“It’s leaking?” I asked.
“It is. That’s what brought on the seizure.”
“The nonconvulsive seizure,” Lucinda noted, like that made it better.
“I thought you said there was no bleed in the brain,” I said.
“No significant bleed,” he clarified.
Why was I arguing with him?
He went on, “We need to go in and resect that blood vessel.”
Huh. “By go in,” I said, “do you mean go in … to my brain?”
“Exactly,” he said, pleased I was getting it now.
I was definitely getting it now. “You’re telling me I need brain surgery?”
I looked at Lucinda again. There was no one else to look at.
Lucinda leaned toward the doctor like she had a juicy secret. “Her father is a very prominent cardiothoracic surgeon,” she said, as if that might somehow earn me a pass. Then, with all the confidence of a woman whose biggest accomplishment was being married to a very prominent cardiothoracic surgeon, she stated: “Richard Montgomery.”
Dr. Estrera took that in like a random pleasantry he was too polite to ignore. “Yes. I’ve met him on several occasions.” He turned back to me. “It’s an elective procedure, in the sense that you can schedule it at your convenience. But I’d recommend sooner rather than later.”
“How can brain surgery be an elective procedure?” I asked. Botox was an elective procedure. Tummy tucks. Tonsillectomies.
“I’ll have to refer you to scheduling,” Dr. Estrera went on, “but we can probably get it done in the next few weeks.”
The next few weeks! Uh, no. That wouldn’t work.
I mentally scanned back through the email I had just gotten yesterday about placing in the portrait competition.
Placing in this contest—landing in the top ten of two thousand entrants—meant that I had exactly six precious weeks to plan and execute the best portrait I’d ever painted in my life. From choosing a model, a color palette, and a setting, to doing the prep work and the initial sketches, to rendering the final, full painting … I was going to need every minute I had.
The competition. I’d almost forgotten. I was a finalist in the most prestigious portrait competition in the country.
I couldn’t blow it. After all those years of failure: just scraping by and working overlapping jobs and questioning my value as a human being, I had to win.
Sue had wanted to celebrate yesterday, but now the real work started. This was my shot. Possibly the only one I’d ever have.
So no, I wasn’t going to sign up for elective brain surgery right now, thanks very much.
“Um,” I said to Dr. Estrera, in a soft voice, like I didn’t want to offend him, “I just don’t have the time for brain surgery.”
How bizarre to say those words out loud.
And then my desire not to have brain surgery ran into direct conflict with my desire for Lucinda to never know anything about my life—and I hesitated so hard to explain my situation that when it all came out, it was one rapid burst: “I’m a portrait artist, and I’m a finalist in a competition that has a deadline in six weeks, and the first-place prize is ten thousand dollars, and this really is my big break that could change everything for me, and I’m going to need every single second between now and then to create the most kick-ass portrait in the history of time because I really, really need to win this thing.”
Had I just said the word ass in front of a brain surgeon?
“I understand,” Dr. Estrera said. “But please realize, there is some urgency here. Bleeding—even seepage—in the brain is never a good thing. And while ‘brain surgery’”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“sounds like a big deal, and it is, this procedure is relatively quick. You’d need only two to four days in the hospital. We can even do hair-sparing techniques to avoid shaving your head.”
Was he trying to make it sound appealing? I hadn’t even thought about anyone shaving my head.
What had started as a simple no was rapidly becoming a “hell, no.” I nodded like I was thinking about it. But what was there to think about? An old New Yorker cartoon of a person scheduling a meeting and saying, “How about never?” came to mind.
“I think,” I said then, “that I’d really like to put the surgery off for as long as humanly possible.”
Three
LUCINDA TRIED TO force me to ride home with her in her Navigator, but I called an Uber instead. No way was I accepting help from her.
Or letting her see my apartment, either.
Though “apartment” was too generous a term. More of an “efficiency.” Or more accurately, a “shack”—built as the caretaker’s quarters in the 1910s when the building was constructed as a warehouse.
Sue’s dad, Mr. Kim, had renovated the building, turning it into hipster industrial condos. But the rooftop shack was last on his list—and in his words, was still “not fit for human habitation.” Sue had talked him into leasing it to me as a studio space—promising him I’d use it “almost like a storage room.”
That was before I left my ex, Ezra—after he fully forgot my birthday, and, while I was getting stood up in the restaurant, I wound up reading a clickbait article on my phone about narcissists … realizing in a sudden flourish that I was dating one. Two long years of clues I ignored, then one very enlightening article—and then suddenly I was done.
Leaving was just a relief.
Finding a place to live on the income from my Etsy shop was going to be a challenge at best, and I’d drained almost all the cash I got from selling my car—a radical choice in Houston, which is not exactly a walking city. My hovel was fine for now. For $475 a month, I didn’t need a showplace.
But my living situation now was more like “a little princess banished to the servants’ quarters” scenario than a “living the high life in a luxury penthouse” one.
I had promised Mr. Kim I wasn’t actually living there, and he was compassionately turning a blind eye. Which is to say, one person’s “not fit for human habitation” is another person’s perfectly acceptable hovel.
The light alone was incredible.
Not to mention the views of downtown. And the bayou.
Sue thought my moving into my studio was a genius gaming-the-system move. Not a normal living situation, but cooler. She’d been pushing for a shack-warming party from the start. But as much as I wanted to embrace the spin that I was too fantastic to live like normal people, the truth was that I was just too broke.
Back home after that night in the hospital, nothing about my shack, or my life, or myself had ever felt less fantastic. It’s a disorienting thing to know there’s something wrong with you. It made everything about my life seem different. Worse. False. Like I’d been misunderstanding everything all along.
* * *
I HAD SOME portraits queued up to finish—a little girl with her cocker spaniel, a young man’s graduation photo, a sweet grandmother in an eightieth birthday party hat—and I couldn’t bill for them until I shipped them. They were a hundred bucks a pop, so that’s what I should have been doing all day after I got back from the hospital: covering this month’s rent.