by John Muncie
“Because after a while you stop seeing the bars and start thinking your jail is your safe house. It’s like the way our brains flip everything over, so we don’t have to stand on our heads to make things seem right side up. Then if you stand on your head, everything looks upside down, for a while. And you know something’s wrong.
“But here’s the catch: You don’t have that long to fix the problem, because before you realize it, your brain will flip things over so everything seems right, even though you’re standing on your head. And after a while you don’t even know you’re standing on your head. That’s what happened to me. I was standing on my head for eighteen years, but everything looked fine. If it hadn’t been for Henry wanting to go to MBA school, I’d still be standing on my head. He actually asked me for a divorce because he thought I’d make fun of his fellow MBA classmates. Which I would have. If you ask me, Darryl’s been making Alyssa do headstands. The real question is, has Tug flipped her back over and will she do something about it?”
CHAPTER 18
The next morning, Alyssa was in the wash stall, soaking the foot of an uncooperative horse that was trying to muscle his way out of the bucket, when Abbi walked in. “Hey Liss,” she said. “Does this mean we’re not going for a ride?”
Alyssa shoved her weight into the side of the horse, shifting him enough so his foot landed in the bucket of hot water and Epsom salts. “No,” she said, wrestling with him as he tried to remove his foot again. “This one’s not ready for trails yet, anyway. He still thinks he’s on the track. Plus he’s dead lame. You should see the poor guy walk. It’s just a stone bruise, but he acts like he broke his leg. Give me a few minutes to finish up, then we’ll get Roy and Theo, okay?”
“No problem,” Abbi said. “I’ll go talk to Tug, unless you need an extra hand.”
Alyssa waved Abbi on and as Abbi walked away she heard a loud, “God bless it, Rascal,” and a bucket of water spilling down the wash stall drain.
Tug was sitting on a folding chair outside the barn, his back to the sun. He was facing Mount Buck, the hill that formed the back of the property. He was trying to capture planes of light shifting over the long grasses.
“Hey, Tug, how’s it going?” Abbi said, looking over his shoulder. “My, how representational we’re getting. Very Andrew Wyeth. Want me to lie in the grass and play Christina?”
“Ha-ha, very funny,” Tug said and then began an earnest explanation of this new phase in his art, how he was finding inspiration, even comfort, in the discipline of realism. When he got to the part about fundamental shapes and line, Abbi interrupted. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, “this creativity talk is all very interesting, but before Alyssa comes out, I’m supposed to deliver a message from Nattie. A question, actually. Look up at me. She told me to do it exactly this way.”
Tug turned his head. “Are you and Alyssa . . . ?” She finished by making the finger-sliding-in-the-tunnel gesture.
Tug shook his head and laughed. “Leave it to Nattie to put it that way. She and Marius are perfect for one another, two knuckleheads. Alyssa and I are friends, that’s all.” Then he gave her a smile. “Besides, you know me better than that.”
Now it was Abbi’s turn to laugh. She certainly did know him. She herself had been felled by his contagious smile and country-boy charm. She’d met him fifteen years ago at a Guggenheim show of Donald Judd’s boxes. He’d graduated from Pratt and was welding at an auto body shop to pay the rent. She’d just graduated from Barnard and was waitressing at a coffee shop. The two months that followed had been intense, but Abbi knew from the start it wasn’t serious. He wasn’t ready to settle into anything resembling monogamy and neither was she.
When the romance wore off, she found that she wanted to keep him as a friend. She hadn’t been in love with him, so there was no deep hurt when he told her he’d met someone else. And she liked him. She liked his energy and his concern. He was as passionate about people as his art.
A few weeks before they became “just friends,” they were walking down West Fourteenth Street. It was bitterly cold and they saw a straggly-haired homeless man standing by a corner. He was carrying a cardboard sign that read: “Please help. Please. Vietnam veteran. Cold and homeless. Need work or money for food and shelter.” As the light turned green, a hand reached out from a car and dumped coffee into the homeless man’s donation cup. Then the car sped off.
They were both outraged, but Tug turned his anger into art. He and some Pratt buddies scoured the boroughs for homeless people and paid each one $5 for their signs. Then, using old ornate wood frames they’d decorated with gilt paint, they matted and mounted the signs and, with the arm-twisting of some of the Pratt faculty, got them hung at a Chelsea gallery that specialized in outsider and folk art. Tug called the show “Please Help Please.” He had the gallery charge a $1 entrance fee and donated everything, including money from sales, to a homeless shelter in Brooklyn.
Abbi went to the opening, which attracted a surprisingly large crowd, including a local TV station. Tug and his crew were there, wearing secondhand tux jackets and jeans; so was the homeless man whose plight had started it all. That night she and Tug went back to her apartment and never got to sleep.
But over the years, they’d turned out to be far better friends than lovers. Abbi became the big sister Tug had never known he needed. She’d helped extricate him from several unsatisfactory relationships that the Smile had gotten him into. He had a weakness for the thin, the dark, and the dour. Of which Margaux was one of the thinnest, darkest, and least likely to chuckle.
Abbi’s armchair psychoanalysis was that Tug was trying to prove to himself, by conquest, that he belonged to New York’s art crowd. She’d never told him flat out: “Okay, you’ve proven it, now grow up and move on.” But in the past few years she’d tried to fix him up with friends who had more effervescence and fewer black outfits. She was certain that Tug would find a way out of his crisis of art if he found someone who helped him be happier, looser, and goofier.
Someone like Alyssa Brown?
That possibility had never occurred to Abbi when she was arm-twisting Tug into a Limespring summer. But suddenly he was happier, looser, and goofier than she’d seen him in years.
“Well, maybe Alyssa will have more to say on the subject,” she said. To her delight, this wiped the Smile from Tug’s face.
He narrowed his eyes and pointed a finger at her. “Abbi, if you say or hint or suggest anything to Alyssa about anything like this, I’ll kill you. Slowly and painfully.”
She rolled her eyes and pretended to swoon. “Oooh, Tug, I love it when you get rough. Quit worrying, I’m on your side. Discretion is my middle name.”
CHAPTER 19
“Tug’s great, isn’t he? I mean he’s funny and serious at the same time. And he’s a really good person, too. You know he helps coach a boys’ basketball team, and did I ever tell you about his homeless art project . . .”
Abbi’s words drifted up to Alyssa from behind. She caught most of them, but as the horses’ hooves rustled the leaves and crunched twigs, some of them were lost. It didn’t matter, she got the picture. They were all about Tug and what a great, generous, handsome, sweet, Mother Teresa kind of guy Tug was.
It seemed odd for Abbi to go on like this. Gush didn’t suit her. Irony, yes, but not adulation. It reminded Alyssa of Roz talking about her latest boyfriend. She’d met him during spring break at a used bookstore and couldn’t stop talking about him. Alyssa met him once; his name was Jackson, he was a wiry philosophy major at Georgetown with bold blue eyes and frizzy hair. She’d found him pompous; Roz found him intense and charismatic. She’d wondered at the time if Roz had lost her virginity to him. She started to wonder about it now, but chased away the thought.
She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think, period. That was the beauty of trail rides. She could just melt into the sway of Theo’s body. She’d sink herself into his rhythm until she didn’t know where she stopped and he
began. Every move of his felt like a move of hers. Even when he coiled his muscles and sprang to the side, she did the same, riding the spook as if it had been choreographed. She’d always imagined figure skaters stitched together with invisible elastic threads that kept them bound through every spin and curve. When she was on a horse, she felt tied with the same invisible threads.
While Abbi continued to talk, Alyssa nodded her head every so often and tried to fall into Theo’s rhythm. But the no-think magic of trail rides wasn’t working. Every time she settled in, Abbi’s words yanked her back to the surface.
Abbi couldn’t stop talking about Tug, just like Roz couldn’t stop talking about Jackson. Alyssa didn’t know what she found more annoying: that Abbi had the hots for Tug, or that she cared that Abbi had the hots for Tug. Thinking about it only made her more irritated. She tried to drive away the irritation with rationality. Abbi was single, she could do whatever she wanted. She’d had a thing in the past with Tug, there was no law she couldn’t rekindle it. And who am I to feel . . . whatever it is I’m feeling? I barely know the guy. We’re just friends.
“. . . and I know he downplays his work,” Abbi was saying, “but I’d kill for the kind of reviews he gets—of course, that’s assuming I ever get published. He’s the whole package, don’t you think?”
They’d gotten to a wider part of the trail and Abbi had trotted her horse up beside Alyssa’s.
When Theo started prancing at the other horse’s approach, Alyssa patted his neck and cooed, “Settle down now, boy. It’s just Roy.” As she continued to stroke his neck, he relaxed, dropped his head, and picked up Roy’s easygoing pace.
She forced herself to sound casual and light. “Abbi, what’s with all this talk about Tug? Things heating up between you two again?”
Abbi’s mouth opened and for a moment nothing came out. Then she let out a loud, startled laugh that sent Theo skittering to the side. “Oh, sorry about that, Liss. Me and Tug? Are you out of your mind? Been there, done that. And yes, while it was an exemplary experience, I have no need to revisit my past. I just thought you might want to talk about Tug, that’s all.”
Alyssa recognized the arched eyebrow. It was Abbi’s I-know-what-you’re-really-thinking look.
“Now you’re the one being ridiculous,” she said. “I’ll talk about Tug if you want to talk about Tug, but I’ve got no reason to. He’s a terrific artist, he’s curious, he’s funny, he seems like a great guy, what else is there to say?”
There were a lot more things Alyssa could have said. Like how many different outfits she tried on every morning before he came over or how much she thought of him on her nightly walks or how she’d spied on him from the hayloft just the other day to watch his hands at work.
They were big hands, with broad, square palms. Nothing about them seemed delicate until they touched down onto a piece of paper. It was the delicacy of his movements that intrigued her. She’d noticed it the first time she’d watched him draw nearly three weeks before.
“I’m hunting for some extra halters,” she’d called down to him from the hayloft. As usual, he was sitting on a folding chair in the center aisle of the barn. “Watch out, I may throw a few down.”
She had plenty of halters in the tack room, but she couldn’t think of another ruse. She stomped around for a while, moving buckets and rattling things. Then she quietly unzipped her paddock boots and tiptoed across the hay-covered floor to the edge of the loft. She wedged herself between two hay bales and peered down.
He didn’t seem to notice that the loft noises had stopped. He had a stick of charcoal in his right hand and a dark glob of kneaded eraser in his left; his drawing pad was propped against his knees. As best as Alyssa could tell from above, he was sketching a water bucket that hung against the horizontal planking inside the stall.
As she watched, he looked down at the drawing pad, back up to the stall, then back down again. His hand made a series of quick, light strokes and the bucket part of the image began to fill in. Then he stopped for a moment and squinted his eyes at the scene before him. He rubbed the wad of eraser against some errant lines and slowly began to work an area to the lower right of the page, coaxing a shadow to life.
She didn’t know how much longer she could keep up the halter charade. But she didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t just that Tug’s hands were fascinating, there was also something seductive about hiding in the loft and spying like a thirteen-year-old. Something sexy. And it had been years since Alyssa had felt sexy.
She and Darryl had never been exuberant lovers. The first time they made love—on the couch in her apartment—she’d been on top of him. He’d been surprised by how noisy she was. Right in the middle, he looked up and said, “Oh my. I hope your neighbors aren’t home.”
From then on, she toned it down. By the time Roz was born, their sex life was routine at best. Occasionally she’d try to spice things up with a slinky nightgown or bottle of massage oil. Once she even suggested he tie her up. He’d laughed uncomfortably and said, “I don’t think that’s my style.”
After a while, months began to pass before either of them made an advance. She couldn’t even remember the last time they’d made love. There might have been snow on the ground.
That day in the hayloft, as she watched Tug’s hands moving across the drawing board, she wondered how they’d feel moving across her.
The trail narrowed again and Alyssa pressed Theo ahead, ducking under some branches. “Seems like a great guy,” was just the beginning of what she could have said to Abbi about Tug. But beyond it were things she could barely admit to herself, let alone to another person.
What she did say was this: “You know me, Abbi. I’ll support Limespring any way I can, and if opening my farm to an artist helps, then my farm is open to Tug or any other fellow.”
The arch in Abbi’s eyebrow returned. “Right,” she said.
CHAPTER 20
On solstice day the sun stands still. It hesitates at the horizon, as if it’s wondering, Should I head farther north tomorrow? It never does. The next day, it turns back and, evening by evening, ever south, it heads to winter. But on the day of hesitation anything’s possible. Put vervain, trefoil, rue, and roses under a girl’s pillow and she’ll dream of unknown lovers. Send Puck around the world and he’ll find that flower, purple with love’s wound. Mix an arts colony with midsummer and you’ll get revelry and rococo.
Limespring’s famous stone arch had been dressed with votive candles and long streamers of ribbon. Around sunset, the ribbons’ bright colors matched the sky’s magentas and marigold yellows. As darkness settled in, the candles, winking away in stained-glass cups, outlined the arch’s lintel and the path that curved under it.
The arch was a massive thing, made of three granite slabs. The artist who created it claimed to be a druid and signed his works with the play on words, “Beodog.” He had seen the stones bulldozed aside at a highway road cut. With Jackie pulling some strings, he got a county crew to haul them to a field near the main Limespring office. Two of the slabs were pushed upright and the third, a smaller, flatter piece, was rested on top. Astronomically sited, the arch faced the Shenandoahs, and, like the monoliths of Stonehenge, it exactly framed the sun as it dipped behind the mountains on solstice day.
Everyone gathered at Beodog’s imitation Stonehenge for the sun-dipping moment. Afterward, there was a reading by a poet about his tortured childhood and three of the visual artists held open studios. One of them specialized in “captured” pieces of “information”—amebic shapes in varying shades of blue—with Sharpie pens, another drew miniature patterns in boisterous colors and planned to blow them up on wall-sized canvases, the third projected unsettling images (Robert Downey Jr. as Jesus splayed across the artist’s lap) on a wall washed in red paint. In the room where Alyssa had first seen Tug’s horse sketches, a composer played his composition of sounds he’d recorded in empty studios.
Afterward, the crowd made its way to the amphitheater, through t
he beribboned arch and down a path lit by flaming tiki torches. There were around seventy people at Limespring that night—fellows, staffers, locals, and a few family members, Darryl Brown among them.
Darryl walked along the path alone—a tall, thin man, with thinning dark hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. Alyssa had gone ahead to make final stage adjustments with her friend from New York who dressed like a gypsy and some artist named Bug or Tug or Doug. Bursts of laughter and conversation came from groups walking ahead and behind him. He hadn’t minded the poems, they were actually kind of sad; and if he was forced to choose, there was an orange splash of watercolor bearing some resemblance to a hummingbird that he’d consider hanging on his walls.
But that was it. The video Pietà’s self-conscious irony made him want to yank the projector plug out of the wall. Those splats of paint outlined in Magic Marker? Who was the artist kidding with her “capture” and “fill” and “information” talk? They were doodles. He had notebooks full of them in high school. And the sounds of an empty room? At first he’d thought it was parody, another Limespringer being ironic. Then he realized the composer was serious. Talk about the emperor; every last one of them had no clothes. Darryl was convinced that, deep down, they knew how phony it all was, but couldn’t admit it because it would make their lives irrelevant.
When he and Alyssa first purchased the farm, the Limespring connection had been amusing. “People of your ilk,” the real estate agent had said. They’d laughed at the lockjawed way she’d said “ilk,” and imitated her for weeks afterward. Alyssa was excited about being near “all that creativity,” and she came up with a theory, which Darryl found charming at the time, that the molecules in the air were bigger at Limespring and bombarded you with the urge to make something. In the beginning, he’d bragged to friends and co-workers that his new farm was just down the road from the arts colony where Benjamin Shepard had written the notorious avant-garde musical Another Teen Pageant.