I’m sure it’s hard leaving the city, though,” I added. “Starting fresh and everything.”
They exchanged a glance, and John took a rather large sip of his wine.
Vera sighed. “It is, yeah. It can be hard to meet people. You’ve got weekenders who do the city and the country, and you’ve got people who were born and raised here. The in-betweeners, like us, we don’t always quite fit in. It’s a little easier if you’re right in the heart of downtown Woodstock, but even a few miles out, it’s different. When we moved here, we were the only people who didn’t grow up on this block. The neighbors didn’t really warm up to us,” she said.
Maggie flashed to mind. It wasn’t that far-fetched to imagine a local woman set in her ways finding a pair of Manhattanites self-centered. Perhaps that’s all there was to it.
I took a sip of wine, desperate to get us back on comfortable ground. “Are there any spots I should know about? Good restaurants? Bars?”
“Bars!” Vera said, laughing. “I hate to break it to you, but the bar scene around here is severely lacking. Nothing like you’d get in the city. Hardly anything’s even open late in Woodstock.”
“There’s Platform,” John offered.
“Platform?”
He nodded. “It’s pretty interesting, actually. Quaint. In an old converted train station, right downtown. Open till two and everything, unlike the other spots, which are pretty much just extensions of restaurants, so it’s kind of the catchall for people in this area.”
I made a mental note. “Do you guys go there a lot?”
Vera laughed, but for a second, it sounded almost bitter, and her eyes caught John’s.
“We used to,” he said cautiously. “But, you know, we’re getting older. Not as tapped into the scene.”
I laughed. “You guys aren’t old.”
Vera bit her lip. “I’m thirty-nine.”
“And I just turned forty,” John added.
“Oh, come on, that’s not old,” I said.
Vera nudged her husband. “Says the girl in her mid-twenties!”
“I’m twenty-eight,” I said, feeling myself blush. Perhaps Vera saw it in the haze of the lights.
“No, no,” she said. “Don’t misunderstand me. You don’t seem overly young or naive or anything, just, I don’t know . . . lovely.” She shrugged. “I know we’re not that old, but it can feel that way sometimes. Anyway, the main reason we don’t go out so much anymore is because we’re trying to watch our finances. John hasn’t Van Gogh’d yet, so his paintings only bring us so much. And we recently had to lay off our gallery assistant and cut our hours.”
“‘Van Gogh’d’?”
John grinned rakishly, turning to Vera. “I thought we agreed to stop sharing our plans for my impending demise with our dinner guests. My god, she’s only just met us.” He arched an eyebrow. “So here’s the thing: After my inclusion in the Whitney Biennial didn’t pan out exactly as I’d hoped, we started joking about how I could disappear, you know, wander off somewhere and get on the map.”
I leaned slightly forward. I knew a thing or two about wanting to disappear. To seep into nothingness, where Davis could never find me. To leave behind not even so much as a record of my presence. No failed relationship. No loss of my parents. Nothing for anyone to pity.
“I read a book about it once,” John went on, leaning back, shoulders relaxing as he took another sip of wine. “This Swedish artist faked his death to give his work more value. And, believe it or not, it worked—for like a decade or something. We started calling it Van Gogh-ing. He wasn’t popular in life, but after his death—you get the idea. Though I have no interest in cutting my ear off.”
“Well, it would certainly make my life a lot easier,” Vera said, beaming. “I’d have a star in my portfolio.”
John squeezed her knee. “That Porsche isn’t going to buy itself, right, V?”
She turned to me with a devilish smirk. “We love art, but we love money more.”
I laughed, her words refreshing. An honest, callous love of money, not the WASPy bullshit that forces us to pretend like it doesn’t make the world go round.
Mom would cringe. Like a slap across the face, the weight of missing my mother. I imagined her subtle indignation: Your new neighbors said what? Out loud?
Vera seemed to pick up on my change in demeanor. “You know we’re just joking, right?”
“I’m not dying anytime soon,” John added. “Porsche or no Porsche.”
“Of course,” I said. And then, humoring them, “If I were an artist, I might Van Gogh, too!”
As we made our way through the wine, they explained how they first met, nearly fifteen years ago, when John was in art school in the city and Vera was an assistant at a gallery. It was as close as possible to love at first sight, even though they didn’t believe in that, not really.
I filled in the pieces of my history, too.
Vera asked about college, and I told them I’d majored in journalism and minored in computer science at the University of Washington. I neglected to mention the video, the one blasted across every social network: me drunk and dancing, taking off my top in a dive bar, giving a lap dance to anyone who wanted one, letting one guy suck on my nipples for an electric-blue kamikaze shot. In my experience, pity or misplaced anger was worse than any ding to my reputation; plus, in the digital age, I figured we all had less-than-stellar moments living somewhere in the cloud.
And then, reeling from the loss of my parents, New York. Moving here to be a journalist, unaware that “journalism” would turn into something else between the time I set out to do it and now—writing indulgent personal essays and asinine listicles it was hard to have the heart for but that paid the bills anyway, everything from “What I Learned from Dating Nerds in My Early Twenties” to “16 Apps to Get Your Personal Finances in Order.” I explained how I wondered sometimes if I would one day run out of topics to mine for a few hundred bucks, if I should just write a book already, like I’d always imagined I would . . .
Our faces softened as the solar string lights waned, and maybe there was nothing better in the entire world than sitting outside in the Catskills in the middle of September with new friends and a good bottle of wine.
“It’s amazing,” Vera said as she pulled a little black vaporizer out of the pocket of her skirt. “After things with . . . well, with Rachel”—her eyes, again, flashed to John—“I was so eager to meet someone new, someone like-minded, you know. I joined this god-awful book club in Woodstock. I even signed up for Meetup. It was horrible. But now you’re here. An awesome Brooklyn woman—plop—right next to me. Do you mind?” she asked, clicking the vaporizer to life.