by John Muncie
“Forget it,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do.”
Abbi looked up from the carpet. “Would you take that hangdog expression off your face? You look like a basset hound and it’s not at all flattering. We’ll think of something.”
Tug stalked over to get the pillow. “You want a plan?” he said, grabbing the pillow so hard a little puff of feathers escaped. “How’s this: I start slapping paint on one side of her house in the middle of the night. That way, she has to let me stick around, at least until I finish the other side. There, there’s your plan.”
Abbi was silent for a few moments, then she started nodding her head. “That’s brilliant, Tug. You’re a genius.”
“I am?”
“You are. You just came up with a twenty-first-century update of Scheherazade. Well, not the house painting part, but the ‘finish the job,’ sticking around part. Remember how Scheherazade keeps the Sultan hanging each night so she can survive another day? That’s what you’ll do. Each night you’ll slip a half-finished drawing of something at Finally Farm under her front door—a barn scene, her horses, whatever. Then each morning you show up at her doorstep and say you have to stay there in order to finish. It can’t miss. She’ll think it’s wonderful and romantic and charming. She won’t be able to resist. No woman would be able to resist.” Abbi, who had clearly fallen in love with this idea, practically levitated from the chair in her excitement. Her eyes were bright with the possibilities.
Tug’s eyes, on the other hand, had a look of horror. “Oh man, Abbi, you’re nuts. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. She’ll think I’m an idiot.”
Abbi pointed her finger at him. “As I said, you know nothing about women. It worked for Scheherazade and it will work for you.”
CHAPTER 31
Tug pulled a black T-shirt from the middle of a pile on his dresser. It was the first night of Operation Scheherazade, the stealth mission in the war to win Alyssa’s heart. He’d spent the day half drawing images; trying to capture half the essence of something so compelling that Alyssa would beg him to complete it. Or at the very least, tickle her curiosity. The results lay on the bed next to a flashlight.
He put on the T-shirt and picked up one of the sketches. It was an oblique view of the barn’s wash stall. A horse’s head, chest, and front legs protruded from it; a bucket, hose, and brushes lay on the floor. The horse’s face had been carefully shaded and detailed. The head was slightly dished, a white star was stamped between the eyes. A few pencil strokes suggested the rest of the horse and the stall.
It was meant to be a portrait of Theo, Alyssa’s favorite. The one that followed her around like a dog and begged to be scratched; the one whose photo was on her refrigerator. How could she resist?
He glanced down at four other half-finished sketches on the bed. Each one was quite resistible. He looked over the Theo drawing again. If not compelling, what about mildly amusing? What about pitiful? Maybe she’d feel sorry for him that, after all this time, he still couldn’t draw a damn horse.
Someone knocked on the door. “It’s me,” said a voice. It was Abbi, Tug’s partner in stealth. She’d insisted on joining him. “In case you need a cover story,” she had said. “If Alyssa spots us, I’ll tell her I lost an earring at the party and didn’t want to walk over in the dark by myself.”
Not the most logical cover story, but Tug was glad to have Abbi along. With two of them it became a tale they could tell friends over drinks. Alone, it was just humiliation.
They set out after midnight. Tug wore dark green swimming trunks and navy Tevas to complement the black T-shirt; Abbi wore a black tank top, black jeans, and one earring of dangling stars and moons. “Wait, we should darken our faces first,” she said. “Let’s grind up one of your charcoal thingies.”
When Tug’s eyes widened, Abbi grabbed his arm. “Oh relax, would you? I was just joking. Come on, let’s go.”
This was the plan: They’d walk to the farm, tiptoe to the front door, and slip the half-drawn sketch under it. If Darryl’s car was there or if Alyssa was still awake they’d turn back. If anything went wrong, they’d run like hell.
The plan worked, at least the stealth part. The farm was dark, there were no extra cars in the driveway, nobody screamed, the horses in the pastures didn’t even nicker. The only glitch was the screen door. As Tug began to pull it open, the hinges made a screeching noise that sounded to them as loud as a car alarm. For ten seconds they stood frozen on the porch, Tug’s hand on the door handle, waiting for a light to come on in Alyssa’s bedroom. It didn’t. He eased the screen closed and, in the exaggerated pantomime of the stealthy, the two of them slowly turned, slowly bent down, and even more slowly taped the drawing to the porch floor so it would be the first thing Alyssa saw when she walked outside the next morning.
Then in the same quiet slo-mo, they tiptoed away, leaving behind the fragrance of Abbi’s Picasso perfume, Tug’s half-portrait of Theo, and a message that read: “Don’t you want to see how it ends up? I do. But I can’t finish it at Limespring. See you in the morning as usual. I’ll be good.” It was signed “Tug Palifax, The Sorry Sultan of Sketches.”
The minute they got to Limespring Hollow Road, they started giggling. The giggling quickly turned to the loud laughter of relief.
“I hope to hell this works,” Abbi said.
That stopped Tug’s laughter dead. “What do you mean, you hope to hell this works? Yesterday you said it was foolproof.”
“Wellll,” Abbi said, “I’d love it if somebody did it for me. But that’s me. You never know about Alyssa.”
“You never know? You never know!”
“Calm down for Godsakes. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“She could shoot me for trespassing.”
CHAPTER 32
Alyssa didn’t shoot him. When Tug showed up the next morning, he found her sitting, unarmed, on the red porch glider by the front door, holding the sketch of Theo and a cup of coffee.
There was a moment of awkward silence as they looked at each other then glanced away. Tug steeled himself for her response: Leave and don’t come back. But, as the moment stretched to the breaking point, Alyssa said nothing, and Tug, for one of the rare times in his life, didn’t either. Finally, Alyssa got up and stepped to the front wall of the house. She tacked Tug’s drawing to the yellow clapboard and stepped back. She examined the drawing, then said, “Needs work. Theo’s in the barn, I’ll put him in the wash stall for you. But you have to stay five feet away from me at all times. Agreed?”
She was using her drama teacher we’ve-got-three-days-to-make-this-work voice. He couldn’t tell if she was serious or teasing him. But when she turned to face him she was smiling. It wasn’t a big smile, but big enough. Operation Scheherazade had not failed yet.
He took the sketch and walked to the barn. Everything he needed was there: his folding chair in front of the wash stall, a cup of coffee, and hope. Alyssa soon followed, leading Theo.
“If he fidgets, just talk to him,” she said. “But if he really starts acting up, give a yell. I’ll be around the barn.”
Tug worked on the sketch all morning. Theo alternated between pawing the concrete, chewing the crossties, tossing his head up and down, and dozing. Alyssa came by several times to and from chores or the pretext of chores. They didn’t say much, but each exchange was less strained than the one before. On the fourth time, Alyssa went into the tack room to get a jar of Furison for a cut on Theo’s leg. As she smeared on the yellow ointment, Theo nuzzled her pockets looking for carrots.
“Think it’s possible for a horse to like to be drawn?” Tug asked.
“You mean Theo? With him, anything’s possible. He doesn’t know he’s a horse.”
Tug’s pencil kept moving while he talked. “It’s like he strikes a pose, then looks at me to make sure I’m watching. And if I’m not, he bangs the floor with his foot. I think he’s showing off.”
Alyssa stood up and Theo rubbed his head a
gainst her chest, knocking her off balance. “Of course he’s showing off. That’s what alpha horses do. That’s how they get the girls. Just like alpha men.”
With the sketch nearly done at noon, Tug led Theo to his stall and gave him some hay. Then he peeked around the edge of the barn to see where Alyssa was. He didn’t want any awkward good- byes or questions about the sketch or future sketches or anything that could put a crimp in Operation Scheherazade. Mystery was crucial. He cut quickly across the pasture toward Limespring Hollow Road to avoid any chance of being spotted.
That afternoon in his studio he put the final touches on sketch no. 1 and started the second half-drawing. After sorting through a stack of earlier studies, he decided on a view of the farmhouse as seen from the front pasture. The job went quickly. Even though he took a long dinner break—there was a spirited argument at his table about whether painting or music was the original art form—he was done by mid-evening. For this drawing, the finished work surrounded an unfinished center. The pasture, fence, hills, and trees were nearly complete, while only a few pencil lines suggested the house itself.
The second sneak attack began at eleven-thirty that night. This time he was alone. He’d given Abbi a full report earlier in the day and she’d decided that her moral support and earring excuse were no longer needed. It was a cloudy night, raindrops spattering down occasionally; he carried the drawings in his portfolio. When he got to Alyssa’s front porch, he taped the finished Theo drawing and the half-done farmhouse sketch to the floor. This time the message read: “Hope you like Theo’s portrait. Hope you want to see how the farmhouse ends up. See you in the morning.” It was signed simply, “Tug.”
When he returned the next morning Theo’s portrait was gone and the unfinished farmhouse sketch was tacked to the door frame. Next to it was a note in Alyssa’s hand. “I loved the drawing of Theo. It really captured him this time. Go to the front pasture. There’s a chair there and a thermos of coffee. I’m in Warrenton, be back around 10:30.”
The previous night’s rain had left the day muggy and the sky a smudgy gray. Tug sat on the folding chair filling in the page’s central blank. The surrounding portions had been drawn with the long shadows of a late summer afternoon. Under the morning’s monotone light he struggled to capture the equivalent shading for the farmhouse image. He was caught up in the problem of windows when a voice said, “Need a break?”
Alyssa stood a few yards away, carrying a bowl filled with strawberries.
“Farmers’ market,” she said, nodding down to the strawberries. “Might as well have bought them at Safeway, though. They’re not great, but I sprinkled some sugar on them. Here, try one.”
She picked a strawberry from the bowl and walked up to him, breaking the five-foot rule. Tug held up his hands, blackened from the charcoal.
“Oh,” she said. “That wouldn’t taste good at all. Open up.”
Tug opened his mouth and she tossed the strawberry. It hit him on the chin.
“Your foul shot’s worse than Shaq’s,” he said, wiping an arm across his face.
“Wait, wait,” she said, laughing. “Let me try again.”
She tossed another strawberry and hit his nose. She tossed another, then another. It got even harder to land the shot, because they were both laughing. Eventually one made it into his mouth.
“You’re right,” Tug said. “They’re terrible. But thanks, I needed the break. Nothing’s happening with this drawing. The light’s worse than the strawberries.”
Alyssa looked over his shoulder. “Hmmm. I like it so far. I’ll be interested to see how it turns out.”
“Yeah, I will, too,” said Tug.
Alyssa stood behind him for a moment longer. “Well, good luck,” she said. “See you later.” Then she walked back toward the farmhouse.
Tug waited till she reached the front door before he pumped a fist in the air and said, “Yes!” A little before noon, he jogged back to Limespring and told Abbi that Scheherazade, the artist, could keep his head for at least another day.
He holed up in his studio all afternoon. Instead of joining the picnic table crowd, he spread his lunchbox items on the studio’s daybed and ate quickly without registering the meal. Cold cuts? If you’d asked him an hour later, he wouldn’t have remembered. He was deep in a world of lines and shade, deep in the world of his own creativity.
Inadvertently, Operation Scheherazade had become a watershed for the art as well as the artist. From the time Tug had arrived at Limespring he had focused on taking things apart. The drawing paper piled on the studio table or tacked on the walls was covered with fragments—horse legs, flower petals, fenceposts, the pattern of a mosaic tile, the head of a stuffed gorilla. But the game of halves had demanded completion. So Theo’s portrait became his first full Limespring composition. To his surprise, it was the act of leaving some of it unfinished, even if only for a day, that had brought it together.
Because of Operation Scheherazade, the whole became more important than the pieces. For the first time that summer, Tug had to commit to the empty spaces on his sketchpad.
He struggled with the farmhouse drawing until five. Still unsatisfied with its shadows, he decided to take a nap on the daybed for a few minutes before struggling some more. Nearly three hours later, he awoke with a start. Groggy and a little disoriented, he arrived at the cafeteria just before the kitchen closed. He wolfed down some vegetable lasagna, declined Cora’s invitation to join the weekly Limespring poker game (“Too bad,” said Cora, “I could’ve used the money”), and returned to the studio, determined this time to wrestle the farmhouse drawing to the ground.
But when he faced the easel again and examined the work clipped to the drawing board, he realized it might already be done. From the perspective of a forty-minute dinner break and a plate of lasagna, the drawing seemed pretty good.
Buoyed by this triumph, Tug dove immediately into half-sketch no. 3. The image was already in his head. It involved the north side of the barn and the aged John Deere tractor that Alyssa usually parked there. He planned to crop the image ruthlessly, focusing on mechanical shapes against an architectural background. The only softening, organic elements would be the grain of the barn’s wood siding and a fuzzy striped caterpillar inching across the tractor’s faded, chipped engine cover.
It was well past midnight when he arrived at Alyssa’s front porch carrying the half-finished tractor drawing. He had to stop himself from bounding up the steps and pounding on the door. He’d have to wait eight hours for her reaction, but that made it all the more intoxicating. Tug had no idea how long Operation Scheherazade would continue, but at the moment he taped the finished and half-finished drawings to the porch he was willing to stretch it out for a thousand and one nights.
CHAPTER 33
When Tug returned the next morning, he found another note taped to the front door. “Go to the tractor,” it said. When he got there, Alyssa was sitting on the machine’s seat, drinking coffee and leafing through a slender book.
“What’re you reading?” he said.
Alyssa showed him the cover: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“We do a Shakespeare play every year at Emerson,” she said. “I’m thinking of this one. Last year was Richard II.” She paused a moment, then, in a dropped voice, said, “A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse.”
She slid off the tractor. “This year, it’s time for a comedy.” She twirled her left hand in an Elizabethan flourish and said:
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew’d thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb: and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
“Impressive,” he said. “You do Shakespeare better than I do da Vinci.”
“I’ve been at it longer. I’m what, four years older than you?”
“I th
ink of it more like four years smarter.”
She reached out and tapped him on the top of his head with the paperback. “Smooth, Tug, very smooth. You’re one of those ‘fellows of infinite tongue, that can rime themselves into ladies’ favors.’”
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
“No, Henry V. The king’s making a bid for Katherine.”
“Did it work?”
Alyssa offered Tug an arch look. “When hasn’t it worked?”
For the next two hours he sat by the tractor, filling in the lines and shapes and contours. The light was perfect. He could have worked faster, but he didn’t want Alyssa to come back and see a drawing so completed that it would throw off the Scheherazade timing. When she stopped by around eleven, he hoped it was unfinished enough to keep the plan going.
“Looks like you need a break,” she said. “Want to go for a walk?”
She carried an empty coffee can in one hand and pointed up the hill with the other. “Let’s go up Mount Buck. I have to make amends for yesterday.”
He started to ask what the can was for, but she shushed him. “You’ll see.”
The pasture behind the barn rose steeply to a fence halfway up the hill; beyond it was forest. The temperature had already reached the eighties as Tug and Alyssa walked through thigh-high grass, scattering grasshoppers and small butterflies the color of buttermilk.
From up at the fenceline, they could see miles of the northern Virginia countryside, a soft mosaic of greens, browns, golds, and distant blues. Alyssa drew in a slow breath. “No matter how many times I see this view, it still takes me back to that first day I stood here. It’s like falling in love. You know how you remember everything about the first time you fell in love? The way it looked, and smelled, and how the air felt against your skin? That’s how it is with this view.”