David Charles had written a story about two children who find a baby giraffe who’s lost and try to help it find its way home, only the giraffe would rather hang around with the children and play kickball. He liked the children I drew just fine, but the giraffe was something else — too tall, too cute, too menacing, too leggy, wrong face. Had I ever even seen a giraffe?
“Draw me a goddamned giraffe,” he said one day. “Is that so hard? You’re supposed to be an artist.”
“I’m trying!” I said.
“Oh, god, Alice,” he said. “This isn’t supposed to be hard! Do your job!”
“I am doing my job,” I snapped. “And you don’t like it.”
And Max was getting frustrated; we were getting ever closer to the deadline.
“You should be making more progress,” he would say.
“This isn’t my fault,” David said. “Lissy’s the one who can’t draw a fucking giraffe.”
There were problems.
It was still cold outside, but my new apartment was enough to make the Sahara seem like a temperate climate. The thermostat didn’t believe in a happy medium, it believed in all or nothing. So we either had the temperature of an August day in Florida, or we had all the cold from outside. I was already starting to get used to what I figured was going to be a permanent headache.
I’d moved in with Jonah almost three weeks before, in a small apartment downtown paid for by the advance on my illustrating gig. Neither of us was handling it very well. I secretly felt we weren’t ready to live together, but I didn’t want to live with my dad anymore and Jonah’s roommates were kicking him out.
I didn’t want to live with my dad because he’d just gotten engaged to a girlfriend I didn’t even know he had. In fact, the first time I met her was when he took both of us out to dinner and told me that he was marrying this woman I’d just met half an hour before. She was respectable enough — about ten years younger than he was, not too slutty, didn’t laugh charmingly at everything he said. But I was stressed out, and it was a big brick to drop on me, and I didn’t want to live with them in one house, even if I was living in the basement. He announced she was moving in; I announced I was moving out. And meanwhile, Jonah’s roommates decided to get married in a quickie wedding in Atlantic City and decided they wanted their own place.
Jonah and I decided to find our own place.
We found a small one-bedroom just off the heart of downtown. We would never have been able to afford it if I hadn’t had that advance, but I did and so we took it. I moved all of my art supplies in; he moved all of his computer supplies in. And there was chaos.
Labels: january brings few faces