My wife and I were lounging beneath a cabana.
“Let’s go in the water,” she said.
Two older couples bobbed in the shallow end of the hotel pool.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Am I supposed to talk to those people? Or do I pretend they don’t exist?”
“You can do whatever you want,” my wife replied.
A pair of preteen siblings were having a splash fight. They giggled and squealed.
“And what if those kids try to play with me?” I asked. “How do I get out of that?”
“Oh my God,” my wife said. “You have to relax!”
I assessed the other people on lounge chairs: A fit couple with tattooed legs, reading thick books. The preteens’ parents, sliding their fingers across iPads. What if, once I got into the pool, all of them did too?
“Maybe I should have a drink,” I said to my wife.
It was our third wedding anniversary. We’d come to the Hotel Roanoke in Roanoke, Virginia, to relive a fun night we’d spent there five years earlier, but my sobriety was making that difficult. I needed alcohol to erase my social anxiety.
“I won’t drink again after today,” I said. “I just want to loosen up a little. It’ll be like old times.”
My wife knew that if she pushed back, I’d turn gloomy and offended. And I’d probably drink anyway. There was nothing she could do. I ordered two cocktails with funny names. The buzz muffled my worries. I swam freely.
Later my wife and I went downtown for dinner. We held hands, played footsie, kissed, and laughed. I drank until my face turned red, my stomach sloshed, and I began to sweat profusely. Cautionary memories zapped me: Cracking a beer after breakfast. Slurring words on phone calls with Mom. Waking up surrounded by paramedics.
By 9 PM I was on the toilet in our hotel room, diarrhea exploding out of my backside. “This is what you get,” I hissed at myself. If one thing has made my drinking problem more manageable in the second half of my thirties, it’s this: my stomach has grown weak. Lately even a whiff of booze makes my insides rumble. It’s a strange kind of blessing.
By midnight I had a hangover and lay in bed whining, sighing, groaning, tossing, turning, and clutching my splitting head.
“Stop moving,” my wife pleaded.
I tried to snuggle her, but I was wriggling too much.
“Leave me alone!” she said. “I’m sleeping!”
Around 3:30 AM I did us both a favor. I got dressed and left the room.
The Hotel Roanoke is old and ornate: Auburn wood. Crystal chandeliers. Dark carpets. Huge mirrors. At the edge of the lobby, I paused. An elderly man was working the reception desk. Should I nod to him? Should I sidle up to his desk and say, “I can’t sleep”? Would that lead to a beautiful conversation? Or would he just look at me like I’m an asshole? I walked briskly past the desk, head down. Why did I long to connect with people while also fearing basic social exchanges? Why, now that I was alone, did I wish I’d made friends with the people at the pool that afternoon? Why couldn’t this desire for human contact lead to a rich social life? It had something to do with the massive gap between my inner life and my outward performance. I needed to close that gap, to reveal more about who I was inside. But how? I couldn’t imagine telling people that I was uncomfortable and confused and silently freaking out around them. I didn’t want to burden anyone with my problems.
I turned a corner and saw a tall, handsome man staring right at me. He wore a green sweatshirt, black basketball shorts, and white Nikes. His face was expressive, wise, large-featured. Five-o’clock shadow. A shock of salt-and-pepper hair.
He was me. I was looking into a mirror.
I usually thought of myself as a slob: Dry, blotchy skin. Big belly. Thinning hair. But my reflection was actually pretty nice-looking. I only became a “slob” when I realized who I was looking at, when I understood the mess behind the face.
I walked on until I came to a high-ceilinged wing of the hotel where paintings lined the walls. A calm settled over me.
My whole life, I’ve taken solace in art. In my early twenties, when I lived in New York City, I frequented the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, and the Met. I’d get drunk alone on the Lower East Side and wander into small galleries to stare at paintings, waiting for my body to react. Once, in a gallery on Prince Street, I encountered a painting of a man with a sleeping baby on his chest, and I wept quietly. Other people must’ve noticed this public display of emotion, but nobody spoke to me. I looked like a frat boy and smelled like vodka. I was the opposite of approachable.
I cried in front of that painting because of what I saw beneath its surface: an assurance that peace is possible in this life; that someday I might be able to fall asleep while touching someone.
At the Hotel Roanoke I stood before a large landscape in muted colors: Chalky, overcast sky. Hazy mountain range. A row of trees, none of which contained a straight line or clear boundary. Greens, blues, browns. Smeared, smudgy, textured paint. In the foreground a yellow-green meadow, a pond, and a charcoal-colored cow, staring out of the canvas. Behind her, chewing the earth, a calf. The cow and its offspring had no well-defined boundaries. Flecks of grass were visible through the mother’s body. The painting portrayed a swirling gentleness behind the hard edges of reality.
I was about to walk away when the painting spoke to me.
Stay, it said. Look at me longer.
I’ve lived out in the country for roughly 87 percent of my life, and there have usually been cows somewhere nearby. During bleak phases in my twenties I’d wake up hungover, walk to a farm, lean on a fence, and stare at the cows. Human eyes have always scared me—so full of mysterious motives—but cow eyes have a calm certainty in them. They say, I see you, and I am fine with you standing there.
I don’t know how long I stared at the painting in the Hotel Roanoke. I lost track of time in the roiling eddies of color, no longer lonely, because I wasn’t alone. I was with the artist, who had painted something I yearned for, something amorphous and invisible and everywhere, just beneath the universe’s violent veneer. It was weather-beaten and forgiving and soft. It was inside every cow’s eyes.
I googled the artist, thinking maybe he was someone local whose work I could afford. The paintings on his website cost thousands of dollars—way out of my price range.
Ah, well, I thought. Maybe someday.
I reset the sobriety app on my phone and strolled deeper into the hotel, my neck and shoulders looser than usual. A tension had eased. I’d made a connection.
Thirty-nine days later I got an email from someone who’d read my essays in The Sun and enjoyed them: “I’m writing to ask when you will finish your book. Is it a memoir or a novel?” I’ve received hundreds of messages like this one, and I always want to respond instantly, though I usually wait a day or two. I don’t want to seem like a loser who is constantly refreshing his email (which I am).
The next morning I answered the reader’s questions, and then I went about my day: drinking too much coffee, finalizing my course calendar for the upcoming semester, walking the dog. But throughout all this, something nagged at me. That reader who’d emailed me—his name, Greg Osterhaus, was familiar.
I googled him as I sat on the couch that night, watching an episode of High Maintenance with my wife. He had a website. I’d seen it before. I paused the TV.
“Remember how I got all emotional while looking at a cow painting at the Hotel Roanoke?” I said.
“Yeah,” my wife said, squinting. “Vaguely.”
“The guy who painted it just emailed me. He likes my essays!”
“Shut up.”
I showed her his email and his website.
“That’s crazy.”
“Should I tell him I love his work?”
“Yes, I think that would be really sweet.”
“Maybe we’ll become friends. Do you think he might want to paint me?”
My wife laughed and told me to slow down. “You don’t want to come on too strong.”
Good point. I have a history of being unappealingly enthusiastic.
Greg and I had a brief email exchange. He was pleasantly surprised by the coincidence and said he liked my work because I was so honest about my personal struggles. I told him that his paintings captured a gentleness that existed inside everything. Afraid of being overbearing, I didn’t say any more. I wanted to say, It seems like a minor miracle that we have found each other through our art. When I write, I want to connect with the reader in this intimate, private way, where our bodies are separate in time and space but our spirits briefly overlap. When I saw your painting, I swear, it talked to me. It said: “Look at me longer.” I feel like I’m saying that in my writing. I feel like every artist, in one way or another, is begging to be witnessed. But there are so many barriers between people that it’s hard for them to see each other. Do you know what I mean?
Instead I wished Greg well. This had been a lovely coincidence. No need to get carried away and ruin it.
Then I spent the entire autumn hemming and hawing about how to ask Greg if he’d paint my picture. I didn’t want to put him in the awkward position of having to reject my request, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. It was like when an essay starts taking shape inside me. Even if I’m scared of the subject, I have to write it.
Finally I emailed Greg and told him the truth: I wanted to put an author image on my website that captured my essence, and photographs simply didn’t do that. I believed he had the ability to produce a powerful portrait, not just because he was a talented painter, but because of our serendipitous connection. I concluded: “I’m sure that ‘paint me like one of your cows’ is probably one of the strangest requests you’ve ever received, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”
Greg responded: “I’m going to need to give this some thought, but my immediate answer would be a definite maybe.” He painted mostly cows and landscapes, not people, and he was unsure of his abilities. I told him that made sense. I felt sure I’d never hear from him again.
I’m composing this essay during an era of calamity. Billionaires hoard resources. Prices soar. Mentally ill people purchase guns and slaughter strangers in public. Israel razes Gaza. Russia pummels Ukraine. Wildfires spread. Oceans fill with plastic. Every year is hotter than the last. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock to eighty-nine seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been.
Sometimes, when I write my essays, I wonder what good they can possibly do. When I’m feeling especially pessimistic, I think art is merely a vent where potentially revolutionary energy is released and rendered benign. But there is no time for pessimism at this late hour. We must tell our stories, paint our paintings, sing our songs. We must show each other how gentle we truly are. We must pray that our gentleness can someday win.
It took Greg Osterhaus one day to decide. He agreed to try painting me.
He needed pictures to work from, so my wife and I staged a photo shoot in our backyard. No matter how many pictures we took, however, my facial expressions seemed dishonest, posed, and desperate. I hoped Greg could capture something beneath this cringeworthy performance.
Before sending Greg the pictures, I had a scary thought: money. I told him up front that I couldn’t afford his usual prices, and I understood if that made the project a no-go.
He responded that he’d do it gratis.
Recently, on a cloudy, breezy day, my dog and I walked down a gravel road in a valley between two mountains, past a field with three adolescent cows in it. As we strolled along the barbed wire, the cows began to follow us, and I grew worried. My dog resembles a sable wolf, and over the years the sight of him has made some cows defensive, causing them to charge the fence to scare him off. For all their sweetness, cows will trample a threat.
But these black cows meant no harm. They simply wanted to meet us. A cow with “192” tagged to her ear approached the fence and bowed her huge head. My dog stuck his snout through a gap in the barbed wire and licked the cow’s snotty nose. The cow licked my dog’s crusty eyes.
I considered going inside the fence so the animals could play, but I wasn’t sure it was safe. Best to let them touch each other through the fence. They were used to living confined lives and would probably have no clue how to interact without a barrier between them.
Greg called his portrait of me a “glorious mess.” My wife said she couldn’t think of two better words to describe its subject.
The backdrop was purple. My bust, which covered the majority of the canvas, was purple, blue, and beige. The sun was behind me, flecks of its light visible through my face. My expression said: Look at me longer. Greg had captured something that refused to show up in the photos. He’d softened my hard edges. He’d painted what’s beneath the surface.
