The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  Her phone chirped in her bag. She withdrew the drawing journal, pencil bag, and her sunglasses case before finding the phone. A text from Betsy.

  That fucking bitch.

  Arden gave a choked little giggle. Betsy’s next text appeared while she was thumbing She’s trying to keep the peace for—

  Where are you?

  She looked around. Umpire Rock.

  On my way.

  Arden scrabbled a pencil from the bag and opened the journal, then stared fixedly at the rock. A blind contour drawing was exactly what she needed right now. She’d followed the jagged, irregular line of the immense rock through several peaks and shadowy faces when “That bitch!” fractured her concentration.

  Betsy. Phone in one hand, her Miu Miu bag in the other, teetering on four-inch Louboutin heels and a geometric print Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress, holding the skirt closed as she trotted down the sidewalk. “That bitch!”

  “Betsy,” she said.

  “Fuck Geneva. Fuck her! Who does she fucking think she is, keeping you away from Mel’s shower?”

  Her friend stood in the middle of the path, making big, sweeping gestures with her arms. “Betsy, I love you with all my heart and soul, but the last thing I need right now is you making a scene.”

  Betsy looked around, then sat down on the bench and looked at Arden more closely. “Sorry, sweetie. I’m very protective of you, that’s all,” she said quietly. “Look, why don’t you take Mom up on her offer and head down to Palm Beach for a few weeks, until this blows over? Because it will blow over. All you need is another big scandal, and everyone will forget about this.”

  “No one’s going to forget about this,” Arden said distantly, her eye still following the peaks and cuts in the rock face. “No one we know. The media will, but everyone in our world has the memory of elephants. There is no escaping, so there’s no point in leaving, and I’m not going to back down.”

  “Fine, be that way.” Betsy sighed. She settled back onto the bench, and peeked over Arden’s shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  “Blind contour drawing,” Arden said without looking down. She kept her hand moving, her eyes fixed on the exposed bedrock. Solid, immovable, the core on which Manhattan was built. Far more stable than the flibbertigibbet landfill at the tip of the island, or the long drop under Arden.

  For a moment longer, Betsy looked at the drawing, but made no comment. “Why are you doing it in the middle of Central Park?”

  “I expected to be at the shower until midafternoon, so I told Derek to park the car and do whatever it is he does when I’m shopping or having lunch or working. Just because I was summarily kicked to the curb doesn’t mean I should ruin his afternoon.”

  “It’s such a farce,” Betsy said, but her voice had lost its rancor. “Dressing up for each other. It’s her third, for Christ’s sake. What did you get her?”

  “A handmade baby book and a Sheba Clark from West Village Stationery. You look really nice, by the way,” Arden said. The dress was vintage, passed down to Betsy by her mother. Betsy couldn’t be bothered to dress up for anyone.

  “So do you. Sarah Burton?”

  Arden just nodded. The suit felt ridiculous now, with its silk fabric, feathery hem, and slender gold belt, especially because she wasn’t in a Central Park West penthouse but sitting on a chipped-paint, pigeon-stained bench in the park.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Betsy added.

  “Thank you,” she said. “She said it would be fine.”

  “I know.”

  “I asked. I never looked at people and saw a MacCarren investor. I never looked at them and saw whales or minnows. I just saw friends, classmates, acquaintances. Now I look at them and see amounts above their heads, in red, for losses. Of course, I didn’t just assume I would be welcome after . . .”

  “You should be welcome,” Betsy said, and crossed her leg. “You were welcome until Geneva discovered how much Randall invested with your father. That’s not your fault. Randall was always looking for the get-richer-faster inside track. You didn’t know.”

  “I should have known. That’s what everyone’s thinking. I should have known. How could I have not known?”

  “Because it’s your dad and Charles. Literally thick as thieves, those two. Because they didn’t want you to know.” Betsy eyed the hot dog vendor at the intersection of two paths.

  “You know that, Betsy. Not many other people do.”

  Betsy shrugged. “Did you eat?” When Arden shook her head, she added, “Want a hot dog?”

  “Sure.”

  Betsy returned with two hot dogs, a pretzel, and two bottles of water. She cracked the seal on one and held it out to Arden. “Drink one of those. You look pale. You can’t blame yourself for not knowing what your father and brother obviously went to great lengths to hide.”

  Reluctant to give up the tiny measure of comfort she felt from guiding the pencil across the page, Arden focused on the waves in the outcropping of Manhattan schist in front of her, waves formed over eons, the bedrock on which Manhattan skyscrapers towered. “What are the grief stages? I don’t think I’m at the blame stage yet. I think I’m still in shock.”

  Betsy set down the water and started in on her hot dog as she watched Arden draw. “You asked me for Micah’s phone number. I assume you were tracking down Seth.”

  “I was,” Arden said. “After the meeting with the government agencies fighting over the MacCarren carcass, I wanted something to take my mind off . . . everything.”

  “And?”

  “He came over and modeled for me. Then we had sex.”

  It was amazing what came out of her mouth when she’d partially disengaged the filtering, processing, fear-based side of her brain. A tiny girl in a white sundress and matching hat scrambled up the side. Without thinking about it, Arden added the girl’s hat brim to the drawing and kept her hand moving.

  “Good,” Betsy said. “Or, I assume good.”

  “Very good,” she said, remembering the shape of his cock in her mouth, the heat of his body over hers when he’d flipped her to her stomach. Her right brain sent up vivid, flashing images, and her hand quivered for a moment, then resumed the measured pace. One millimeter at a time. She’d spent literally thousands of hours in Central Park since she was the age of the little girl in a sundress and hat, and never before really looked at a rock.

  “It’s helping,” Arden said. “Drawing. It’s helping. I breathe in naturally, but I forget to breathe out. When I’m drawing, I remember to exhale, like I’m taking all of the data coming at me and channeling it. I nearly had a panic attack just crossing Central Park West, and that hasn’t happened in a long time. I’m holding my breath, waiting for the next hit, but when I do this, I’m okay.”

  “Good,” Betsy said again, this time quieter.

  Arden let everything except the rock fade into the background, the tourists strolling by, Betsy, the children playing while their parents hovered. A thought struggled through the sediment settling in her brain, something about the way Special Agent Logan had looked at her, a flash of something under the impassive facade, leaking out in the unusual, awkward circumstances. The FBI and the SEC and everyone else would go through the motions, searching for more people to indict, try, blame, but Logan believed she’d known nothing about it.

  He thought she was a victim, too. And here she was, sitting on a park bench, unable to cross a street without breaking into a cold sweat. The panic attacks weren’t getting better. They hadn’t been before the night when the FBI raided their home in East Hampton.

  She should have been grateful for his compassion; he might even help manage the agents who wanted to interrogate her mother, but all she felt was frustration. Other than Betsy, people saw her as either a thief or a victim, too much a MacCarren or not quite enough of one, prone to inconvenient panic attacks. If the drawing helped, then she would master it.

  Galvanized, she closed the journal and snapped it shut and jammed it back in her bag. Betsy lift
ed one eyebrow. “Better?”

  “Yes,” Arden said decisively. “Is your mother sincere in her offer to host my mother in Palm Beach?”

  “Of course,” Betsy said. “Frankly, I’m surprised Lyd’s still here.”

  “She wants to be close to Dad. I think a change of setting would do her good.”

  “I’ll tell Mom to try again. See you in class on Sunday?”

  “Yes.”

  But she was hanging by a thread, clinging to anything that helped her deal with the ruins of her life. As she walked slowly toward the East Side, the memory of Seth’s gaze flooded her mind. She wanted him, a man who’d fought real battles, who saw her as strong. Maybe she could learn to be the woman he saw.

  Just before she reached Fifth Avenue, she pulled out her cell phone and texted him. Are you busy?

  Now?

  Yes.

  No.

  Meet me at my place.

  – SEVEN –

  When Arden’s blue front door opened, Seth wasn’t sure who was more surprised: him, or her. He didn’t have words to describe what she was wearing; he’d need metallic pastels and hours of focused drawing time to re-create her outfit. A jacket and skirt, he supposed, in a shade slightly darker than cream. The cuffs and hem of the jacket were ruffles of gold matching the skirt’s frilly hem. The jacket’s high collar made up for the deep V-neckline, softened with elegant ruffled folds. A slim gold belt encircled her waist, and something about the structure gave him the impression of a corset. On her feet were strappy gold sandals with a killer heel. The whole outfit had a sheen to it he could only describe as expensive, like a car, leather and walnut, perfect fit and finish, or a gun, well-oiled, precisely engineered. Her hair curtained her face with the same sheen as her outfit. Expensive. Luxurious. No tousled, tangled strands here. Everything from her pores out gleamed like it had been buffed.

  Without a word she stepped back and let him in. He leaned his bike against the wall next to the table, the one now holding a purse, keys tossed on the polished wood, a red leather journal, the same wallet she’d pulled a sheaf of twenties from last time, tossed negligently on top. So far so good.

  What tipped him off was the wineglass. Red wine, held negligently in her hand as she stared at him at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. She didn’t look like a woman about to dirty herself with charcoals, pastels, or even pencils, so the modeling/art student thing was bullshit, at least for now. What really tipped him off was the way her eyes flicked over him, hitting the highlights. She started with his face—he’d give her points for that—but in a split second she checked him out, shoulders, chest, thighs, then back to his face. He was glad he’d gotten decently dressed, in dark jeans, a white shirt. But when she looked at him like a bored, rich, thrill-seeking woman checking out the rent boy she’d hired, everything else dropped away.

  Her life was in ruins; she was coping in a way he recognized. Alcohol and sex were two legitimate methods for combating anxiety. That was his job now. Be helpful.

  The decision to play this out didn’t happen in his left brain, rational mind. Some element of creativity in the right brain took the primitive signals pulsing up from his brain stem, added a healthy dollop of simmering lust, and formed a single word in his mouth.

  “Arden?”

  Her name came out of his mouth in a rough, businesslike tone with enough of a question to give her the hint. See if she’d catch the ball on the fly, throw it back to him, or at him, or duck.

  “And you are?”

  A one-handed catch, sent right back at him, fast ball down the center of the plate. Don’t let the jeans and loose cotton top and fresh face from last time fool you. She’s sophisticated in ways you cannot begin to imagine. “Seth.”

  Another glance, just haughty enough to send blood pulsing to his cock and a fresh rush of lust darkening the edges of his vision, then she nodded. He crossed to stand in front of her. After a few seconds it became clear she wasn’t going to break the ice by offering something to drink. Without breaking eye contact he took the glass of wine from her hand, inhaled, then sipped it. It was good, deep and full-bodied, filling his mouth and nose the way one look at her blocked out everything else in his vision.

  He set the glass on the table. “What do you have in mind?” he asked, playing along. He of all people had no reason to contact a woman like this. Maybe at some level he was asking for permission to put his hands, his tanned, scarred, killing hands with a faint ring of bike grease in the cuticles, on her suit.

  One shoulder lifted in a shrug. The fabric whispered against the strands of her hair, a susurrus of sound. Like she didn’t care. Like it didn’t matter as long as he fucked her.

  “Come on,” he said, his voice still foreign in his ears, “a woman like you has to know what she wants.” He leaned close enough to see the fine hairs on the skin covering her cheekbones, watched them lift as he whispered. “I bet you always get it.”

  Her eyelids, covered in a shadow barely one shade darker than her skin, flickered, but remained open. She turned to look at him, as if she couldn’t believe the disrespectful words coming from his mouth. Like a dancer at a barre, she straightened, then stepped to the side and circled him. His heart beat four times to every slow click of her heels on the polished floor. She stopped behind him, waited. His heart was pounding hard enough now to strike sparks in his blood, making his skin tingle from the inside out. He could hear her breathing, shallow, giving away some of her arousal.

  She set one fingertip to the base of his spine, just above his waistband. This time she wasn’t asking permission to touch him. He automatically straightened and squared up. His cock pulsed, too, just from one single touch. In his peripheral vision he saw her arms curve around his waist. His mind, rushing ahead, envisioned her leaning her forehead into the triangle between his shoulder blades and his neck.

  Wrong. He’d expected her to need something from him, to lean on him, use his strength. Instead, her fingers, the nails perfectly manicured, tugged his shirt from his waistband, then unfastened each button from pelvis to throat. His pulse beat crazily in his head, in his cock, lust a physical weight surging in his veins. Why did he feel her touch like a hot, sweet weight? He had seventy pounds on her, easy, all of it muscle and bone. She should make no impression on him at all.

  Surprised by his own words, he thought about it for a second. Spending most of his days on the bike kept him near fighting shape, but as her fingers moved deftly up his shirt, he realized he’d lost something that couldn’t be measured in pounds or kilograms. He spent most of his days anchored by constant contact with his friends, keeping one another alive on patrol, laughing, shooting the shit, cleaning gear, watching movies. He never noticed that both their noise and presence weighed him down in all the best ways, until Arden put her hands on him like she owned him.

  Again, his vision darkened at the edges. She didn’t help matters any when her hands stroked up his abdominal wall to fan out over his chest, pausing at his nipples just long enough to halt his breathing when she teased them into peaks. One hand slid up his throat, like she fucking owned him, then back down to shift his shirt fronts to the edges of his shoulders. Without pausing, her fingertips skimmed both dragon and the sword.

  Crazy turned on, he stopped breathing. She finished her circuit of his body, the tip of her finger tracing the edge of his waistband to his belt buckle. She paused, her gaze lingering on his body. It wasn’t the body he’d fought with. Those muscles were gone, lengthened and strengthened into the bike messenger’s body, constantly burning more calories than he could easily consume. She hooked her finger in his waistband, barely brushing his erect cock, straining against the denim. He heard the soft, satisfied noise she made, completely in character, like he met with her approval. Her gaze traveled up again, this time all the way to his face.

  Her gaze still locked on his mouth, she trailed her finger back up his torso, along his throat to his jaw, then over the day’s worth of stubble there to his lips. She t
raced first the lower lip, then the upper before sliding along the corner to touch his lower teeth. The tone in her eyes changed, and fuck, he recognized that look, too. It was entirely possible he wouldn’t get to fuck her in this role. That added to the edge, too.

  She negligently snagged the handles of her enormous handbag, then turned away and walked up the gently curved staircase leading to her main living space, crooking her finger over her shoulder as she went. She didn’t look over her shoulder as she did, though. That would make the command an enticement. Instead, she beckoned without looking, utterly, transparently confident he’d come to heel.

  Heels against floor, heart against ribcage, cock against fly. His own shoes, soundless on the parquet, as if he weren’t really there. When she reached the living room she tossed her bag on the sofa, then turned the chair away from the windows and sat in it, easing down with her back straight and her head bent. The sunlight permeated her suit, turned it to gold, her hair to gleaming chestnut. It was a Saturday afternoon, time in abeyance by gold sunlight, gold suit, molten eyes. Where the hell had she been, dressed like that? Head cocked, she looked up at him, tucked her hair behind her ear, and crossed her legs at the knee. “On your knees, please.”

  The please was a formality offered because she didn’t have to give commands to a rent boy. Or a companion. She could mask them in requests, knowing he was bought and paid for. What the hell had he been thinking when he started this?

  He hadn’t been thinking. Just acting. His body knew what it wanted. He heard Manny’s voice in his head. Just go with it.

  He went to his knees, thinking about all the times he’d done this with kneepads on to protect him from rocks and shrapnel and debris from bomb blasts. All the ways you tried to protect your body from injury, how ineffective they were in the end. Something bigger, stronger, meaner was always waiting.

  But right now a woman drenched in gold was waiting for him to play his role. Up close her suit was even more incomprehensible, the skirt’s frilly hem lying soft and easy against her knees. He tried to get a handle on the lust flooding his system by taking her uppermost foot in his hand and putting his fingers to the buckle.