Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  Cal followed her back into her office, watched as she pulled out her appointment book. “Can’t next week,” she said. “The one after?”

  Cal nodded. His eyes, angled down at the outward corners, gave him a sleepy, almost hangdog look. She asked if he needed to write it down, but he smiled and shook his head.

  Rounding a corner of the corridor, carrying the weekly load of sketchbooks, she came upon Yvette of the beret. Aaron’s arm encircled her waist. The solemn curve of her chin and cheek shifted into a smile at something he whispered, and she rose up onto the toes of her black clogs to whisper something back. The whisper became a lingering kiss that traveled from Aaron’s ear to his eye, along his cheek, down to his lips. His hand found her rear end and tightened there, pressed her against him with a muffled groan. The hem of her black smock rose up, exposing skinny thighs. Beneath sheer black tights she wore white panties. Not bikini underwear, not satiny, not flowered or colored. Plain practical white, riding up over one buttock.

  Blood beat against the inside of Lizzie’s ears and at the backs of her eyes. Her arms ached with the weight of the sketchbooks. Young love, she told herself. It wouldn’t last. But it was as if the weight of the books she held in her arms echoed some vaster load. What exuded from Yvette and Aaron was all she wanted. That bottomless, thought-less connection was what she waited for, kept looking for. But it never lasted, and what were you to do when it disappeared?

  You had a margarita with Cal.

  Voices and laughter sounded down the corridor. Aaron and Yvette drew apart. “Well, hello, you two,” Lizzie drawled, walking towards them. “You look cozy.”

  Yvette turned, clearly pleased to see her. “Hello, Ms. Maxwell.” Aaron’s gaze flicked her up and down. Lizzie felt her chin rise. He knew. He knew why she was wearing her tightest jeans, her heeled boots, her cropped sweater. He was not too young for that. All his male computer chips were already in place and whirring. She turned away.

  Hands on her hips, back to the class, she began to inspect the charcoal compositions hung for critique. This hour and a half of class was always hard on the students, although it was where they learned the most—not from what was said about their own drawings, but from being forced to comment on the work of others. Sara, due to model during the second half, arrived just before break. She was accompanied by a man carrying two grocery bags. He wore a Braves baseball cap pulled low, hair in a long braid.

  Lizzie told the class to take a break and went to find Sara and her friend in the dressing room. The man in the Braves cap leaned against the wall beside the bags of groceries. “Vegetables will freeze if I leave ’em out there,” Sara said. “Lizzie, this here is my sister’s husband’s cousin’s nephew. Or is it my cousin’s sister’s husband’s boy? Something.”

  He did not look like a boy to Lizzie. His face was a wonder of planes and surfaces. The light from the window, flattened by the steely skies outside, caught on nose, scarred cheekbone, angled brow. “You want to model for me?” she asked. “What do you think, Sara?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll even let you keep your clothes on.” Lizzie smiled, trying to charm him, but he shook his head again.

  “Don’t fun him,” Sara said. “He doesn’t have much in the way of a sense of humor.”

  “I want to see what they’re drawing,” he said. “I’ll be out there.” He went into the studio. His long torso sat oddly on stocky legs.

  “My sister’s cousin’s husband’s cousin?” Sara turned on the electric heater, began to get undressed. “We worked it out once. When I’m done here we’re going over to visit Sam. You seen him?”

  Lizzie shrugged. “Sure.” She’d been to the hospital, once, to pick up Theo when Maud had taken him for the afternoon. Sunk into some deep place inside himself, Sam had barely acknowledged her, hardly responded when she kissed him. The skin of his cheek had been leathery and papery at the same time. It had seemed as if her lips would go right on through to the inside of his mouth. Sam kept his eyes closed.

  “Lizzie, girl.” Sara stopped in the middle of pulling her arms out of the enormous halter that was her bra. “What is it with you? He’s been there for over a week.”

  “It just makes me—” Lizzie pushed her hands apart, as if she might throw them away. “I don’t know how to see him when he’s like that. I can’t bear it.”

  “And by not seeing him you’re going to bear it better? You’re a mystery, girl.”

  Her father had told her the same thing, when the old family dog had been put to sleep. Maud had been hysterical. Lizzie locked herself in her room to paint pictures of seagulls. Seagulls! “But we don’t live near an ocean.” Her mother, holding one up to the window, clearly trying to draw something significant out of the subject matter. But there wasn’t anything significant. How often had she told them that. Lizzie let herself slide down the wall to the floor. Her feet sprawled out along the linoleum. “I’m tired.”

  “Everyone’s tired,” Sara said. “Or sick. Seems like the planet’s sickness has got to get everyone sick before anybody does anything about it.” She pulled the back of her bra around to her belly so that she could get at the hooks and eyes, and then stepped out of beige cotton underwear as large and square as boxers. Her thighs were like tree trunks—thick, brown, sturdy. The muscles in her shoulders and upper arms were taut ropes, bunched beneath the skin. So much flesh. So much skin, so many places that blood had to pump to. Lizzie felt suddenly exhausted by all the work bodies had to go through, every second of every day.

  Sara sashed herself into the kimono she lifted from its hook on the wall, shoved her clothes off the chair, and sat. “I went. He didn’t want to see me. Told me to get away.”

  Lizzie was tempted to ask something she’d wondered for a long time: if Sara and Sam had ever been lovers. But something about the solidity with which Sara sat on the chair, staring at her cracked, splayed feet, kept Lizzie quiet. She heard the large clock on the wall tick.

  Long time passing. She wondered when the last time was she’d actually heard Maud sing that song. Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago.

  “I’m trying to get hold of some clan,” Sara said. “He’s thinking he’s all alone in the world. Doesn’t know he’s making it be that way.”

  Lizzie felt something shift, the way a lock might give when the dial is spun back to the third number in a combination.

  “I’d do anything for him. He did for me.” Sara kept her eyes lowered. “Won’t let me.”

  “Yes,” Lizzie said. That first winter, when her hands were so cold she couldn’t hold matches long enough to strike them, Sam had arrived unexpectedly and built a fire in the woodstove. Kept wood piled outside the door. Brought potatoes and cheese or onions and wine to augment a meal. Held her, the one time she ever cried in front of him, when she was so scared that she wouldn’t make it through the winter, that she wouldn’t make it through life. What had she ever done for him that was comparable? What had she ever done for anyone that was comparable?

  “Sometimes I hate winter,” she said. “I have to get more wood in. Already.”

  “It’s a cold one. Except for the rain. Can’t make up its mind. Crazy.” Sara stood. “How many positions today?”

  “Three.” They left the dressing room, Lizzie carrying the electric heater. Students returning from break were setting up easels, flipping the pages of their sketchbooks, eyeing the attractive but slightly ominous presence of Sara’s relative. He’d taken off the cap and sat cross-legged on the floor in the corner of the room, his back straight, as if he were trying to be a picture of something. All he needed was a peace pipe.

  Sara pulled the model’s cube to the center of the room. “I put an ad in the paper down on the Rez,” she said as Lizzie draped a piece of cloth over it. “To see if anyone might show up to talk about Sam Dunn, Bitter Water clan.”

  Lizzie plugged the heater into an extension cord, aware of being watched by Sara’s sister’s cousin’s nephew. Sara nodd
ed in his direction. “That’s why he’s here.”

  “He’s a relative of Sam’s?” Lizzie turned to look at him. He made her efforts at civility—such as the smile she now sent in his direction—seem cheap, manipulative. She raised an eyebrow at him, registering this, and turned back to Sara. “So that means you’re related to Sam?”

  “I’m probably related to everybody. You’re probably related to everybody. The point is, someone should take Sam out of that place.”

  “I guess we can’t,” Lizzie said. “They don’t let you.”

  “That right?” Sara surveyed her, eyes dark and steady. “They?”

  Lizzie moved to the front of the room, pulling her mind away from Sam, lying alone in a hospital bed on this bleak, cold day.

  “Three poses.” This was the first exam of the semester, and the air in the studio was charged, anticipatory. “Twenty minutes each. What’s at stake here, what I’m looking for, as you better know by now, is that first clean line.”

  She flicked her eyes past Aaron, sought Yvette’s. “I’ll stress it again. If you get that, the picture will draw itself. Wait until you know before you put charcoal to paper. No flipping to a clean page. No erasing. Begin.”

  Sara disrobed and took her first pose—slouched over, head bent into encasing arms. Her face and breasts were hidden, her braided hair looped over one broad shoulder. From every angle in the room the pose was excellent. Rodin’s Thinker gone female and in despair.

  Lizzie passed Aaron without a glance at his pad. She paused behind Yvette, fighting with a desire to find fault—she who was young, who had talent, who had a man who adored her, who would be both muse and model, who would not let life get in her way, who would paint and paint and paint.

  Yvette gave her a quick, shy smile. Lizzie’s presence did not seem to make her at all nervous. Lizzie had to grudgingly respect this. Most students quailed when she stood anywhere near them. Yvette took her time. She tried a few movements in the air in front of her pad. When she finally allowed charcoal to touch paper the upward, curving swoop of black took in the long thigh, the folds of skin of Sara’s belly, the bulky line of the bent arm, the curve of skull and the long down-line of braid. The stroke also managed to convey the inherent melancholy in the pose. The authority of Yvette’s hand and arm, that unbroken line that delineated and communicated so much, made Lizzie give an involuntary grunt.

  She moved on to observe another student, aware that the atmosphere in the room—intent, studious, disciplined—was both a product of, and conducive to, good work. This had been the climate her own favorite mentors had provided, and as a teacher was what she sought to emulate. She felt an upward tilt of her spirits.

  She ambled through the easels and stools, aware of being watched by dark eyes from a corner of the room. “That’s it,” she said. There were several groans and frantic scribblings and the sound of the large pages being turned. Sara rested and then took the next pose. In her face, lined as it was, furrowed with crevices deep enough to sink a dime into, Lizzie saw that the brown eyes that stared without blinking were not necessarily happy, but they were accepting. Resigned. How did one ever get to be that way?

  Today. She would go today, visit Sam, talk to whoever was in charge about letting him go.

  Again she worked her way around the room. She paused beside Aaron. He had not yet begun to draw, although Sara had been in this particular pose for almost five minutes. Lizzie waited, standing to one side and behind him, recognizing the acrid odor that he exuded. She had smelled it in the arms of nervous men. She folded her arms, waiting for him to make his first stroke. Aaron cast her an imploring glance. She arched an eyebrow at him and moved away.

  For her third pose, Sara lolled against the back of the cube, presenting breasts, belly, pelvis, legs separated, one bent, the other straight. Lizzie watched from a corner of the room, aware of hands flashing in and out from the sketch pads. She thought about the beautiful boy-man who had posed in a similar position for the class last week, a young ski-patrolman. She had enjoyed prowling the room, looking at his body and at her students’ renditions of it. Yvette had concentrated on the semierect cock that probed out of tightly curled pubic hair. Then too, Lizzie had felt a grudging respect and affinity for the girl. It was what she would have chosen to draw herself.

  Now, standing in her corner, she listened to the long pull and quick scratch of charcoal. One day that beautiful boy-man’s pubic hair would be gray, the lovely cock would have a hard time rising. He would have wrinkles deep as Sam’s arroyos in his handsome face. He would have age spots, tired limbs, skin that no longer pulled tight against muscle.

  She checked her watch. She had stood for ten minutes without moving, as if she were a pose herself. “That’s it,” she said, and ignored the groans. “Close ’em up, hand ’em in.”

  She stood at the table at the front of the room as the students dropped their sketchbooks off. Sara disappeared into the dressing room to change. The nephew-cousin stayed where he was. His gaze at her, at the room, at the disappearing students, seemed full of loathing. She resisted the impulse to stroll towards him and ask, “What’s your problem?” But as she listened, nodding, to the murmurs and excuses of her students handing in their sketch pads, she thought that after all she would not go to the hospital today. Not when Sara would be there. Or this fellow with his hateful stare. Nor when Maud was there, either. What she would do, tomorrow or the next day, was make some calls, find out how to spring Sam from the hospital. She would bring him home, put him by a window in the living room, where he could look out at the sky, the bare trees, the snow, his trailer. Summer could see him every day when she got home from school. But today she would go home, turn on the heat and lights in her studio, and paint. Seagulls, maybe. Or self-portrait of cactus.

  CHAPTER 24

  JAKE

  the water goes on rolling

  down down down

  the water keeps on rolling

  can we step into it twice?

  The elevator slowed, stopped, pinged. The doors opened. Eleventh floor, Mountain Memorial Medical Center. Jake stepped out. Linoleum squeaked beneath his boots. Corridors spoked away from a central reception desk. He stood in line to ask for directions. Ahead of him a Native American with a long braid and cowboy hat wrangled with a nurse over some paperwork.

  Waiting, he stared at passing nurses, at his boots, at patients, visitors. Then he saw Sara, reading a magazine in the lounge area. Last time he’d seen her he’d been living at Lizzie’s. She wore her usual long skirt, unlaced work boots, man’s shirt. She looked up as he approached.

  “Well, now, it’s Jake! You visiting Sam?”

  He nodded.

  “We are too.”

  Hope flashed like a blast of reverb. “Lizzie with you?”

  “Ought to be. Shame on that girl.”

  Jake agreed. But it would be a betrayal to say so. He’d gotten up enough nerve to call her that morning, ask if she’d visit Sam with him. Her machine had picked up. He’d left the message. She hadn’t called back.

  “He’s down there.” Sara pointed. “On the right. Number eleven fifty-six. There are four beds, separated by sheets. He’s D.”

  The Native American, still in heated discussion with the nurse, looked up as he passed the reception desk. Jake nodded at him, sympathetic to the hassles of bureaucracy. Got a long dark look in reply.

  The pulled curtains in room 1156 did look like sheets. In the quiet cacophony of sound—televisions tuned to different stations, visitors engaged in chitchat—he recognized Maud’s voice:

  I do not want them in a boat

  I do not want them with a goat.

  I do not want them in a den,

  I do not want them now or then.

  He looked around the curtain. Maud held Theo on her lap, book perched between his legs. Sam had his face turned in their direction, eyes closed. Attached to a wrist were clear plastic tubes connected to bottles attached to various metal contraptions around the bed.
Sam’s face was leached of color, features drawn in upon themselves, pinched.

  “I do not want them, Sam I am.” Maud made her voice intense and irritated. “I do not want green eggs and ham!”

  Theo chuckled. Sam uttered a small sound. Jake pushed the curtain aside.

  “Hey, Maud, Theo. Hello, Sam.”

  Maud’s face lit with that surprising smile. She jiggled Theo on her knee. “Look, Theo! It’s Jake.”

  Sam opened his eyes. Jake sat on the edge of the mattress and took his hand. “Salad,” Sam said, and then something else Jake couldn’t understand. Maud watched Sam with a face full of worry. “We didn’t understand that, Sam,” she said. “You want to try it again?”

  Sam closed his eyes with a look of utter disgust. Jake kept hold of his hand. Theo leafed wildly through the book, saying, “Sam I am” and “Green eggs and ham!”

  “Where’s your ma?” Jake said.

  Theo looked at him. Brown eyes. Maud’s eyes. Or, Jake thought with a jolt of pleased surprise, his own. “Ma,” Theo said. “Ma?” And then a series of unintelligible sounds.

  “I’m having trouble understanding everybody, it seems,” Jake said.

  “Ma’s at school. Having a conference with Summer’s teacher.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Maud tipped her head in Sam’s direction. “She’s been off the deep end lately.”

  Theo said something that sounded like “Maud read book.”

  “Next time, Theo. I’ve got to go. I’ve got rehearsal.”

  “Rehearsal?”

  “Moon said now,” Sam began, and shook his head. His fingers moved inside Jake’s hand.

  Maud nodded. “I’ve been cast in a play! Shakespeare, no less.”

  “Well, congratulations, Maud. I’ll have to come see it.”

  “I hope you do. Sam says I’m storytelling.”

  Sam nodded.

  “Ball.” Theo pointed at the light fixture in the ceiling. The l was distinct now.