Edie knows a lot of things. She's actually a very smart woman, for all her dyed hair and her fuck-me shoes. She knows that when breaking up with someone, you should wear only solid colors; patterns screw up their brainwaves and it makes it harder to communicate. When seducing someone else's husband, don't wear jewelry; it's easier for him to forget that you're not his wife when there's nothing to interrupt the flow of his gaze as he looks you over. When confronting or being confronted by another woman, wear a lot of rings in case you come to blows; in any case, the jewels will distract her and throw off her train of thought.
Susan knows a lot of things, but she knows different things. She knows the way flowers should be arranged so that their colors set each other off brilliantly, and how the body should be arranged when posing for a picture; she inherently understands the matching of clothes and how to angle a paintbrush to capture the curl of Edie's hair perfectly, and Edie understands none of this and just goes along with it, praying that Mayer's not going to screw this one up. But Susan, when it comes to color theory or oil paints versus acrylic, never disappoints, like she does in a lot of other things, and sometimes she even surprises Edie with the things she says about these fail-safe topics.
"No, no, not those," on a day when Edie wants to wear a pair of red shoes with an otherwise drab business suit. "Wear these instead." And the shoes offered are black, and Edie doesn't understand what's so special about them until she sees that the soles are bright red, and that Susan wants her to set the ground aflame with every step.
A distressed, "That's so obvious," on a night when she's taking Edie to one of Bree's little soirees and Edie has a gold necklace she wants to wear. Instead she goes pawing through Edie's jewelry and brings up a necklace of white gold, one that Edie had forgotten she had, holding it up to the light. On Edie's neck, the reflected light makes her hair glow pale from the inside out, it gives her a soft halo, and she catches Susan's smile in the mirror, and her quiet statement of, "Perfect."
The quiet "Hold still," the one time that Susan paints her, and Edie is draped in red fabric and has flowers in her hair, which is falling in her eyes. She doesn't understand why Susan doesn't want a nude painting instead, that would be so much easier, until she sees the finished painting (after much "Ummm"ing and "I don't... It's not really that good"ing from Susan), and she sees her own shadowed eyes, the way the fabric wraps around her, the ebb and tide of curves hidden beneath cloth. Edie has always known she's hot, that she's sexy, that she's a fucking goddess, but now she realizes that she's beautiful. She, Edie Britt, is beautiful. Susan Mayer made her so.
Stories like this, though, are ones Edie knows too well, knows better than Susan, because no amount of paintings or good jewelry choices can fix what's broken, and she and Susan chafe against each other, neither of them knowing how to handle the other between those moments of serendipitous understanding.
Knowledge of solids versus patterns doesn't come in handy when Edie stares into Susan's eyes and says, "I'm sorry," and knowledge of color theory doesn't help when Susan is trying to find a way not to cry. They stare at each other from opposite sides of a chasm they never learned how to cross.
In that moment, Susan looks at her with liquid eyes and shaking hands and whispers, so softly, "You're so beautiful, Edie." Edie, not knowing how to stay, walks away anyway.