The Muse's Undoing

“Have I answered all of them?”

“In your way, I guess.”

“Good, then—shall we?”

He squints at me. The way the streetlight hits his face is striking. Young Brando. Except Matthew has a chin cleft, which, in my opinion, makes him better looking than the old movie star. Tonight, in the shadows, the dent in his chin looks like a black hole in a way I want to touch and probe. Futz with.

We keep walking.

“Anything interesting happen to you today?” I ask.

“I think I’m about a day’s worth of work on my project away from being able to have you over to the loft,” he tells me.

“You’re done with the sculpture?”

“Almost.”

“That’s great. I’m excited. Also to see the loft finally.”

“You’ll either love it or hate it.”

“Why would I hate it?” I ask.

“Given where you live.” He gestures at the apartment buildings as we pass them with their white stone facades and wrought iron doors, all more or less the same.

“It was either this or Connecticut,” I tell him. “And Nicole didn’t want to leave her friends with me being gone so much.”

She got pregnant after we’d been seeing each other for about four months. It was an easy decision at the time to marry her and settle down. I was thirty-three, she was thirty-five. What else were we gonna do? I’d had a family in mind when I asked her out in the first place.

My only regret is that we couldn’t make it work for Vaughn because we rushed into everything without considering how stressful my time away would be on a relationship, much less a new mom.

I often wonder if Nicole and I would have been better off as friends.

“Does she still hang out with Ravenna or not?”

“I don’t know. Like I said—Raven and I don’t talk much.”

“Still, you don’t think all this is gonna get back to Nicole?”

I sigh. “I don’t know. Wait—do you know something I don’t?”

“I really can’t say,” he says.

I nudge my shoulder into his. “What good is having a brother who’s a doorman if I can’t ask for the scoop?”

“She just used to go in and out a lot more at night. I haven’t seen her as often.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning…she’s not going out as much.”

“Can you say that with a high degree of certainty?” I ask. Matthew’s attention to detail applies strictly to his artwork. Not his memory. I saw the most recent sketch he drew of me, and it was…somewhat inaccurate.

“I would say an average degree of certainty.”

“This is it,” I say gesturing at Gramercy Place, the building where Gibson lives and works and kinks.

“This building?” he asks.