These parties were not yet salons in the strictest sense, if we adhere to Bill Bliss’ definition. Only once Vera and Miles and friends concluded that their orgiastic method was the best way of relating to Artemisia Guile, did they become Etna's first Artemisiac salon. Encouraging lust, prostration, gluttony, and licentious obsession, the Rosentraum's and similar adoration salons came first. But the Hiatus triggered a boom. Soon every street had a salon of its own sort. There were contemplative salons on Lake Street, Pelican Street, and Adelphia Road, where yoga and meditation protracted and extenuated our longing. At a small house on Cumberland, Marty Tang introduced us to the staples of Etna's orthodox salons: anticipation games. Orthodox Artemisiacs filled empty hours with these games and deep-diaphragm sighing. A firm believer in privacy and modesty, Tang explained rules and methods for a few hours each Saturday morning then sent us home with pamphlets and photocopies of his hand-drawn illustrations. A whole evening, we discovered, could be passed just twiddling one's thumbs or pacing without any expectation of satisfaction, excitement, or even companionship.
While these salons prescribed ways of living with Artemisia Guile, the liberal salons gave us the chance to discuss her. Some of us wanted simply to say her name and smile. According to Bliss, these comfortable gatherings accounted for no less than eighty percent of the salons. What else did we want on those purgatorial nights but to stroll down the sidewalk through the lamplight shadows of trees to a place where we could sit together in living rooms or out on porches with our similarly afflicted friends while chatting and sipping chamomile tea or a little neat bourbon.
* * * *
Hundreds of square white envelopes arrived in mailboxes across Etna on August 2. These were invitations to the opening of Bill Bliss’ attic museum. Our moods picked up. Meanwhile, squadrons of gulls flew in from the lake and bivouacked in our parking lots. It was raining in Detroit and Chicago. Overhead purple and steel-gray decks of clouds shuffled perilously. Then came a turn of events. On August 6, fax machines across Etna whined to life and printed a single sheet transmission from a blocked ID. Centered on this page was an enormous serif “AG.” Then, fortuitously, it rained. The national news mistook the storm's genre, calling it epic, while we knew for sure it was an expression of our town's languishing heart. Those dark cloud decks came down one after another on Etna, the whole of the sky collapsing over the course of two days. Basements flooded and attics leaked. Birds were washed out of the skies, moles rinsed from their homes in the earth. Sewers choked. Lightning struck both the WKET antenna and little Dominick Turtelli, who liked to play with coat hangers.
After two days the storm subsided, the sky wearing out near four o'clock. A blueness appeared through the drifting panels of cloud. Those of us driving north that evening from GeoPlastics and the St. Lawrence Hospital were the first to witness the Rain Message, now more popularly known as the Finale. Painted in uniform black letters across the cheek of the pale green water tower that overlooks the interstate, the Finale read, “DREAM OF ME ALWAYS—INFINITE AG.” The police later reported that the size and font of the typographic template used to produce the Finale were identical to those in the Water Street Bridge Message. Though smaller chalkings and markings still persist to this day, she never again spoke to us on such a scale.
Explanations have circulated widely among Etna's skeptics and lampoonists—the crowd Mary Tang's orthodox Artemisiacs call “non-anticipators.” Proponents of the Idlewilde Conjecture argue that we are unwilling to risk the effort to produce such messages. The majority of us, however, express a disinterest in post-Hiatus Artemisiana. Could it be that during her abstinence, when we felt so abandoned, our anticipation fermented into the nostalgia that makes the Bliss Museum so compelling?
It opened to the public on a wet, mid-August Sunday afternoon. To allow a steady flow through the wide attic above the Bliss’ Victorian home, the exhibit was structured in a clockwise path following the chronology of events. Light from the dormer windows was too dim, especially in the corners and along the outside walls. In this faint light, the attic's paisley wallpaper made some of us uneasy. When we looked up from the collection we were certain that the patterns on the wallpaper had altered itself slightly or somehow shifted positions, scurrying like cockroaches behind our backs. This discomfiture has become a trademark of the Bliss Museum of Artemisiana.
In the living room a little while later, we ate hors d'oeuvres and drank glasses of Cabernet and Pinot Grigio while Bliss made a little speech. He thanked Etna, particularly his best friends and dear Elizabeth. Raising his glass, he toasted, “To friends and the wonders of the world.” His daughters, hiding between their father's legs, gulped apple juice spiked with tonic water. Then we ate the olives, cold cuts, cheese slices, and crackers the size of credit cards.
Visitors to the Museum often linger at the far end of the attic, in the garret. Two photographs face each other all day long in the greenish maple-filtered light that comes in through the garret's window. To one side is the famous black and white photo of the Water Street Bridge Message. Opposite is a hurried color snapshot of Nina Rosentraum in her infamous body paint, taken as she neared the swimming pool. In a few moments, she'll mount the diving board, stand on the tips of her toes, and with arms spread wide, command us to “Adore Artemisia Guile!” before running, bouncing, and somersaulting into her parents’ spectrally-lit pool.
* * * *
On the first Thursday of September, Archie's last letter ran in the Sun-Gazette. “I would like to present a conjecture,” he wrote just before leaving town. “We treat the Idlewilde Conjecture like a lurid wreck.” Very simply, Archie claimed that we, the population of Etna, Ohio, have nurtured and propagated our own mystery. We created Artemisia Guile, he said. We committed all the acts of midnight graffiti and scribbling and banner-hanging. “I see there being, at first, only one or two graffitists who worked quietly in the shadows, preoccupied with a name as hollow as a barrel but so very arcane. The name then struck someone else, probably without the knowledge of the initiators. This newcomer made his own little graffito. Soon another someone got involved, then another, then another until that number of participants had grown exponentially.” We each made our individual contributions, however minor, he said, merely by secretly inking her name here or there. “This explains the professionalism of some of the signage,” Archie continued. “Experts were involved. Painters can be blamed for the Water Street Bridge Message, printers for the Milwaukee Banners. It was a serial job for which everyone must bear some of the blame."
Bill Bliss disagreed. He wrote to the newspaper, too. In a response letter that appeared in late September, he accused Archie Idlewilde of completely misunderstanding Artemisia Guile. “Nobody got duped,” he wrote. “This was a summer fling to remember. An extraordinarily gifted artist strummed our heartstrings for a few months. Then he moved on before we could get bored with his feats. I for one will always want more Artemisia even though I understand that it could never again be the same as it was this past summer."
On certain sleepless nights, while we pace through silent houses, the floorboards creaking underfoot, our children murmuring in sleep, we find ourselves alone with that acute sense of longing. Around our desire flock the debates, the questions, the splitting of hairs, the speculation—our pursuit of Artemisia Guile—like the tribe of gulls wheeling over the Merwin Building Plaza on cold autumn mornings.
The pursuit is a way of multiplying her presence. We speak the name to hear it repeated; we dispute details not out of thoroughness but from a desire to view again and again from all angles our “infinite AG.” We repeat our questions and revisit the discussions in our salons until, in the end, we arrive once more at the beginning. Then someone reminds us that: “We believe it was in the middle of May, while our lawns greened and the red-orange eyes of daylilies debuted, that the graffiti first appeared in our lakeside Ohio town."
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Reality Goes On Here More or Less
The realtor stank of cigarettes, as did the realtor's car, a rough and ready Jeep Wagoneer packed floor to seat with listing printouts and half-eaten snacks.
Roger rode shotgun; Carla wedged in the back. At her feet, a homeseller's prep sheet in a font large enough to read without bending:
Three's company—Don't tail the realtor and
prospective buyer.
Never apologize for the state of your house.
Always let the realtor do the talking, he/she is the professional—you aren't.
She and Roger weren't selling a house. They weren't truly in the market to buy. But even browsing seemed to require a professional chaperone. Susie Johnson, realtor, Roger had selected at random from a multiple-listings website.
"So how long have you called Tidewater home?"
Carla let Roger explain.
They weren't really Virginians, neither of them. They were Navy brats who just happened to turn eighteen while their fathers were stationed in Norfolk and stayed put when their families moved yet again.
"So you grew up together?"
No. But one military brat can usually ID another in a bar, in a supermarket, standing in the lottery ticket line. They'd each purchased scratch cards, five apiece. With their combined $10 winnings, they'd lunched on hot dogs in a trashy park, compared histories and awarded the following career distinctions: Carla's Dad, Five-Star Ambitious; Roger's, Blindest Patriot. Then they'd compared hair color: his slightly redder, hers significantly thicker.
"How many states before age ten?” Roger had tested on that park bench.
"Seven,” she'd answered without pause.
"Bingo. Which probably means we should bow to karma and apply for a marriage license today."
Instead, they'd waited an entire week. Grown-up military brats are either commitment phobes or fast attachers. As it happened, she and Roger shared a sub-classification too.
"Does the smoke bother you?” Susie Johnson asked, an hour into their smoky ride-around. “As Virginians, you might not be aware: North Carolina's the tobacco capital of the world."
"Hmm,” Roger said. The noise he made to pacify, not necessarily agree.
Chesapeake Bay was an impact crater. Everything was something, Carla thought, while comparing the something they whizzed by (tasseled corn and green-stuffed ditches) to the view from their apartment (chain-length fences, a mini-mart's ice machine).
When the Wagoneer swerved onto the rutted shoulder, Carla bounced; Roger yipped (his startled response). With burning ash, Susie Johnson pointed out a derelict house, also green-gobbled.
"A little pruning and those grapevines would thrive."
Dead sycamore branches hung in pairs and threesomes. Leggy camellia bushes fanned across the windows. The driveway was impassable. Susie Johnson seemed perfectly content to discuss the property's merits and demerits from the Wagoneer's driver's seat, so who had suggested they take a closer look? Afterwards neither Carla nor Roger could remember.
The all-purpose realtor key didn't trip the lockbox dangling from the front doorknob but while nosing around Roger discovered the back door ajar. Dead leaves spiraled inward from that opening crack, forming one question mark after another.
"Push came to shove, we'd have climbed in through a window,” Susie Johnson declared after the fact, so why give the brag credence?
Inside smelled decrepit: old boards, old wallpaper, old people disinclined to ventilate. Vast colonies of spiders. Expired flies suspended from cobwebs, dangling upside down like trapeze artists whose daredevilry had gone awry.
"Floorboards,” Roger radared, eyebrows lifted for emphasis.
She'd already noticed: wide and minimally stained.
"Dining room,” she alerted. A single room with more windows than their entire apartment.
"Trim those camellia bushes,” Susie Johnson directed, “and you'll never have to turn on a light."
An exaggeration. But just.
Back on the back porch, Carla noticed a black-dot alphabet of crusty watermelon seeds. At the far edge of the property, toward the woods line, the remnants of a deluxe-sized dog pen.
For rabbit dogs, “huntin’ hounds,” Susie Johnson explained. “But it'll pen any breed."
Carla's and Roger's hmm's coincided. They didn't own a dog.
In the vicinity of a weeping willow, Carla was seized with the desire to plop down on rangy crabgrass, cloud gaze, pluck at dandelions.
Odd.
Also, equally, true.
Back in the Wagoneer, Susie Johnson failed to ask for their phone number but handed each her business card. The heirs stuck with the dog-pen/watermelon-seed house would probably accept a lowball bid, she intimated. Probably she never expected to hear from the Virginians again, but did, the very next day, when Carla and Roger faxed over an offer that, once accepted, doubled their work commute.
After the closing, they put in for instant vacations, then spent two weeks slaving like members of a road gang under armed guard, scrubbing, stripping, chopping, hauling, dead to the world, the house and each other by nine every night. Neither could remember what both had assumed they'd never forget: the 24-hour thrumming of the mini-mart's ice machine. In their fixer, they made all the noise.
Technically, Roger still had a day left of vacation when his boss called. It wasn't a problem only Roger could fix, but his boss preferred he fix it. If you were a military brat who'd somehow managed to escape the allure of racetracks, tattoo parlors, and online ordering, employers tended to rely on your mediation skills. It was an oft-proven fact.
"Better safe than sorry,” Roger's boss said.
Roger said: “If we ate nothing but hot dogs, starting now..."
But they couldn't afford to retire anytime soon, even if they ate pebbles. Roger kidded occasionally, dreamed perpetually.
As it happened, she wasn't sorry to spend a day in the house alone. It gave her a chance to putter, peek and pry at her own pace, disdaining the project list taped to the refrigerator door.
Every closet still smelled of mice and mothballs—they hadn't gotten around to simpler cleaning chores. None of the windows in the guest bedroom would open, jammed by paint that had dripped and dried. She could have scraped at windowsills, sponged the grime off wallpaper in the hallway and guest bedroom, most of those paper bouquets sun-bleached to vanishing point. Instead, she ventured into the attic. She'd only been there once before, trailing the realtor and her fire hazard cigarette up the fold-down ladder.
"Big enough for a skating rink,” Susie Johnson had whooped, but neither Carla nor Roger joined in the rave. They didn't need the extra space for storage, for anything. The downstairs square footage was triple what they'd been used to, gobs more than they could fill.
There was no compelling reason to visit the attic again, so why did she?
Afterwards she couldn't remember.
Dirt dauber nests, rusty coat hangers, filmy canning jars. Arachnids the size of cockroaches. Along the center pitch, she could almost stand without crouching, but when she sneezed, rebounding, she bopped her head.
The green caught her eye—a smidgen between pink insulation.
Why had she so readily stuck her hand into the hole?
Afterwards, she couldn't remember.
The first hat was straw, pale green with a yellow band, dusty but hardly the worse for wear, the last two black with elaborate veils. Nine in all.
An odd thing: to wall up hats. But so what? (Mental shrug). Life squirmed with oddities.
She was sitting on her heels in a circle of hats, not touching any of them when a dog, singular, began to howl. She cupped her ears, the better to listen and distinguish between the first howling dog and the pack that now seemed to be throwing themselves against a jangly fence. When she raised up on her knees to check further on the commotion, she slid a bit and caught a splinter. Picking it out of her knee, she tuned in to what could only be described as heroic effort: the grapevines stretching and straining to
reproduce the cut-away. The other something surging, just below the window, turned out to be crabgrass. When she leaned forward from the waist up, careful not to slide, she saw it waving, already higher than the camellias, so high it almost blocked out the Jeep Wagoneer that passed and re-passed the driveway, glowing orange.
If growth continued at its current rate, Roger would need a scythe to reach the front door. Finding someone to sell him a scythe after five o'clock might pose a problem. But Roger was resourceful. She had faith.
She sat back on her heels, electing, in what seemed her best interests, to stay quiet and uncompetitive. The larger black hat with the sweeping veil had definitely begun to crowd. At least there were no sailor hats among the bunch. Roger would be very glad to skip that standoff. No negotiating with sailor hats. No sailor hats to distract or cause distraction. She had absolute confidence Roger would take full advantage of that strategic blunder, when and if the crabgrass let him through.
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Three Urban Folk Tales
Eric Schaller
I. The Postman
There was a postman whose father was a postman and his father a postman before him. Like them, the postman wore a blue-gray uniform with a stripe down the pants leg and, like them, he delivered mail on six days out of the week, resting on Sunday as was the tradition. Times change and traditions change, and many of the postman's brethren took to wearing running shoes. Some even wore spikes so as not to slip on the icy winter sidewalks. But the postman still wore black leather shoes and polished these to a high gloss before he went on his rounds each morning.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 Page 6