It is true I cheated by falling like an apple into Melba’s lap, but Ilyana guillotined love when she fucked my best, and only friend, Ambrose. Ilyana called this recompense, and argued there was a way through this that would change us both and perhaps widen love if we could make space for the entirety of us both, not as we wanted each other to be, but as we actually were. I cited Ilyana’s cruelty not as recompense, but as revenge and she only shrugged. 

        “Melba was not a conscious decision I made to devastate you and leave you friendless. Melba happened. Melba arrived on my literal doorstep. Melba followed me. You chose Ambrose,” I explained, rather patiently I thought.

        “I did. I chose Ambrose. I invited him here. I gave him a glass of wine. I took off my robe. I stood there, in the doorway of our bedroom and I waited. He did not take his shirt off, Eddie, and I gobbled him whole. I filmed it. You can watch it. We can watch it together. You can know what actually happened and not imagine it.”

*

        Melba followed me from the gallery where she worked, cleaning, and where a miniature show of my miniature oils was hung. She followed me eighteen blocks to my studio. I was working on a canvas so huge it was laid like carpet on the floor. It was a spring day, spring so new it was unfurling like the delicate leaves newly arrived on the trees. Life was bursting open, but Ilyana claimed I was stagnating in the idea of a midlife crisis. It bored her. She said soon I would bore her. It sounded like a warning. Ambrose, my best and only friend, had a key to my studio on the second floor. He had opened a window and the music he pulled from his violin fell about me like silver ribbon curled by the sharp blade of a scissor. 

        Melba was a crooked young woman—small, chipped, pearly bottom teeth like niblets of corn clustered too close, a nose made crooked from a brutal older brother, a slightly hitched and crooked walk because her right leg was slightly shorter than her left. And yet, as crooked as she was, she spilled out into the world like too many peaches in a bushel basket. She had cleavage that wanted to pop out of shirts and nightgowns and dresses. A laugh that got caught in my hair and deeper, into my brain, so I wanted to be the inciter of that sound. She gave herself over to it, and I lived in a world where people swallowed laughter, or hid it behind their hands, or worse yet, weaponized it. Her personality was unrehearsed, Midwestern pleasing I suppose, but I would call it ripe and full, so unabashedly herself, and her dark eyes, though on the small side, so uninhibited and unguarded, they became a place I wanted to spend time exploring. There was nothing calculated about Melba.

        That spring day, I became aware of Melba because she yelled at me. “Hey. You. Tiny painting man.” I turned. She had a hand on her hip and I thought she was posing; just a bit off kilter and cool kid, but it was just her body, the way she stood at ease. She wore a gray t-shirt that read, “You Smell Like A Hangover. Leave. Me. Alone.” I wasn’t looking, but couldn’t help noticing her nipples, pressing against the tight fabric, as big as the tips of my pinkies. Her jeans were tight and cuffed, and she wore running shoes. Her socks had avocadoes in party hats. She had a flannel shirt tied at her small waist. She was only four feet away, but she continued to yell. “I saw your paintings at the place I clean the johns in. I like them. They get me, right here.” She pressed the point where her rib cage converged, just below her ample breasts. 

        Ambrose’s violin ceased playing and silence clustered like grapes between this woman and me. Her hair was amassed in a dark ponytail that was lopsided, like she had slept in it and hadn’t bothered to brush it. Ambrose stuck his head out the window two flights up. He had a life it seemed half the world was running toward—married with kids and a mortgage in the suburbs of Chicago, but he spent the majority of the week in the city playing in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. 

        “Eddie! Take the stairs two at a time. I brought you a bottle of the finest Apple Pucker. Sharon Darling’s kiss, bestowed upon me at the age of 17, was infused with and possibly inspired by several shots of this elixir. It is Tuesday and this, this bottle, is the antidote to the shit show of Tuesday.”

        Melba shielded her eyes from the sun and waved to Ambrose.

        “Eddie? Who’s your friend? Hello, friend! Will you Apple Pucker with us and round it out as an official party?”

        She removed her hand from her face and held her hands up like a referee whistling a goal and announced, as though for a theater full of onlookers or the world, “I am Melba. Melba Tulane Severson. And the answer to that question will always be yes.”

*

        Ilyana believed music was the highest form of performance art, live music particularly transformative, followed by her art which was performance art utilizing the body. Her body. In her early work “Comfort or Cruelty” strangers reached into a box to withdraw an object and determine how to utilize it on Ilyana. Ilyana stood in a white nightgown beneath a sign that read, “Do to me what you will. I embrace all responsibility and free you of all liability.” A woman pulled a hammer from the box and handed it to her, whispering, “Protect yourself as you create.” An old man withdrew a red plastic solo cup and filled it with water, giving her loving sips. A man of indeterminate age, in slick leather and accessorized by a wife in a slinky off the shoulder dress, both with expensive haircuts sprayed into place and high balls in hand, reached in together and grab bagged a small envelope of razorblades. I watched as they squatted, placing their drinks on the floor, and made fine, swift cuts beginning just above her ankles, all of the way up to her crotch. The man did not stop there. He pressed the blade to the soft skin just above her collarbone. It looked like a red thread appearing, and then the blood formed drops and then a stream that the white cotton absorbed and webbed out. The crowd pressed forward like pack animals. Ilyana called this moment an exchange of energy, her hope being she could reveal what terrorizes and transforms us—pain, suffering, mortality and her body would be the vessel that momentarily liberates us all.

*

        When I found running, initially, is that I pushed too hard. I thought pain was potentially deserved, and it proved something to endure it. I tried to find the line, the one where, if I went over it, I knew the potential for real injury was there, but if I rode the line I knew my brain would go blank and afterwards, for a while, I would feel as close to good as was possible for me. I do not want to blame Apple Pucker, or the dull and constant thrum of my anxiety, or Melba’s ease of being for why I cheated on Ilyana. I am trying to simply tell the truth. I used to call riding that line in running, “the good hurt.” It was a feeling I sometimes got listening to music or from a passage in a book or a scene in a movie—my ribcage getting stretched apart so the wonder of life could crawl inside and devour my thumping heart. I have pulled back in terms of running. That was not the good hurt. That was a relentless drive, a running from, something that became compulsive and life controlling and a way to both punish myself and avoid myself, as well as the angry hive of bottle rocket thoughts ricocheting around in my skull. Ilyana wanted to find her own line, in her performance art, and cross it again and again, and the line kept moving. 

        I was scared for her, but mostly, I was just scared. Life scared me. 

        Life did not scare Melba. She was open and curious, and it seemed to carry her. She floated on it. It stood behind her in the kitchen and wrapped its arms around her and she leaned back against it and sighed happily. She trusted it. Melba thought I talked too much about making art. Forcing art. Struggling. Melba did not think struggling or suffering were crucial to or necessary to create. Or to live.

        Melba fit into my studio as easily as the paintbrushes nestled in the coffee cans. She often handed them to me knowingly, intuiting what I needed before I needed it. She said it was a gift, really, but the problem was when people expected it or labeled it a woman’s way. She took up residence there, and I would find her napping on the queen- sized mattress she’d gotten friends to lug up two flights of stairs. She had a way of placing her hand in the middle of my back, calmly, a gesture that said, “You are trying too hard. Stop pushing. Come rest.” Then, she’d lead me into the easiness of her being. 

        Once, I asked her what she wanted from me, more harshly than I intended and it was the closest I got to wounding her. She took a breath, and I could see she was really thinking about it beyond the sting of it. She told me she liked me is all. She liked my tiny paintings. Then, she liked my studio. Then, she liked the brain and body that made the paintings. Then she kissed my face and said, “I wanted to know what this felt like,” and she put her nose in my collar bone, “and this” and she unbuckled my belt, “and I wanted to know what it would be like to know you in this way, not just look at your art on a wall.” 

        Later, when we were in the sweet pocket of near sleep, the sweat cooling in the small of our backs and the sheets pooled on the floor, she asked, “Who would you be if you understood there was absolutely nothing wrong with you? Who would you be if you stopped struggling and striving so hard?”

*

        Six months after Ambrose fucked Ilyana, he came to my studio to confess and hoped we could talk about it. His shirt was not buttoned properly, and he was by turns elated and ashamed. He argued that Ilyana was something we’d both had, and now could share, and the shared knowing could be a bridge to deeper friendship. Ambrose and I were both 45. Ilyana did not celebrate birthdays or disclose her age, and she could have been 35 or close to 60. Her hair was deeply hennaed a wild and flaming red. She was stunning. Her face was sharp in its lines—cheekbones the flat of my palm longed to cup, and full lips that broke into a smile that ate half of her face. Her eyes were green, like a glass marble the sun shot through. She amended her body based on her pieces of work. She would go lithe and lean or deeply curved. Once, she gained 120 pounds on a diet of fast food and sewed a dress from the hamburger wrappers and molded a French fry container corset.

        I told Ambrose that if he thought we had both “had” Ilyana, he was mistaken. He did not know me, or know Ilyana. She had simply constructed an experience for us and she was waiting for it all to play out as an emotional energy exchange. Maybe Ambrose understood that Ilyana longed to connect with the world, and wanted to share herself with it, and that maybe, maybe we wanted to contain her. Maybe part of love is a feeling of belonging and we don’t know how not to translate that into ownership. 

        I told Ambrose to go back to the containment of the suburbs and the safety of his wife, and leave his key. We weren’t friends.  Ambrose dissolved, even as I hardened like curing cement inside. His face was wet with tears, and snot dripped from the tip of his nose as though it were crying too. His breath hitched and shuttered as he wailed, “I can’t go back. I can’t go back there. I have no home now, Eddie. Even if I didn’t tell Sharon, I know that wilderness is out there. That expanse. That kind of feeling. I can’t go back to my old way of being. Is that living? I can’t live like that.”

        Melba sat, roundly pregnant, cross legged on the mattress in the center of my studio, one hand on her heart, the other on her Buddha belly as it rose and fell. She was 28 years old, and crying at the drama of two middle-aged men and the woman who had been a part of their combined lives for a decade. Melba, it turned out, wanted a baby, but not me, and she was returning to Dubuque, Iowa to make a life as soon as the baby was born, which was only 12 days off, it turned out. 

         “Ambrose,” she said, motioning him to her. He curled up, weeping, his head in her lap. “You have your music, Ambrose.” She smoothed his thickly curled, blonde hair and rubbed his back until he was quiet. “Is there any other home you can take anywhere? Only music, Ambrose. Go there. As much as possible. Make it and write it, even. There are all kinds of love. We get so wrapped up in just one kind. But music has space for all of it. All of you, Ambrose.”

        He stood with some dignity, and awkwardly patted the melon of her belly. “Melba, I hope you have a good life.”

        “But I already do. I do, Ambrose.” She smiled at him, and the tears made her cheeks shine. He left the key on the counter with the dignity Melba had given him, and walked out into a world that had changed the moment he fucked Ilyana. Or he had changed. Or both had changed. I have not seen him, nor do I plan to, but the music he has written and recorded often sounds like letters he is sending directly to me.

*

        Ilyana insisted on filming us dismantling the apartment we had lived in for ten years together. I did not sign the release, but it did not stop her from releasing the film five years after we stopped speaking. Ambrose composed the soundtrack to the soundless black and white film. In it, she boxes up objects in only a Cubs t-shirt. Her long, pale legs appear unbearably naked. There is a moment that breaks my heart. She is in the kitchen. She pours herself a glass of milk, and drinks it in breathless gulps. She is weeping, soundlessly, and Ambrose’s violin trembles. Then her eyes go hard, and she smashes the glass on the tile floor before walking across the shards. Her mouth forms the shape of howling pain. She refused to go to the hospital, and she tracked bloody footprints across the landscape of the apartment. I unknowingly go about boxing up my books, my back hunched and to her as she leaves evidence of her pain everywhere. I had my ear buds in. I never heard the glass shatter or her howling.

        I still find blood startling, but not as startling as I once did. I was allowed to be with Melba in labor and delivery, but only if I really agreed to be there. No camera. To experience it.  “Eddie,” she said, “This is not a performance. This is my life. This is your life too. Just let it be enough. It is actually way more than enough.” Melba still thinks life offers itself up every day for the taking. 

        I won’t write about Melba’s strength or the child being labored into the world or what passed between us, or any of it. Melba was right. Some things are private, not meant for an audience. If the child is ever curious about me, they’ll travel from Dubuque where they are richly living. I know this, just like I know Melba’s laugh has changed, deepened, added new rooms to the already mansion of it because she sometimes calls me on a Friday night when the child is sleeping and she is having a bourbon. She puts her voice in my ear and gives me a litany of simple pleasures and small joys she gathers to herself, and I suppose to me, by way of her.

*

        I was in a coffee shop, having ordered an Americano with an extra shot of espresso and room for cream, waiting. Sometimes in waiting I can find a stillness that is like the sweet spot of easy running, which is the only running I do these days. Running for pleasure. I was on my way to teach, something I do now and flounder meaningfully at. It has given my life a shape I like the contours of. And then I heard her voice, 10 years after she last spoke to me. My body turned on its own accord, a strange brew of longing and muscle memory. Ilyana has continued to push the line that keeps all eyes, in the art world particularly, on her. But here, our eyes found each other, and our gaze held and held like a breath, and maybe for the first time ever, ever, I let her see me, all of me. I stood there in a public space, in the most private moment I have yet had, more naked than I’d ever been previously although I was a fully clothed, thinking animal, my heart a drum, and what passed between us was I suppose what people refer to offhandedly as intimacy, the deepest knowing, and then my name was called, my coffee ready, and we became strangers again, and not a soul in the place was watching us.