“It’s not really good for artists either.” His mouth curling, a little roguish. “So much for a secluded retreat in the woods. We renegades have to stick together.”
From behind them, there’s a splash, laughter, more voices. She glances over her shoulder; Dan is gone now. Up on the deck, Sadie hoists a glass in victory.
“Look out,” Justin yells. “Sexy Sadie’s back in town.”
She turns back to find Sim waiting.
“What are they playing? Beer pong?” She’s joking, but he gives her a slight nod.
“Something like that. Only with champagne.”
“Wait—really?”
“Brut pong, let’s call it.”
Dan comes out of a changing room but he’s still dressed; like Karo, he’s rolled his pants up halfway to the knee. It feels voyeuristic, to gather them all here like this, then simply patrol the decks. Justin leans a hip against the wall and Sadie pushes him off like she owns it, spins and forces a high-five from Dan. She has to step in front of Anna to do it, Anna skidding back a little on the deck. Then she turns, scanning the water before calling out to Sim: “Sim Nielssen, quit wasting my time! You’re up!”
Drinking, like poker and kung fu movies, is just another way-in for young women trying to grab a place at the boys’ table. Or at least, those were the routes when Maeve was young. Even here, where the boss is a woman, she can see the value that comes from hanging out with the guys. The power.
She turns back to Sim. “Looks like you’re supposed to play the winner.”
“I’d rather stay over here,” he says. Then: “I mean it, about trusting yourself. Any time you say yes to someone else, it’s a surrender.”
Maeve steps in, one eyebrow raised, closing the gap between them. No more small gestures.
“But you want me to say yes to you.”
He’s about to answer—is he? She can’t tell—when they’re interrupted by Sadie cheering, calling again for Sim to come take his turn.
Instead, he leans in, his mouth at Maeve’s ear:
“Who says I’m asking?”
“You’re interested in him,” Karo says, hovering on the deck as Maeve pulls up out of the pool. The moment feels a bit like an ambush.
“He’s interesting, all right.”
Karo hands her a robe.
“You married young, didn’t you?” But she doesn’t wait for an answer, turning instead to watch the players, the little ball flitting between them, tossed and caught in plastic champagne flutes. “I married Gianpietro when I was eighteen,” she says. “He was forty-four. I had to run away with him, can you believe it?”
“Eighteen is a lifetime ago.”
“It is,” Karo says. “He died.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean—”
Karo waves the apology away. Lung cancer, she says. “When I was thirty-two. It’s strange to think of him now. So you’re right—it’s like a different life completely. It’s almost as though I didn’t live it at all, like it’s something I read about once in a book.”
Maeve sits with that and doesn’t answer right away. She can feel her body tense. Iain does not seem a lifetime ago. “So,” she says, a little puzzled by Karo’s attention. “You’re interested in Sim?”
“Me?” Karo tips her glass. “No,” she says. “Not the way you mean. But I don’t want him to get distracted.” She glances over at the men again, then pulls it back. “Or electrified by something other than his work. He owes me an installation, and I want it done well.”
It’s not advice. It’s an accusation. Maeve feels herself harden in response. She wonders if Sadie has endured this same reproof.
Karo doesn’t break her serious look.
“People come here and they suddenly become teenagers. Don’t waste your time—”
“Fucking around?” Her mother’s phrase: You’re just fucking around. But Karo only dips a toe in the water and shrugs, as though Maeve is overreacting, before she turns away.
Maeve pulls Anna into the bathroom with her.
“Karo gave me another lecture,” she says, through the cubicle wall. “That’s two in two hours.”
“Oh, fuck her.” Anna’s feet go pigeon-toed in the next stall. “She gave me a lecture about smoking in my room. What am I, fifteen?” Her foot dances about, trying to get back into its flip-flop. “I wish you’d been here when the place was crowded. It’s easier. The truth is she handpicks her artists and then she thinks she owns us. She was a painter, you know, but she stopped making art to do this admin job instead. So now she wants to pretend our work is hers somehow? No, thanks.” A pause. “I mean, it’s a big job, I guess,” Anna says. “In fairness. But still.”
There’s the rolling thunder of the toilet-paper dispenser.
“I’ll tell you what’s a big job,” Maeve says. “Working your whole life with no easy template, just working blind and hoping something sticks. No pension, no security, nothing. What happens when we’re all seventy? Ever think of that?”
“I’m not defending her.”
Maeve comes out of her stall and looks at herself in the mirror, the white robe hanging open, her body exposed underneath. The exchange with Karo has left her hostile: a mix of angry and defiant and oddly ashamed, as though she were a much younger Maeve caught with a schoolgirl crush. She pops her hip, testing it, but the damage from her earlier fall is just a bruise. Rolls her hip one way and her shoulder the other. Everything works. Now she only feels the power of her recklessness in the studio. If she can harness that, control those big sequences?
She didn’t even get hurt.
“For God’s sake, I’m a grown woman,” she says to Anna.
Maeve leans against the sink, arms crossed. Anna lets the cubicle door bang shut behind her.
“You’re gorgeous. Let me use your lipstick.”
Maeve digs through her bag, then passes the whole thing over.
“I don’t do this, you know. I mean men. Not since my divorce. Maybe twice. That’s it.”
“You can do whatever you want,” Anna says, correcting the lipstick at the corner of her mouth with a finger. She catches Maeve’s eye in the mirror. “What would a dude do, Maeve? Would a dude be skulking around in the bathroom, Oh no, maybe I’ll get in trouble . . . ” She caps the lipstick, hands it back. “No. Your body, your decision, your time in the mountains.”
Maeve gives her own lips a swipe of color—then leans impulsively into the mirror and presses them against the glass.
An open mouth. A kiss.
“I’m only here for twelve more days,” she says, admiring the print. “That’s no time at all.”
Out in the spa, there are accusations.
“Who’s the least drunk here? Who?” Justin wants an impartial judge, and it’s Maeve who steps forward, bold in lace underwear, before Sexy Sadie gets a chance. She can feel Karo’s eyes on her and pulls herself up taller. Sim merely juggling the little ball in his cup, playing innocent.
“He’s obviously a shark,” Maeve says to Justin. “You should never have put your money against him.”
Anna hoots with delight, pouring out a few more glasses of champagne, Dan and Sadie handing them around.
“I say this man’s a cheat and a liar!” Justin is having a good old time; he holds his glass high as he calls it out. “Let’s all raise a glass to this genius, who has stolen a hundred-dollar bill right out of my hands. He’s left me with nothing. Look—” He pulls the wet pocket of his trunks inside out, but it is not quite empty after all—a last, damp twenty flutters toward the floor and Justin catches it with a snap of the wrist. He spins to Maeve, the bill in hand.
“I’ll pay you twenty dollars right now to slap that grin off his face.”
Sim steps in. He is grinning, it’s true.
“You wouldn’t.” He’s talking to Maeve, not Justin.
They’re using her, she knows, as a kind of amusement. Justin flickers the bill in his fingers.
“You’d make me immensely happy,” he says, sp
arkling.
“You’d make me immensely sad,” Sim says. But he suddenly turns to Dan. “She’ll never do it, she’s very nice. Haven’t you seen how perfectly nice she is? Can’t even get a drink in her.”
Dan stiffens, like a man expecting a fight.
But Sim only looks back to Maeve, a new slyness to his smile: “Can we, worker bee?”
There’s a beat, his eyes locked on hers, Justin’s goading smile, and the weird, hostile stance on Dan behind him. Sadie raises an eyebrow—a dare.
She doesn’t want to be the one to look away this time, demure.
Maeve takes the money and smacks him. Open hand. Clean across the face.
The sound of it.
There’s a shock of silence, the room gone electric—
(A rush of fear in her throat; for just a flash, it’s Iain standing there, Iain whom she’s hit; what Iain would have done in return—)
—and then the moment breaks, the high, bright explosion of Anna’s laugh, pure glee, leading them all on. The place erupts.
Maeve standing there, a flood of adrenaline down her limbs, right down into the sting of her palm. She takes a breath, surfacing. She can feel the line of her bra against her bare skin. Sim hasn’t moved and won’t take his eyes off her.
Then he shakes his head, shakes it off, offers a long wolf whistle. A good sport.
“Let me get you some ice for that hand,” he says.
Is this why it happens?
Not guilt, but because she’s galvanized. The current between them is lit. Skin to skin. She wants more of him.
The rest of the night feels like a blur, everything eclipsed by the lingering burn of her palm, a dull ache right up into her shoulder. Sim holding a cold highball glass to his cheek. The drunks get drunker.
At the end of it, she walks him home, their footsteps echoing in the back stairwell.
“A lot of dangerous people around here,” she tells him. “Better not to be alone.”
He’s got a corner suite on the floor above hers, all windows and exposed concrete where he’s rolled back the rugs and set a canvas taller than Maeve against a wall. She presses her back to it, catching her breath—but he’s waiting for her to come to him.
“I never do this,” she says, almost to herself. The space between them taut as a highwire.
“Never?”
There is no moon or the moon is hidden. Outside there is nothing but snow and more snow and silence and Maeve walks around the whole space and shows him every place she wants him to fuck her.
Here, with her hands and breasts pressed against the cold window glass, and here, up on the counter with her legs high and spread in a V, toes pointed like a good ballerina, and here, where the bedclothes have been thrown down in a corner, this time Maeve holding him hard to the ground and her small body looming over him, the duvet a cushion for her knees.
She cannot risk injury, she tells him. They must think of her knees.
“Don’t you have anything you want to do?” she says. “No weird artist stuff? You don’t want to dip me in paint and press me up against your sheets or something?”
He says he wants to put his tongue inside her, and he doesn’t like the taste of paint.
The room is dark. When she peels her clothes off, he switches on the light.
“What’s this?” he says, rising to meet her. She is naked; his fingers trace the scar at her center that cuts her in two. She hesitates, her hand with its own scar unconsciously closing and drawing away from him. Then:
“C-section,” Maeve says.
He takes that in silence but spreads a hand over her belly, cradling it. “I thought it might be some crazy stage accident. You have a baby, baby?”
“I have kids. Two.”
“Huh. Married?”
“He’s dead,” Maeve says.
She turns out the light.
Later—it’s very late, so late it’s early, if it weren’t for the time of year and the heavy snow, there would be light in the sky, Maeve thinks—they wind themselves in the bedclothes and rest.
“Do you not sleep in bed at all,” she says—they are still on the floor—“or are you a sort of fantastic slob?”
“I like the floor. Especially here. It feels like I’m camping.”
From where they are lying, all they can see is the night sky, heavy with snowfall. In the near distance, the eastern ridge. They are surrounded by frozen ridges, as though at the center of some fortress. Nothing but high walls on every side.
He lights a cigarette and holds it out to her. “Don’t tell Karo I smoke in here. Verboten.”
“Aren’t you worried you’ll set off the sprinklers?”
“They’re disabled.”
“You disabled your smoke alarm? On purpose?”
“Problem solved.”
She rolls the cigarette in her fingers but doesn’t take a draw before passing it back to him.
“No tobacco either?”
“A temple, I say.” Maeve pulls aside the sheet to display the temple, then gets up to leave. He shakes his head.
“And she didn’t even stay for a nap.”
He’s languorous, smoking in his bed on the floor. It’s a performance. She gathers up her things.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I have to go. I have to work, I’ll sleep later.”
He watches as she reconstructs: bra, dress, shoes.
“You aren’t wearing panties.”
“No.” Damp from swimming, they’re in a ball at the bottom of her purse.
He stubs out his smoke in a little tin ashtray and sets it aside.
“You leave your children so you can be someone else for a while.”
“No,” she says again. She pauses, standing there, then slowly goes back to buttoning herself up.
“So you can be yourself, then. Which is it?”
“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s either/or.”
“When someone asks if you’re a dancer or a mother, what do you say? Don’t think! The very first thing that comes to your mind. What are you, Maeve Martin?”
She doesn’t say anything, her fingers still playing at the top button of her dress.
“I know what you are,” he says. He runs his tongue along the seal of a new cigarette before lighting it up. “Otherwise, why would you be here? You weren’t even drunk.” He takes a drag and repeats himself: “You weren’t even drunk.”
“No.” She wraps her hair into a bun and pins it. “I told you: a temple. A working temple.”
“Most unexpected.”
He’s drunk himself, but there’s a different look to him all of a sudden, something Maeve recognizes but can’t quite place. It pricks at her.
“Almost like I was asking for it,” she says. “How’s your face? Still beautiful?”
She can see the shadow of a bruise where it’s coming in, high along his cheekbone, but he doesn’t say a word. Only draws on his cigarette and smiles.
Day 3
THIS TIME SHE plays only deep jazz, women with their mournful songs, and Maeve’s body purposefully wild, operating not in time but its opposite. Defining herself in contrast to the long-held notes and low voices: spin-out-lift, lift-go-farther, reach and pull in, contract, release, contract, release, a high jump just to show off, just to show what she can do. She tips the bowl of her pelvis up, a twinge at the old scar whenever she forgets—God, she wants to forget—swing out and back, arch, lift up. There is nothing careless now to the way she’s moving; each moment of flight, each landing meant to look visceral, meant to look lush, and she’s sticking it with a precision that makes her head spin. Turn, turn, sweep out, slide, and contract, she can hear her own breath, the sweep of her soles against the floor and the music coming even slower now, push up, roll-to-push, roll-to-push, and up now for good—extend-extend—wide into the turn, high leg, hold-it-hold-it and around—
She hits the floorboards. Lands it.
This is the aesthetic: she’s almost giddy with it, o
perating at the intersection of recklessness and control, taming herself and breaking free in return. This. This. The way her body moves now, post-age and -injury, is the thing; it’s the hook. Directing young, ballet-trained female dancers to mimic it will show up as both experimental and political.
Raging or joyful, depending who’s watching, Maeve thinks. Depending on the eye. She’s got a burning in her shoulders, forearms, thighs, down her back, and she walks it off in circles. Less a muscle pain than a fire under her skin. She pushes out from the wall, breathing hard—
Who said you’re done?
She’s not done yet. Not by a long shot.
It’s night by the time Maeve wants to leave the studio, or it’s dark, anyway, and she has to fight her way out; the door is blocked with new snow. She arrived before dawn, carrying a piece of pie on a plate wrapped in cellophane—pie! The plate selected with purpose from the kitchen pantry, the sugar going straight to her head—and an entire urn of black coffee she brewed herself, pinched from the empty dining hall, while everyone else slept on.
Verboten, she thinks now, swinging the empty urn in one hand as she cuts along the path in her high boots. Maeve is sure coffee urns are not meant to be taken to the forest.
The wind picks up, but she can hear it more than feel it, the sound of it building somewhere far away, down in the river valley, or along the ridge. In the woods she feels shielded. Safe.
She has that high vertiginous feeling you get when you haven’t slept. A kind of dizziness, or giddiness, or both. She’s had too much coffee and not enough food and her body aches with victory, every piece of it: the small, strong muscles in her feet and hands, the bands of tight ligaments at her ankles and her elbows, the deep sockets of her hips. A good day. A very good working day. A day when Maeve was fully Maeve again, her body a beautiful streak, every line of her a machine that moves and changes, angle to curve, curve to angle, then changes again.
Her neck and her shoulders are stiff; her limbs feel swollen, but not numb. A heat to her skin. She is swelling within herself.
Expanding. Limitless and powerful.
The Retreat Page 6