The message arrives on a Tuesday.
I know it is Tuesday because the studio has a rhythm that is tied to the days of the week — Mondays are critique days, when the third-years gather in the main studio and Professor Endo moves between easels asking questions I am never prepared to answer. Tuesdays are working days, which means silence, which means the sound of brushes on canvas and the occasional conversation dropped to a murmur and the smell of turpentine building in the closed room like a weather system forming. Tuesdays are also the day I have been going to the campus library in the late afternoon to sit with a score and a pencil and pretend I am working on the composition I am supposed to be writing for Kanade — the piece that is supposed to be a gift, a thing of beauty, a way of saying with sound what I cannot say with words — and which I have been failing to write for three weeks because the sound I want to make is not the sound I know how to make and the thing I want to say is not the thing music was designed to say.
The message arrives at four seventeen in the afternoon. I know the time because I look at the phone when it vibrates against the desk — a small, precise vibration, the phone telling me someone has reached out — and the time is displayed in the upper corner of the screen and I read it the way I read everything when I am waiting: with more attention than the thing deserves and also exactly the attention it deserves, which is all of my attention, which is the whole of me, because when Hasumi's name appears on my phone the whole of me turns toward it.
Next week is my graduation show preview. Come.
This is the message. This is all it says. Seven words — no greeting, no context, no explanation of why he is texting me, why he wants me to come, why he has decided that the preview of the most important exhibition of his academic career is a thing he wants me to attend. Seven words that are also a door, an opening, a thing that places me inside something I have not been invited into before and have been circling from the outside for three weeks, visiting his studio twice, painting his hands once, tearing the painting apart the same night, carrying the torn pieces in a drawer in my room, and wondering, in the hours when I am supposed to be working, what it would mean to paint him properly, what it would cost, what the painting would say that I am not prepared to hear.
I read the message twice. I read it a third time. I set the phone on the desk, face down, the way I set things down when I need to not look at them, which has been my primary strategy for the past three weeks and is not working as well as I would like.
The studio is quiet. Shiraishi is at her easel near the window, working on the landscape that is not quite a landscape, the one with the dark red smear in the lower left corner that I have been not asking about and that she has been not explaining. She has been quieter than usual today — not the usual bright quality she usually performs but something more contained, more observed, a quality of attention she is directing at the canvas rather than at me, which I read as relief, which I read as the studio having returned to its normal state after the corridor conversation, after the admission and the counter-admission, after the moment in the hallway when she told me she knew before I did and I did not know what to do with the knowing.
I pick up the phone. I type: I'll be there.
I send it before I can reconsider. The sending is a decision and also not a decision — it is the continuation of the thing that started when I walked into his studio three weeks ago and did not leave when I should have, when I stood in the doorway and watched him work and could not look away, when the cold of his fingers and the precision of his hands and the quality of his attention when he looked at me became the thing I have been carrying, which is also the thing I have been painting, which is also the thing I have been not saying.
The response comes two minutes later. I know it is two minutes because I have been watching the phone, which is face up now, which is a change from face down, which is a change I did not decide to make and which means something about the nature of my waiting, which is the nature of someone who is waiting for a specific message from a specific person and who cannot pretend otherwise.
Good.
This is the response. One word. Seven letters. The same economy of language that he uses in speech, the same precision, the same sense that every word is doing exactly what it is meant to do and not one thing more. Good. Not: I'm glad you're coming. Not: I hope you can make it. Not a single additional word that would give the message emotional colour, that would make it into something other than a fact. Good. The word is the word of someone who has said what they needed to say and is finished.
I put the phone in my pocket.
The motion is small — a movement of my hand, the phone sliding into the front pocket of my jeans, the pocket that is close to my body, the pocket that means I will feel the weight of it, the presence of it, for the rest of the day. I put the phone in my pocket and I do not take it out and I do not check for another message and I do not reread the ones I have received and I do not think about what the word good means in the context of Hasumi saying it to me, which is a thing I will think about later, tonight, in the dormitory room, in the space between lying down and sleeping, which is the space where the things I am not thinking about during the day arrive without being invited.
The studio continues. Shiraishi paints. The clock moves. The light outside the window begins the slow transition from afternoon to early evening, the quality of the sun's angle changing, the shadows lengthening on the floor, the dust motes visible in the late beam that cuts through the high window on the north side of the room. I stand at my easel. I do not paint. I think about the preview, about what it means to walk into a gallery and look at Hasumi's work in the context of a formal exhibition rather than a private studio, about what it means that he wants me to see it, about what it means that he texted rather than told me in person, about what it means that he said good and nothing else.
I think about Kanade.
This is where the thought goes, inevitably, the thought that has been following me for three weeks, the thought that is the subject of the tenth version and the reason the tenth version is covered with a cloth, the thought that is the thing underneath the thing I am doing, the thing I have been not naming. I think about Kanade and I think: should I tell him?
Should I tell him I am going to Hasumi's preview? Should I tell him I have been to the printmaking studio? Should I tell him the things I have been not telling him, the visits, the hands, the torn canvas, the admission that is building in my chest and has been building for three weeks and for longer than three weeks and for the eight years that are the substance of the distance I have been living in?
The answer is no. The answer has been no every day for three weeks. The answer is no because the telling would require the explanation and the explanation would require the naming and the naming is the thing I am not prepared to do and the not-prepared-ness is not a temporary condition but a permanent one, or a condition that has lasted so long that it has become permanent, or a condition that I am treating as permanent because the alternative — the admitting, the naming, the conversation — is the thing I have been avoiding since I was thirteen years old and felt something for the first time and did not have language for it and have still not found the language for it and am now, at twenty-one, standing in a studio with a phone in my pocket and a cloth over a canvas and a preview invitation that is also, without my permission, a door opening onto something I have not decided to enter.
I do not tell Kanade.
I will not tell Kanade. I am going to the preview. I will walk into the gallery. I will look at Hasumi's work. I will be seen looking at Hasumi's work, because Hasumi will be there and people who show their work are always watching who comes to look at it, which is a form of attention I have been on the receiving end of and which I am about to be on the receiving end of again, in a different context, in a formal context, in the context of a room full of people and a body of work and the question that will be visible on my face, if I let it be visible, which I will not let it be, which is the thing I am best at and which is also, Hasumi told me in the studio, the thing that is wrong with my work.
The hours pass. The studio empties. Shiraishi finishes her session and packs her bag and leaves with a small nod in my direction — the minimal acknowledgment, the door held open by a glance — and then the room is empty and I am alone with the easel and the cloth and the phone in my pocket.
I lift the cloth. I look at Kanade's face.
The tenth version. The amber eyes I could not get right. The face of someone I have been in love with for eight years and have been unable to paint because the painting would require the admission and the admission would require the words and the words have not arrived and may never arrive and in the meantime there is this: the canvas, the paint, the technically correct image of the person I love, which is not a painting of him but a painting of the distance between us, which is what all my paintings are, which is what I have been learning to see only in the past few weeks, in this studio, with this cloth, with this phone, with this life I have been building around the central absence of the thing I cannot say.
I cover the canvas. I put on my jacket. I leave the studio.
The corridor is empty. The stairwell echoes with my footsteps. Outside, the campus is settling into the early evening — the last light of the day, the quality of April dusk, the cherry blossoms visible against the grey-blue sky, still there, still blooming, still holding on for another week or two before the wind takes them and the season changes and the spring that has contained all of this — the visits, the paintings, the admissions, the silence — becomes the summer and the summer is what comes next and I do not know what the summer will bring.
I walk to the cafeteria.
I do not know why I am going to the cafeteria. I have not been going to the cafeteria on Tuesdays. Kanade has composition on Tuesdays at two, which means he is in the music building until four or five, which means he is not in the cafeteria at six, which is the time I am arriving, which means I will not see him, which is what I should want, because seeing him is complicated now in a way it was not complicated three weeks ago, before Hasumi's studio, before the hands, before the torn canvas, before the text message that said good and nothing else.
The cafeteria is half-full. Students eating dinner, catching up on the day, the particular energy of early evening when the work is done and the meals are unhurried and the conversations have the quality of people who are tired and fed and not yet ready to go home. I get a tray. I move through the line. I choose rice and miso and something I do not look at because I am not hungry and the choosing is mechanical, the body requiring fuel it does not want.
I look up.
Kanade is at a table across the room. He has a tray. He is eating. He is not supposed to be here — he is supposed to be in the music building, in composition, in the room where he has been quietly failing for two years while everyone around him remains technically impressed by his technical goodness. But he is here. He is here and he is looking at me and the looking is across the room, which means I am visible to him and he is visible to me and the distance between us is the length of the cafeteria and also the eight years and also the thing I have been not saying.
He does not wave. He does not nod. He looks. I look. For a moment — three seconds, four, the length of time it takes to really see someone across a room full of other people — we are looking at each other and neither of us is saying anything and the nothing is the loudest thing I have ever heard.
I put the phone in my pocket.
The motion is small. The phone in my pocket. I have been putting the phone in my pocket all day — the small habitual motion, the thing you do with a phone when you are not using it. But the phone is not in my hand. The phone is in my pocket because I put it there after reading Hasumi's message, after typing I'll be there, after the two minutes and the good and the silence that followed. The phone is in my pocket and it has been in my pocket for hours and I am putting it there again now, in front of Kanade, across the cafeteria, the motion that says: nothing is happening, nothing is new, this is just a phone in a pocket, this is just a person standing with a tray, this is just the evening and the cafeteria and the two of us.
I do not go to his table. I find a seat at a different table, one that is not across from him but is also not far — the same room, the same light, the same evening, the same cherry blossoms visible through the window on the far side of the room, the blossoms that are still blooming, still thin, still holding on.
I eat. I do not taste the food. I do not look at Kanade. I do not go to his table. I eat the rice and the miso and the something I did not look at, which turns out to be a kind of braised pork that is too salty and which I eat anyway because the eating is the thing to do with the time and the time is the thing I am spending to avoid doing the other thing, which is the going, the sitting, the saying, the admission that is building in my chest and has been building for three weeks and for eight years and for the fourteen years I have known him and which is not ready to be said and may never be ready to be said and in the meantime there is this: the cafeteria, the tray, the phone in my pocket, the blossoms outside the window, the evening light the colour of old gold.
I look up again.
Kanade is looking at me.
He is not pretending he is not looking. He has finished eating — the tray is in front of him, pushed to the centre of the table, the universal gesture of completion — and he is sitting with his hands loose in his lap and he is looking at me across the room and the look is the look I know from fourteen years of being looked at by him, which is the look of someone who is paying attention, who is taking in the whole of what is in front of them, who is seeing without pretending to see something else.
He does not smile. I do not smile. We are not waving. We are not nodding. We are not doing any of the things that people do when they see each other in a cafeteria and want to communicate that they have seen each other. We are looking at each other and the looking is the communication and the communication is: I see that something is happening. I see that you are not telling me. I see that you have a phone in your pocket and a message you are not sharing and a reason you are not giving. I see all of this and I am not asking because I told you: you don't need to give me a reason. And the not-asking is the kindness and also the wound and also the proof that the thing I have been not saying has been heard anyway, by the person who has been listening to me for fourteen years, the person who knows the silences as well as the words, the person who is looking at me now across a room full of people and who will keep looking until I turn away or until one of us leaves or until the cafeteria closes and the evening ends and the distance remains what it has always been: the size of a thing I cannot say and will not paint and am only now beginning to admit that I have been carrying.
I turn away.
I eat the pork. It is too salty. I eat it anyway. The cafeteria empties around me. The light outside the window fades from gold to grey to the particular blue of April dusk, the hour when the day is ending and the night has not yet begun and the cherry blossoms are barely visible, ghostly, holding their shape in the last of the light.
I do not look at Kanade again. I finish eating. I take my tray to the return. I walk out of the cafeteria.
The campus is dark. The cherry blossoms are invisible now — present, still there, but not visible, gone into the night the way all things go into the night, which is the way the spring will go, and the summer will come, and the year will move, and what is happening now will continue to happen or will stop happening and either way the year will end and the painting will be made or it will not be made and the distance between Kanade and me and between me and Hasumi and between all of us and the truth of what we want is the thing that is waiting to be named and that I have been naming in the only language I know, which is paint, which is canvas, which is the slow, careful, technically accomplished construction of the thing I cannot say.
I walk back to the dormitory. I close the door. I sit on the bed.
The drawer in the desk is where I left it — the drawer with the two pieces of the torn canvas, Hasumi's hand and Kanade's hand, the torn seam between them, the space that is the painting. I do not open the drawer. I lie down. I close my eyes.
I see the cafeteria. The gold light. The cherry blossoms through the window. Kanade at the table across the room, looking at me, not asking, waiting, the way he has been waiting for eight years, the way I have been waiting without knowing I was waiting, the way we have been waiting for the thing that has already started and that neither of us is ready to name.
The phone is in my pocket. The message is on the screen. The preview is next week.
The year is beginning.
The phone buzzed once. Kanade, asking: I will be at the preview too. Should I come? I read the message twice. I did not reply. The screen went dark.
