by April Hill
“Well then, I have an idea,” he said.
Gwen sighed. “Yeah, I know!”
Denning grinned. “No. Not that. Something more permanent. If you marry me, you’ll be covered under my car insurance and my medical plan. It’ll save me a fortune!”
“Are you serious?”
“Look, I know I’m a supercilious dictatorial tyrant... that last part is redundant, by the way. But I’ve never been guilty of cruel jokes. Of course I’m serious. That’s why I ordered another Jeep... self-protection. I ordered blue to avoid confusion, if that’s all right. You like blue, right?”
Gwen began to cry. “I like blue.”
“Good. I thought that if you don’t mind living in sin a little longer, we could get married when we go to New York next month.”
“New York?”
“I want you to meet my agent and my publisher.”
As they walked arm-in-arm from the studio and up the still-shaky stairs, Gwen felt a great sense of relief and happiness, tempered just slightly by the lack of the specific word “love” in Josh’s proposal. And by a nagging worry about what had become of the rest of Susannah Channing’s last paintings.
Chapter Eight
There was no doubt that Big Sur was amazingly beautiful. Long before she became Joshua Denning’s houseguest, Gwen had been enraptured like millions before her by its wild windswept coastline and deep, still forests. To drive the Coast Highway as a tourist was thrilling; to live every day in this house, built entirely of natural redwood logs and rough native stone, was beyond that. It was hypnotic. Each day, when Gwen first woke and before leaving her bed, she turned to look out the wide window of her room at the always-changing view that never failed to astonish her. On most mornings, the fog hung low over the coastline, obscuring the beach and the ocean. At those moments, it was like living in the treetops above the clouds, with only the dark green spires of the tallest evergreens poking through to prove that the ground itself existed. Later in the day, as the fog lifted, the cove and beach reappeared slowly, inch by inch, as though being reinvented each morning or unveiled by some unseen hand.
The house was built at the very edge of the bluff, hanging on by sheer force of will, it seemed, its deck suspended over the cliff’s thick undergrowth by sturdy redwood timbers and unseen steel girders. Unlike many of the extravagant multi-million dollar homes scattered up and down the coast, it wasn’t a large house, and so well hidden from prying eyes among the trees that from the road it was barely noticeable unless you knew where to look. Even from the beach below, the house’s rustic construction made it seem a part of the cliff’s rugged landscape.
Because of all the scrub trees that clung to the cliff and surrounded the house, it was difficult to see the ocean from the living room windows or from the deck, a peculiar design detail that had always struck Gwen as odd, considering the stunning views provided by the house’s remaining windows. To truly enjoy an ocean view from outside it was necessary to climb the sea-stairs to the first landing, and then, of course, climb back up later when the sun had set.
“You could cut back some of these trees, you know,” she had observed one afternoon as she sat on the deck, trying to peer through the trees at the sunset, “and really improve the view from up here.”
Josh was reading and responded distractedly.
“Too much sun....”
She didn’t believe him, of course—not since Josh had described seeing Susannah drown. Gwen knew that the view from the deck brought everything about her death back.
“Wrong,” he said, coldly, when she suggested this possibility. “Please try not to practice psychiatry without a license. The sun’s too bright out there in the summer, that’s all—annoying. The trees cut the wind too.”
Gwen didn’t mention it again. She might not have even thought of it again if she hadn’t noticed a fire on the beach just a few days after this brief conversation. It was past midnight, and she was searching the fridge for the last Diet Coke when a flicker of orange light caught her eye, coming through the window over the sink. She opened the back door and stepped out, but from her vantage point she could see nothing. She hurried back to the den, where she expected to find Josh working late, as he always did, but he wasn’t there and the room was dark. Thinking he had finally gone up to bed, she ran upstairs to the bedroom. Josh wasn’t there, either, or in the bathroom.
She was halfway down the sea-stairs to the first landing when it occurred to her that it might be Josh on the beach. Leaning over the railing and looking down the beach, she could see the fire clearly now, burning low and almost out. In the fading firelight she could make out a figure, but it was too dark to tell more.
Gwen was scared, but her curiosity by now vastly outstripped her fear, so she made her way down the remaining stairs to the beach and staying as close as possible to the cliff wall, made her way toward the fire and the mysterious figure. Where the HELL was Josh?
Just as she edged near enough to see clearly the dim figure disappeared and with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach Gwen knew exactly where he’d gone. The fire which was virtually out by now had been built on the damp sand close to the foot of the stairs leading to Susannah’s studio. And even before she had approached close enough to the fire pit’s glowing, darkening embers to see what had been burning, Gwen knew in her heart she would find Susannah Channing’s missing canvases.
The fire had been partially extinguished with seawater, and the scorched and charred wooden stretcher bars of perhaps twenty or twenty-five large canvases were all that was still recognizable of the last paintings Susannah had finished before she died. Gwen stood by the dying, hissing remains until they had burned completely and then kicked sand over the pit. Trampled into the wet sand she found two scraps of painted canvas... less that two square feet of seared canvas of what had probably been months of work. With no moon, it was too dark to see what was on them, so Gwen dusted the sand from the two pieces and slipped them in the pocket of her robe, then started wearily back for the house.
When she looked the next morning, the tide had taken all traces of the fire and of Susannah Channing’s paintings out to sea.
* * * * *
Gwen didn’t know if Denning had seen her on the beach and didn’t care, but as the days passed with no mention of it from him, she chose to leave it alone. It had been Josh at the fire, of course. Who else could it have been? His reasons for destroying a major portion of his dead wife’s life work were his own until he chose to share them... if he ever did. As deeply as she now loved him, and his proposal of marriage notwithstanding, Gwen knew that she was as likely to be “chastised” for spying on him as to have him open his “dark secrets” to her.
The next morning Gwen looked carefully at the scraps of burnt canvas she had rescued from the fire, hoping to find some clue that would explain why Josh would want to destroy something as beautiful and priceless as his wife’s last work. The fabric was too badly scorched to see more than a few dark figures, which Gwen assumed had been blackened by the flames. Finally unable to see anything useful in either of the remnants, she put them in the trash and covered them with crumpled boxes.
In many ways, Gwen realized sadly that she was little more to Joshua Denning than a tolerable, maybe even amusing, substitute for someone he had loved profoundly and then lost someone who could never be replaced. And now, after all these years, perhaps out of loneliness, he had simply decided to settle for less.
Gwen, who had never loved and then suffered a terrible loss, could only imagine that kind of searing grief. Her own decision, on the other hand, was both simple and impossible. She had to decide if she, too, could settle for less.
* * * * *
The short story collection was nearly finished, and as each grueling rewrite came to an end, corrected and edited and proofread until she could no longer stand even the sight of her own words on the paper, Denning explained that each “finished” still needed to be “polished.”
Gwen rebel
led. “I don’t want to polish them!” she wailed, slinging fifty pages of print across the room. “I want to cross-shred them into confetti! I want to make them into little paper airplanes and sail them off the fucking deck!”
He glanced at his watch. “I’ll give you exactly two minutes to finish this little tantrum and another two hours and fifty-eight minutes to crawl around on the floor to find all of those pages and get them finished. If they’re not on my desk in three hours, I’m going to take five minutes out of my busy workday to take your pants down and do a little cross shredding of my own—-on the fucking deck, maybe. Get to work!”
“You are being a goddamned fucking shit today!” she screamed after him. “A domineering, motherfucking asshole! And I don’t give a rat’s ass if you do come right back and spank me... it’s the goddamned fucking truth!”
When he stopped and turned to look at her with frank amazement, Gwen suspected she’d gone too far.
Josh strode to the desk and yanked her out of her chair, then walked down the hall to the bathroom with her struggling frantically under his arm. Without another word, he turned on the faucet, grabbed a bar of soap from the sink and dunked it briefly in the running water. Realizing suddenly what he was about to do, Gwen shrieked and tried harder to get away, and when that failed, squeezed her lips tightly shut and swung her head back and forth to avoid the advancing soap bar. Josh simply pinched her nose between his thumb and forefinger until she opened her lips to gasp for air and then crammed the foaming bar in her mouth and swished it around vigorously.
Gwen tried to yell and tried even harder to swear at him or bite his hand, sputtering and spitting and making muffled gurgling noises as she gagged, foamed at the mouth and pounded her fists against his leg. Finally he threw the soap aside, deposited her on her feet and turned the faucet on fully to let her bend down to rinse her mouth. He had done a thorough job of it and Gwen spat out suds and bits of soap for a full minute before she managed to rid herself of most of the soap. The aftertaste, she learned, would remain much longer.
She was still spitting soap suds when he pushed her facedown over the sink counter, pulled her pants down and went to work on her bare backside—first with his own soapy hand and then with the green plastic bath brush.
The spanking was brief, a sort of side dish to the main course of perfumed soap, she thought later with some bitterness. The incident however... swearing, soaping, spitting and spanking had required almost ten minutes door-to-door, during which the meter as Denning put it had still been running. She now had two hours and forty-eight minutes to finish “polishing.”
“The soap was for bad manners,” he explained, when she complained about the double penalty. “The spanking was for lack of originality.”
“And if you’d bitten me, as you were attempting so eagerly to do,” he grinned, “I fully intended to turn you over the damned tub and stick a smaller bar of soap up your adorable ass. Just a little something to think about before you throw another tantrum like that one.”
He was right about one thing. As Gwen’s uneasiness about their relationship grew, so did her impatience and her temper. For close to six months now, she had worked on these stories, trying to please him and to validate herself. Yet no matter how many pages she retyped or how many words she changed or how many hours she spent staring at a computer screen, there was always more he wanted from her and less she seemed able to give.
AS they sat on the deck having lunch Gwen tried to explain how she felt. “You see this lemon?” she mused, squeezing the last drop of juice from her used-up wedge of lemon into her iced tea. “This lemon wedge is ME and it’s all squeezed out... all used up, Josh. There is nothing else of any possible use in this little lemon wedge. This poor lemon in the immortal words of the crew at ‘Monty Python’ is ‘bloody demised’. This is an ex-lemon!” She dropped the fruit on his plate.
Denning picked up the squished lemon held it over his own tea glass and twisted it again, hard. Two tiny drops of juice welled up at the edge and dropped into his glass.
“And what’s that supposed to prove, Superman?” Gwen pouted. “That you’re so much stronger?”
“No” he grinned. “It proves that I know how to squeeze a lemon more efficiently than you do. And that there’s always more there than you think!”
“My God, “ she cried. “There you go again, sounding like a fortune cookie. I’m tired, Josh—can’t you see that? Why is it so important to do this all so fast?”
“It isn’t,” he sighed. “I wouldn’t care if it took ten years, if I thought you were serious about getting it done.”
“I am serious!” Gwen yelled. “I’m just sick of your goddamned bullying! And you know what? I’m taking the rest of the day off! I’m going to flop on my bed all damned day and watch movies and eat potato chips! I’m not going to write and I’m not going to clean house!” She got up from the table and hurled both tea glasses and the lunch plates off the deck into the bushes. “There! Now the dishes are done!”
Without leaving his chair, Josh grabbed her wrist and dragged her down across his knee then reached through the deck railing to rip off a short section of pine bough. Yanking her pants down to her ankles, he whipped her ass and thighs hard for maybe half a minute, until the battered branch began disintegrate, shedding fragrant sticky needles all over the deck, and until Gwen was sobbing with anger and frustration.
“The problem is,” he said, as he let her up, “that you really don’t want to write this book at all, do you?”
Gwen jerked her pants back up and whirled on him in a cold rage. “That’s a filthy thing to say and you know it! Has it ever occurred to you that maybe nobody can come up to your standards? That maybe even your wife couldn’t! Is that why you burned all her beautiful paintings? Because they weren’t up to your high and mighty standards? Not good enough to show to people, because she was tired and sick and unhappy at the end! Weren’t they good enough for you, Josh? Wasn’t she good enough? Maybe that’s the real reason she just finally gave up and swam out too far that day!”
Gwen had once seen an old hotel professionally demolished, implanted with explosives by a team of professional demolition experts and then blown up. The twenty-story building went down in an almost magical sort of slow motion, and when it was over nothing remained where the building had been but a neat pile of bricks, a slowly rising cloud of dust and absolute silence. Not a tinkle of broken glass, not a whisper of slipping concrete. Only silence. It seemed literally impossible at that moment that such devastation could occur and leave such utter silence.
For several horrible moments the silence between them was exactly like that.
Josh finally got up from the chair and pushed by her to go into the house. Gwen went to her room and lay down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
Seconds later, he knocked on her door and opened it without waiting for an invitation
“While I was at the post office yesterday,” he said quietly, “I ran into Evelyn Springmeir from the library. She wanted to know if you’d found everything you wanted in the archived newspaper files.”
“But I didn’t....”
“She recognized the car. She said she assumed you were a houseguest. It’s a small town, Gwen.”
“I’m sorry, Josh... I didn’t....”
He threw what looked like a large loose-leaf notebook on the bed.
“This should save you some time. You should have checked the papers a little further up the coast.” He turned and left. A few minutes later she heard the car drive away.
She took the book into the living room where he had started two logs in the fireplace and sat cross-legged on the rug to look through the neatly glued pages.
The book contained mostly newspaper clippings, some of which she had already seen in the collection at the Grove City library. Further along in the book, however were other clippings she had not seen:
“CORONER LABELS PAINTER’S FALL ACCIDENTAL
“County investigators
today closed their investigation into the death of well-known artist Susannah Channing, who died last Thursday in a fall from a cliff near her home. An inquest concluded that Miss Channing had lost her footing while hiking on the bluff near her ocean-front studio in Grove City.”
And:
“FOUL PLAY DISCOUNTED IN ARTIST’S DEATH
“Local police said yesterday that they had found no reason to pursue further the circumstances surrounding the death of famed marine artist Susannah Channing Denton, who fell to her death on September 14th near Grove City. Ms. Channing’s body was found below the cliff from which she had fallen by her husband, retired college professor John Denton. Mr. Denton originally stated to investigators that he had just returned from a business trip when he made the tragic discovery. Subsequent discussions with business associates of Mr. Denton’s in San Francisco verified that he had been in the city at the time of his wife’s accident.”
There were several other clippings, all similarly brief and all unambiguous. Despite the vague suggestion that the police had at least briefly considered other possibilities, none of the articles concluded that anything other than a simple straightforward accident had been responsible for Susannah Channing’s death. Yet not ONE of the clippings mentioned drowning or indicated that Susannah had been swimming in the cove when she died.
When she had finished reading, she took the book into the den and laid it on Josh’s desk then sat quietly waiting for him to return.
It was almost midnight and Gwen had fallen asleep on the couch when she was wakened by the sound of the front door opening. She pulled herself up and sat up unsteadily, rubbing her eyes, feeling exhausted, defeated and confused. After hours of thought, she knew only one thing clearly: she loved Joshua Denning and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
He came into the living room and took the large armchair across from her.