The following is a story from Corinna Vallianatos’s Origin Stories. Vallianatos is the author of The Beforeland and My Escapee, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2023, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She lives in Virginia.

I had high hopes for being friends with an artist, but as it turned out the artist’s wife found me hopelessly uncool—a seething boredom came over her face whenever we got together—and the artist’s art was much too expensive for me and my husband to buy and there was no chance he’d gift us a painting. I’d only ever seen his paintings on his website where they lost the intensity my husband claimed they possessed and seemed simply to blare. They depicted smooth, seal-skinned figures in scrubs laboring in operating theaters and over dentists’ chairs. In one, the figure, legs planted far apart, tugged at the teeth of a bear trap. In another, the figure removed a porcelain doggie holding a little red heart on a loop in its mouth from the cavity of a child’s chest. In a third, I wasn’t sure. A grotesque surprise awaited one, I supposed.

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The artist was always high when he worked, my husband said. He would get too bored otherwise.

I blamed myself for the situation with the artist’s wife. I’d worn jeans and a flannel button-up to her birthday party at a restored bowling alley in Silver Lake. The bowling alley had gleaming wooden floors and orange sherbet-colored molded plastic chairs. The wife was wearing jeans too, with shiny black high heels, and I supposed that made all the difference. She was a teacher at a Waldorf school, and many of the guests at the party were parents of children in her 3/4 class. The men were bearded and broad, with thick, soft shoulders and mighty calves that burst out of their fanciful socks. The women were cautious, assessing, their eyes oracular and their faces so sharp-boned they appeared antique.

When we arrived, neither the artist nor his wife introduced us to anyone. This would be fine if we were in a living room or a backyard where you could attach and remove, attach and remove, and there were always a few people in the kitchen eating chips, but the alley was cliquish, the guests clustered in small groups laughing over their gawky mini-stepping on the lanes and high-fiving when someone bowled a strike. I got separated from my husband (rather, he separated himself from me), and ended up bowling a silent game with another solitary guest. We simply found ourselves at the same lane. My bowling ball was much too light and skittered across the slick wood as if across a licked popsicle. His ball was heavy, thudding, and strangely effective.

He was attractive in a haggard way, and I considered that there was no female equivalent for that.

I’d worn the flannel and jeans because that was the kind of thing I wore. I knew I looked as if I were picking out paint samples at a hardware store or trundling recycling to the curb, but I didn’t mind. Undertaking some common endeavor, in other words. Living in the world, as men did.

Snatches of conversation floated our way. “Finally I said why does Cole always have to be the monster?”

“. . . plowed right through a migrating cloud of painted ladies. I couldn’t freaking slow down!”

When the artist, my husband in tow, approached the silent bowler and they began to talk, I realized two things: one, I was the lowliest person there, for the artist had approached him, not me; and, two, the silent bowler and I had a lot in common but we hadn’t let ourselves discover it.

We had in common our taste in music. We had in common a self-conscious laugh.

We had in common a certain stance toward the world. I gathered he was a fellow sufferer.

Cake was being served. I accepted a large piece and gobbled it up, then fled to the car.

I slipped my socked feet out of my bowling shoes, climbed into the back seat and curled up on my side. I let my mind drift. I thought of my past, college, riding buses, tumbling golden leaves. (They tumbled here in December, papered the sidewalks obligingly.) My second year of college, I rented an apartment with a girl I’d known since childhood. We thought it would be funny to read bedtime stories to each other. In my memory this plan was devised by both of us, but it was probably mine. She twisted and turned angrily in her bed as I read The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and the first few chapters of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and then began staying out very late at night. She’d realized our plan smacked of the desperation of people who wanted to be cheered, and the fact that she had come to this realization before me—though surely I was on the cusp of it myself—meant that I was solely responsible for how she felt. She left notes taped above the kitchen sink that said Do your fucking dishes and Take out your trash. My trash? I thought. I let the phone ring when I suspected it was my boyfriend calling so he’d think I was out with friends. I’d listen to his cheerful voice leaving a message, a voice from a distant land.

I returned to the bowling alley and stood next to the long silver rack where the balls were kept. A strange idea came to me. We were in one of the artist’s paintings, I thought, and in that painting his wife carried a whip like a black rat’s tail and if she determined you a poor guest, stilted or boring or awkward or frazzled or uncomely, the painting came to life: a trap door opened beneath your unlucky feet and you fell a short distance onto a heap of bodies. I could practically feel the sudden lurch, the swing in my gut as I plunged down onto a writhing pile. I apologized profusely as I rolled off to the side. We were in a storeroom. The silent bowler was there too, squatting on his heels. He did not look pensive though he should have looked pensive. We heard the clicking of the wife’s high heels coming down the stairs, whip rasping behind her. An iron key rattled in the iron lock and the heavy door groaned open. She spoke to us sharply and assigned us impossible, mind-numbing tasks. I was given a toothbrush and told to scrub the mold from between the honeycombed stones of the walls and floor. The silent bowler was told to polish the tiny, high window using his own palm and saliva.

We were the painting’s janitors, its silent labor. Every work of art was supported by people like us.

The wife left. Guests kept plummeting through the trap door onto the pile of us, and we rearranged ourselves bitterly. We did not ask each other how we knew the artist or his wife. One way or another, suffice it to say. From here or there, why would it matter? What mattered now was what had been taken away. To have one’s shine dulled so completely, to be tumbled in with those who you frankly could conceive of belonging here . . . well, it was dispiriting. Let’s talk, someone said. Let’s stay human to each other. Goat cheese, yay or nay? Improv, embarrassing or freeing? Do you follow any of the organized religions?

My husband strolled by the rack and I reached out and grasped his arm. “Where are you going?”

“The bar.” I trailed him there. He ordered a beer and received a tall sloshing glass. “Want one?”

I shook my head. A slim arm tattooed with dark blue script reached between us to accept a drink. The artist’s wife. I happened to know that the tattoo read With pleasure in Russian, a language she could not speak.

She clinked her glass against my husband’s. “Can I get you something, Cathy?”

“Oh, no thanks. I had a corner piece of cake. I’m bursting.” I looked at my husband. “I think we’re taking off soon but this was great!”

“Not that soon,” he said.

I was the assistant to someone who ran a lecture series at the college where my husband taught. I didn’t get to choose who came. I arranged for travel and accommodations, made sure they got paid, picked them up and dropped them off at the airport. I was glad not to have to choose who came because if the readers were clumsy panderers or culturally illiterate or excessively sweaty, it wouldn’t be my fault. At the last reading, the writer had gotten up in front of the audience with nothing in hand, no sheaf of papers, no book. She stood at the podium and said that just that afternoon she’d decided to abandon the novel she’d been writing, the novel she’d been planning to read from. The problem was her distance to it, she said. She’d never figured out her distance to it. And she’d realized something else: it wasn’t about life. And there was ab-so-fuckin’-lootely nothing she could do about that. The director of the lecture series cast a desperate glance at me, so I went to the front of the auditorium. Any questions? I said. Later she told me it would’ve been better to thank everyone for coming and direct them to the coffee and refreshments in the next room. Because what questions could anyone possibly have after that? the director said. Does she think that one book is about life and another book isn’t? Does she think life’s so recognizable? I regarded her with interest and she went on. Our first stories were populated with gods and monsters, she said. Take The Odyssey. Would someone say, well, that’s not about life because there’s no such thing as a Cyclops? Because Polyphemus doesn’t really exist? No, we understand human ingenuity, the longing to go home. And we understand too that it’s never easy, that all manner of monsters might spring in our way. Must spring in our way! For if it were easy—to go home—we wouldn’t want to. So for her to stand up there and offer no explanation to our students, who, after all, are not well-versed in failure, who have, possibly, never failed in their lives . . . it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Maybe it wasn’t the monsters that were the problem, I said. Maybe it was the longing that was missing. The director cocked her head and seemed to entertain the idea for a moment. But longing’s the easiest thing in the world to invent, she said. Throw some longing in the pot! Stir it up with an absent father and a moldering trunk of old letters! My god, writers act like it’s so hard. They should talk to surgeons or janitors or home health care workers or me. Or you! she said, startlingly, because I’d never thought she thought much of my job. The next morning, I drove the writer to the airport. I was tempted to tell her how easy what she had not done was. I scrutinized her for sorrow and humiliation but observed only a tendency to shield her mouth with her hand when she talked. She spoke to me, behind her hand, of her love for her Instant Pot. When I pulled up to the unloading zone, she removed her hand and bid me goodbye as if we were old friends, throwing her arms around my neck and pulling me close. I’ll read whatever you write whenever you write it, I said foolishly. Thank you, she said. You don’t know how much that means to me, but I’m going to massage school.

The artist’s wife and my husband had ordered a second round of drinks. “His gallerist gets half of what he makes,” she was saying, “and he likes her well enough but how much do you have to like a person to be okay with that?”

“A whole hell of a lot. You have to want to pay their mortgage on their summer house in the Hudson Valley,” my husband said.

“Or, in her case, Venice.”

“Venice!”

“It’s outrageous,” she said. “With all its sinking.”

“Why can’t we just get over Italy?”

“About his paintings,” I said. “Do you understand them?”

She blushed and I softened toward her then. The bloodlust of the other discarded guests would be rising. They would’ve figured out they had to work together to break the lock with their combined strength, wrench open the heavy door, scale the stairs. They were about to pour back into the alley, and whose side would I be on?

“I’m thirty-six,” she said finally. “I’m done trying to understand.”

A woman who knew she was younger than the woman she was talking to would always mention her age if she could.

“It was his idea to have my party here. He thought it would be easier than having it at our house. Less personal. Safer.”

My husband was nodding. “Let me show you something,” she said.

“Me?” he said.

“Colleen.”

I followed her out a side door and down a hallway and a flight of stairs to the storage room. The door was plywood. Gold paint peeled off the knob. A waxing and buffing machine stood in the corner next to a mound of orphaned bowling shoes. A small canvas leaned against the wall. She picked it up and hugged it to herself. “My birthday present. It’s a portrait. Other men take their wives to dinner,” she said, and turned it to face me. The paint was thick and the woman’s forehead hideously bulbous not in the manner of a holy figure of thought but rather of someone about to burst with consternation. Her bun sat atop her head like a tiny, shiny gourd, and her eyes were splayed unevenly, as if to avoid catching sight of each other, yet there was beauty in her face. She would not see it. She would not see how he saw her. Love, if it meant anything, was private, lonely, inexplicable. “Do you like it?” she said.

My husband and I left and drove east to the town where we lived where the bowling alleys were not restored but were big, cold, raucous places. To know that the artist could paint like that, create something so true it became continuous, not a fixed image but an experience of looking, made his choice to paint anything else incomprehensible to me, cruel. I did not think it was safety he was after but its opposite. I exited the freeway. At the end of the offramp a man stood next to a plastic bucket of roses in chemical colors. He had other things for sale too. Fuzzy blankets folded over a line. Lidded cups of fruit. I lay awake that night trembling with eagerness for morning.

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From Origin Stories by Corinna Vallianatos. Used with permission of the publisher, Graywolf Press. “The Artist’s Wife” in The Georgia Review’s Winter 2024 issue. Copyright © 2025 by Corinna Vallianatos.