by John Muncie
“Well then,” said Tug, lifting up his coffee mug. “Here’s to cow piss.”
CHAPTER 16
Two picnic tables had been pushed end-to-end under a big elm in front of Limespring’s old dairy buildings. It was a fine spot with long views of soft green hills, and it often caught a breeze. Over the years the tables had become the Limeys’ unofficial summer commons.
At night, the more social fellows would gather in the lodge, either for poker games or readings or just to talk. But during the day it was those two picnic tables that they went to. The place to escape the rigors of the creative process or creative procrastination. The place to break bread or, in the case of Limespring lunches, ham salad sandwiches. At noon, Cora would drive her station wagon up the dirt road from the kitchen and deliver the black lunch pails to an alcove in the dairy barn kitchen. From around noon to about one-thirty, poets and painters, novelists and composers, photographers and memoirists emerged from the studios, blinking in the sun, and walked to the tables carrying their pails and their preoccupations.
Tug’s preoccupation that noon was food. He’d missed breakfast because he’d gone to Finally Farm right after sunrise. Alyssa had told him her barn was a different place in the early morning, and she’d been right. At that hour, the sun angled through cracks in the siding, catching dust particles in midair and making the narrow rays of light almost palpable.
Alyssa had come by around eight with coffee and a present. She had handed him a large folio book tied up in a bow of orange baling twine. “This is exactly what you need,” she’d said. “It’ll help you see horses from the inside out. But don’t get carried away. This artist got so caught up drawing horses, he started dissecting them.”
The book, The Anatomy of the Horse by George Stubbs, was a cross between veterinary text and art. The first eighty-three pages were filled with impenetrable medical terms such as “infra-pinatus scapulae.” But they were followed by thirty-six exquisitely detailed drawings of horses and their skeletons. Tug could almost hear his old Pratt figure drawing teacher saying, “Bones, it’s all in the bones.”
“Harold Reifman thanks you, and so do I,” Tug had said.
Alyssa had left to go grocery shopping in Marshall and Tug had turned back to the separation of light. The next time he looked at his watch it was after eleven. He hadn’t eaten anything since last night’s dinner.
He power-walked back to Limespring and intercepted Cora as she drove up to the dairy complex with the day’s lunches. He grabbed his pail—it had his studio number, C4, painted on one end and a panel of stick-figure horses, which he’d recently added, on the other—and headed to the tables.
For a change, he was the first one there. This rare moment of lunchtime solitude gave him the chance to admire the view and assess future sketching possibilities.
Just down the hill from the tables were the rustic cabins where Tug and eight others lived; next to them was a small red-brick dorm that housed eighteen others. Farther on was the lodge, where breakfast and dinner were served. Hidden from Tug’s view was the small white clapboard tenant house that served as the director’s residence. Jackie Burke’s home for the past nine years.
The “Little House,” as it was called, was the only remaining building from the original farm. The main farmhouse had burned down in the 1940s. Grainy black-and-white photos of the old four-columned building hung in the lodge near a haunting sculpture, called The Cold People, depicting three shadowy, elongated figures with pointy fingers and balls for legs. The lodge was filled with art made at Limespring. A mobile dangled from the ceiling in the dining room, paintings lined the walls, and the shelves were filled with books written by Limeys.
The cabins and lodge were leftovers from Limestone’s merit badge period. For twenty-five years, after it ceased to be a dairy farm and before it became a “Center for Creativity,” the property housed a Boy Scout camp. Then, in 1975, the 280-acre property was deeded over to the state. With help from wealthy benefactors in Washington and nearby Warrenton and Middleburg, it reopened five years later as Virginia’s first official arts colony.
Limespring hadn’t changed greatly from its Boy Scout days. It was a shoestring operation, a stepchild of the state bureaucracy with a lot more cachet than cash. A previous administration had been so worried about money that it had added the name “Shenandoah” to the colony’s title, ignoring geography. Limespring actually sits closer to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but it was thought the word “Shenandoah”—with its melodic sound and ability to conjure up visions of majestic American mountains—would attract more donors than “Blue Ridge.”
The name change might have accounted for a few more patrons, but it wasn’t enough to support the operation. As an additional source of income, much of Limestone’s acreage was leased to local farmers. Ten acres of feed corn grew not far from the Little House. Cattle grazed within twenty yards of the studios. A favorite Limespring activity was watching Ferdinand the bull have his way with the cows, and just as Tug opened his lunch pail that noon, a black-and-white Holstein heifer began scratching her rump against the nearby pasture fence.
He hadn’t gotten far into his ham salad sandwich when Marius and Nattie joined him, followed by Don Schofield, an expat American poet living in Greece, and Charisse McDowell, an Atlanta writer. “My father was a leg man,” she’d said her first day at Limespring, “and a great fan of Cyd Charisse.”
By the time Abbi showed up, the tables were covered in open pails, sandwich wrappers, and juice bottles.
“I’d skip these if I were you,” said Don, holding up a Baggie containing something that looked like fat orange worms. “I think they were made before the Parthenon.”
Tug took a cheese puff from his own bag and bit down. “Yowza,” he said. “Like eating a sponge. Nice color, though. It’s peppy.”
“We used to have something like these in Czechoslovakia before glasnost,” said Marius, “but they were brown and heavy and tasted like potatoes.”
“In other words, they were nothing like cheese puffs,” said Nattie.
“They were, in our imagination,” said Marius. “Czechoslovakia had much more imagination before glasnost.”
“Speaking of imagination,” said Charisse, who, unlike her namesake, was a short, plump woman with a ribbon of glossy dark hair running halfway down her back, “it’s only four days to the Follies and I don’t have a clue what to wear. Alyssa says be exotic and the closest I have is a pair of black running tights.”
“Not to worry,” said Abbi. “I’ve got a whole closet of exotic. Come by tonight after dinner. Cabin seven. You’ll look like Cleopatra by the time I’m through.”
“Does that mean you’ll miss our walk?” said Don. He was an avid hiker who’d started a group stroll on his first evening at Limespring and hadn’t missed one since.
“Don’t wait for us,” said Abbi. “We’ll be busy playing Barbie doll.”
“Count me out, too,” said Tug. “I’m going back to Finally Farm this evening. Alyssa said the light on her pond is amazing as the sun goes down. It’s a good chance to do some light and shadow studies.”
“No, no, no, Tug my friend,” said Marius, shaking his head. “You’ve got it all wrong. It’s a good chance for you to study the delicious Alyssa Brown.”
“Oh, Marius, stop drooling,” said Nattie.
“Besides, Alyssa’s married,” said Charisse, who leaned across the table toward Tug and batted her eyelashes overdramatically. “Unlike some lonely Limespring writers I know. By the way, have I ever told you about the light in my room? The shadows in my cabin are amazing around ten o’clock at night.”
“Very funny,” said Tug amid the laughter. “But, unlike you, Marius, my mind’s on art, not women. Finally Farm’s a dream. Hills, horses, barns, all that crazy stuff in the house. And what about those starbugs, Marius? They even inspired you. I feel like I’m back in art school. Anyway, Charisse is right. Alyssa’s married and I have a girlfriend . . . Sort o
f.”
“Good God, Tug!” said Abbi. “You’re not still stringing Margaux along, are you?”
“Who’s Margaux?” Don and Charisse said together.
Marius pointed at the red-faced Tug. “There seems to be more to our Mr. Tug than we know.”
“Or less,” said Abbi sarcastically.
“Enough, enough,” said Tug. “I’m trying to have a serious discussion about art.”
“And,” said Marius, “we’re trying to have a serious discussion about sex.”
Tug started packing the remains of his meal into his lunchbox. “Then there’s nothing to discuss.”
Marius looked up at the elm branches. “Forgive him, God. He’s a madman,” he said. Then he held out a hand like a tour guide making note of the late spring landscape. “Women are like flowers. Each one should be handled carefully; each one should be savored; and each one should be pollinated.”
This brought howls of friendly outrage from Nattie and Charisse and the utter annihilation of any serious discussion about art. New lunch recruits arrived and, under the cover of greetings and updates about artistic progress, Tug said his good-byes and walked back to the dairy building and his studio.
The dairy, built in 1917 of ash gray cinder block, had been gutted of its stanchions and milking apparatus. The cavernous rooms that remained were partitioned to create the studios, which surrounded the Square, where visual artists often moved their work for different light or longer views.
Tug’s studio was a large white room that contained several workbenches, a couch, a sink, and a block-and-board bookshelf. A grid of iron piping hung from the ceiling; eight adjustable spotlights were clipped to it. Dried paint drips and splatters gave the bare concrete floor a Jackson Pollock motif. For the past few years, occupants had written or painted their names and dates on the door frame so that from a distance it resembled a column of colorful hieroglyphics. Tug had tacked up dozens of sketchpad pages around the room. Horse heads and haunches filled some; others contained partial landscapes or barnscapes. None were completed.
A series of vertical shapes in black, gray, and white covered a page that lay on one of the workbenches. Tug tore the sketch off the pad and sat down in front of the blank page. He thought about that morning’s trip to Finally Farm. The light had been inspiring, but what had struck him more was the calm. An overlay of barn noises only amplified it. From his first day at Limespring he’d begun slowing down. But that morning was different. Its peacefulness had reminded him of a seventeenth-century Delft landscape. At that moment in the barn, he would have traded all the video installations in the world to be able to capture the feeling. And then Alyssa had come with the book and coffee.
He knew what his daily trips to Finally Farm might seem like to the other Limeys. And he knew what he’d told them at lunch wasn’t the complete truth. It wasn’t only about art. If it had been, why hadn’t he ever mentioned Margaux’s name to Alyssa?
Absentmindedly, he picked up a Sharpie and began making crosshatching patterns in the lower right-hand corner of the paper.
After a while he stopped doodling and began to draw an oval shape near the center of the page and, next to it, a faint triangle. In a few minutes the oval became a cheek, the triangle a nose. Somewhat later an eye, with the slightly downturned lids he’d been looking at for the past few weeks, took shape and began to look back at its creator.
CHAPTER 17
Two days after Tug missed the evening hike to see Finally Farm at sundown, Nattie leaned over to Abbi and whispered, “Still think they’re not doing it?”
She didn’t need to whisper—the Limespring theater was as noisy as a construction zone. Fifteen yards away, three Limeys were knocking together fake storefronts of Baghdad with a nail gun. Near them, another three were testing out spotlights and cursing creatively. A few yards in the other direction, Marius was practicing line readings in a booming voice. “Your wish is my command!” “Your wish is my command!” “Your wish is my command!”
Nattie and Abbi were on the scenery crew, painting a Herez design on a piece of plywood that was to be a magic carpet. They had stopped to watch Tug play the Sultan to Alyssa’s Scheherazade on the small stage below them.
The theater, or “Follies Coliseum” as it was called this time of year, was a rustic amphitheater carved into an opening in the woods behind the barn. The stage was just a circle of concrete that backed up to a bank of Limespring Creek. It faced two sections of split-log benches stepping up the grassy slope that Nattie and Abbi were using as a studio. The theater dated from Limespring’s Boy Scout era. Some kids from New Jersey, bused down for a month’s stay in the country, had built it as a summer project. The Boy Scout fleur-de-lis and the inscription “Fort Lee Troop 6” could still be seen etched in one corner of the concrete. Not to be outdone by a bunch of Jersey teenagers, some Limeys had added multicolored tiles and a removable bronze gnomon to turn the circle into a huge sundial.
Preparations for the performance had sputtered along for ten days, but now, with the summer solstice party and Limespring Follies only four days away, Alyssa had forced the pace, getting the volunteers to work an extra two hours after dinner. Things were in a shambles. Confused actors tripped over tools and smeared themselves on half-painted backdrops; a bank of lights had fallen over with a frightening crash. But old hands knew that, somehow, Alyssa would pull it together. It helped that she not only oversaw everything but was also the lead actress. Unlike her amateur cast, she could turn a corny script into delicious ham.
“All right, you sorceress. Live another night,” Tug was saying in an accent that sounded more like something from a Tijuana sombrero shop than a Middle Eastern palace. “Once again, you have left me hungry for more.”
Tug took Alyssa’s arm and started to chew it up and down as if it were an ear of corn. She spun into him, wrapped her free arm around his neck, and threw her head back.
“Oh, Master, I thank you a thousand times,” she said, sounding suspiciously like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie. “You will not regret this. I will satisfy all your hungers.”
Nattie nodded down at the stage. “That looks like a lot more than acting to me. I’ll bet you ten bucks they’re . . .” She finished the sentence by sliding her index finger in and out of a tunnel she’d made with the fingers of her other hand.
Abbi put down her paintbrush and peered over her glasses at the diminutive redhead on the other side of the plywood. “You are, as usual, your wonderfully eloquent self. But, not to put too fine a point on it, I don’t think they are . . .” Abbi made the same hand gesture, then added, “Yet.”
Nattie shook her head. “Wrong.”
“I’m not wrong,” Abbi said. “Tug told me so himself. He said they were just really good friends.”
“Ha! Good friends,” Nattie said. “Maybe three weeks ago. Just look at her now. Watch the way her hands move and her face lights up. Yeah, I know she’s always animated, but now she’s . . . she’s . . .” Nattie searched for a word. “She’s . . .”
“Carbonated?”
“Exactly,” Nattie said. “So you’ve seen it, too. And what about Tug? He’s been at her place every morning since they met. Have you seen his sketches? What happened to the horse project? Now he’s drawing everything there. Even the shit spreader. And catch the way he looks at her.”
“I didn’t say they don’t have the hots for each other. I simply said I don’t think it’s gone beyond their imagination. At this point, yes, I do believe they’re just really good friends. Kind of like you and Marius.” Abbi cocked her head and arched her left eyebrow. “Right?”
“Here we go again. Marius and I are just good friends. I don’t care what Cora says about the boxwoods. He was just showing me where he wanted to put his next installation. That’s it, end of story. No married men for me. The sad truth is it’s been so long, I don’t even remember what a penis looks like anymore.”
“Sure, Nattie. Whatever you say. But for your information, Mar
ius looks at you the way Tug looks at Lissy.”
“Marius looks at every woman that way. Even Mrs. Tomkins, and she’s eighty-five.”
As other cast members joined Scheherazade and the Sultan, Abbi turned back to the magic carpet. But Nattie kept watching the stage.
“Back to this Tug-Alyssa thing,” Nattie said. “Maybe Tug’s just being discreet. Ask him again. Or better yet, ask Alyssa, you guys are close. Next time you go riding, ask her then.”
Abbi’s tongue was pressed to her upper lip in concentration as she tried to paint a series of minute orange zigzags inside some tiny green rectangles that Nattie had outlined. “Nattie, ease up on these designs, would you? I’m a writer, not a calligrapher. And I can’t just come out and ask her if she’s you-know-whating Tug.”
She continued painting zigzags and wiping off the orange overflow with a rag. “Lissy’s pretty private about her personal life. It took her eight years to open up to me once. And that’s only because we were both drunk. Remember last year when she made me dinner for my birthday? After you guys left, we finished the last bottle of wine and I started complaining about men in general and William in particular. Then I asked her what she thought about the notion of great love. ‘Luxury of youth,’ she said—she was even drunker than I was. She started talking about Darryl, how they’d separated, but got back together for their daughter’s sake. Then she said the saddest thing—I went back to my cabin to write it down to use it in a book. She said she and Darryl had found a way to stop hurting each other and sometimes that’s the best you can hope for in a marriage.”
“Ouch, I’ve been there,” said Nattie, “except Henry and I never found a way to stop hurting each other.”
For a moment Nattie was silent. “I know why she stays,” she said, breaking her reverie.
Abbi put down her paintbrush. “Okay, Dr. Freud, lay it on me.”