Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  I did not. He was a mobile peeping tom and I had no wish to encourage him.

  And what did I do?

  The absurdity of the question. What does any woman in this town do? “I’m a wife,” I said. “A wife,” he said, considering. “Well, shit.” There was no shower of spittle from Adam’s lips but the feel of the word in this man’s mouth was the same.

  “That’s not entirely true. I mean, I have a job. I work at a cafe part-time. And...and I garden. And I like to read.” These admissions made me feel tiny and defensive.

  “You’re interesting,” he said. His voice was deep, slightly nasal, low enough that I had to lean toward him to catch each of his words. “You’re friendlier than most wives in this town.”

  For a moment the sound of his voice was all I heard – the note of it, I mean, the timbre. The words made no sense, as if my mind could only sort and analyze one aspect of his speech at a time. The umber hue of it, the dark wet honey – the whole world turned that color. His voice overtook me. Tickytacky walls of houses going transparent, and inside every bedroom fantastic and compelling scenes of fornication, all of them deep earth brown, lime and blue metal.

  Then I breathed in, blinked, and the meaning of the words caught up to their sound.

  “Have you tried flirting with many other wives in town?”

  He laughed. His smile canted up higher on one side than on the other, self-deprecating, totally disarming. “Not many. Only the ones who don’t mind my beer-drinking.”

  “What makes you think I approve of your beer-drinking?”

  “You didn’t pretend I wasn’t doing it. All your friends tried really hard not to look at me.”

  All my friends would be coming out into the parking lot soon. I realized I needed to get away from this man, or there would be probing, prying questions. And though we had only shared a conversation, I did not want the obligation of recounting it next Thursday. I wanted to keep it for my own.

  “I need to get going.”

  Wait. He put out one finger – his hands looked too immature, like a boy’s beautiful hands – and touched my wrist. The gesture was so foreign in its intimacy that I stopped moving, stopped breathing.

  All my senses concentrated on the warm slender point where his skin touched mine. “You have an interesting look, and an interesting personality. Can I draw you?”

  “Draw me?”

  “I used to do a lot of figure studies. They’re important. Anatomy – it’s important, even if you’re doing cartoons. I haven’t done any figure studies in a long time, and I’d like to try a few. I’m out of practice.”

  “Figure studies? Like – nude?”

  “The nude form is easiest to draw, but if you’re not comfortable with that....”

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

  “What’s your name?”

  I told him my name before I realized I probably shouldn’t.

  “I can pay you for your time.”

  “I don’t need money; my husband is a professor at the college and I don’t need money.” “Just consider it, okay?” A card was in his hand; his hand dropped toward my purse. The card slid down between pocketbook and paperback, vanished.

  “I really have to go now.”

  “Good-bye!” He waved at me and grinned, and laughed down at my bumper while I climbed inside my car, shivering, and watched him shrink in the rear view mirror. Over and over I said to myself, Oh my heck, what just happened. It would have been easy for one of my friends to laugh off this conversation as an encounter with an out-of-town loon, a great story to tell at the next girls’ night out. Can you believe it? This creep wanted me to take my clothes off for him. He really thought I’d do it! But perhaps because of his swaggering confidence, or because of his Adam eyes, or the way his voice looked right through all my walls, I realized slowly that I hadn’t told him no. Not exactly.

  Around the block where he couldn’t see, I pulled to the curb and found the card. I read it several times before the words made any sense. His phone number and the word ILLUSTRATOR, the acronyms of a few professional organizations, and a detailed line drawing of a bird. And his name, of course: Xavier Pratt.

  Final confirmation. Not Adam. Not Adam at all. Something more potent than Adam, and more compelling, my X.

  12.

  I took an art appreciation class in college. We were required to study nudes. This is startling curriculum in a Mormon school, and only barely acceptable because nude paintings by the Masters fall under the auspices of Fine Art. Everyone was embarrassed. They all tried to hide their nerves behind a sudden bluster of bookishness, a mass show of studious sobriety that only strained the classroom’s atmosphere all the more.

  But I was not strained. I envied the figures we studied. Like me, they had certain things worth hiding. Unlike me, they had bared their skin, their throats, their hearts, everything. And the result was not terrible, but lovely. People with all their privacies frankly expressed, athletic men in postures of stooped gravitational waiting, ready to surge up and hurl a discus or a javelin; women lying prone with loose-sketched faces, dense black triangles confronting the viewer with a dark texture and a decisive, knowing stroke of the brush.

  I remember staring at each work of art as rapturously as a nun at the Madonna. The professor smilingly commented on my enthusiasm for the visual arts. It was not enthusiasm so much as desperation. In the boldness of the figures I might find some example of how to turn my own sensitive pale nakedness out toward the world. Like baring a breast, I might declare GOD IS NOT REAL, and once the world’s initial shock had faded, I might be framed in gold and displayed, admired, declared brilliant and brave. But no matter how I studied them, the nudes never offered any real help with my dilemma.

  My fellow students, for their part, did not appreciate art appreciation. I remember one painting we studied in particular: a light-skinned woman lying prone, face turned away, long blonde hair tangled, hands lightly resting against the shameless, unashamed form of her own body. She floated against a black void as if pleasantly paralyzed in a dream. The crux of her thighs showed its flagrant golden hair. The other girls viewing the painting thought she was disgusting and unkempt, too coarse and too sexual. They said so with a display of moral banner-waving meant to draw the men in our class into their righteous and modest orbits.

  I did not comment.

  When I went to bed every night for weeks afterward I put myself into the blonde woman’s pose, closed my eyes, and set myself drifting on a black velvet sea. I imagined there were watchers, analyzers of my composition. I dreamed the watchers could see right through my watercolor skin, but though I was an opened book, they pretended they could not read.

  Within that dream I also dreamed of red berries in frost, and the parting of hair, and solo landscapes where white houses in brown fields waited for snow.

  The watchers observed silently. They wrote papers on my dreams and I graded the papers and gave them all failing grades. Nobody understood. So nobody passed.

  These were the best dreams I ever had.

  13.

  Back home, I kicked off my shoes in the mud room and shut the door to the garage quietly. No sound of television or radio. Kitchen abandoned, lights off, sun streaming in sideways through the valley-view windows, attenuated, rust-brown dust devil stretching up from my heart to heaven, wavering, breaking like a thread and retreating back into my body. James was not there. A note on the kitchen counter:

  Sweetie – I went to I.F. For golf with the guys. Back late Saturday. J.

  Golf with the guys. It had ceased to upset me more than a year ago. For all his faults, in spite of the total lack of passion in our marriage, I loved James. He was dear to me. I wanted him to have whatever happiness he could wring from this life, even if it was not with me. After all, I could never give him what he needed, no matter how dutiful a wife I was. I could not change the fact that I am a woman.

  I am still surprised, even now, how quickly I came to accep
t James’s trips to Idaho Falls. The way I saw it, he may as well have been sneaking off to visit a health spa or a psychiatrist. This was his therapy, and I would certainly not begrudge him a little relief from Rexburg. He was gone nearly every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, thanks to a forgiving class schedule at the college; but he was always home in time for church by Sunday afternoon.

  I had no idea whether it was always the same man he saw, or a different one every time. It made no difference anymore. We had stopped trying for a family long ago, but I still drove all the way out to Jackson twice a year to be tested, just in case. By now, devoid of all danger as our marriage bed was, the testing was an empty gesture, but one I could never make in Rexburg. Patient privacy laws be damned: tongues there would wag. They always did. Neither James nor I could afford to chance the rumor mill. I developed the habit of putting my husband’s therapeutic excursions to good use. There was always gardening to be done, or house work, or reading, my great pleasure. I read more books than I could count during the two years of our marriage. It was a peaceful time for me.

  Now, though, as I stood alone in my silent kitchen holding Jamess note in my cold fingers, the rhythm of the strange man’s walk pounded in my temples. My skin flushed hot and prickly – the rhythm of him.

  Tongue on knife.

  Swing of leg.

  Hand drop.

  Card drop.

  Laugh.

  Good-bye!

  James was in I.F., with some man. James was always going off with some man, and I never complained. It was Thursday, girls’ night out, therapy day. Why not? I had a vision of Katherine leaning across the kitchen counter toward me, her face masked in studious worry: Are you doing what you need to do?

  Somewhere between the car and the mud room, I had transferred the business card to my jeans pocket. I pulled it out and stared at it. I watched his name for signs of movement. I turned the card upside-down. I flipped it back-to-front, then back to the front again. And my cell phone crept into my hand, opened itself with an efficient muted flip, and the numbers dialed themselves, I swear, using the little hard callus beside my thumbnail, my hand under a smoke-lime spell.

  He answered the phone: “Yello.” rough baritone, very vibrational.

  “Is this Xavier?”

  “Maybe. Is this the wife?”

  “So, supposing I do want to model after all. This was a simple inquiry, nothing else.

  Information-gathering, decision to be made at a later date. How do we do it? I mean, what’s it like, and where would we go, and how long?”

  “My hotel room is probably the best bet. Since you’ve never done it before, you can do seated poses, or lying down, if you’re comfortable with that. It’s easier than standing still. Holding one position for five minutes is a lot harder than it sounds; sometimes it’s better to lie down. We can go for as long as you want to go – just a few poses, or longer. If you’re comfortable with it, I can do a whole painting. That would take around an hour.”

  “I guess it kinds of sounds like fun. I mean, why not, right?”

  “It can be a lot of fun. I’ll make it easy for you. And I really appreciate it. You’re helping me out.”

  “No problem, Xavier. I’m looking forward to it. I think.”

  “Call me X. Nobody calls me Xavier, not even my mom.”

  In the nervous shower, I shaved the stubble from my armpits and legs. I watched my face in the foggy mirror for signs of disapproval. None came. The steam from the shower dissipated off the mirror’s surface. I got dressed, and with a scrap of paper carefully held between thumb and forefinger (hotel address scribbled in red ink) I drove downtown to the Best Western.

  The building was an unfocused gray; trees with gray-green foliage and gray-green trunks ringed it. I avoided looking around to see who might be seeing me. I bypassed the check-in desk, took the stairs. There was a faint mildew smell in the stairwell with chemical flowery overtones. The carpet was patterned and thin and seemed to drag at my feet as I climbed.

  When X opened his door a square of yellow light fell out of the room, lit up my shoes in the dark hotel hallway. The dark fringe of hair above his eyes and the dark beard over his chin made his face a yellow square, too, which his wide mouth dominated with its slanting smile.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’ve never done this before.” I watched his mouth, couldn’t look at those eyes.

  As I had knocked on the door a memory had risen up, a wisp of smoke in a distant field. Adam had wanted to be an artist, thought it would be cool, sort of glamorous or sexy, though as far as I knew he had never so much as doodled a stick figure in all his life. I wondered, standing in the hallway, whether I might read X in reverse, find a path in him to trace backward eleven years to Adam on the Bench with the golden dusty wind blowing down in the valley, an anagram, a palindrome.

  “Well.” X opened the door wider. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and his feet, absurdly long and angular with delicate, almost pointed toes, stuck out beneath the cuffs of his jeans. Feet shuffled backward over the hard flat dark green carpet. “Come in.”

  There were two queen beds and two small russet armchairs flanking a round table, three lamps in the room, all of them lit and giving off an unnatural, grapefruit-yellow light. Spread over one of the beds were thick papers of various sizes, deckle-edged, all of them bearing the images X had collected on his vacation. I examined them: cropland furrowed by rows of reflected sky; basalt canyons; elk herds; against an ocher hill, the innocent white steeple of a tiny church; overlapping that paper slightly, another depicting in dull browns and greens the burned-out skeleton of a building under a rainy sky. I looked at each one in turn, while X stood with his back to me (his shoulders were broad, almost as broad as my husband’s), flipping through a sketch pad.

  I said, “These are amazing. You’re really good.”

  “Thanks. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, I’m fine. Thank you. How long have you been doing this?”

  “Art? Oh, I don’t know. My whole life, I guess. I’ve always liked to draw, but I didn’t start painting until college.”

  “You have a degree in art?”

  “Nah. I started one. I went to Cornish – big private art school up in Seattle. But I ran out of money pretty quick, and couldn’t find any more. I dropped out by the end of my first year. Turns out you don’t need a degree to be an artist, just a good portfolio. I guess I dodged a big bullet. Private college is expensive, and art doesn’t pay well.”

  “Seattle?” Madam I’m Adam.

  “Lived there my whole life. It’s a nice town, though the people can be a little chilly and it’s cloudy all the time. You ever been there?”

  With considerable embarrassment I admitted that the furthest from home I had ever been was to Salt Lake City. And to the Grand Canyon with my family once when I was a kid, an unpleasantly warm trip in a big rented van that smelled faintly of vomit. I guess I’m not much of a traveler.

  “You’ve never wanted to get out of Rexburg any more than that? Just Salt Lake and the Grand Canyon?” He let the sketch pad fall onto one of the beds. It had fainted from shock.

  “What’s wrong with Rexburg?”

  X laughed a little. “You’re tense. Relax. I’m a professional. I’m not going to get weird on you.”

  “I’m not tense.”

  “Look at yourself in the mirror.”

  There was, of course, a dim mirror dominating the wall beside the television, the same mirror that hangs in every hotel room in America. In it I stood, blurred and orange-hued, arms crossed rigidly under my breasts, shoulders hunched. I found it impossible to tell whether the shine in my eyes was guilt or fear.

  “Okay. I might be a little nervous.”

  “It’s cool. It’s normal to be nervous the first time you model.”

  “Have you modeled before?”

  “Sure. I did it a lot in college to get extra money. In a school full of artists, nobody sees you as a naked person – you’re nothi
ng but shapes and values then, just the rudiments of form. I was scared shitless the first time I did it, but after a few minutes it was no big deal. I modeled for whole classes. Now that’s an experience, standing up on a wooden box with easels all around you. But it was only scary for a few minutes. You’ll see.”

  “You said I could leave my clothes on if I wanted to.”

  He only hesitated for a second. “Oh, sure! Whatever you want to do. It’s fine, really.”

  He convinced me to sit in one of the armchairs, and though I refused a drink again, he pulled a glass bottle of iced tea from the mini-fridge, turned it upside-down and slapped the bottom in one quick, automatic movement; the metal cap responded with a sharp pop. He opened the bottle and set it on the table beside me.

  The iced tea was probably caffeinated. What the heck, I though. In for a penny, in for a pound. I drank half of it in a single draft.

  X shuttled his paintings together into a more orderly stack. He began sliding them into the sleeves of a big black portfolio case. “I’ll just be another minute.” When he had cleared off both beds, he produced a long wooden box from the space between bed and wall, flipped it open on the nightstand, and sorted through its contents. He pulled five or six bright turquoise pencils from inside the box, slowly and deliberately, examining the white inscriptions on the sides, then bit into the end of each one to hold it in his teeth. I watched in wary fascination. His tongue was just visible as he fit and adjusted the pencils in his mouth.

  A strange, bitter, sharp smell, tangy and dark-golden, drifted across the room from the box. It was at the same time both penetrating and unobtrusive, just like the sound of his voice – and like his voice, the odor overwhelmed my senses, demanded my full attention yet received from me only a muddled, sleepy kind of dream-awareness.