Interfictions (10 page)

It was love between them, then and thereafter. They sat together on the library balcony dreaming under the conifers and wide-reaching oaks. He complimented her work, and he didn't correct her stammer or finish her sentences. Happy to sit, Dean waited for her to express herself on her own time. When they finally touched, finally embraced, finally kissed, her undisciplined, impractical poems grew measured and majestic. Dean began to write epics as if he were the first man to fall in love with a beautiful woman. He cut a lock of her hair and made a braid—carried it in his pocket. Chloe fell, and fell, and fell. She lost herself, and was glad.

Dean could hear the heavenly music.

Chloe is in the attic. Spiderwebs undulate with her breath like undersea vegetation. A delicate fuzz coats the surface of boxes and baskets like plankton and her writing tools are on the arms of the chair, sleeping under a shroud of powder. The room wants to be aired and scrubbed, to be arranged and alphabetized into submission. But Chloe drops into the recliner and watches dust spurt in a mushroom cloud. She sheds her clogs, strips off her gauntlets, hat and veil—hurls them into the boiling dust balls on the floor. Her heart, still giddy, sends blood to her limbs and a blush to her cheeks.

The window is hazy, but she wrenches it open and takes a breath of fresh air. Tucked into the recliner she can see signs of habitation in Evan Lee's room. Shirts are hanging in the closet. The goose-necked lamp is clamped to the nightstand. The easel is an origami crane with a tablet of newsprint in its beak. Red chalk, artist's gum, and sticks of charcoal are a jumble of kindling on the tin TV tray, waiting for the spark.

The artist approaches the easel with a stick of black chalk. She stands as if balanced on a precipice. A breeze from the open window ripples the paper, lifts her hair, toys with the hem of her white shirt. She closes her dark eyes, and her lips begin to move. The artist is summoning something from within, drawing the cloak of artistry around her, that veil of incandescent power. She stretches her arms, rolls her head to loosen her shoulder muscles, pulls her elbows across her chest one at a time, and then bounces lightly on the balls of her feet.

Hear me
, she mouths.
Come to me, spirit.

Three strokes hit the paper then the sheet is savaged from the pad. Others soon follow, to collect in a drift around the easel like crumpled gray snow. As she moves, her light cotton shirt flutters and undulates, collecting smears of charcoal at the cuffs and the hem. Lost in the work, the artist shrugs the garment away, baring a broad, strong back. She winds the cloth around her palm to use as an implement, her naked shoulders curved into the page. Eyes narrow and fierce, she smudges the paper with her thumbs, her wrists, her fingers. She swipes over the paper with elbows, forearms, clumps of wadded-up shirt. She leans into the tablet as a lover curves into an embrace. As the power of creation hits her, the artist tucks her dark head low and the strokes on the page become violent and wild. Her lips move and it's as if she is singing some ancient ballad as her marks impale the fibers of the page with lethal energy, crow's wing black, burnt crimson, bone white. Bright-eyed and gasping, she finishes the piece with a flourish. She brushes a wild strand of hair from her damp face and steps back to examine what her labor has wrought.

Without magnification, Chloe shouldn't be able to see the image, but it steps from the easel to stand at Evan Lee's windowsill. It is a little girl, pale, red-lipped and covered with beach sand. She stands in the window like a warrior, with a stick in her hand, a lance, a spear, a bright sword. Behind the girl is the massive, aquamarine curl of a wave, shot through with foam and strands of black kelp. In a shimmer of chalk dust, the warrior child waves her driftwood spear at Chloe and sticks out her little pink tongue. Then she's smiling, sharp nacreous teeth. Her hair flutters in the ocean breeze, crazy dandelion fluff. No longer a dread specter, a harbinger of cold aquatic death, she is a nixie, a sprite, a sandy-legged sylph.

Chloe bends toward the window, and scribbles a little to get the ink flowing from her pen. Words spill onto the dusty sheets, random, tumbling, breaching like porpoises over warm waves. As when she was crazy and young, her first disjointed attempts fall to the floor in a mad cascade of half-crumpled paper. Writing this topsy-turvy way, uninhibited, is like pulling the handle of a slot machine, again and again with blinking lights and caterwauling sirens:
Loss, loss, loss, win! Loss, loss, win! Jackpot! A winner! Fly!

She isolates an image, adds another and another, and as the discarded pages pile up under the windowsill, an epic erupts and takes flight. Her pen hand dips and soars to keep pace with the words, climbing, banking, gliding on thermals, accompanied by a burbling that fills the room like a child's breath escaping water, but this time Chloe isn't driven to the disinfectant. She is uplifted up, up, up toward the receding storm clouds, “D—.—.—.—d—.—.—.—d—.—.—.—DONE!"

Triumphant, Chloe looks at the artist. With a gaze like volcanic glass, the artist releases the neck of the easel to lean naked against the windowsill, chin propped on her chalk-blackened elbows. She has no breasts, no nipples, no navel. Her skin is smooth caramel satin over muscle and bone. Like a priestess offering a blessing beneath a canopy of wild olive, she raises a hand, closes her eyes, and sings Chloe's newly penned verse:

Young Pallas, daughter of Triton, and granddaughter of Ocean

Was the beloved friend of Athene, Gray-Eyed goddess of war.

Both girls loved a good skirmish, spear and javelin most of all

And sadly, when they matured, all the crude nonsense started

With “Mine's bigger than yours” and “It's quality not quantity."

So, when Pallas raised her weapon, no doubt to prove a point

She was struck down by accident to fall dead at Athene's feet.

And grieved to the heart, Athene wrapped Pallas in the aegis

The snake-cloak of protection, and placed her body in a shrine

And bought her fixtures, and clothing and self-help books like

"How to Forget Your Javelin, in Twenty-Eight Days or Less."

And although in a tomb, Pallas wove macramé to pass the time,

Learned to cook and to sew and to praise Athene's offerings.

Growing strange and preoccupied, under the weight of her dread,

She stuffed her ears full of wool, and bent to the sharp spindle

Avoiding the call of the Deep.

As a teenager in Venice Beach, Chloe wasn't afraid of the ocean and people and wide-open spaces. She spent long summer days in the sand scribbling poetry, waiting for boys to invite her into the surf. Befriending foreign boys was best because all languages were like oxygen, and she didn't stutter on foreign syllables. One summer she had many conquests. She gave four days of passion to a doe-eyed Argentinean, two days of frivolity to an apple-cheeked German, five days of tenderness to a studious Swede named Jan. The day Jan had to leave, Chloe ran home to her mother and wept tears of sand and salt.

Her mother had been shuffling notes with a screenwriter named Tinky all afternoon. She caught Chloe up in arms of warm cotton fluff and rolled her like a sausage in the scene-blocking cards until all of them including Tinky were pink and fizzy and giggling. Her mother told Chloe not to be sad. She said, Take heart, my little wild thing, for you were raised by wolves good and proper. Don't you know that wolves run in packs, and sing to the moon, until they find the One Wolf that makes them complete? Jan is certainly lovely—bless the moon and stars—but does he hear the heavenly music? Does he, Chloe-love?

Chloe pondered her mother's breathless question for the rest of the summer. She sat on the sharp rocks at Gideon's Point and ignored the bonfires and the hoots of her classmates. She was sick with emotions; love and fear battled inside her, war on an Olympian scale. But the fire that burns hot burns quickly, and in the last week before she went off to college, she smoldered like a banked ember in the depths of the recliner. She slept in the bright throne of creation that had not yet forgotten its purpose.

Stricken, Chloe reads her poetry on the lips of a stranger. Her heart falters, and she presses against the arm of the recliner to keep from falling out the window. The artist smiles with a tired compassion, a battle-scarred veteran fresh from a deadly dance, still ankle-deep in the blood of a fallen companion. There is a moment of stillness, a moment of reflection, and then she motions. Sit on the windowsill. Pose for me. I will draw you.

Chloe stands motionless in the window, a gazelle paralyzed by the heat of a tiger's breath. She waits for slashing ivory teeth to end the meticulous diorama. Get it over with, cut my throat.

The artist reaches for her tools.

One afternoon, Chloe stood knock-kneed in her second-hand swimsuit and watched a gang of children build a sandcastle. There were three kids in the gang, two pale blond boys and a girl. They worked like golden fiends on the structure, but for all their frenzied scooping and dumping, the best they could do was a lopsided cone of sand. Unable to stop herself, Chloe sidled up and whispered to the boys about battlements, and moats and curtain walls. The stunning blonde sister tossed her silken hair over one shoulder and said, Look at that dumb girl. She's got a ratty hole in her bathing suit and her sandals don't match.

The stink of Chloe's fear excited the golden children. Twitching their little red beaks, they stalked her like scavengers. They made fun of her pale skin and her apricot-colored hair and her s—.—.—.—s—.—.—.—stutter most of all. Cawing, they snatched her packsack and tore it open, used her pencils like lawn darts and screamed her poems at one another, before twisting them into little ropes and flipping them into the surf. Then they fled the carnage, toward the blanket and umbrella fortress where their mother was reading a fashion magazine.

Chloe nudged her beach bag with her foot, and ran home. Unable to laugh it off, unable to cry, she was numb, mute, dead. Chloe's mother took her into the Story Chair and told her a good one about the day Chloe was born. Did you know you were born with a hole in your heart?

Mama, please.

Oh, I know what you're thinking. But there was a little hole—a real pinhole—right through the muscle of your heart. Even though it closed up when you were six, it still hurts. All your life you will pour things into this pinhole to ease the pain, the way you wiggle your tongue inside the empty tooth spot. As long as you keep your heart filled, you'll be blessed, Chloe-Bear. Promise me you'll fill it with magic and secrets and sunlight and ocean waves, and all the other things that hurt but also make you feel alive. Promise you'll do this. Forever and ever. Promise me.

Oh, I promise, Mama. I promise.

The sun is streaming through the open window, drawing beads of sweat from deep within her body. Maybe the sweat comes from fear, or from tears trapped in the folds of the garments she uses to anchor herself. Her anxiety is receding. It's not as bad as it was when the artist first began to paint. But at eight minutes to noon, the heat is changing from prickly insect feet under her arms to a massive cowl of wet wool around her neck and shoulders.

A voice inside tells her that if she doesn't unwrap her sweating body soon, she might faint, strike her head. Die. Strangely, the idea of death is no longer comforting.

Nakedness has been a horror ever since she abandoned her tools on the reclining chair, and only in the shower, contained in that small, wet-pounding space, can she bear it. Whenever she's naked out in the open air, she feels rumpled and slack, although her muscles are still firm and her skin sleek. It's not the nakedness itself that disturbs her, but the buoyancy.

The artist waits with a long sable brush held lightly in her fingers. Her canvas has been prepared, the oils squeezed into mounds that glisten wetly against a sheet of rounded fiberboard. There's a glimmer in her dark gaze. Her expression is challenging, but loving, that of a teacher watching a favorite pupil. She could draw Chloe swaddled in bathrobes like circus tents, indeed she could, but instead she waits for the human being to emerge.

Chloe's hands are moist. They pat and pluck, and search her taut surfaces for access. She unfastens the necktie, her fingers trembling. The first thing to come off is the housecoat, size 32, and it hits the floor with a wet
fump
. The second item is a brocade bathrobe, size 18 (because it comes from a line that caters to women who like to consider themselves Rubenesque). The frog closures are satin, and they slip in her sweaty fingers. She shoves the bathrobe under the recliner with her foot. A third garment, cumbersome pink satin, drops to the floor with a rustle. With the release of each garment, her legs shake less, her hips ache less, and her heels seem to apply less pressure to the floor. Away drop three gabardine button-ups, sizes 18, 16 and 12. Next, two pairs of leggings and three pairs of tights, which she peels off and drapes over the arm of the chair like empty snakeskins. Off come two sweatshirts (sized 10) and two T-shirts (sized SM). Off comes a rumpled cashmere cardigan and a camisole edged in marabou, both dropping into the dust from light fingers. Dressed in a wisp of silk, Chloe teeters at the window. The sable brush caresses the underside of one lace-covered breast, the oil paint rolls across the curve of her hip, delineates the line of her thigh. All is terror. All is joy.

What would Dean think? Should she tell him how she stood bare to a stranger? Would his hands make that warding-off gesture? Would he call her a whore? Would he leave her? Should she go downstairs into the garden and behead the glads, the hyacinths, the fussy tea roses, before he comes home? Should she break all the dishes, smear all the windows with her sexual liquids, warn him somehow of her return to the Deep? Should she show him the wild child, that creature with the perforated heart, the beast she tamed and destroyed?