The woman in the sketch was naked. Her long straight hair fell across her face.
The artist beckoned to Javier at a lively outdoor market in Buenos Aires. Mariana was browsing jewelry at the next stall.
"Your girlfriend, she is no good. The woman in this picture, she is the one. Find her." The artist spoke English, not mistaking Javier for an Argentinian despite his dark hair and eyes. Javier was relieved. This twenty-fifth birthday trip had reminded him that he didn't speak Spanish nearly as well as his mother would like.
The artist drew the finishing touches on the sketch and handed it over. Javier reflexively glanced at Mariana, a few yards away.
"Do not worry. She cannot see you," the artist said. "No one can see you in my tienda."
This strange man intrigued Javier. He gave unsolicited advice and artwork, and seemed to think that his open-air stall—nothing more than a table covered by a brightly striped cloth—had invisibility powers. Javier didn't really believe in magic, but he didn't not believe in it either. He examined the sketch, an elegantly simple line drawing of a woman. The black ink on white paper showed only the outlines of her body. He couldn't tell her hair color, her skin color, even what her face looked like.
Playing along, Javier asked, "But how can I find this woman when I can't see her face?"
"You will know when you see her. It will be magic. If it is not magic, it is not her."
Javier tucked the sketch in his backpack, pulled out a banknote. The artist nodded and Javier turned to leave. Mariana was walking toward him. The sketch safely stored away, he waved to her. She passed right by. He called her name, she didn't respond. He hurried to catch up with her.
"Where the hell did you go?" Mariana asked.
"I was right at that artist's stall. I called you. Didn't you hear me?"
"What artist's stall?"
"Right there." Javier pointed back to the spot where he had spent the past few minutes, but all he saw was a massive ombu tree, its gnarled roots spreading in every direction.
"What, you were hiding behind that funny-looking tree?" Mariana frowned. "Stop being childish. Let's go find some lunch. I'm hungry."
Once they got home from their trip, Javier broke up with Mariana. Things hadn't been good for a while, and the artist's advice was just the push he needed. He bought an expensive silver frame and hung the sketch in his bedroom. This outline of a woman might or might not represent his destiny, but it would remind him not to stay in any more bad relationships.
As the years passed and Javier moved from place to place, he always hung the drawing across from his bed. When he brought women home, they would ask with suspicion-tinged voices, "Who's that in the picture?" Javier would say it was just a drawing from a street artist in Buenos Aires, a souvenir of his trip. He never told the whole truth, never said the woman in the drawing was the one he was supposed to be with. But when it came time to end a relationship, he'd look at the sketch and convince himself that his girlfriend couldn't be the one the artist drew. Her boobs were too big, her legs too short, her hair not long enough, not straight enough.
Javier was thirty-two, seven years and four girlfriends after Buenos Aires, when he met Faith. She was ten years his junior. He had never dated a woman that much younger, but when he first saw Faith, she was looking down and her hair fell across her face. She had the long limbs, slight build, and long straight hair the artist had drawn. Before Faith, Javier hadn't seen a real-life woman who so closely resembled the image.
After Faith moved in, she asked Javier to take the drawing down. "But babe," Javier pleaded, "it's you!" He felt so certain Faith was the one that he confided in her about the artist, about the ombu tree. "You're the love of my life," he said, "just like the artist predicted."
"Whatever," she responded. "I don't care if this artist was, like, a magic elf or something. I'm not looking at a picture of some naked girl every time I wake up."
"It's not some naked girl," he protested. "It's you." But he took the sketch down. Whenever he caught sight of the blank wall, he noticed an emptiness.
After Faith left him, Javier rehung the sketch. At first, he stared at it, pining over Faith. As time elapsed, the drawing stopped being her, and went back to being the one woman he was still looking for. The artist's words returned to him: "You will know when you see her. It will be magic. If it is not magic, it is not her." Javier admitted to himself that he hadn't experienced magic with Faith. "How could I have thought Faith was you, anyway?" Javier asked the picture. "She was only a kid when the artist drew you."
He started seeking out women who could truly be the one in the sketch. Women who were in their twenties back then, when he was too. Women with slight builds and long limbs. With long straight hair that could fall across their faces. And he found a few. Sharon cheated on him. Cassandra never really got him. He never really got Sofia. Despite the resemblance, none of them turned out to be the one the artist had drawn.
At Javier's fortieth birthday party, his mother pressed a plate of chocolate cake into his hands while chiding: "You are not getting younger, Javi. Stop wasting so much time. Go find the mother of my grandchildren."
Hoping for commiseration, Javier grabbed his sister Maya and her wife Susie. He took them to a quiet corner and confessed about the sketch. "Come on, Javi," his sister responded, "that's just another excuse not to commit. Doesn't this all come back to the stuff with Dad?"
In Maya's view, all of Javier's relationship problems could be traced to "the stuff with Dad," otherwise known as their father running off with their babysitter.
"This has nothing to do with Dad!" Javier asserted. "I've had plenty of serious relationships. I've lived with women. It just hasn't worked out with any of them. Yet."
"Well, Javi, the common denominator isn't the drawing. It's you," Maya said. Susie gave him a sympathetic look and a squeeze on his arm, but added, "Maybe Maya's right, sweetie."
At home, Javier told the sketch, "Some birthday—my whole family berating me! I can't help it that I haven't met you yet." But as he thought more about his relatives' badgering, it occurred to him that it might be time to abandon his quest.
Before he actually let go of the sketch, Javier first turned forty-one and went through one more relationship. "Sorry, love of my life," he said to the drawing after his breakup with Jennifer, "I think I have to give up on you. Jennifer looks like you, but she isn't the one. Just like the others. Maybe you have been holding me back. Maybe I have been using you as an excuse not to see the right woman when I find her." He took a deep breath, then lowered the sketch and placed it at the back of his closet, behind his college diploma. He learned to avert his eyes from the empty spot on the wall, and eventually bought a painting to hang there. The new artwork did nothing to stop the pang in his chest whenever he remembered the sketch.
Kate sighed and sipped her chardonnay. This was the third time Tasha had urged her to sign up for a dating app. "I want it to be magical, you know?"
"Well, how's the magic working out for you so far?" Tasha asked.
Kate looked around for an eligible man she could talk to and prove Tasha wrong. Back when Kate met Marc, no one she knew used dating apps. You met people the old-fashioned way, in bars! But as Kate scanned this bar, inhaling its stale beer smell, the men appeared so young. Maybe Tasha had a point: men their age weren't going out to meet people. Maybe they really were at home, swiping left and right. Now forty and recently divorced with no kids, Kate's attempts to get out there—going to bars like this, taking classes, volunteering—had landed her zero dating prospects.
"Dammit Tasha, give me one more month. If I don't meet someone in real life, I'll do an app. I promise."
Tasha smiled. "Girl, you'll have more men than you know what to do with, once they see those blond curls and sexy green eyes of yours!"
They clinked glasses, sealing the deal.
At home, Kate googled "online dating for middle-aged women." At least I have a whole month before I have to do this, she thought as she read reviews of the various apps. One seemed the most highly rated, so she took a peek. She only had one glass of wine at the bar. Another couldn't hurt. She got a bottle from the fridge and gave herself a generous pour.
By the time Kate drank the last drops from the bottle, it was after midnight. Somehow she had spent three hours on the app. And somehow she had signed herself up. "What have I done?" she groaned, noticing that she already had thirteen "likes" and two messages. That sensible voice inside her insisted that she put her phone down and do nothing more until morning.
In the morning, Kate found that she had uploaded a photo on the app the night before. She had mixed feelings about recent pictures of herself. She spent her childhood hating her curls and yearning for straight, shiny hair. She then spent chunks of her adult life in salons, getting her curls straightened. Kate had long straight hair when she met Marc, and she kept it that way over their fifteen-year marriage. On a whim, after the divorce, Kate got her hair cut short and let it go curly. She didn't love how it looked, but she did love the idea of starting over, of accepting her true self.
Examining the dating app further, Kate saw that she now had five messages. Three were creepy; two seemed normal. She wanted more than just normal. If there ever was any magic between her and Marc, the years had drained it out of their marriage. Kate longed to experience magic now. Could that happen on an app? She called Tasha.
"Yay! So glad you didn't wait a whole month," Tasha said. "My advice? Meet every single one of them you wouldn't be disgusted waking up to in the morning!"
"Seriously?"
"It doesn't hurt to go on one date with anyone. Just make sure you meet them somewhere public. And you know you have to keep me posted!"
Kate wrote back to both men. Dave turned out to be nice enough and good-looking, but after one meeting, she could tell there was no spark. The other—Javier—seemed much more promising. They met for coffee and ended up getting dinner and after-dinner drinks, talking nonstop for almost eight hours, and kissing goodnight.
The following day, Kate gushed to Tasha. "I felt like Javier really heard me. And saw me. In a way that Marc never did. You should see his eyes. They're so dark. Maybe even magical!"
"Kate, that's awesome. But give yourself time. Don't settle for the first one you like. You're on the rebound. Plus, you said he's never been married. You know that man has to have commitment issues."
"You will know when you see her. It will be magic." Javier thought back to the words of the artist from sixteen years before. In the months since he took the sketch off his bedroom wall, he had been on dates, but none had been magical. Until last night, with a woman named Kate. He had made himself give up the sketch, but he didn't have to give up magic. He couldn't bear to wait the requisite two or three days. He texted Kate to ask her out again, feeling his heart beat inside his head when she replied yes.
Kate went home with Javier after their second date. They stayed up most of the night, enjoying each other's bodies and talking. At one point, she complimented the abstract painting in his bedroom. "Thanks," he said, "I used to have an old drawing in that spot, but I outgrew it."
After she left, Javier pulled the sketch out and compared it to the vision of Kate he held in his mind. The body is right, but the hair is wrong, he thought. "It doesn't matter," he said out loud. His skin tingled from the memory of Kate's touch. Or maybe from seeing the sketch again. He wanted it to be Kate's touch. "Kate is magical," Javier told the picture. "She could be the one, even if she's not you," he insisted before returning it to the closet.
Javier and Kate began spending every night together. She loved laying her head on his solid chest, fitting her body to his. He loved weaving his fingers into her soft curls, kissing the space between her eyebrows. On the six-month anniversary of their first date, he asked her to move in.
Tasha warned Kate to slow down, reminding her that Javier was the only man she'd been with since Marc; Kate didn't know him well enough yet. "Don't worry," Kate said, "I'm just renting out my place. If it doesn't work, I can always move back. But I know it's going to work."
On moving day, two boxes marked "Basement" mistakenly got left in the kitchen. Javier picked them up. One slipped out of his hands. Photos spilled onto the floor.
"I got ‘em," he told Kate.
"Thanks, baby," Kate responded. She was fitting her glassware into his cabinet.
Javier gathered up glossy handfuls of photographs. "Seems crazy that we used to take these with actual cameras and get hard copies."
Kate laughed. "Those are ancient. I should get them digitized."
"I hope I don't have to see your old lovers in here," he said, half joking, half serious. As he put the pictures back in the box, he scanned for Kate's ex-husband or other men from her past. He spotted several photos of a woman who looked a lot like Kate, but had long straight hair. His mind shot back to the sketch. Could Kate have a relative who resembled her but with straight hair? Could that woman—not Kate—be the one meant for him? No, he told himself, Kate's magic. Kate's the one. Screw the sketch. But he tucked one of the photos in his pocket, and later stored it in his nightstand.
That night, they opened a bottle of champagne. For the first time, Javier didn't want to make love. When she asked what was wrong, he responded, "Just tired, too much champagne. I'm sorry, babe." Then he lay awake thinking about the woman in Kate's photos, remembering the sketch.
The next day while Kate showered, he retrieved the image and compared it to the photograph. The woman in the photo definitely looked like the one in the drawing. Dread crept from his stomach to his throat. Was he wrong about Kate? Should he find the woman in the photo instead? He wished he had asked who she was when he first saw the pictures. It would sound too suspicious now.
"How's it going so far?" Tasha asked Kate over their monthly drinks.
"Maybe I should have listened to you, Tasha. It's been three weeks since I moved in. And get this, we haven't had sex once! He used to tell me his thoughts. We used to stay up all night. Now we barely talk. It's like he lost all interest once we started living together."
"Do you think…" Tasha began, then stared at her glass.
"Think what?"
"Well, is it possible he's cheating on you?"
Kate swallowed some chardonnay. "No, I can't imagine. Why would he ask me to move in? Anyway, his father left his mother for the babysitter when he was a kid. It kind of scarred him. He's always railing against cheaters. I can't see Javier ever doing that."
Tasha did that thing where she raised one eyebrow.
"Okay," Kate said, "you're right, I haven't known him that long. And he has become so distant. I don't think he's cheating on me, but I really don't know what to think anymore."
"Men," said Tasha, shaking her head.
Kate got home feeling both suspicious and tipsy. She changed into the lacy black lingerie Javier liked, and called him into the bedroom. He still wasn't interested.
"Will you please tell me what's going on, Javier? Is there someone else?" Kate blurted out as tears pooled in her eyes.
Javier considered his response. Technically, there was someone else—the woman in the photo, the woman in the sketch, hopefully one and the same. But how could he explain that to Kate? "I—I've just been having cold feet, I don't know," he mumbled.
Anger invaded Kate's sadness. "Cold feet? You asked me to move in with you! I found tenants for my place! Couldn't you have figured out your cold feet a little sooner?"
Javier took a breath. Should he confess about the sketch, about the photo? Kate was amazing, they had such a connection until recently. Maybe they could figure things out together. No, he thought, she'll think I'm crazy. She won't want to be with me. And, he realized, he didn't want to be with her. He was wrong to give up his quest for the woman in the sketch. The photo proved that she existed. He could still find her. He placed his hands on Kate's shoulders. "It's getting late. Let's get some sleep. I'll go in the guest room if you want."
"You're damn right you'll go in the guest room!" Kate shouted, pulling away and turning her back as he left.
She lay trembling under the comforter, staring at the ceiling. Did Javier have someone else? He hadn't denied it. But then why ask her to move in? Was he using her as cover? Maybe he was involved with someone he shouldn't be? A married woman? Or maybe he met someone else after she moved in and he was too much of a coward to admit it? Kate felt her insides being ground up, her head filling with pressure. She had to find out what was going on. Without letting herself think about whether it was wise, she got up and searched his dresser, the pockets of his clothes in the closet, his nightstand drawer. Inside the drawer, she found a photo of herself in her twenties.
"What the hell?" Kate said out loud, then remembered the box of photos that Javier had dropped on moving day. Why would he have taken this, she thought, though it is kind of sweet. Kate started to smile; maybe there was some hope. Then she stopped herself. Who cares that he liked this old picture of me? He won't make love to me. He barely talks to me. And his only explanation is cold feet? She looked in the mirror, rolled her shoulders back. "I don't need to put up with this," she told her reflection.
Kate placed the photo back inside the nightstand. Even though it belonged to her, she didn't want him to know she had snooped. Anyway, let Javier live with that old picture of her. The real her was leaving. She didn't need to waste one more minute stressing over him. Tasha was right, she obviously didn't know him well enough.
From the guest bed, Javier heard the front door slam and his phone chime. He read Kate's text: "I'll let you know when I book a moving van." He walked down the hall to his bedroom, removed the abstract painting from the wall, and hung the sketch back up where it belonged. Then he took the photo out of his nightstand and went to look for a frame that would fit it.
