by Joe Derkacht
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With a new commission in hand, I could sit at my drafting table and put Kit out of my mind. It suddenly didn’t matter that nothing had come easily to me these past few months in spite of my strange dream and Reverend Grunwald’s coaching. I started doodling on a bit of scratch paper to see how things would go. If it went poorly, I’d crumple it up and throw it away. If something worthwhile emerged from the roiling concoction of thoughts and emotions in my brain, all the better.
I let the ideas flow as freely and quickly as possible, without the restraints of the usual implements of drafting, even employing a stick of charcoal instead of a mechanical pencil. I was looking, at the moment, for attitude, mostly, with rusticism as my spiritual guide, as it were. After I captured something of the spirit, then I could add the flesh with precise ideas of proportion, materials, finishes.
All the same, thoughts of Kit kept nibbling at my mind, tempting me to put aside the charcoal. Claude’s seeming familiarity with her was especially annoying, his calling her Kathy, when as far as I knew, myself and everyone else had always called her Kit.
“Focus… Focus… Focus…” I mumbled. Once the flow of inspiration was interrupted, it might take me hours or even days to find it again!
Like Claude, Kit liked the sound of her own voice too much. Unfortunately, I’d always tended to gravitate to people who talked a lot, likely to compensate for my own inability to communicate without driving other people crazy. In utter contrast to her, I loved the periods at the ends of sentences, and all the spaces between. The result was that her incessant chatter tended to give me headaches, and though I was the one who owned a history as a nutcase, she was the one it drove crazy.
The first time she walked in through the open door of my workshop and glanced around, I was searching through the wood blocks I used for my inlay work. I nodded politely in her direction, selected a piece of mahogany I wanted, and went to my table saw.
“You’re the strong, silent type. I like that in a man.”
I shrugged, grinning noncommittally, as I pulled my safety glasses down onto my nose and reached for the power switch. On any given day, especially summers, when Driftwood Bay was overrun with tourists and the usual influx of Portlanders and Seattleites who owned homes along the beach, a handful of the curious poked their heads in past my open shop door. I welcomed visitors, since I’d earned commissions over the years by letting them wander in to watch me pursue my craft. She didn’t look like one of my typical customers, though, in her plunging, orange halter top, cutoff jeans, flip flops, and a nice tan that contrasted with her short, wedge-cut sun-bleached hair. She wasn’t thirty, yet, that’s for sure. Most of my customers were couples, gray-haired ones at that, often attired in Dockers and matching Izods.
It wasn’t that I’d stared; like any artist, I was simply observant. I certainly didn’t expect her to have stuck around, after I pushed the block past the blade ten times and finally shut off the saw.
“That’s for parquetry, isn’t it?”
Startled, I dropped the pieces of mahogany like playing cards squirting out of my hand. As they clattered to the floor I leaned over to pick them up, and we bumped heads. Simultaneous exclamations turned to mutual laughter. I stepped back apologetically.
I slid my safety glasses up, perching them atop my head. An angry red mark appeared near her scalp line. She reached up and touched it gingerly, before removing her sunglasses and squeezing them into a hip pocket.
I blurted three words without stuttering, the words I’d practiced more than any others in my life: “Sorry! ’Scuse me.”
“That’s okay, mea culpa,” she said, grinning wryly, still fingering her injury.
In that moment, I noticed a fragrance in the air different from the shop’s usual freshly sawn wood spiced with machine oil. I would have sworn she smelled like fresh raspberries. For a second or two I felt my head swim. Then she knelt down to retrieve the pieces of mahogany scattered across the floor. I knew I shouldn’t look but I did anyhow, staring for reasons that had nothing to do with my artistic inclinations, and couldn’t tear my eyes away until she stood back up and winked conspiratorially at me.
I think that was when I fell in love with her. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it wasn’t exactly love. But for someone who had given up on the idea of love by the time he managed to escape from high school, it was close enough to be in the neighborhood—the county—even the solar system. For the next two weeks, she came in and watched me every day as I worked. As usual, I didn’t say much beyond a single syllable word. As usual for her, as I would shortly discover, she kept up a running commentary, most of it for the present to do with her fascination over the creative process—of making something from nothing, of taking pencil markings on paper and transforming them into something as beautiful as a Grandfather clock. It was the easiest relationship I ever fell into, requiring nothing more from me than admiring glances and the occasional uh-huh, yup, or nope.
At the end of those two weeks, we were on a plane headed for Las Vegas. It was the stupidest thing I ever did, even stupider than getting married by a cross-dressing Reverend Elvis. I remembered that first morning we woke up together. Sunlight streamed in through the hotel curtains, while the sounds of children splashing in the pool drifted in through the balcony screen door. For some reason, the word marquetry came to my lips.
Actually, I said, “M-M-Mar-q-q-quetry.”
She rolled over and squinted at me, her blue eyes curious.
“What’s wrong with you?” She asked.
“Nothing,” I said, creating a paragraph of unintelligible squawks from one word.
“Well, that was totally annoying.”
Despite the cool morning air, my face felt as though it were on fire. Unable to bear it for long, I reached for her and held her as tightly as if we were going down on the Titanic.