by John Muncie
She turned and started fiddling with the rusted chain on the gate. “Damn,” she said. “I meant to bring some WD-40. Oh well, just climb over, but be careful, the hinges are about to go.”
Tug tried to ignore the gate’s metal pipes teetering under him as they climbed over. “Tell me about the first time,” he said.
Alyssa jumped to the ground on the other side. “The first time I fell in love? That’s easy. It was with Joe. It was freezing cold, my breath came out in clouds, my fingers were so stiff I could hardly move them, and my toes seemed like they’d shatter any second. But I didn’t feel any of it. It sounds corny, but it literally took my breath away. I remember that I had to force myself to breathe.”
Tug wished he hadn’t asked. He was certain no one had ever remembered him that fondly or fervently.
“Joe was something, all right. Everything a first love should be: handsome, kind, beautiful, soulful eyes.”
Okay, enough about Joe, thought Tug. “So what ever happened to this Joe guy? Working somewhere on Wall Street?”
Alyssa laughed and bumped her shoulder into him. “The only job Joe could get in New York would be in Central Park. Joe’s a horse, Tug. The first horse I ever rode.”
The path wound through sunlight; the air was heavy with the dark green smell of damp leaves and sunbaked bark; his rival in love turned out to be a horse; and the woman he was in love with had bumped his shoulder like a horse at play. Life was good.
As they walked along, the feel of Alyssa’s touch remained on his shoulder, fading as slowly as the afterimage of a lightning flash. Things had changed. The five-foot rule ruled no longer. He couldn’t say for certain what those changes were, and it might be a while before he found out, but he was willing to wait.
“Now it’s your turn,” Alyssa said. “Who’s your Joe?”
“Well, she wasn’t a horse, I can tell you that. Jamie McAllister. I was a goner from the first day I saw her. It was tenth grade. Mr. Beyard paired me up with her in biology lab. She had wild carrot-colored hair down to her waist. I was in my Botticelli stage then and she was my very own Venus on the half shell. She had freckles across her face and over her arms. Like Seurat had painted her. I know, I’m mixing my artists, but you get the idea.”
Alyssa pressed him for details and Tug told her the whole tale, from first glance to first kiss. One day, Jamie asked him to come to her house to study after school. He spent so much time in the shower that his mother banged on the door and told him to stop using up all the hot water. He shaved, even though he didn’t have much to shave, and brushed his teeth twice. By the time his mother dropped him off in front of Jamie’s house—a brick rambler with tractor-tire planters in the front yard—his stomach was in knots. His voice cracked when he introduced himself to Jamie’s mother, who met him at the door.
Alyssa interrupted him: “What was she wearing?”
“Jamie’s mother? I don’t know what she was wearing. All I remember was that she was as big as a refrigerator. I remember thinking she could crush me.”
“Stop,” Alyssa said. “That’s really mean.”
“But true. That night, while we were studying mitochondria, I kissed her. I got a D on the test, though. She got a B, she always was better in biology. But whenever I think of cellular structure I think of Jamie McAllister.”
Alyssa laughed and touched her shoulder to Tug’s again. Maybe it was because the path had narrowed a little, maybe not. “Did she become a doctor?”
“She should’ve,” Tug said. “She dumped me in about two weeks and started going out with Ron Kolb. He was smooth. He smoked between classes and drove around in a blue Chevy Impala. She got pregnant right out of high school and I never saw her again.”
They walked for a while, swapping high school horror stories: why Tug got kicked out of woodshop; the day Alyssa got into a fistfight with the class snitch, Beth Comroe. As they neared the top of the hill, Alyssa stopped by a dense stand of brambles.
“Here it is,” she said. “My secret patch of golden raspberries. Look.”
The thicket was filled with little amber caps and jumbo-jet bumblebees that looked like they were made from fuzzy pipe cleaners. Tug picked a berry and tasted it. Red raspberries had high, sharp notes of flavor. These were deeper, richer. A whole octave lower. He picked another. There was a hint of something tropical about them. Bananas?
The golden raspberries were larger than their red cousins, and their skin was smooth. One of the big bees lumbered down on a berry next to Tug’s hand.
“Don’t worry, they’re not interested in you,” said Alyssa, who was putting berries in the coffee can, ignoring the insect activity. “I’ve never seen one sting. They’re like big workhorses, gentle giants. Abbi calls them Belushi bees—remember the Saturday Night Live skit?”
The can was soon full and Tug and Alyssa sat on a log by the trail, licking fingers sticky with raspberry juice.
“Tenth grade?” Alyssa said. “That was really your first kiss?”
“I was a slow starter.”
“Let me guess, you’ve been making up for it ever since?”
“Well, let’s just say that Jamie wasn’t my last kiss. What about you? When and who?”
“Eighth grade. Frank something-or-other. I don’t even remember his last name.”
“Were you in love?”
“Hardly. I barely knew him.”
“What about now? Are you in love with Darryl?” He hadn’t meant to say it, though those words had been in his mind for a long time. Finally, like a broken pressure cooker, his lips lost the seal and the words just spurted out. But if the question bothered Alyssa, she didn’t show it. She just leaned back and let the light warm her face.
“It’s complicated. Like all marriages, it’s complicated,” was all she said.
On their way back down the hill they revisited the subjects of Joe and Jamie for a few minutes, then turned to art and drama. Tug described his first solo art show, an installation called “Jekyll and Hyde,” which involved department store mannequins, medical devices, and models of internal organs from a medical supply house. Alyssa told him of her first Shakespeare role, Lady Macbeth in eleventh grade. She had dreamed for months afterward about sex and death and washing her hands in blood and her teeth falling out.
When they got back to the tractor side of the barn, Alyssa held up the can of raspberries. “These’ll be great on cereal,” she said. “Thanks for helping me pick them. I’ll save you some for tomorrow.” Then she added, “Sorry about Jamie McAllister. She was a fool.”
Tug picked up the nearly finished sketch and sat down in front of the tractor. The lines and shadows now seemed lifeless compared to amber raspberries and Belushi bees and the touch of Alyssa’s shoulder against his. He packed up and headed back to Limespring. By twelve-thirty he was at the picnic tables eating ham salad sandwiches and arguing about science-fiction movies with Marius. As he left, he raised a hand and intoned, “Klaatu Barada Nikto.”
He completed the tractor drawing that afternoon and, after dinner, returned to the studio. As he shuffled through his Finally Farm studies searching for another subject for Operation Scheherazade, he found two of the pages stuck to each other. He pulled them apart to discover that the bottom one was the portrait of Alyssa he’d taped back together. Her head was slightly turned over her left shoulder, her eyes looked straight out of the page, an imitation of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. It was recognizably Alyssa, but little else. He knew he could do better.
He tore off a blank page from the drawing pad and clipped it up to the easel. He stood before the white paper for three or four minutes, creating and rejecting poses in his mind. Finally, he picked up a 2B pencil and motioned across the page, dividing it into imaginary quadrants. Then he drew two curved shapes near the middle of the page. The beginning of eyebrows.
CHAPTER 34
He was early tonight. Alyssa watched the green numbers on the clock by her bed turn from 11:07 to 11:08 as she listened
to the sounds of Tug trying to be quiet: careful steps on the front porch, muffled scratchings of tape pulled from a roll (was he putting it under his shirt to soften the sound?), the light rustling of paper being positioned on the floor, the tiptoeing back across the porch, the diminishing crunch of gravel.
When the only sound left was the clicking of crickets, she threw the sheet aside, bolted down the stairs two at a time and out onto the porch. For the fourth night in a row, the dark gray planks of the floor had become an art gallery. She untaped the pages and scurried to the little bathroom under the stairs. Quickly, she closed the door and flipped the light switch, wondering what part of Finally Farm would be on the new unfinished drawing he’d left behind.
She guessed it would be the round hay bales in the front field. The day before, she’d seen Tug studying them, turning his head one way and then the other, looking at them through a square made by his index fingers and thumbs. The bales dotted the surrounding farms like giant green gumdrops and were a dramatic sight even to her. To an artist, especially an urban artist unused to seeing such extravagant shapes in the country, she knew they would be nearly irresistible. Three summers before, a painter from Los Angeles had spent her entire Limespring fellowship painting them in every light and with every color scheme. A hay-bale version of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series. Alyssa thought that the mammoth bales, with their perfect curves and endless lines swirling round and round, would beckon Tug as A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been beckoning her.
She was wrong.
A tiny gasp of air caught in her throat as she saw the drawing. She felt dislocated, like she’d just woken from a vivid dream and wasn’t sure which world was real. There in front of her was—her. Or a half-finished her. Her eyes were detailed down to the dark spot on the lower left of her right iris. There was part of her nose and the beginning of her lips. The rest of the page was blank.
She flipped down the lid on the toilet and sat, looking at the drawing of herself. She examined it, following the lines of the half-formed face as if they were clues to a mystery. Who was this person? The expression in the eyes was indecipherable; the lips were unfinished and held no clue.
She knew that these half-drawings were just part of a game; Tug’s way of getting back to the farm and back to her. She had been charmed by his ingenuity, even grateful for it. The drawings of Theo or the farmhouse had made her smile. Not this picture, this half of a face. Something about it was eerie, unsettling. She wanted to shake it hard, like she used to shake her Etch-A-Sketch when she was a kid. But instead of erasing the lines, she wanted to shake them together, make them join each other. Make her whole.
She held the drawing out at arm’s length. And it came to her with the sickening lurch of an elevator dropping: Tug’s half-drawing wasn’t incomplete. It was, in fact, exactly as she was. Half there. Unknowingly, Tug Palifax had captured the essence of Alyssa Brown.
Or had it been unknowing? Had he seen what she thought no one could see? That only part of her existed and the rest had been lost; that what she presented to the world was simply the starring roles she’d mastered—Alyssa the Accomplished Drama Teacher, Alyssa the Devoted Mother, Alyssa the Emotionally Reserved Wife—and that the real Alyssa had faded into this half-woman she held in her hand?
She stood up, put her portrait down on the toilet lid, and covered up the accusing eyes with the finished drawing of the tractor. A half of a woman, that’s what she’d become. It’d taken a few lines on a piece of paper for her to finally see it.
She turned on the cold water in the sink and splashed her face. A complete face reflected back at her from the mirror over the basin. She examined it as she had examined Tug’s half-portrait. It was a desperately, achingly unhappy face.
She’d fooled herself for a long time. Duped herself by her own acting ability into believing those other Alyssa roles were enough. But they weren’t. And she knew it now. She’d known it for the past month, but every time the notion started creeping to the forefront of her thoughts, she had pushed it aside, distracting herself with Limespring activities or mind-numbing chores. Even Darryl had noticed the farm’s clean cupboards and alphabetized spices.
A small smile appeared on the face in the mirror. The irony was not lost on her, even in her state of misery. In order to avoid the real Alyssa, she was turning into the woman Darryl wanted her to be, organized and compulsive.
It was all Tug’s fault. Damn him and his horse drawings and his da Vinci dreams. If he hadn’t made her so happy she wouldn’t have known how unhappy she was.
Damn him for being so much fun on solstice night. She remembered the walk back to the farm, how she’d deliberately bumped into him several times in the darkness and held on to him as if to stop herself from falling, how they’d sung James Brown and danced a mock waltz across Limespring Hollow Road.
Damn Tug Palifax and his smile and his words and his curiosity and his interest in her. Damn him for kissing her. Damn him for coming back after she’d told him not to.
She picked up the unfinished drawing. That was who she was; who she’d become until she—Alyssa forced herself to complete the thought this time: until she’d met Tug.
In the time she’d known him, she’d felt her outlines becoming more distinct; she could feel her soul spreading out to meet those new lines. She no longer felt shriveled. Tug Palifax was filling her up.
Damn him.
CHAPTER 35
A breeze pressed the thin cotton of Alyssa’s dress between the inverted V of her legs as she walked down the middle of Limespring Hollow Road. It stirred the roadside oaks, adding extra notes to the usual score of crickets and cicadas, frogs and beetles, cows and horses, foxes and field mice. Alyssa listened to the night’s music backed by the percussion of her own heartbeat and the quick scuffing of her clogs against the road.
The thin moon illuminated the fields with pale phosphorescence; beyond them, lights from a scattering of farms glimmered like a far constellation. The road ahead, draped with the deeper night of tree shadow, was familiar to Alyssa. A quarter mile on, around a curve, would be the welcome sign for Limespring.
She picked up her pace. She wanted to get there before she convinced herself to turn around. Soon, a white sign materialized out of the gloom by the side of the road: “Limespring Art Center, Markham, Virginia.” A yellow bulb burned over the office door. Two streetlights shone down over the parking lot. On her right, a series of low fixtures illuminated a gravel path that wound to the dining hall, ahead of her other lights showed the way to the living quarters.
Alyssa followed the path past the giant boxwoods and the dorm building to the cabins. She saw Abbi inside No. 7, leaning against the headboard, reading. The next four were dark. She walked to the last one, opened the screen, and knocked on the door. Inside, a light went on almost immediately. It was 11:57, less than an hour since she had heard Tug tiptoeing around Finally Farm.
The bedsprings creaked and there were some scuffling noises. Finally the door opened and Tug appeared, backlit by a bedside lamp. He was wearing a pair of running shorts and a black T-shirt.
His hair was tousled. The look in his eyes didn’t seem to be surprise. He and Alyssa stood there for a moment, just five feet apart, silent. Then, just as Tug was about to speak, Alyssa handed him the portrait.
“Finish me,” she said.
CHAPTER 36
“Turn just a little to the right.”
Alyssa shifted her weight on the stool.
“That’s it, just like that,” Tug said. “Don’t move.” He adjusted a table lamp on top of a nearby bookshelf. The lampshade had been removed; the bare bulb bathed the left side of Alyssa’s face in light and turned the right side into a land of shadow and contour. “That’s perfect.”
He walked back to the easel. For a moment he studied the drawing clipped there, then glanced at his subject.
“Perfect,” he said again. “Now you can’t move for the next twenty-seven hours or however long this takes.”
/> Alyssa started to laugh and Tug gave her a mock stern look. “What did I say about not moving? Do you think Mona Lisa moved when she was sitting for Leonardo?”
Alyssa settled back, letting her laugh become an enigmatic smile. She wondered if the same kind of scene had unfolded between artist and model five hundred years before. Was the subtext the same? So that’s what Mona’s smile was about.
The dairy barn complex was dark that night except for studio C4 and a music room, assigned to a Chilean composer, a few doors away. Tug had propped open the window with some books and a coffee can. Every so often, a cross-breeze stirred Alyssa’s hair; she let the strands blow across her face. From time to time, the tinkling of piano keys drifted in.
The lamp bulb was the only light. Behind Tug’s easel, the white walls of the studio were overlapped with shades of gray. On them were taped dozens of pen, pencil, and charcoal sketches. Many were of horses or parts of horses. The charcoals were rough and gestural, done quickly to seize the essence of movement and mass. From Alyssa’s perch, the most distant images looked like little Rorschach tests.
The easel was set up only a few feet from the stool, and Alyssa watched Tug as he concentrated on her, then on the drawing paper, and then back on her. Sometimes he peered around the edge of the drawing board so that she could see only half of his face, as she had seen her own half-face earlier that evening.
Once, she asked him if she could scratch her nose. He quickly replied, “No.” When her eyes widened in surprise, he smiled and said, “You stay still. I’ll do it.” Following her directions, he leaned over her and, using two fingers, lightly scratched the very tip. About ten minutes after they’d begun, the smattering of piano notes suddenly became a strident boogie-woogie, heavy on the left hand, and then, just as suddenly, stopped completely. “Sounds like Neftali’s done for the night,” said Tug.
Otherwise they didn’t speak. With the piano silent, the only sounds were the night noises brought in on the breeze and the soft scratchings of Tug at work. He used a combination of 2B and ebony pencils. Alyssa could see his right arm rising and falling. She let her eyelids droop and through her half-closed eyes the studio became a small, dim cave and Tug’s movements became caressing strokes. It felt as if the tip of the pencil wasn’t only touching the paper, but lightly skimming her skin.