by John Muncie
“Sure, bows are exhilarating, but they’re nothing compared to watching a student’s breakthrough performance. Alex got a standing ovation. After the show, he thanked me, not just for teaching him about acting, but for helping him understand the nature of human flaws. I still get teary thinking about it.”
Alyssa closed the yearbook and placed it back in the shelf with great care, as if it were a rare and valuable first edition.
“You’re a lucky woman,” Tug said. “You’ve got three grand passions—your farm, horses, and theater. I’d be happy if I had one.”
A slight frown creased her forehead. She looked out the open porch doors, nodding slowly. “Lucky,” she said without inflection.
Lucky was the last thing she ever considered herself.
CHAPTER 13
Alyssa had expected Tug at nine the next morning, but he sneaked to Finally Farm a half hour earlier. “Yes!” he said under his breath as he peeked around a corner of the barn and saw that she wasn’t there yet. He’d come up with the plan the night before and could hardly wait to see how she would react.
He walked quickly to the third stall on the left. Big gray Poli was inside, head down, eyes closed, bottom lip drooping. One of his back legs was cocked under him; he made a slight snoring noise.
Tug reached over the stall door and patted the horse’s side. Poli started awake. “Sorry for the early wake-up call, buddy,” Tug said. He held out a couple of carrots. Poli ate them slowly, as if he were savoring the flavor.
Tug rubbed the horse’s neck and ears for a while. When Poli seemed to enjoy it, or at least tolerate it, Tug decided that it was safe.
“This’ll just take a minute,” he said and slid open the stall door.
A few minutes later, when he was done, he gave Poli a pat on the neck. “Thanks, big fella,” he said. Then he turned on the barn lights, set up the folding chair, and started drawing.
“You’re early,” Alyssa said when she walked into the barn twenty minutes later and set down two cups of coffee.
“I had to fix Poli,” Tug said.
“What?” Alyssa shook her head. “What are you talking about? His limp?”
“No, not that problem.” Tug grabbed Alyssa’s hand and led her to Poli’s stall. “His running problem. Remember what the animal communicator said? Well, voilà!” With a flourish, he slid open the stall door for the second time that morning.
Poli looked up from the hay he’d been eating and Alyssa nearly collapsed with laughter. The big gray horse had a pair of eyeglasses drawn on his face.
From that morning on, their routine was set. Tug would walk from Limespring to Finally Farm carrying his sketchpad, pencils, charcoals, and gum erasers in a purple plastic portfolio. Alyssa would greet him with coffee, conversation, and carefully brushed hair.
They traded gossip—Tug told Alyssa about the tintypes photographer hitting on the memoirist from Atlanta (she said no), and Alyssa told Tug about the Warrenton weapons heiress who killed her South American polo player boyfriend (she got two weeks in jail)—and they frequently discussed the progress of the Follies.
They also traded life histories, like kids trading baseball cards. Alyssa matched Tug’s tale of Mrs. Miller’s Christmas mural with her own elementary school memory of Mrs. Wentzel’s fourth-grade fingernail check. Bit by bit they got to know each other. And bit by bit, they found themselves surprised by how much they looked forward to the next morning.
Of course, Alyssa asked about Tug’s nickname. “My mother tells the story to anyone who’ll listen. Apparently I used to follow her around all the time—at home, in the grocery store—tugging on the hem of her skirt. She called me her ‘Little Tugster.’ Eventually that became ‘Tugger,’ then ‘Tug.’ But I don’t mind. Anything’s better than Alvin Dwight Palifax Jr.”
“I have to agree with you there,” Alyssa said.
Tug talked a good bit about his family. He called his father, Alvin Dwight Sr., the most decent man he’d ever met. “I saw him run across a rocky beach at Lake Oswego, breaking every one of his toes, to save a little girl who was screaming for help.”
In turn, Alyssa told Tug about her family. “I was genetically destined to teach,” she said. “Mom teaches music, Dad teaches chemistry.” She told him about her obsession with horses. Though she left out the part about how she and Shelley Bush used to play mare and stallion in the sixth grade, she did tell him about her shelves of plastic horses, her plan to win a pony by selling the most cans of Salvo, and that she’d read Misty so many times she knew it by heart.
She told him of her transformation into the mini-diva of Beeber Junior High who planned to star on Broadway; the New York City waitress/bicycle courier who worked nights with an experimental theater troupe; the drama teacher facing the daily dramatics of teenagers; and the woman whose dream of living on a farm finally came true.
“So you see,” she said a little too brightly, “I have everything I’ve ever wanted.” Alyssa Brown could act, of that there was no doubt. But even she couldn’t pull off that line. She quickly changed the subject. “So tell me more about the adventures of ‘the little Tugster.’”
And he did.
After their morning coffee, which usually stretched close to lunch, Alyssa would turn from horse instructor to farmhand, leaving Tug to his sketching. Most days he left by one o’clock, though sometimes he returned in the late afternoon after the day had cooled.
One early evening, after mowing the fields, she’d come back to the barn to find Tug sitting in the middle of the center aisle on a folding chair, staring through the open tack-room door at a confusing tangle of leather, rope, and metal hanging from the wall. From a stall behind him, Poli looked over his shoulder like a ghostly art critic.
“You’re here kind of late, aren’t you?” she said.
“I’m going to get these leather things right if it kills me,” Tug said.
Alyssa looked at the sketchpad on Tug’s knees. He’d drawn a row of bridles. Somehow he’d given the same straps of leather and bits of metal she’d been around for years a kind of life she’d never noticed. They had shadows and dimensions and a slightly coiled, helical energy.
Tug tipped his head back and looked up at Alyssa. “I’m trying a kind of Toulouse-Lautrec/Bal du Moulin Rouge perspective. What do you think?”
“I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “It looks so real. Beyond real.”
Tug started drawing again. He worked quickly, the charcoal tip making numerous short strokes and a delicate scratching noise. Soon, an old horse show ribbon and a faded, curled photograph appeared. She liked watching him draw. It was like watching a photograph develop.
By now, she’d seen him working many times. Each time the process was the same, each time the results were surprising. At first, the marks seemed extraneous and vaguely geometric—wobbly triangles, unparallel parallelograms—but as the charcoal sped its way across the paper familiar shapes began to materialize. Sometimes it seemed as if the figures had been there all along and the pencil or pen or charcoal just picked away at the white paper covering them up.
Suddenly in the middle of a downstroke, Tug stopped. “It’s not actually how I do it,” he said. “It’s more how I see it. When I look at all that stuff on the wall, I don’t see strips of leather. I see blocks of light and shades of dark that define the depth. Abbi says she writes to think. I draw to see.”
He leaned back and put the piece of charcoal behind his ear. “But you’d be surprised how hard it is to see. My old drawing teacher at Pratt, Harold Reifman, insisted you couldn’t draw the human body unless you knew what was underneath the skin. He’d say things like, ‘One cannot represent the pelvic region faithfully without knowing the fascia lata.’ That’s why my horses look like dogs. I don’t know a damned thing about their structure. I can’t see how they’re built from the inside.”
Alyssa put her hand on his shoulder. She’d been finding reasons to touch him a lot lately. “That’s why you’re here.”
He went back to his drawing and she went back to her chores.
Over the years, lots of Limeys had come to Finally Farm for one project or another, but none had worked as hard as Tug. He sketched for hours at a time. While he joked about his own competence (every day he teased her about the Mr. Ed comment), his skill surprised Alyssa. She hadn’t expected someone who could draw that well, based on the horse sketches she’d seen at Limespring. And though his horses were still awkward, his other work was remarkable. Some offered the thrill of recognition, and some, like the bridle drawing, made her see the farm in a new way. One showed the manure spreader casting a hulking shadow against the barn in the late-afternoon light. She’d never noticed the shadow before. When she offered to buy the sketch from him, Tug tore the page out of his book and handed it to her.
“It’s yours,” he said. “Keep it safe—someday an original Palifax will be worth millions.”
“I’ll guard it with my life,” she said. She tucked it under her arm and started to walk outside. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. It’d probably be better if you didn’t come tomorrow or Sunday. Darryl’s coming out and he’s a little bit touchy about Limespring fellows.”
Touchy. It seemed an odd word for her to use, and though she smiled when she said it, there was something in her voice that told Tug not to pursue the issue.
CHAPTER 14
Alyssa drummed her fingers to the beat of the “Jet Song” from West Side Story as she waited for the images on the computer screen to fill in.
“Alyssa, I’m trying to read,” Darryl said.
He was sitting on the sofa on the opposite side of the room. She’d set up the computer on an old laundry table and her assault against the enamel sounded like Chita Rivera tap-dancing on a garbage can.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I was daydreaming. It takes forever for this thing to unload. But thanks for getting it fixed. An old computer’s better than no computer. ”
“It’s the connection, not the computer,” Darryl said without looking up from his magazine. “Someday this county will move into the twenty-first century.”
Alyssa stared at the screen. Slowly a page of party hats appeared. She clicked on the white plastic boater with the red, white, and blue band around it.
“Darryl, I found it! Come here, look. They’re just like the ones at Judy’s party. If we order more than fifty, we’ll get a pretty big price break.”
“Liss,” he said. “I know you’ve got to have a July Fourth party, but do we have to make such a big deal of it? Let’s scale back this year, okay? Forget the hats.”
“You wore a boater just like that the first time I met you,” Alyssa said. “At Judy’s July Fourth party. Remember, everyone was wearing them?”
“I can barely remember Judy, let alone what I was wearing to her party.”
Darryl turned back to his reading and Alyssa back to the computer screen. She was still waiting for the order sheet to pop up.
“Judy was your sister’s friend from college. She was an actor, she worked at Eddie’s with me. Short, dark hair, Liza Minelli eyes?”
Darryl nodded and turned the page. “Right,” he said.
Alyssa had almost skipped Judy’s Fourth of July party for a trip to the shore with a friend. But her friend’s car broke down so she went to Judy’s instead. There’d been a pile of those boaters by the front door. Everyone inside was wearing one, including the tall, slim, dark-haired man flipping burgers on a little hibachi in the backyard.
She’d asked him for a burger, rare, and they’d introduced themselves. Judy had already told Alyssa about “the brainiac from Washington” and had even tried to fix them up once. “He’s a nice guy and he’s straight, which puts him way ahead of everyone we know,” she’d said. But Alyssa refused. “What could I say to a scientist that would be interesting, or vice versa?”
Plenty, as it turned out. He loved her backstage stories and was enthralled by the life of a struggling actor. “I could never do that,” he said several times in an awed voice. At one point he asked her to recite a passage from Private Lives she’d memorized for a reading early the next morning. In turn, he made his research sound like a treasure hunt. The way he told it, all his professors were characters out of Dickens. He monopolized her evening and made her laugh, as if he were auditioning for the role of boyfriend.
Returning home after the call the next day, she found a page torn from the Daily News slipped under her front door with two horoscopes circled and a note that read: “It’s in the stars—Darryl.”
Her horoscope was Aquarius: “Venus, your ruler, aligned with the sun means there’s a surprise in store. Capricorn, Libra, or Sagittarius individuals could play role.”
His was Capricorn: “The moon is in a harmonious angle. Dichotomies and contradictions are cleared up. Dogged determination gives you the advantage over those who only have speed going for them.”
For six months Darryl pursued Alyssa with the dogged determination of the most tenacious Capricorn. He called her nearly every night and took the train up every weekend to see her in New York. He stood in line with her at cattle calls and a couple of times helped her with the courier job. By the next July Fourth, they were married and living in Washington.
Over the past few years, Alyssa had often wondered how different her life would have been if her friend’s car hadn’t broken down and she’d gone to Beach Haven that July Fourth, nineteen years ago.
Darryl stood and stretched. “It’s late,” he said. “I’m heading to bed. Are you coming?”
“In a little bit. There’s a couple more things I want to look for.”
She ordered seventy-five party hats, then clicked to another page featuring patriotic bunting. As she waited for it to electronically unfold, her fingers began to pick up where they’d left off: “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way . . .” But they stopped when the sound of whinnying came drifting through the open windows.
She sat for a while, listening for horses. Then she turned back to the computer and interrupted the search for bunting. She called up the Google box again. Her fingers hesitated over the keys momentarily. She typed in, “Tug Palifax.”
CHAPTER 15
On the morning after Darryl’s departure, Tug walked over to Finally Farm and Alyssa met him in the barn with coffee and muffins.
There was a sly look on his face as he took his first sip. “So, where are the humping horses?”
“I see you’ve been talking to Jackie,” Alyssa said.
“She told me about all your erotic etchings. Come on, you’ve got to show me.”
Alyssa led him to the north end of the barn, where she pushed a large wooden trunk away from a corner of the center aisle. There, drawn in the concrete, was a cartoon of a stallion mounting a mare. Both horses were looking up with wide eyes and oversized grins. Above the drawing were the words, “Finally, a barn for Finally Farm.” The stallion’s rump was branded with the name “Darryl.” The mare’s flank read, “Alyssa.”
“A Limey did it, of course,” said Alyssa. “I can’t remember his name, except that it was a mouthful, something like—Dagomar Petrosian. He was a composer who cartooned as a hobby. He drew it in the wet concrete with a nail. We didn’t realize he’d done it until the next day when the concrete was already set.”
“Well, it’s . . . uh . . . cute,” said Tug.
“It was funny for about a day. Then Roz saw it and refused to walk in the barn until I covered it up. It’s really the only thing I’d change about this place.”
They sat on a hay bale, their coffee mugs in hand. Alyssa looked down the center aisle. After seven years, everything about the barn still thrilled her: the thick wood boards of the stalls with their knuckle-sized knots; the wisps of hay that drifted down from the loft and rode the currents of the fan-swirled air; the pine shavings that looked like twists of lemon taffy; the pitchforks with their metal tines aligned as straight as soldiers; the orange wheelbarrow that Roz had painted with flowers befo
re her Bauhaus phase; the big plastic trash cans filled with sticky-sweet corn and oats; the voodoo mural of devil horses painted by a (strange) fellow from Miami.
“This is my favorite place on the farm,” she said. “Possibly even the Earth. This is where I am—pardon the hippie talk—the most centered. I could be happy living right here in this barn, even if I were alone.”
“Alone?” said Tug. “No stage, no lights, no Shakespeare?”
“I meant alone except for the annual theater festival in the front pasture and weekly visits to Limespring.”
“Jackie also told me you guys built the barn in just a day.”
“Mostly. Did Jackie also tell you that she was behind it all?”
“No.”
“She’s being modest. If it hadn’t been for her, we’d be in the middle of a field right now. She got tired of hearing me bellyache about standing in the rain with my refugees. You know, doctoring their legs and cleaning out their cuts. She told me to do the prep work and she’d organize the rest. So Darryl and I poured the footers and bought the lumber, barbecue, and beer. Jackie got all the Limeys and some of the farmers to come over. She organized teams—blue armbands hammered, red armbands sawed, that kind of thing—and the barn went up in one day. It was just like Witness, except the men weren’t wearing turquoise shirts and we clearly didn’t have God on our side because as soon as we’d gotten half of it raised, the sky turned black and it started to rain. And I mean rain, like God opened a fire hydrant. Or as Odie says, ‘Like a cow pissing on a flat rock.’”
Tug laughed hard at this description, a reaction that gave Alyssa a little jolt of triumph.
“Then everybody started running like crazy, grabbing power tools and food from the barbecue. We all crammed into the living room smelling like wet dogs and ended up having a picnic on the floor. The rain turned the barn site into a mudpit, but afterward we went out and finished it up. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”