A Butterfly in Flame (3 page)

Chapter Five

She hesitated, turned to run.

“Molly tells me I look dangerous,” Fred said.

The woman turned back. She was tall, slender—well, skinny, actually—with lank black hair roped into a pony tail, jeans. Something on top made by indigenous persons who were not indigenous to Stillton, Massachusetts. Her feet were bare, and knobby, as if they, also, were not indigenous to Stillton, Massachusetts. “I’ll go,” she said. She hesitated. “I don’t know Molly.”

Fred told her, “You’re Meg. Just guessing.”

“How did you get Morgan’s keys?” she demanded. Her suspicious fright was well barricaded behind the mask of authority. This was her turf until Fred could prove otherwise.

“This’ll take a minute, and I’m just getting settled,” Fred said.

“I heard you knock.”

“What we could do—I see Morgan has a couple of chairs overlooking the view,” Fred countered. “Let’s talk.” Fred strolled into the living area that opened from the kitchen. Couple of ratty stuffed chairs, a table with mugs and plates and a basket of fruit past its prime. A rudimentary couch whose fund of stories you might not want to know. Closed doors would mean bedroom, closet, bath. Things on the wall he’d look at later. No desk? “You take the chair nearest the exit,” Fred suggested, sitting in the other.

“It’s not a joke,” she scolded. “A woman…”

“Not joking,” Fred said. “I’d offer you tea, but I don’t know…”

“Tea downstairs,” she said. So. This and the absence of denial seemed to confirm her identity. “I’ll get it.” She loped out.

Fred stayed put, letting his gaze take in the walls. A calendar showing the wrong month of the wrong year exhibited a photo of half-naked human females taking the sun on a tropical beach. Poster of a show of Vallotton: little girl walking with a basket through an ominous woods; calendar with the right month of the present year, topped by a generic waterfall and a motto that couldn’t be read from where he was, but could be presumed to encourage the principled stewardship of nature’s expiring bounty; big poster of a Harley, more suitable to the bedroom of a high school student.

The woman came in again, holding an outsized blue china mug.

“It
is
Meg, isn’t it?” Fred asked.

She nodded and sat in the other chair, of yellowing, ancient plaid Herculon. That chair would be out on the sidewalk as soon as Morgan Flower spied his ship on the horizon.

“Fred,” Fred said. “I’m taking Morgan’s classes.”

“Jesus!” Meg’s mouth tightened and she shook her head. The room was chilly. Even so, her tea failed to emit steam.

“The authorities, whatever you call them,” Fred said. “That’s how I come to have keys. They’re not Morgan’s. The powers that be. What’s her name?” He took out the envelope and, from the information provided, picked out the name “Elizabeth Harmony.”

Meg’s mouth tightened again. The room grew chillier. “Not that I give a shit,” she said. “But where do you come from?”

“I’m a bookmark. Told them I’d fill in for a week. That gives Morgan a chance to come back from his bender or, if he’s found something better to do, it gives them time to do it right.”

“Them?” Meg sneered.

“The powers that be. Them. You. The search committee. Whatever,” Fred said.

Meg took a sip from the blue mug.

“Faculty housing?” Fred asked, making an inclusive gesture.

Meg shrugged. “In lieu of decent wages. Not that we have no choice. We can rent something else somewhere else, but the salary doesn’t change. Take it or leave it. No offense. It’s kind of a sore point with most of us. What are they paying you? For the week you’re working?”

“The use of Morgan’s rooms,” Fred said. “I see what you mean. Otherwise, it’s a favor for a friend of a friend of a friend. And, to be frank, it’s a good time for a change of scene. Nobody who’s looking for me is going to look for me here.”

“Believe me, nobody is going to look for
anybody
here. Whose nephew are you, is that it?”

“We seem to be starting wrong,” Fred said. “Let’s try this way. You’re on the faculty at Stillton, yes?”

“They claim they want accreditation,” Meg persisted. “Bull shit! There are procedures to follow, even here. Like you advertise the position and interview candidates and all that. Equal opportunity. It’s like we are North Korea and claim to be a democracy for the simple reason that democracy’s a good thing to claim to be, but we go on at the same time doing whatever the fuck we feel like, and just
say
if we’re doing it, that proves it’s what democracies do. If you don’t like it, we shoot you as undemocratic. No, they shove you down our throats without even waving you at senior faculty first.”

“Or we could try it this way,” Fred said. “You and I find we are neighbors. Just happen to live next door to each other. Not having any particular reason to fight—unless I play loud music and throw bottles out the windows and blood leaks through your ceiling after an especially good party—we pass the time of day. Then, after a week, I’m gone.”

“Drawing and painting,” Meg said. “I run the life room.” She took another sip from the blue mug.

“I have beer,” Fred said. “If you’ll visit a spell, I’ll have one. I could open another for you, to add to your tea.”

“Caught me. I’ve gotten so used to setting a good example,” Meg said, “It’s almost second nature. We know we’ve become adults when the natural sneakiness of the child becomes full-fledged hypocrisy. I’ll take a beer, thanks. In a glass. I hate it out of china. Thing is, you can’t see through…”

Fred did the honors, finding that he was obliged to wash one of the dirty glasses in the sink in order to honor his guest’s demand. Meg went on talking. “Fine. Since we are accidental neighbors, I’ll assume you are ignorant. Insurance broker. Stillton Academy: it might be the only almost genuine 19th century French academy of art left in this country, maybe in the world. There’s nothing left like it in France, anyway, not for the last fifty years. I teach first- and second-year drawing, painting for second- and third-year students. And as I said, I run the life room. Also I teach figure modeling. That’s clay. It works out for me. Clay is my medium.”

“The life room,” Fred said, presenting her with the damp glass and a tall can of Ballantine ale. He carried another can with him to his chair. “That’s where students work from the model.”

“The live model. Always nude,” Meg said, “until the second half of the third year, when we let the painters start working with drapery as well. I said we were 19th century, but not even we work from cadavers. Not since about seventy-five years back.”

Chapter Six

“Too expensive?” Fred guessed.

“Extraneous people in authority started wondering who they were,” Meg said. “It’s a teeny place, our students come from nowhere and most of them go nowhere. I make exactly enough money to break even if I go to New York four times a year, as long as I stay with friends. The administration treats us like shit and they don’t either know or care what we are doing. The work is long and hard and I love it. You’ll be in Stillton B.”

She took a swig. “Ale isn’t beer.”

Fred said, “I saw it. Stillton Hall. On the way over.”

“Nobody knows we’re here,” Meg said. “Especially since, recently, even the most free-wheeling grad schools got legalistic. That’s accreditation for you. It has its downside. Until then we got the occasional kid into a good grad school just on the strength of an excellent portfolio. Basil Houel is one. Not that you’d care. Not that you’d know his work.”

“Rusty empty tin cans in urban landscapes,” Fred said. “Discarded cartons from juice, milk. Scraps of bubble wrap. Packaging with weeds growing through it. I remember a dismembered Barbie…sometimes there’s a human shadow; an occasional bare foot strolling past. Small, tight, colors tending toward lurid…”

“Nobody knows Basil’s work,” Meg said, letting her mouth hang open.

“Stillton B,” Fred prompted.

“I’m there in Stillton B three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesdays, tomorrow, I’m Stillton A. Figure Modeling,” Meg said. “Sometimes Thursdays too. Studio classes run six hours. Breaks for the model or a smoke, and lunch, run the day longer. Your lib arts classes meet on Tuesday and Thursday.”

“Jeekers!” Fred said. “Six hours?”

“Not lib arts,” Meg assured him. “You’ll be OK if you can keep them guessing an hour and a half. I can’t believe you know Basil’s work. I wish—but hell, what difference does it make? You’re here for a week. Wear old clothes. They paint in that room too.”

“Who else does lib arts, as you call it?” Fred asked.

“You’re it. Morgan, that is. He’s the lib arts department. And even the one faculty member in anything outside studio arts, that’s you, is new last year. For balance. They make us. To prove we mean it. For accreditation. NEASC. You know what that is?”

Fred nodded. “As much as I want to.”

The fog horn’s regular hooting made an unwanted third party in the conversation. Rain rattled against the windows steadily now. Morgan Flower had neither blinds nor curtains on the windows overlooking the view of lighthouse and dark water whose slow, small swells lit up in regular shafts as the light of the lighthouse swept across them.

Meg said, “If you run what you want to call even a barber college these days, supposing you want all the licenses and permissions, which means you want accreditation, you have to show that the students are exposed to an educational standard that includes balance as well as specialization. Enough science, history, literature, as well as enough specialized attention to whiskers and split ends, so they can function as literate general human barbers when they achieve their degrees.

“Before we brought Morgan in we shipped the students out to take the minimum required extraneous credits in nearby colleges though even the nearest college is forty minutes away. But the schedules weren’t compatible and besides, someone figured out that it was cheaper to hire one more miserable instructor full time than pay for the bus, the driver, the insurance, and the scheduling headache. So. We hired a lib arts department. That’s Morgan. Therefore you are the substitute lib arts department. What do you know?”

The foghorn hooted. A lone gull responded. With all the others.

“Where
is
Morgan,” Fred asked.

Meg shrugged. “His car is out front is all I know. They didn’t give you keys to that, I guess? That’s still regarded as his property? How do you spell Basil’s last name?”

“It’s pronounced ‘Howell,’” Fred said. “But it’s spelled H-O-U-E-L. A French name, I’m guessing.”

“I still can’t get over…”

“I like pictures,” Fred said. “I don’t like Houel’s pictures but I’ve noticed them, and thought about them. They seem mean. You know the guy?”

Meg poured the remainder of the ale into her glass and stood. “I’ll bring this back. See you tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be in Stillton A. Life Modeling. Clay. Clay makes such a mess it’s all we do in there. Thanks for this.” She raised the glass and left, descending the stairs without closing Fred’s door.

If that was a habit of hers, it indicated a degree of familiarity with the place or its previous occupant. Fred closed the door and began the tour of inspection he had been about to start when Meg walked in. If Morgan Flower taught liberal arts—English and Art History at least—where were his books? Oh, here. The closet was full of them. Crammed shelves lined the back and side walls and boxes of books were piled in the remaining space, as high as Fred’s shoulders. A fast glance proved the collection to be remaindered art books—mostly Impressionists and Italian Renaissance war horses—and the texts assigned in low level college introductory lit classes a couple of generations back:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; A Room of One’s Own.

A second closet held a parka, sport coats, pants on hangers. The third door opened into Morgan Flower’s Spartan bedroom. Spartan? Almost monastic. The single bed was made: metal frame, no headboard or footboard. The last blue chenille bedspread in the known world lay across it. The hooked rug in the room’s center must come with the place. A wooden desk held a tablet of lined yellow paper, legal size; a notebook and seven books. Next to the desk a ratty, two-drawer file cabinet might bear looking into later. The bureau held underwear, shirts, socks and—the top drawer—an assortment of foreign money that, put together, might trade for three hundred dollars at the most.

No passport.

No phone anywhere in the place. Presuming that he had one, he depended on a cell phone, iPhone, or so-called smartphone. Therefore no helpful answering machine with stowed messages.

Shoes under the bed: loafers, sneakers, boots for the winter.

The search was quick, since there was nothing much to search. Bathroom off the bedroom yielded a slightly running toilet—Fred looked into the tank and adjusted the ball cock—a tub with one of those infuriating contraptions rigged above it to allow the landlord to claim the existence of a shower—sink, and towels that looked to have come from the same yard sale as the Herculon-upholstered chair. The bathroom window when he raised the blind looked directly into the bathroom of the next cottage over, ten feet away, across a dark side yard.

He couldn’t smell the man or get a feel for him. The shelf of condiments in the bathroom didn’t show such obvious lacunae as to demonstrate the absence of their owner. There was no sign either that he had departed or that he was expected home. In the whole apartment, in fact, so far, there was nothing a man would mind leaving, and nothing much to come back to.

“The fridge, then,” Fred said, making his way back to the galley kitchen through which he had entered. Ice, ice cream, most of a bottle of vodka, two fat frozen pork chops and a square of lima beans in the upper compartment. In the lower, milk, half a lemon—the man had no TV set? Remarkable. Maybe they were forbidden in Stillton? No, that was the drone of TV evening news coming up through the floor from Meg Harrison’s apartment. Come to think of it, there was no stereo equipment either. No computer? Did the guy live his life by cell phone, iPod, and BlackBerry?—and—still in the fridge—most of a loaf of whole wheat bread of an unpretentious brand; peanut butter, grape jelly, a withering bowl of spaghetti in browning sauce, beer, and more wine than you’d think was necessary until you began to speculate what life must be like in Stillton, Massachusetts.