Her husband, Thomas, was not nearly as keen on the idea since all of the proceeds of the admission fees and portrait sales would go to benefit WPW. In essence, hosting the exhibit would require the gallery to shut down any revenue-producing activity for about four weeks, allowing time to remove the existing art, set up the photographs, and get everything back to business order afterwards. They had already lost money in the short time since Iphigenia opened, and the thought of giving up an entire month of income struck him as supremely foolish. Then again, lots of things seemed foolish to him lately.
“I can certainly understand his point, Ellie,” Ari said.
“You always side with him, Ari,” Ellen pouted, pulling a few strands of her dark hair back into place behind a velour headband.
“Someone has to.”
“Well my best friend doesn’t.” Ellen wore a navy blue sweatshirt that somewhat disguised the bulk of her upper body, along with a pair of powder blue tights and a short distressed denim skirt to emphasize her relatively thin legs. Her body shape had plagued her teenage years with diet after unavailing diet until she discovered that there were men out there—quite a few, actually—who liked a woman with her shape. During college, increasingly comfortable with her self-image as a kind of earth mother, she’d had her fare share of sexual adventures and even spent one long, lazy, summer on a commune in a remote section of New York State. All of that ended in grad school when she met her future husband, and now at age 37 she was earth mother to a pair of eight-year-old twin boys and a four-year old girl. She didn’t miss that phase of her life and rarely thought about it. The entire topic was not one she had ever mentioned to Thomas, although she had never deliberately concealed anything.
“I don’t know why I bother talking to you about him,” Ellen said.
“Because I tell you what you should hear, not what you want to hear. You’re picking a fight over something stupid and maybe threatening your marriage over it. Listen to the wise old head, Ellen.”
Ellen laughed.
“Wise old head? Now there’s a crock.”
Ari was a few years over forty (not even Ellen got the true birth date), but she was slim and trim from the tip of her delicately featured face to her size six shoes and looked to be in her mid-thirties. So far, she’d been married three times to husbands who’d each had the good grace to leave her a sizable sum of money and property when they died or moved on to others. She never begrudged them, so long as their generosity extended to her bank account. She ran her own boutique public relations firm “to keep busy,” although she did not need the money. Her hair was a wonderful red applied by the best colorist on the Upper East Side. This, along with Ari’s matchstick-like figure dressed in a perfectly fitting designer rag, caused Ellen an involuntary pang of jealousy every time she looked in her direction.
“Don’t sass your elders,” Ari said with a smile.
They were standing together in the gallery, a large rectangular room on the second floor with a row of evenly spaced, tall, thin windows looking onto the street side. A partition ran down the center to increase the wall space. The photographs were spread around the gallery’s interior, propped against the bare white walls. The two women stood near the entrance, arms folded across their chests, focusing for the moment on which images they most wanted to be seen first upon entering.
Ellen walked over and switched the positions of two pictures and came back to Ari again.
“How does that look now?”
“Nice. But if you separated them by another inch, I think they would be even better.” She paused. “And all I’m saying, Ellie, is that Thomas is right when he says that a business is supposed to make money.”
“I want to make money, and I will make money,” Ellen replied with a frown. She walked back over to adjust the photographs as Ari had suggested. She had never intended moneymaking to be the be-all and end-all of her life, but Ari (bless her heart) was not the right one with whom to argue that point. Nor had Ellen confided just how close she was to divorce, or why. “I just need a little time. And a nice big boost from this WPW show.”
“Well, I hope you get it. Word of mouth has been good so far. We’ve got a good crowd coming for the opening, and I’m expecting several members of the media. Once it’s in the papers, we’ll be attracting crowds for two weeks, I think. Lots of people will have heard of and visited the Iphigenia Gallery by the time the exhibit is over.”
“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Ellen said. “Tommy has been pushing pretty hard lately to close this place down. ‘Do you know what kind of rent we could get for this place, Ellie?’ he says to me.” Ellen adopted a flat nasal voice that approximated her husband’s slight Cleveland accent. “‘We could use the income stream to buy more properties. I’m telling you Ellie, if you would start doing the bookkeeping and get involved with the rentals, we would have enough properties in fifteen years to retire to a monster beach house in the Islands.’”
“You got something against the Islands, Mon?” Ari asked dryly.
“I don’t know. I just don’t think I could stand my life if I didn’t have this gallery.”
Ari smiled.
“You lived without it for most of your life.”
“I know that, Ari. But it was always my dream, and now that it’s in my grasp, I can’t let it go. Since I was a girl, I’ve loved art. I can’t make any that’s worth a damn. But I love everything about it—the artists, the buyers, the museums, and the history, even the smells of the studios where artists work. I quit work when the twins were born, but I always thought I would return to that world, with my own place. So, I don’t want to retire. And I can’t stand the thought of being a bookkeeper or a landlord.”
The doorbell rang for the entrance downstairs. Ellen took a step over to the intercom and buzzed the door open without checking who it was.
“Are you expecting someone?” Ari asked.
“It’s probably Maggie. She said she would stop by to help this afternoon.”
“Excellent. I haven’t seen Maggie for a while. Has she entered a self-portrait?”
“Not yet, but she said she would before the opening next Thursday.”
Ari cocked her head to one side.
“Maybe I can use that to drum up some more media interest. Did you see that story she wrote for The Portal this week?”
“Yes. It was almost as big of a turn-on as her first book—until the knife appeared.”
“Well, here’s the interesting part. The police found a man early today. And guess what part of his anatomy was missing?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ellen said. “Wow. Wait ‘til I tell Tommy. He’ll freak. Remember that woman who cut off her husband’s penis while he slept? Tommy couldn’t hear about that without crossing his legs, I swear.”
“I don’t think he’s the only guy to have that reaction.”
Ellen laughed, and then realized that Maggie had never come up to the gallery. She pressed the buzzer again. “I wonder what happened to Maggie.”
Ellen opened the door to the hall and looked down the stairs but saw no one. As she was about to go back inside, the bell rang a second time.
“It must be some school kid fooling around on his way home,” she said.
Ellen walked down the stairs, and when she reached the bottom, she saw Maggie through the door’s panes of glass. She opened it and gave Maggie a kiss on the cheek in greeting.
“Did you buzz twice?”
“No. But I saw someone leave a package for you.”
Now Ellen noticed the thin package that was leaning against the foyer wall. It was wrapped in brown paper and fastened with twine. The hand-written address was for WPW care of the Iphigenia Gallery.
“Here it is. Strange. I wasn’t expecting another entry for the exhibit, but that’s what it looks like. Well, whatever. Come upstairs. Ari stopped by too.”
As they climbed the stairs, Ellen loosened the string on the package. By the time they reached the second floo
r, she had removed the wrapping paper to find that it contained an 8 x 10 mounted black and white photograph. A note fell out to the floor.
“What is that?” Ari asked, peering over Ellen’s shoulder. “Maggie’s self-portrait?”
“It’s not mine,” Maggie said. “I’m doing mine this weekend.”
Ellen handed the photograph to Ari as she read the note.
“It’s a little weird,” Ari said.
“A little?” Maggie asked.
The photograph was a montage whose central figure was a naked woman lying on her back in a field of tall grass. A man’s face had been cut from another picture and superimposed on hers, and a man’s chest was pasted where her breasts would have been. Covering her pubic area was the bloody image of a castrated penis.
“Okay, it’s very weird,” Ari said. “Who did it, Ellen?”
Ellen shrugged.
“The note says it’s from some woman by the name of Diana,” she said. “There’s no address. No phone number. Nothing.”
“It’s her again!” Maggie said.
“What do you mean?” Ari asked.
“I was meeting with Harry Lesdock and my editor and Jane Larson around noon today when an e-mail arrived with a photograph attached of a man who had nothing but a bloody mess between his legs. The e-mail was from a woman also named Diana. And if I’m not mistaken, the cut-outs on this submission came from that photograph.”
“Do you think this woman actually killed the guy and photographed it?” Ellen asked.
“In imitation of your writing?” Ari added.
“I don’t know,” said Maggie. “But I think this is getting kind of freaky. I’d better call Jane right away.”
Maggie’s hands were trembling as she dialed Jane’s office number, putting the phone on speaker so that Ari and Ellen could hear as well. On the third ring, the answering machine came on. But when it was halfway through the greeting, Jane’s voice interrupted.
“Jane, I’m so glad you’re there,” Maggie said quickly. “I’m here with Ellen and Ari.”
“I just arrived and I’m talking to my landlady, Dorothy. Somebody broke into my office.”
“What!”
“Yeah. They didn’t seem to steal anything. Just dropped off a present for me in a nice little pink bag, wrapped up in pink paper with a pretty little pink bow. Dorothy’s opening it for me.”
Suddenly there was a piercing scream from Jane’s end of the phone.
“Jane, what’s going on?” Maggie asked. Ellen and Ari drew closer to her, looking concerned.
They could hear the sound of the receiver being placed hurriedly on the desk, muffled curses, and then Jane’s steady calming voice punctuated by that of another woman, nearly hysterical, asking over and over again, “What is it? What is it!”
Finally, Jane succeeded in calming Dorothy. Maggie could hear Jane walking back across her office and picking up the phone again.
“Still there?” Jane asked evenly.
“What happened to you?” Maggie demanded, echoed by Ellen and Ari.
“Nothing happened to me. Apparently, our friend Diana just left a little present for me and for WPW. That’s how the card is addressed. I feel the way a cat owner does when her pet leaves a mouse on the doorstep. Only this isn’t a mouse. It’s a man’s penis, all wrapped up in butcher paper. I’ll give you three guesses who it belongs to, Maggie.”
“I think we can all figure that one out,” Ellen said. “Maggie told us what happened to you guys earlier. And we were calling you because this Diana woman submitted a photo of a similar subject matter for the WPW exhibit.”
“Wow. Really?”
“Jane, what is she doing?” Maggie asked. “And why?”
“I don’t know, Maggie. But I would say it’s time to call the cops. So hold on to anything Diana may have touched.”
“I will,” Ellen said.
“And right after I call the police, I think I’ll put in a call to Scott Harper at The Portal. What do you think, Ari?”
“My head is still spinning with all of this,” Ari said. “But I believe your instincts are correct. As a practical matter, the publicity from this woman will only help the WPW exhibit and Maggie’s book as well. It just seems a bit unseemly to use death as a promotional device.”
“I think the publicity is inevitable now anyway,” Jane said. “The guy’s already dead. Why not make use of it to aid the living?”
Chapter Five
In the late afternoon, Maggie returned to her apartment on the Upper West Side. Small, rent-controlled and cheap, it had replaced a roomier dwelling in the West Village and become her city base after she’d bought her house in Connecticut. Now, at the desk near the single window in the living room, her laptop was already open and turned on. Her entire mind and body seemed to hum with the events of the day and the prospect of what the future might hold for her tomorrow and the next day and beyond.
She thought again about the meeting earlier that afternoon and the fear she had felt from those men and their power over her. It had melted away when Jane stood and slammed her hands on the table, fighting for her. And when the photo arrived and Jane had put her arm around her shoulder and rushed her out of that room—out of his presence—Maggie had begun to feel that things might actually be starting to change for her.
Certainly, the prospect of sitting at a blank screen and wondering if she would be able to write did not frighten her anymore. The story stretched out before her like scenery along a well-traveled road.
Jane had told her there were legal reasons why Maggie needed to be prepared with the next chapter—reasons with legal-sounding names. Tender of performance. Ready, willing, and able. Blah, blah, blah. She was right, of course.
What Maggie had not told Jane or anyone was that at this point the writing was not a matter of money or convenience. Even though in ways it ravaged her, she could as easily stop breathing as refrain from sitting at the keyboard and pecking away at the keys, watching the words accumulate. The story would be told. Diana was on a mission to see it done.
And she wasn’t just writing for some nameless woman or man who might buy a copy of The Portal and find the new insert, Femme, and be drawn by curiosity or boredom to read the latest from that almost-forgotten author, the pseudo-feminist, Maggie Edwards.
Now she had a reader whom she very much wanted to please. Whom she was frightened not to please, and whose reaction she awaited with a different nervousness, as in anticipation of an encounter with a new lover.
Accept my offering, oh my muse.
Chapter Two
~ Diana ~
By
Maggie Edwards
Here’s the thing—I’ve not always been so strong. I’ve had to work at it.
There was a time when I would stand in the dripping shower stall and have to reach with one arm past the shower curtain for my robe, which I would wrap tightly around my body before stepping out, lest the image of some intimate part of me be reflected in some shiny surface.
Keep in mind that this habit of mine continued even after I smashed the mirror that hung the length of the bathroom door, smashed it with my fists until they were bloodied and bruised. It was as if Acteon himself had seen me naked at my bath and had to be destroyed. And afterward, when the pieces had been cleaned up and put into the trash and hauled away and buried deep in a landfill, it seemed to me that the broken shards did not reflect mere darkness, but that they retained the image of my innocent breasts, my nipples, my thighs; my pubescence, my hated body, my despised passions. And though I might smash them finer and finer, the pieces remained—the remnants of the puzzle that was and is and will remain my life.
Bear with me, dear reader. There is a story behind the story, and I can only tell it this way.
The blinds are pulled tight as I walk through my apartment to my bed. The lights are extinguished. I sit upon the mattress with my legs folded beneath me as I begin to brush my thick hair dry. Let’s say it’s brown. I could make it
blond. Or black. Or red. But color is not important. What is important is the methodical action of my hand and wrist and arm and shoulder, and the repeated scratch of the bristles running through the wet tangled strands. I should be able to lose myself in the physicality of the routine, as the yogi loses himself in his breathing. But instead I wonder if the radio or television should be on to further occupy my thoughts, or if I am already too late. The thoughts and images and memories bleeding through from my soul have taken hold of me. Even as I try to force my mind to fasten solely on the stubborn knots, the movements of hand and arm, the beginning of the ache deep inside the muscle of my shoulder, my mind begins to drift, inexorably. I am as a leaf floating on a country stream, pulled slowly at first, and then more and more quickly downstream. I am inundated by the crashing images and cast about. Nearly drowned, I emerge on the other side shaken, crying, drained and wishing that the rapids had taken me under once and for all.
Imagine April. Imagine the very first warm day of spring that brings with it the recollection of every beautiful spring day of your life–-reminiscence, perhaps, of lying on a thick green lawn, flouncing down the street in a new dress, falling in love for the first time, kissing that boy hard on the lips, pressed against him. Imagine the windows of an old Dodge van are wide open as you drive on that first wonderful day of spring, through the countryside, past the recently plowed fields, past trees with new green growth and the multi-angled farm houses. The air is heated by the sun, sweetly scented, full of moisture and the rich smell of the parted earth. It seems to pour over you like a sensory balm.
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