Dark Things I Adore

by Katie Lattari

  By the time we finish our late brunch—my mood much improved by the food and coffee and a cigarette or two out in the sunshine and bracing autumn chill—it’s nearly one in the afternoon. We’ve taken our time, luxuriating in the meal, in our conversation about the institute, her thesis project, my theories about what has made a successful thesis in past years, even some chatter about awards and recognitions and gallery showings I’ve achieved in the past. Audra is patient as I prattle on about myself, and then she opens up about her own process. It has fully brought me back to myself, back to why I’m so attracted to her in the first place.

  “The idea is to harness these voices, women’s voices, in a chorus that reaches through time. Through these mixed-media collage pieces I’ve pulled together. A kind of chant or a siren song drawing the looker farther and farther into the world of the pieces, of the thesis, into its message and truth.” She taps the tines of her fork against her bottom lip, looking off into the distance as she tries to describe her work to me. Her mind. Her eye. Her talent. Electrifying, maddening, incredible. She blushes and laughs at herself gently. “That’s a lot of talk, I know. But that’s what I’m trying to do. I’ll show you this afternoon, and you can tell me if I’m even close.”

  “If there was ever an artist I thought could pull off exactly what they imagined they could, it’s you.” I let my napkin fall onto my plate. I smile at her because there’s nothing else I can do. Smile, and wait for her genius to bludgeon me. “Alright,” I say, feeling full and somehow already sleepy again. “Let me go do my homework before I lose all motivation. And then studio. Thesis.” She smiles when I say homework.

  “Feel free to use Pops’s office down the hall. Or your room. Wherever you’d like.”

  “Thanks,” I tell her and head off. I climb the stairs on my pulsing ankle and grab my laptop, bring it back downstairs to her grandfather’s plush office. I close the door, and over the next two hours, I respond to the emails I’m most overdue in responding to; I proofread a grant proposal a few colleagues and I have put together on behalf of the department; I grade a few short response papers by a student from my Art & Critical Theory class. When I’m getting ready to shut it all down, I hear a new email ping through. I close my other windows and go back to my inbox.

  TO: mdurant@biva.edu

  FROM: thedevil@kingcity.me

  SUBJECT: Hi, Moss

  Everything seems to slow down. Tunnel down into one point of light. I can hear my heart in my ears, as if the rhythm lives there. My finger hovers over the track pad. I look down and see it’s shaking. My hand. My finger. It acts as if outside of me and clicks.

  who are you drawing these days

  who are you painting

  A strangled yelp erupts in my throat, and I stand up so fast, the chair falls over behind me. The clatter it makes startles me again, my shoulders high and tense as a spooked cat. Then the room is still again. Just my breathing. The silent screen. I reread the words over and over again. It’s like worrying the shell of a scab. I read it and read it. It stings each time.

  I force myself to look away from the screen. I inhale more than breathe.

  I push my eyes onto objects around the room, struck with a creeping vertigo. The solid wood desk. I press my hand onto it. A photo of Audra and her grandfather on the sideboard. The window behind me. Sunlight. The nice Persian rug under my bare feet. I curl my toes into its fibers. I breathe in and smell furniture polish. I focus on these things, these real things I can touch and sense, like a dreamer wanting to banish away horror with a pinch.

  Moss.

  When I look down at the screen, the email is still there. I feel sick.

  I slam the laptop down hard. Hard enough that, for a split second, I worry I may have broken it.

  I stand up too fast and cry out when my ankle angrily protests, a hot spike driven in sideways. The bite of it is jagged and clarifying. My astonishment that became fear has now become anger.

  Who did this to me? Who would do this to me? Who could do this to me?

  I pace around the room like an animal, trying to get a hold of myself.

  Maybe I didn’t see what I saw.

  I did.

  Maybe it doesn’t mean what it meant.

  It does.

  I lean against the desk and force myself to take three deep breaths.

  I turn my gaze out the window. The light is pushing from clear and lemony into veiled and golden. This must be the light Audra was talking about yesterday. Our light for looking.

  I glance over at my laptop and feel only terror. I can’t open it. Not now. Later. I’ll look at it again later. Maybe I didn’t see what I saw. The room feels too quiet now. The laptop too menacing. I flee the room.

  Audra is on her couch, legs tucked up under her. She’s reading Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. She looks up at me, expectant, happy.

  “Were you able to get—”

  “The ankle,” I say by way of reintroduction, my voice terser than I want it to be; Audra is cut off. She looks sheepish. “It kills.”

  “Advil?” she offers. I nod. “How about a drink?”

  “How about several,” I say. I watch her get up to go fetch me these things. I stand in the living room, dazed.

  Someone knows what I did. And someone knows that I’m back.

  Audra

  Saturday, October 20, 2018

  He emerged at around half past three, asked me to fix us some drinks, and then immediately chain-smoked three cigarettes outside in succession. I watched him smoke and limp back and forth across the patio, jacket pulled around him, body looking tight. It’s rare for him to smoke three in a row.

  How bad could work have been?

  He’s agitated. Maybe more than agitated. Maybe worse than agi-tated. When he comes back in, he gratefully accepts his gin and tonic.

  “Got anything stronger than Advil?”

  I offer him a half a Vicodin from a small cache I still have from dental work several months ago. He takes it down with the drink, ignoring the Advil. I say nothing.

  We sit down in the living room, Max rolling his head around on his shoulders like everything in his body is kinked up. I’m trying to tell him a little bit about the Brautigan book, but he’s disinterested. Distracted. So I start talking about my thesis work again. Where in the process I am. The goals he and I had developed together. Max is on his third drink of the afternoon, and, very uncharacteristically, he has nothing to add. No pearls of wisdom to bestow. No anecdotes about his own incredible triumphs as a graduate student. I see him eyeing everything rather baldly. The furniture. The art on the walls. The family keepsakes. It’s like he’s trying to discern a coded message. His face is serious, the hint of dark circles under his gently glassed eyes. His lip twitches.

  “I came all the way up here to see your portfolio. Let’s have it, then,” he finally says, taking a final swig of his drink, placing the empty glass down on the coffee table roughly.

  “Oh, yes, of course—I suppose the time has arrived.”

  “I only have one more full day, and I imagine there will be quite a lot of…work for you to do.” His tone is borderline nasty. “So much talk, Audra, so much confidence, and I haven’t even seen it.” He rubs an eye socket with the palm of his hand. “I’m here to look at your work. Critique it. Then leave you to see what can be made of it.” He’s on edge. He looks dreadfully worn, as if this afternoon has become impossibly heavy on him.

  “No, yes—you’re right. Let’s do that.” I lead him out of the living room and down the long hallway to the attached garage. I wonder, as he follows closely behind me, if he still has that knife in his pocket. The knife he flicked open and closed mindlessly yesterday in the car. The knife I told him it was handy to have on him in these parts. I feel every vertebra in my spine, every expansion of my rib cage, my intact lungs. We cross the garage, moving pa
st my white Volvo wagon and my Gram’s old red Toyota Tacoma. I take him up the unfinished staircase to the loft above the garage, which is half-finished with plywood but has plush area rugs, raw outlets but expensive curtains, rough shelving but top-notch art supplies, an open, roughed-in bathroom but a divine, pink velvet couch, a darling, squat, potbellied wood-burning stove. My canvases of various sizes lean about the space, three different easels with three different works in various stages of completion particularly displayed. My paints cover various table and shelf surfaces, my brushes and tools in large coffee cans, jam jars and supply organizers. Smocks hang from pegs, lovingly paint-splattered.

  “Just about everything you see here is—is part of the thesis collection, or a draft of something that will be in the thesis collection. There will likely be eight to ten total—I know there are more than that here. I promise to choose carefully.” I scratch the back of my head, nervous, waiting. Ready. His face manages to be a disconcerting mix of slack and stony; soft with drink, tense with anger or fear—or something. God knows what is in his mind now. Does he understand his position? He’s a rabbit caught in a snare. I look at a vein straining in his neck and the wear in his face and think he is beginning to.

  I watch him mindlessly pat, pat, pat his jeans pocket; the knife is surely there. He’s prowling around. He looks hunched and predatory. He pauses in front of a series leaning against a workbench. He studies deeply. It is a golden wing, sensual, brave, loud on the canvas. Small, rough wafers of paper are suspended in layers of paint, sloping letters and language and charcoal pencil drawings barely visible as they peek out of the landscape here and there.

  Max is a frozen man. A statue.

  What has he seen in my work? What has he read?

  “You—did these?” he asks, voice taut. He turns so half his face is toward me. His teeth are just bared.

  “Yes, it’s what I’ve been working on all these months.”

  His eyes climb to my face, then look away, moving over to a hyper-alive, bursting, erotic apple painting, layered similarly with scraps of paper. The edges tapered into a veiled, dusty rose. Primal. Sleepy. Some subconscious carnal core. Magnified to a sexual redness. Max steps back and then seems to take in the myriad other paintings. He is surrounded by them. It’s an assault. A series based on the bark of a birch tree, composed in similar fashion. A coiled, bone-colored rope. A butterscotch scarf. A russet lantern. Magnified, all magnified to a shocking visibility. Sub-sketches and sub-notes layered and collaged inside folds, smears, veils of color. A sketch of a woman’s bare chest, clavicles elongated.

  “What—what do you call this?” he asks.

  “Her Dark Things,” I reply. He mumbles the words as he brings his face close to the lantern painting again.

  “There is so much paint in these. So much paper—so much subject. Where does the eye rest? Where does the viewer get to rest?” He is upset. “These your little macabre doodles? I can’t even read this chicken scratch. There’s so much paint globbed over these notes. So much matter. Too much,” he spits. My jaw clenches. You’re so brave now, Max. So dismissive. Let’s see how long that lasts. He is leaning in toward a scrap of paper inside the lantern image.

  “No, those are the found objects I was telling you about. The intermedia component. Interesting, right? The interplay? The texturing?” A heat and thrill run through my body as I watch him devour my work. As I watch it get into him. As I watch it push inside. His right fist clenches and unclenches. It feels like a long time before either of us speaks again.

  “You do not know,” he begins, voice low, almost creaky, “what it’s like to be around someone like you, Audra.” He turns to face me. His hair is a nest in disarray. From the incessant running of his hand through it while we sat and drank and he tried desperately to read my walls, my belongings, my life—much of which I have curated for this very visit. For his eyes only. It becomes clear to me, in this moment—the faraway glassiness of his eyes, the hunched, harmed posture—that I might be in for a very bad time. The kind of time I have only ever seen intimations of, heard tell of. Max, out of control. My gut lurches. “How impossible it is. How impossible you are. The very—the very fact of you.” He gestures at me in a way that indicates both disgust and exaltation. I swallow and steel myself, gazing out the large picture windows onto my field in the goldening, late-afternoon light. He turns to me. His glasses frame his troubled expression.

  “Max, I—”

  “And, and I’m sorry if my…my worship of you has become tedious, Ms. Colfax.” There are storm clouds in his eyes; they hang heavy on his brow, creasing it.

  “Worship? Max—what is this? What’s happening?”

  “Oh, would you quit it with this act? Like you don’t know. Like you don’t know of your own brilliance. Of the shadow you cast. Not only upon your classmates but upon—upon me as well. Your mentor.” He limps on to the next easel to find a midnight-black crow, elongated and abstracted, the eye oversize, overwhelming, glinting. “You don’t know what it’s like.” He is rubbing his hands up and down his face as he turns away from the crow, as if trying to expel it. He limps a few paces over to one of my workbenches and absentmindedly picks up a half-finished bottle of Barbera and takes a swig straight from it. It’s been sitting there for days. It must taste awful. “You don’t know what it’s like. To teach someone like you, to want to celebrate someone like you, to want to mentor someone like you—who already shines so brightly and at such a young age. To want to be with someone like you,” he mumbles, anger and despair mixing in equal measure. I feel overwhelmed by his sudden honesty. He has been careful up to now, cryptic, sly, quiet, veiled but persistent. This is something else. I’m undoing him. “I mean, Jesus. You come to the work, to the craft fully formed. And so young. So goddamned young.” He looks at me, and his eyes look hurt, burgeoning into bloodshot. “It’s so easy for you.” He’s teetering on the edge of implosion—and yet it’s not out of fear, exactly. Or at least, it’s fear of the wrong thing. Fear of my excellence, fear of his own obsolescence is breaking him down. Mere jealousy. Pathetic insecurity. It’s unbelievable, maddening, that that’s what he’s taking from the work. Even in this he manages to put himself at the center.

  “Max, you—maybe you want to—” I shake my head, trying to think of something to say to redirect him, gesturing back at the paintings.

  “I’m old, and my best production is, is six, seven years behind me.”

  “You’re spiraling.” Perhaps it’s a challenge, the way I’ve said it. Or a taunt. A reprimand. An observation. It’s the truth.

  “Name the last work of mine that you’ve loved. Really loved. Name it.” We are playing a dangerous game now. He has produced precious little in the months we’ve known each other. Most of what I have seen has been almost brilliant. But only almost. We both know that the peak of his career is a decade behind him. He’s in the business of collecting now—collecting mentees, his shiny show-and-tell girls. He’s become the definition of the old phrase those who cannot do, teach. He senses my hesitation. “You have always been a cruel one, Audie. Always a cruel streak in you.” He takes another swig from the Barbera. The deep-red color on his lips and teeth is grotesque. Rancid.

  “Your Builder series,” I finally relent. He looks at me then, fixated, almost frozen. “Those were…excellent,” I admit. It pains me to admit it. There were three or four of them. His ex-girlfriend paintings. Haunted, dastardly, compelling, and rhapsodic in impossible shades of blue. His face softens a bit, and I see his eyes go distant for a moment; he is thinking of them. I swallow. I’m sure he knows how good they are, despite their utter darkness. Not his best ever, not the kind of work that launched his career, but strong nonetheless.

  “But just those few, huh?” He comes back into himself, something deep inside of him hunched and demonic, hidden under his handsome exterior. He’s taken over again. By jealousy. “And what I had to do to, to get those—yo
u have no idea.” He shakes his head, a meanness in the shape and curve of his mouth. But I do know. All too well. I have more of a sense of his process than he can begin to imagine.

  “That’s enough, Max.”

  “Your work…it has made me weep, you know.” He stabs himself in the chest with his index finger, the rest of the fingers on that hand clutching the wine. “I mean, Christ. Christ, Audie. Look at this! Scores of them!” He slams his fist down on the table, making a dormant candleholder topple over. I jump, my pulse up.

  “You are overreacting.”

  “Am I? Am I? Or has the time finally come,” he says gravely, a bit dramatically, “when the master comes upon the protégé”—the word is garbled in his mouth—“who will make him obsolete?”

  I want to howl with laughter. He drinks deeply again from the olive-green bottle. Some of the liquid dribbles pathetically down his chin.

  I want to scream.

  “Give that to me,” I demand. “No more of this. Of any of this. Professor Durant—” I stalk over to him and am about to swipe the bottle from his hand when he seizes it by the neck, spins to the work-table at his hip, and smashes it down with shocking force directly into one of my paintings resting on a workbench. The sound is a startling thud and crack as it contacts the canvas; glass shards fly up at us. I shield my face, hearing the glass scatter to the floor.

  I slowly lower my arms. I look at the table, then him. My mouth falls open; he is red-faced, sweating, maniacal. Wine is splashed all over the table, the floor, pooled in the stretched divot in the painting the impact of the bottle has made. A winged cardinal/red apple orchard hybrid painting I had high hopes for.

  “Jesus—” I breathe almost involuntarily. I look at Max, who now wields a jagged, deadly piece of glass. Easy now. He stares me down, heaving. He raises the knifelike shard and drives it through my cardinal/apple canvas with obliterating force. He grabs the wooden frame and wrenches his weapon-wielding fist through it, rending it repeatedly, grunting, growling in fury. He leaves scores and gashes in the table in his violence, he topples paint cans, water cups, rattles and sprays trays and sketch paper everywhere. He suddenly stops clawing and ripping. He just holds the bottleneck inches above his handiwork, heaving. I stay frozen still, right where I am. Within slashing distance, I realize with a flinch. I almost dare not breathe.