Lying In Bed

by Rose, M. J.

  I found my boss, working in the personalized stationery area near the front with an elderly woman dressed in an expensive gray linen suit.

  From the number of sample books on the table in front of them, it looked as if the appointment had been going on for a long time. An effort that would exhaust me energized Grace. She is an artist with type and color and paper, and so good with people she never cares how long it takes to match the design to the occasion.

  She looked up when I approached and read my face in an instant.

  Grace Greene is thirty-eight years old, with a rounded physique that Renaissance painters would have loved. Her reddish blonde hair, thick and wild, sets off her heart shaped face like a baroque frame around a fine oil. Her clothes are vintage from the ’40s or ’50s and she wears them with antique paste jewelry that blazes with rubies, emeralds, or sapphires. She’s a work of art in progress, someone you notice, who makes you smile, because she so clearly enjoys herself and her life. The eternal optimist, the most supportive friend I’ve ever had and someone who has never failed to offer me the best advice. As long as she doesn’t tell me she divines it, I try to pay attention.

  Her parents had first opened Ephemera as an art supply store named Greene’s Arts in the early ’70s at the same time that SoHo was being claimed by artists who were attracted by the old, rundown warehouses that offered huge spaces with cheap rents, great light, and a law that granted them the right to live as well as work in these previously commercial buildings.

  In the early ’90s, along with the help of their two children, Grace and Joshua, the Greenes had morphed the store into what it was now. They’d also opened two other branches, both farther uptown.

  Grace has been managing the SoHo store as well as the amazingly successful Ephemera website since she graduated from Wharton Business School and, until he died Joshua had been the buyer, traveling all over the world, searching and selecting the papers, ribbons, journals and albums, pens, and other unique items on the shelves.

  “Are you okay?” Grace smiled as she looked up at me and pushed her hair out of her eyes.

  “I didn’t know you were busy.”

  Turning to her client she asked her if she would mind if she took a moment and then pulled me into a small office next door to the showroom.

  “What’s wrong? You are emitting so much negative energy I can feel it.”

  I shook my head. Once I was standing there with her, I wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it without sounding like a fool.

  There’s a man in my office who I’m scared of because I’m attracted to him differently than I’ve been attracted to anyone in a long time. Ever. Maybe. I want you… no, I need you to get rid of him for me.

  “It’s silly… There’s a man…” I shook my head. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. Marlowe, tell me.”

  Then she noticed the bandage on my right hand and pointed to it. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No. This is a cut. I broke some ink bottles. I’m fine. My hand is fine. Go back to your client I’ll–”

  She put her arms around me and hugged me close. I shut my eyes and just felt the embrace and the comfort it offered.

  A phone started ringing. Not the desk phone but her cell.

  “Take your call. I’ll catch up with you when things are less hectic.”

  She held up her hand for me to wait. A glass ruby, elegantly set in rhinestones, flashed on her pinky. “No. I’ll take a message, I want you to tell me what’s wrong.”

  But I didn’t wait. I was being childish. I needed to deal with this myself.

  “Helen, I was hoping you’d call…” she said, greeting the caller.

  As I walked away, I heard the smile in Grace’s voice as she greeted one of her large circle of friends.

  6.

  As I trudged back to my office, I gazed at the pens, the journals, the papers, the ribbons, letting the rainbow of colors fill my eyes and I convinced myself that Gideon Brown would be gone. He would have read a few more letters, realized that he didn’t like my style and walked out of the store.

  When I got there, I was relieved to find that I was right. He was gone. My sample book was back on top of my desk. The chair he’d been sitting in was empty. There was nothing in the room to indicate he’d ever been there.

  I sighed in relief. And then I realized I was wrong. He had left proof of having been here.

  When he’d helped me up and then bent over my hand to inspect it, and then when he’d cleaned the cut, I’d smelled him: woodsy, dark, and leathery all mixed up with something else, too, some spice. Was it cinnamon?

  Now I smelled it again, in my own office. Uninvited and unwanted.

  I lit the vanilla candle I kept in the corner of my desk. Let it burn. Then breathed in the newly refreshed air.

  Yes, that was better.

  He was completely gone. His eyes weren’t looking at me. His smell wasn’t lingering.

  The office was mine again.

  The letters and stories – my words – were mine again.

  7.

  Nothing was working. I’d already gone through a yard of fabric without getting the right effect. Trying once more, I used the scissors to notch the cobalt blue silk fabric, then pulled and ripped it down the middle.

  The tear still didn’t have the kind of frayed edge I wanted. I threw it down and walked away from my drafting table. The collage was due the next day and I didn’t see how I was going to make it. I’d been working on the cover design for three weeks but I couldn’t get it right. I was almost there but something was missing.

  Every few months I got a book cover illustration assignment from Jeff Harding, who was the art director at a New York publishing house. This time he’d said his deadline was tight - that he only had three weeks - but that should have been long enough for me.

  I hated the thought of blowing it. The jobs Jeff gave me were both creatively satisfying and good for my portfolio, and I wanted to get more of them. I also was good friends with Jeff and didn’t want to disappoint him.

  I’d met him years ago when he and my stepbrother roomed together in college. He’d come home for many holidays back then and all of us thought of him as another member of our family. And it was through Jeff, years later, at a New Year’s Eve party, that I met Joshua and started to date him.

  I threw out the piece of blue silk and cut another square out of the bolt I’d bought at a flea market months before and saved, knowing one day I’d want to use it in a collage.

  This cover was for a novel called Soft Water, about an American woman who moves to Venice, lured there by her lover, to help restore a famous painting he owns only to finds that it’s a fake.

  Part love story, part mystery, the book had kept me turning the pages and at the same had been so well written I’d seen the sun glinting off the spires of St. Mark’s, heard the city’s music and tasted its wine.

  It was past two a.m. and I needed to get to sleep. And I would, I told myself, as soon as I figured out what was wrong with my design. I got up and stretched. Then bent over and reached to the floor with my fingertips. The cuffs on my oversize, man-tailored shirt fell down and I pushed them back up. It was an old shirt of Joshua’s that I’d appropriated from him shortly after we’d started staying over at each other’s apartments. There were glue stains and glitter on the sleeves, splotches of paint on the tails and a rip where the fourth button should have been.

  I walked around the loft and tried to figure out what was wrong with the design.

  First I switched on the lights in the bedroom area and shut off the lights in the kitchen area to give myself something to do. Then I kicked a pile of magazines under the old leather couch and moved a box of paints off the seat so that I could sit down if I wanted.

  I lived in a 1500-square foot space that had been, a hundred years before, a section of the fifth floor of a warehouse that manufactured glass beads. Sometimes still, I’d find a sliver of one in the cracks of the oak flo
or. The space was divided into areas that included a kitchen and a bedroom with a wall of bookshelves.

  When I’d first rented it, I’d imagined it would be a real home. Shortly before he was killed, Joshua and I had decided he was going to move in and we’d begun making it less like a workplace. We hadn’t gotten very far, though. It still appeared to be an large artist’s studio that accommodated my occasional need for eating and sleeping. Three drafting tables dominated what could be a living room. A table Joshua and I had bought, imagining lovely dinners being consumed there, was now where I laid out vignettes and illustrations I cut out of magazines. Currently, it was covered with young women, all with their back to the camera. Almost a hundred different angles and sizes and shapes. One of whom would go on the book cover.

  There were empty boxes piled in corners, some made of wood, others plastic. Ready to be filled with collages. Office supply file cabinets lined the walls, overflowing with illustrations and artifact that I’d collected for my work.

  The space under the window in my bedroom area was stacked with finished projects, research books, and volumes of poetry I used to find quotes in. Unread novels laid piled on the half of the bed where I never slept.

  There was clutter everywhere.

  The only place to find relief was out the large windows that ran the whole length and up one side of the loft. They faced east and north, and during the day afforded me not only a view of the streets five stories below but miles of sky above.

  That night I could see a sliver of moon hiding behind a pearl gray cloud. But stars were hard to come by. They always were in Manhattan; there was too much ambient light.

  With my forehead against the window, I looked down on Spring Street. A taxi cruised by.

  What was wrong with the cover concept?

  I closed my eyes and when I opened them I saw a couple, holding hands, walking close together, meandering up the block towards Broadway.

  As they reached the corner the light changed and they stopped. Bathed in a red glow, the woman tilted her face up towards the man’s. In sync, he bent toward her. They kissed, and from my perch it seemed as if the music playing on my stereo, bluesy jazz from the ’30s, was underscoring their movements.

  There was no reason for me to stand there and watch. No reason for me to walk away either.

  The man’s hands moved languidly over the woman’s back, across her shoulder blades and down her spine. Then, with a sudden fierceness, he grabbed her ass, pulling her to him in a move that was less loving and more desperate than how he’d been touching before.

  I held my breath - wondering how she would react - whether this was what she wanted or not.

  She melted deeper into him.

  The light changed and shined green on them. They didn’t care. Nothing sounded or intruded. An invisible envelope had surrounded them and obliterated everything outside of them. There were no smells except what was on the other’s skin, no air expect what the other expelled after each kiss, no sound except each other’s blood beating and their half intelligible urgent whispers. Words that would have sounded thin and hollow, if not for the context of the tangle of arms and legs and lips.

  More.

  Please.

  Your lips.

  You’re crazy.

  Feel me.

  Oh.

  No, that was my imagination. I was already superimposing my story on their actions. I didn’t know what they were saying or hearing. What they were feeling. Except for their own kind of passion.

  Locked in their embrace, they remained on that corner for a few more seconds until the woman started backing them away from the street, toward the side of the building where they disappeared into a small alcove.

  To anyone walking by, they would be veiled in shadows, but they were still visible to me.

  And as if to prove it, a car drove past, its light illuminating the rest of the sidewalk, but not catching them in its beam. I was glad for them, for finding a place to be hidden in plain view.

  His back was up against the bricks, she was leaning into him, her arms were around his neck, his around her back, his hands were burrowing into the waistband of her short jean skirt.

  Oblivious to any possible danger or intrusion, urgently now, the woman hiked up her skirt, exposing more of her thighs. She thrust forward. The man maneuvered. I couldn’t be sure but from the way his shoulders moved, I thought he might be unzipping his fly and entering her.

  Their slow thrusts were the movements of a sexual dance. With heads bowed and hands gripping arms, their hips gyrated in circles, moving faster and faster until they slowed down for one long aching sequence of kisses and lunges.

  I held my breath, squeezed my arms with my own fingers, pressed my pelvis hard up against the window ledge while I kept watching them, staring, living out their whole pleasure in my head.

  I’d had sex with a few men since Joshua had died. I’d even enjoyed it in my own way with two of them, but I hadn’t come close to longing for anyone, hadn’t been pulled toward anyone with such a force that I would have made love to him on a street corner in the middle of the night. Even with Joshua I’d never been sexually adventurous like that.

  Passion - hungry, yearning, overwhelming - want found its place in the stories I wrote for clients. But those were fantasies. I couldn’t imagine living that kind of desire.

  To feel it required living it. It required exhibitionism, of the body and of the mind, a baring of more than your flesh. You have to open up to someone and show him what is inside of you to feel passion. And that was something that I’d learned to be afraid of a long time before I’d met Joshua.

  Except for my first real relationship with a man, I’d never managed to merge my fantasy life with my reality. Back then, with my first lover, I’d lived out my eroticism easily. Given and taken freely. But since I’d broken that off at 19, for the past eight years, there had been a deep gulf between what I imagined and what I lived. My daydreams and nighttime dreams were thick with lust and wet with pleasure. But when I was with a flesh and blood man, I became tight and dry. Withholding. Selfish. Preoccupied.

  The letters and stories I wrote, the artwork I did, fulfilled me. And I was all right with that. Not everyone could manage to merge their wishes with their deeds, their imaginings with their actions.

  I stepped away from the window, leaving the couple to zip up and pat their clothes back into place. And as I turned back to the living room, I realized exactly what my problem was with the cover of the novel I’d been working on.

  I didn’t think of Joshua – or miss him – too often anymore. Weeks could go by without me consciously focusing on him. I didn’t cry anymore or wonder what might have become of us. But the cover design for the novel that took place in Venice had brought him and his awful, surprising death back to me. And there, in the nighttime, alone and powerless to fight the memories off the way I could during the day, I had become melancholy.

  The cover had made me think of what I’d lost with Joshua.

  At least that was what I thought.

  5.

  Mornings were mine. I never went to the store until noon. And then only four days a week - Wednesdays through Saturdays. So, that Tuesday, I should have been able to sleep in. But as tired as I was from having worked all night, I needed to get up early and get to Jeff’s office to make our 10:30 a.m. meeting.

  He smiled and kissed me and gave me one of his great big hugs after his assistant had taken me be back to his office. Jeff always wore elegant, old-fashioned clothes. Tweeds and bow ties. Three-piece suits. He was slightly foppish but in a charming way with his round wire-rimmed glasses, pocket hanky and little Dutch boy hair-cut.

  He offered me water, which I accepted and he moved over to a refrigerator in the corner by the window and we talked about his wife and two-year-old baby while he pulled out a green bottle, opened it, and poured the sparkling water equally between two glasses.

  The cold bubbles were welcome and I took a few gulps in a row.
And then I pulled the artwork for his cover from my portfolio and put it down on his desk, facing him.

  His eyes took it in quickly. “Wonderful,” he said right away.

  “Thanks.”

  He was still inspecting it. “It works perfectly. The title will go right here.” And he pointed to the sky. “Great job, Marlowe.”

  “This one was tough.”

  “Really?” He looked up at me, puzzled.

  “Yeah. I was surprised too. Couldn’t figure it out. It was the Venice connection. It threw me.”

  He knew about Joshua and understood what I meant right away. “Aw, Marlowe, I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t realize. I shouldn’t–”

  I interrupted him. “No. I didn’t realize it either. It’s okay, now.”

  “I feel awful.”

  “You can make it up to me by getting me some more water.” And I held out my glass. When I did, I jostled some papers on Jeff’s desk revealing a photograph. I know I gasped. Because I recognized it immediately but the small sound was muffled by the louder clinking of ice cubes hitting the sides of the glass as Jeff poured more water.

  It was black and white in a thousand subtle shades of gray. Provocative, it pulled you in, demanded you look at the woman’s open mouth. The lips moist and swollen. The unmistakable expression of passion. And a single mark on her cheek. Which could have been anything. The blemish of a man’s fingerprint. Inky and dark. Smudged. A moody brand, suggestive and disturbing. Yet as a work of art, the photograph was beautiful. I could see that, regardless of all the other feelings the photograph brought out in me.

  I didn’t have to ask; I knew who had taken this photograph as well as I knew my own body in the mirror. I just wasn’t quite sure why it was on Jeff’s desk. His back was to me as he put the green bottle back in his mini refrigerator, so not really caring if it was any of my business or not, I pushed the other papers out of the way to reveal that the photograph was part of an invitation.