The First Cut is the Deepest

The First Cut is the Deepest-part two

Eventually, she was out on Broadway. It was past noon and the summer sun was relentless. She wished for sunglasses. She realized she didn't have anything with her, not even her room key, and definitely not a wallet or purse. That means I have to go back. But she wasn't running away, she reminded herself. She was simply going for a walk. So of course she was going back. And anyway, where would she have run away to? Home-where was that? She and Michael were living in Rye now and it didn't feel like home yet. They were in the same neighbourhood as Fiona which was possibly why it felt so foreign to Ilsa. Fiona's husband Tim was Michael's business partner and best friend; it was how Ilsa had met her husband-to-be, through her sister. She remembered Fiona's disapproving glare, up in the hotel room, the glare that said, I knew you were going to mess this up. Or maybe even, I wanted you to mess this up because you don't deserve any of it. As though it were any great shakes, having Fiona's life. As though it was something to be so fiercely proud of. But if it's not, why did you go after it so hard?  

Ilsa was starting to sweat, a cold, clammy sweat that was in contrast to the heat of the day and covered her skin with uncertainty. She started to walk south. A man whistled at her, the sound like a cartoon missile falling. She wondered what her mother and sisters were doing now, if they were talking about her, if Fiona was saying terrible things about the kind of person who would walk out on a wedding. It was normally a source of pride to Ilsa to not care what people said behind her back. Yet here she was, fretting, wishing she could make it clear to them that she wasn't actually running away. It just looked like it.  

"Nice legs," a man in a suit walking past her said. She tugged the kimono down, then gave up and sat on a bench. She looked down at her hands and arms: engagement ring, bracelets, tattoo. On the other forearm was that very faint line on otherwise smooth skin. Again, she wished the stupid scar wasn't there. It represented a moment she wished she could forget. It made her despise that song Helen loved. It made it all too literal.  

It had happened just after she had left Eric-or, rather, just after she had instructed him to leave their Parisian apartment that she had loved so much and go back to the hovel he had lived in before meeting her. She had done it because she had been trying to feel something other than despair and embarrassment. Ilsa had always believed that she would never have her heart broken, and when it turned out she wasn't immune to it she had been devastated. She remembered doing it, making that first-and what would be the last-cut. She had been sitting at her easel. She had put down her brush and picked up the X-Acto knife she used when she wanted to make a canvas smaller. She had shut her eyes and pushed the blade down until it bit into her skin. It was shocking to see, when she opened her eyes, how quickly the beads of blood rose to the surface. She had thought, Why did I ever get married in the first place? She had thought about how it had felt to walk in on her husband of two months making love to one of his art students, a seventeen-year-old girl. In that instant she had gone from feeling beautiful, bohemian, unique, loved by a fascinating man, to feeling stupid and old and used. She had marveled at how ancient and battered it was possible to feel at the tender age of twenty-one. She had continued to stare at the cut and decided to try to make something out of it: she turned her forearm toward the blank canvas and smeared the blood across the white. But there was not nearly enough blood, and what there was immediately started to darken from vivid red to that useless rust-brown that means the blood has lost all of its precarious vitality.  

Ilsa had been disgusted by it right away. Rather than paint over it and pretend it had never happened, she took the canvas from the easel, carried it down the narrow staircase and threw it into a dumpster. She had known then that the only thing for her to do was to leave Paris and go back home to Toronto and she had hated this idea less than she thought she would. She could already see herself back with some of her art school friends, talking in a worldly way about what it had been like in France and the rest of Europe, how she had stopped in different cities on the way there and done exotic things like float down the Vltava river in inner tubes with a group she met from Boston, or the yacht party in the Algarve. She would not tell anyone about her new Parisian friends who weren't really friends but rather people she would probably never see or speak to again once she left. She knew they all thought her prudish and silly for making such a big fuss about Eric and the girl. These were all things she would keep secret.