13. Jeremy

Even though Jeremy did the vast majority of his professional work on a computer or tablet these days, there was something about the tactile nature of charcoal that nothing could replace. Since lockdown had ended, Jeremy had been working harder and harder to remember the original reasons he had pursued art. He tried pottery, painting, metalwork, watercolor, and photography— all mediums he had worked in during college and his MFA— and he had enjoyed them all, but it was the figure drawing class that met at the community arts center he kept coming back to.

Unsurprisingly late and carrying a large newspaper pad under his arm and a small case for his charcoals, he quietly settled into his usual spot as the instructor was introducing their models and focus for the session. Next to him, an Asian woman with a blackwork sleeve of cherry blossoms, chrysanthemums, and tigers grinned at him in greeting. Jeremy had a routine habit of leaving for events around the time that they were due to begin, so Yuna had begun putting her bag on a stool next to her so Jeremy would be able to sit there. Yuna, a friend that none of his other friends knew, was a bit of a life raft at times. Plus, it was better than being stuck in the back of the class with the boomers who had moved to Vanberg in the ’60s and still thought that everything could be bought and sold for the approximate cost of a small joint.

When he had first met Yuna, they had been seated next to each other in one of the first sessions Jeremy attended and had struck up polite conversation. During the first break, Yuna had commented on what Jeremy had drawn— the life model in a contrapposto pose to echo a classic statue— then showed her own work. Yuna had drawn their life model in with fine lines and pastel colors.

“It’s ukiyo-e,” Yuna had said. “It translates to pictures of the floating world in Japanese.” Following class, Jeremy had asked Yuna out to tea, where she explained her desire to take back the style of Japanese woodblock printing from the way it had been used by western artists in the 1800s. Jeremy, feeling like he could use his art history degree for the first time ever, had immediately felt a friendship connection. Since then, the two had attended an unlikely series of exhibition openings in stuffy, stark white halls and cramped, sweaty dive bars, making fun of each of them in their own ways. Yuna was working as a tattoo apprentice and understood the struggles and successes of freelance art.

They gave each other friendly nods, then Jeremy took a deep breath and closed his eyes, thinking about what his mother used to look like when she sat down at her watercolor easel. She would take a deep breath and stretch her arms out and wiggle her fingers. She told Jeremy when he was younger that she took a moment to see the finished piece in her mind’s eye and she tried to send that image to her fingers to be easier to transfer to the paper.

Maybe it was sitting at an easel. Maybe it was the white noise of pencils and charcoal scratching across papers or the quiet jazz put on by the master teacher, with just the occasional murmur of their voice as they mingled through the easels, offering critique and commentary on the art. Whatever it was, something about figure drawing was calming and centering to Jeremy. He found he could lose himself in the snippets of the body he focused on. Some days, it was a detailed study of the way the elbow bent. Others, the way to highlight the definition of muscle along the calf. Today, he was particularly focused on how to capture the detail of the model’s hair as she moved, the beads at the end of her long, thin braids providing a comforting noise when she switched poses that reminded Jeremy of a rainstick used by his preschool teacher.

It was moments like this that Jeremy was at his most reflective. He loved the push of his body in spin classes, but when his charcoal was in hand and that limb was perfectly in communication with his mind, he felt most centered. Emmy, surprisingly, when he had told her about his love of sketching, had suggested it was because he was reminded that life is a process that you can always adjust and tweak, just like a sketch. He liked the reminder that things could be messy and fragmented but still contain beauty. He had just figured out the particular flick of the charcoal he needed to represent the baby hairs around the woman’s forehead when the master artist rang a tiny bell, which meant a stretch break.

A younger Jeremy would have sketched straight through. Thirty-four-year-old Jeremy knew that his carpal tunnels were only good for so long if he didn’t engage in regular stretches. As he was stretching, he caught a glimpse of Yuna’s work and saw that she had chosen to use a piece of black newsprint and white chalk.

“What’s that?”

“Flash for white tattoos. I want to explore ways of tattooing on different hues of skin, and white tattoos look stunning on skin that’s her tone,” Yuna indicated to the model.

“Yuna,” Jeremy scolded, “you cannot keep sleeping with our figure models.”

She snorted. “It was, like, three times.” Jeremy kept looking at her, eyebrows raised. “Okay three times last year, but you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your princess.” She playfully pushed his arm. “What about you? How’s the Jeremy Rinci frog-and-prince situation?”

“Not my priority,” he said, perhaps a bit too defensively. “My consulting business is actually consulting.” She gave a small round of applause. “Well, I have my first client right now, so most of my off time is working on that exhibit. I’m out in the national forest at least once a week, which means I’m playing catch-up all weekend.”

“Well, at least you don’t have to worry about getting into trouble with mixing business and pleasure,” Yuna said, laughing to hide her bitterness. Shortly after she had met Jeremy, she had lost her first tattoo apprenticeship with her uncle after she slept with one of her clients. She’d been working to earn back the trust of her family’s tattoo business ever since and mostly worked as a guest artist in shops around Colorado and the mountain West. “I can’t imagine there are many rangers and mountain men who bat for your team.” Davis’s face while he was explaining the nuance of lichen versus mosses flashed into Jeremy’s mind.

“Yeah, I think it’s a pretty straight place,” Jeremy replied. Oddly, he realized he hadn’t even opened an app since he started working on the project for the national forest. He supposed it was because he spent his free evenings with his friends or trying to fit in a bit of extra time on that project. Yes, that had to be it.

“Tea?” Yuna asked when class was over.

“Of course.” Yuna biked and Jeremy drove to Dragon Tea Salon, a hidden treasure that Jeremy had discovered in Vanberg during his first month living here, desperate to find some place that wasn’t his home office or mess of a house to exist. A traditional Japanese Chashitsu, dating back to 1700, it had been dismantled piece by piece from a village in Japan and carefully reassembled on a flat piece of land next to Vatten Creek in the early 1990s when the two small towns had become sister cities. When Jeremy had asked Emmy about it, he had been treated to a small lesson on Vanberg’s attempts to become a mountainous Silicon Valley and how the city council’s overtures to Japan had less to do with international goodwill and more to do with luring Japanese companies to locate their headquarters in the university town. Regardless of how the building had come to be, it was another reason Jeremy couldn’t imagine leaving Vanberg. Nothing like this existed in any other city in the United States. As Yuna biked up on her customized fixed gear, pulling off her helmet, Jeremy thought about how any other city wouldn’t have a Yuna either.

Wouldn’t have an Emmy or a Phoebe. Wouldn’t have a bar run by Declan. Wouldn’t have a Foster. Wouldn’t have a Ryan either.

The two ordered their tea and grabbed two floor cushions and settled into a table near a large window with a traditional wooden screen cutting some of the harshness of the early afternoon sun. They made small talk until their tea arrived, poured with the utmost care and confidence. Jeremy watched the small sachet in his cup open, leaves and flowers blossoming. “How did you know you loved tattooing?” he asked Yuna.

A dry laugh was her response. “Because even when I hate it, I can’t imagine doing anything else. It’s a way for me to do art that feels relevant. An honor that things I draw, from my culture, end up on people’s skin. It’s that trust.” She took a sip of her own tea, the ginger wafting over to Jeremy as she did so. “Why? Are you considering leaving exhibit design?”

“No. God, not at all. I have no transferable skills. No one wants a salesman who’s more concerned with font selection than the product he’s selling.” He looked down at his cup again, where two of the leaves had become tangled together, dancing in circles in the currents created by the tea. “I have just been feeling a bit stuck, but I can’t imagine doing anything else.” He finally committed and took a sip of his tea. “I guess that’s why I started consulting. Like maybe this will shake me up. I’m already learning new things.”

“Oh?” Yuna raised an eyebrow, and then Jeremy was telling her about the project out in the forest, about the ideas and how he had been so wrong, and then how he and Davis had stumbled upon an idea that energized them both. Jeremy had left the forest after their previous visit feeling like he was on the right track, but he had worried that he’d somehow offended Davis. There was no reason in particular. Just a sense that a current in the air had shifted slightly, and Jeremy wasn’t sure what it meant.

That fear had been assuaged early the next morning when he received a voice memo from Davis, his voice still a bit scratchy with sleep. Which Jeremy didn’t notice or have any reaction to at all. The voice memo had thanked Jeremy for listening to Davis’s “rambles” and for adding some new ideas. Jeremy wondered why Davis always felt that he had to thank Jeremy for listening, when anyone who had half a brain would have liked to listen to Davis talk about how national forests often surrounded national parks and were hidden treasures that most tourists didn’t spend time in. After that meeting and Davis’s message, it was like the floodgates had been opened. Davis had been sending him articles and photographs, the shared Pinterest board growing by dozens of photographs by the day. Podcast episodes, too, enough that Jeremy could listen to all of them for a week straight and probably not repeat one.

“Sounds like you’re well on your way to finding spark again,” she said after Jeremy finished. “How is the client?” It took Jeremy a few moments to realize that the client was Davis. He didn’t feel like other clients he had worked with years ago, pretentious artists in Boulder or stuffy old men who ran historical societies in small towns in eastern Colorado. Davis was real and genuine and just a pure soul.

“He, uh, I mean the national forest is a great client.”

“He?” Yuna said, catching Jeremy’s verbal misstep.

“Yeah, a guy named Davis. The primary contact at the forest. He’s an educational ranger, which makes sense, because he’s taught me a lot about—”

“So much for the forest being a straight place, eh?” Yuna interrupted. Jeremy sipped his tea. “Is this Davis cute?”

“I plead the fifth,” Jeremy replied delicately.

“Oh, you’re in danger,” she said, chuckling. “Trust me, I know better than anyone how that goes.”

“Yuna, I say this with all the love in my heart, but you’re wrong. First off, it’s work—”

“Didn’t two of your coworkers just move in together?” she interjected.

“Well, yes, but that’s not the point. Davis is, well, Davis. He’s a forest ranger. Out there. And he’s not like me. We established that,” Jeremy said, hoping Yuna got the point. Jeremy had long passed the point where he tried to hit on men of an undetermined sexuality. He was himself, which was openly gay and proud of it, and that made it apparent to anyone where his preferences lay. If Davis had been looking, Jeremy would have known it.

He conveniently ignored the moment their eyes had met across a sketchpad, or the way Davis had blushed when Jeremy complimented his wood-burned sign.

“Your phone is buzzing,” Yuna said, shaking Jeremy out of his thoughts.

He looked down at his phone and saw a short email from Davis, asking if they could do the next work session down in Vanberg. Without thinking, he smiled.

“A hot date? New match?”

“It’s the exhibit,” Jeremy said. “Give me a few seconds to send a response.” The pointed exhale Yuna answered with communicated her thoughts on the matter.

And because the universe had an absolutely pathological sense of irony, when Jeremy swiped to unlock his phone, the photo widget on his home screen showed him a photograph of his family on NYU’s graduation day, the violet commencement gown a contrast with his pale skin. He was skinnier then, a lanky undergrad who spent late nights in the studio finishing his final portfolio for his minor in studio art and early mornings in the library working on his thesis in art history. But his smile was bigger than anything he’d seen in photographs in a long time, because he was sandwiched between his parents. His mom wore a long, felted tunic, probably made by one of the fiber artists she was friends with. Her gray hair was pulled back in her usual low ponytail, the unruly curls that Jeremy inherited doing their best to escape from the clip in the New York spring breeze. His father had insisted on wearing the NYU Dad T-shirt that Jeremy had bought him freshman year, tucked into a pair of khakis held up with a braided leather belt. It wasn’t in the photograph, but Jeremy was sure he was wearing bright red Chuck Taylors. They were something that, according to his mother, he had found in graduate school decided he never needed another type of shoe.

Jeremy’s smile faltered, his heart aching in a way that made the grief feel fresh. He took his photo album out at specific times— their birthdays, their anniversary, the dates of their passings— and he was able to contain his grief on those days. To see it here, after his heart had skipped a beat talking about Davis, was a cruel reminder of how dangerous love could be.

“You good, Jer?” Yuna asked softly.

“Just fine,” he said. “Too many emails.” And if Yuna noticed his eyes watering or the way he wasn’t typing on his phone, she was a good enough friend to not mention it.