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In bed with Mas
---------------

Viv and Mas watched the rain hit the dirty skylight window until Mas
spoke.

"Do you remember when we met?  At the art show?"

Viv smiled.  "Of course I do."

"You were so intense.  Why did you want to know about what my parents
did?"

Viv sighed and rolled over.

"In order to do the kind of art you make, you had to learn a ton of
techniques.  But before that, you had to have a hunch, a feeling, maybe
an innate belief that you could make something amazing at the end of
that training."

Mas looked at her with no obvious expression on his face.

"Mas, you had a supportive family, didn't you?  When you started
painting, they encouraged it, right?"

"Is that a bad thing."

"Not a bad thing.  But... there's art that's really more like a suicide
note.  An attempt to be understood.  You're not in that category.  Which
is strange, because I pretty much only like stuff when it's in that
category."

"You know those green pieces in the hall?  Those are from a dead friend
of mine.  Objectively, they're not sophisticated art.  It's
conventional.  But Judith was making those after finding out she was
going to die from the same cancer that killed her husband.  And I can
see the rage and heartbreak and the desperate desire to finish what she
started.

"If I take away the heart break, it's just a pattern of shapes in shades
of green."



----

After a pause, Viv said how she tried religion.  Tried so hard.

Never got any of the peace she was promised.

She figured she was so rotten, such a hopeless sinner, she

Then she tried psychology.  Went through one miserable memory at a time,
and again, never got out from under this feeling she's had her whole
life.

She said the only thing that ever takes the edge off is fucking.

"Why not leave him?" Mas asked.

Viv winced a little.  "Really, it's because I'm a coward."

She sighed.  Mas looked at her face for a while.

She looked away from him and focused on the dirty window pane in his
studio.

"It's going to be hell for me to leave.  He has spent his whole life
cultivating this image.  Me walking out will destroy all that.

"It's kinda like mutally assured destruction right now.  Both sides have
nuclear weapons that can destroy everything.  If I leave, it will
devastate his chances with the conservative family values party.

"And he'll take it out on me.  He's vindictive like you wouldn't
believe.  In law school, there was a professor that he didn't like.  I
don't remember exactly why.  Maybe he refused to write him a
recommendation for something.

"Something like a decade later, that professor was up for dean.
Garrett at this point wrote a letter to the law school saying this
professor would substantially hurt fundraising and had it cosigned by a
bunch of the well-off recent donors.  He said it was because the
professor was a radical leftist.  That's how he got all the donors to
sign on.  But really, it was just because of a grudge.

"It's wild... I used to find his mean streak really sexy.  God, what's
wrong with me?"

It started raining.  Mas and Viv watched for a while.

Viv looked back at Mas.  "I'm not ready to go to war with him.  To lose
everything.  My home, my relationship with my children.  I got nobody
else really to fall back on.  He was the center of my world."

Mas whispered.  "Gilded cage."

Viv looked away from him, reached over to the floor, picked up her
watch, checked the time.

Then got up and started getting dressed again, quick.

A few minutes later, Viv was in her car, driving home while wearing
sunglases and blasting music loud, tears running down her cheeks.