Painter’s Tape

In February Sylvia and I met in an art history survey. We started dating in April. That same month we were accepted as third-year transfers to the same university, her for art practice and me on a premedical track. In August, Sylvia and I moved in together. We both knew it was too early in our relationship to do so. But classes started at the end of the month and the rent wasn’t bad when split in half. We only toured two apartments and picked what was cheaper. We told each other it had good bones.

Our apartment came with a freezer but no fridge. The day the landlord handed over the keys, Sylvia came back from Safeway with popsicles for dinner, blue painter’s tape, and a Sharpie.

“I think,” she said as she laid out two lines of tape, making a rectangle in the corner, “this will be the bed.” I licked my popsicle. Cherry. Sylvia wrote “Bed” on another piece of tape, and placed it in the middle of her construction.

“Pass me the roll,” I said, catching on. I marked a square out on the linoleum that denoted the kitchen. “We can have the table here and — ”

“No, not there,” she said. “It wouldn’t look right with the window.”

“How about there?” I lifted my strip of tape and stuck it eight inches to the right.

“Perfect.”

“And we can have three chairs,” I said, labeling some pieces of tape and placing them on the floor. “In case we have a guest over for dinner.” I handed the tape back to Sylvia and smiled.

She stepped to the mantle, tearing off a long strip. She wrote on it, “Reclining Young Woman in Spanish Costume.” Her handwriting was neat and boxy. She turned: “It’s a Manet. Makes things more homey, doesn’t it?”

I hardly knew Sylvia then. She had spent half the summer in New England. But sometimes, when our senses of humor aligned or our shared desire for a world that was more forgiving revealed itself, I thought she and I might be soulmates.

It was a delicate fantasy.

“Yes,” I said, and stepped forward, “It makes it much more homey.” I kissed her.

We spent that first night sleeping directly on the floor in our rectangle of tape. She turned to me and whispered like we were at a slumber party.

“I’m so glad you get it, Arthur.”

“Get what?” I whispered back.

“That it’s like an art project.”

“The apartment?”

“Everything.”

I woke up first and made her breakfast in bed. Another popsicle, with tape across the wrapping that read, “Slice of Freshly-Baked Bread.” We got to work soon after, putting up several more paintings. Van Gogh’s “The Mulberry Tree.” Munch’s “Puberty.” Sylvia found the dimensions of the frames online and pestered me, “Move it to the left a bit. You’re overlapping the ‘Mona Lisa’ with our Gursky photo.”

I smiled. Her commitment to our little world made me gloss over some of her other qualities for longer than I’d like to admit. She made loops through our wire hangers: “Leather Jacket.” “Fox Fur Coat.” “Windbreaker.” “Coco Chanel Evening Gown.” Our mattress was delivered at the end of the week. The driver was kind and helped me lug it inside. I winced when Sylvia reproached him with a hint of true disgust in her voice for tracking mud on our “Persian Rug.” By that night I convinced myself I’d found it funny. Unclasping her bra on our new bed, I revealed a strip on her sternum that read “Third Breast.” I stifled my surprise, pressed my mouth to her chest, and began to move my tongue over the tape.

The semester started and the world outside our window pulled at me. I was a bus boy for a brunch shift and classes at Berkeley were harder than community college. I spent less time at home, less time with Sylvia. She had no job. She had fewer friends than I did, though for her, this was another aesthetic decision.

“I can’t keep track of so many people, Arthur. They muddle me.” She would refuse to go to parties, then call me when I had arrived to tell me she missed me. Once I didn’t respond and found the next morning that she had changed the tape on my ten-speed from “Motorcycle (Big Harley)” to “Moped (Small, Dorky).”

One night, after I stayed in the library longer than I’d planned, she said “I feel like we don’t see each other anymore.” With my nails I pressed half moons into my palms. I knew I was the busy one, but I was also the one without a choice.

I pushed the thought away. “Let’s get dinner on Friday,” I said. “We’ll make a real date of it.”

“Okay,” she said, pouting slightly, “I pick the restaurant though.”

She chose a chain family-style place. She had texted me that it was for “Italian immersion.” I sat down. There were fake grapes in the middle of the table. I handed her a piece of tape. “Roses.”

Without saying a word she passed one back to me: “Kiss on the Cheek.” I frowned.

“You could have actually given me a kiss on the cheek.”

“I thought you liked things the way that they were,” she said.

“I do, it’s just that — ”

“You could have actually gotten me roses then.”

“Point taken.”

“I don’t think there should be points in our relationship. It isn’t sustainable.”

“You know what I meant.”

She lapsed into silence. She looked lovely. I searched the restaurant for anything to say.

“Imagine you’re in Rome,” I said. This was a game we liked to play. She was unimpressed so I continued.

“It’s 1940, or just before the fall of the empire. You pick.”

“1940,” she said, “and that man,” she pointed with her left hand at a waiter, “is a spy about to poison our food.”

I laughed, and the relief of her smiling back buzzed in my stomach.

Our relationship buoyed itself like this. I feasted on moments in which I was a cogent part of her fantasy. I convinced myself that in her pettiness I only saw the quirks of an individual soul. The weeks rolled on one after another. I would go to work in the morning. We would go to class. I would walk by the library at night. I tried, staring at the columns, to remember that I toiled to retire my parents, to buy a real house somewhere. Usually I did that walk alone, but once I brought Sylvia.

“I hate playing the game,” she said, looking at the bust of Athena above the library door. It took me a moment to realize she had spoken.

“The tape game?” I said.

She cocked her head at me.

“That’s not a game. That’s living.” The force in her voice surprised me. “I mean the game of studying until you fall asleep at your desk. The way you suck up to grad students.”

“I hate it too, but that’s not a game either.”

It was winter break before I knew it. Visiting home, I was taken aback by two things: how much easier it was to focus without Sylvia around, and how much I missed her.

I returned to school in January. We started to argue more. I felt my future improbably balanced on top of the shaky present.

On the first of February, our heater broke.

“I can’t understand why you won’t ask your mom for some money to fix it. It’s freezing at night,” I said.

She made doe eyes at me.

“Don’t you like huddling together? It’s an adventure, Arthur.”

“Are you f—ing kidding me?” We went to bed entangled out of necessity.

When I woke she was making french toast, real french toast. “Be careful over by the table,” she said. “I threw a wine glass at you last night and missed.”

This had not happened. “What?” I started, before noticing dozens of tape fragments littering the ground. I could guess what they might say already, but I got out of bed to look.

“Shard of Glass,” “Shard of Glass,” “Particularly Large and Jagged Shard of Glass.” I shuddered, trying and failing to escape an uneasy feeling being cemented by the cold and close quarters; a feeling of dread and admiration.

For a frustrating professor Sylvia had to produce a piece of “art as an act of love.” She called the assignment stupid, then asked if I had time to model.

“I was checking the mail today,” she said “— hold still, I’m doing the bridge of your nose — you know our lease is over soon.” I didn’t look up from my flash cards.

I caught myself researching medical schools on the other side of the country, even though I would not graduate for a year. February became March which wound towards April. I made my own strips of tape less and less. Sylvia seemed to either not notice or to think increased vigor would stir me to begin again.

I took my last test on June 2nd. Sylvia gave me a kiss that morning and three pieces of tape. They read: “My Love For You,” “A Picture of Me (Sylvie) (Semi-Nude) (But Elegantly),” “A Cheat Sheet with All of The Answers.” I smiled, then threw them away. I couldn’t have it look like I really was cheating.

When I got home Sylvia had bought a bottle of wine. For her, drinking was a rare and fragile occasion. Forgoing cups, we sat seriously in the two chairs at our round cafe table. We went back and forth three quarters of the way through the bottle. I told Sylvia stories about my two siblings and she told me about an imaginary friend she had had in kindergarten, then lost in security on a tragic first plane flight. There was a pause as I drank.

“Imagine we are outside, maybe in Istanbul. I know there is so much space opening in your mind right now Arthur, now that your tests are over, now that it’s summer again.”

I recognized that she should be right. But, feeling around in my mind, I found no more room for Istanbul, or anything else, than I had before.

“I can’t see it,” I said.

“Imagine we are in a new apartment, next year, restarting decorations. What do you see?”

“I can’t see that either, Sylvia.”

“What do you mean?”

I paused, took a sip of wine, and paused again.

“I just think I’m getting serious about some things now.”

“Okay then,” said Sylvia, with careful, shaky timing. “Tell me about what you see, for your future. I like to hear you talk.”

I tried in earnest this time, pushing my mind into the back of my eyes, and still could not imagine anything. All I could feel was a vague notion of my life requiring less effort than it had thus far. I said nothing and watched through my own glistening eyes as Sylvia began to cry.

In the morning I woke and she had already gone to give a final presentation. I went to the bathroom mirror to see if I looked like I felt. Instead of my reflection I saw a perfect blue oval of painters tape.

When she arrived home, Sylvia was in good spirits, she had a brown paper bag with groceries and three rolls of tape. I asked her about the mirror.

“From tape it came,” Sylvia nearly sang, “and to tape it shall return.”

School over, the week and a half before our lease ended, I should have felt freer than I had in months. I didn’t. I stayed out of the apartment as much as I could, working double shifts on purpose. I would come home to find that the base of the sink, or the faucet, or a section of a wall was blue too. Seeing our possessions covered in tape made me realize how much we had accumulated, mostly collected from curbs, or swap meets if we were splurging. My biology textbooks, my comb, my tooth brush: blue, blue, blue. Sylvia was happier than I had seen her in weeks. Half-asleep she breathed out loud in bed, more to herself than me, “I think this is the best work I’ve done yet.”

Sylvia was methodical and fair. She stretched thin lines of blue over the candlesticks her mother had sent as a gift, the drawing she had done of me, and a pair of kitten heels we’d found at Goodwill on a weekend trip. The last time we had sex our sweat pooled on the taped up mattress.

It had been the plan for weeks that my dad would move both of our things home with me in a U-Haul, and Sylvia would fly to see her aunt for a week, then back home. I had two days of living alone in the apartment before my dad arrived. I did my day-to-day tasks in the wash of matte blue, un-taping nothing besides the microwave to heat frozen rice. It felt wrong to tamper with her vision. Sylvia was gone, surrounding me. I was in awe of her, and sick to my stomach for 48 hours.

When my dad arrived with the rented van, I could not find the words to explain to him why my bicycle, the briefcase he had gotten me when I was accepted into school, every last fork and knife, were covered in tape. Driving away, unspooling the distance, I tried to promise myself that I had been right about what was a game, and what was not.