Red Audrey and the Roping

by Jill Malone

  I’d been out there so long that I grew chilled and was considering sneaking away all together when I heard footsteps on the cement behind me.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  It was Nick. Honestly.

  “Go ahead. I was just about to shoot some heroin.”

  He laughed and sat down in the chair at my right. He smoked Marlboro reds. There was a time (high school), when I would have found this terribly sexy, but after Ireland, where everyone smokes Marlboro reds or brown cigarillos, I’d learned that sexiness is more complex than a brand of cigarettes.

  “How are you connected?” he asked.

  “I’m with the sushi chef. I’ve always had a thing for knives.”

  He looked worried, or possibly confused: his brow furrowed and the skin above his nose scrunched; his eyes seemed sharper and more intense. They looked green on film, but must have been hazel. He took a drag from his cigarette and settled his expression.

  “You’re joking. You’re connected to Emily, right? I’ve seen you with her at shoots a couple of times.”

  “Yeah. I live in the studio behind her mansion.”

  “Some place, yeah? I always felt like a fucking thief in that house, waiting for the butler to box my ears and throw me out the servant’s entrance. I took some pictures of the house but haven’t ever done anything with them. They looked kind of eerie, like maybe the house wasn’t right. Those banyans in the back, you know, giving the place this grim atmosphere? This crazy sort of hovering, and that’s what the camera caught. It was really bizarre.”

  He brushed his hair back from his eyes and smiled at me. He was drinking Heineken. Around the perimeter of the pool, ferns waved listlessly. The pool had a diving board into the six-foot deep end, which seemed inexplicably sad. His cigarette burned away.

  “The bats in the banyans are what I love. I can hear them at night before I fall asleep, flitting like heavy moths.”

  I thought about a church I’d found in Edinburgh beside a shabby little graveyard. Through the round-topped wooden door, I’d entered a striking Anglican sanctuary ornamented in white and gold, where an elderly congregation sang in fine style a song as foreign to me as the country. I was so lonely in their gothic city of gray spires. I wanted to tell the photographer about Edinburgh, explain how the church had meant something. I was so certain it had meant something.

  “Your accent’s weird. Where are you from?”

  “Maui. I went to school in Ireland, though.”

  “Yeah? My mom took us all over the U.K. one summer when I was in junior high. Isn’t it weird to see all the Roman ruins there? I remember being amazed by that. They made it all the way to England.”

  “It is weird. And the druids as well; all these people dragging massive stones around to build temples and shrines, from Egypt to Ireland. I suppose it was some primitive form of the skyscraper.”

  “Commerce instead of religion?”

  “There’s a difference?”

  Nick grinned at me as if to let that one go. Beside the pool now, he lit another cigarette and it seemed unaccountably important to describe the church in Scotland, I wanted the photographer to understand: the garish gold, the bright white, the perplexing song.

  “I have this thing about graveyards.”

  Suddenly he was laughing at me, and in my confusion I couldn’t remember what I was saying, so I stopped and watched him. When he laughed, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth opened wide as his shoulders shook uncontrollably. It was more like convulsions than laughter and made me nervous.

  “You’re a trip,” he said. “Ever posed?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Have you ever posed for a photographer?”

  “No.”

  “Would you pose for me? We could take some shots at Punchbowl, since you have a thing about graveyards. I’ve wanted to do something with Japanese graves. I dig that concept of leaving food and liquor for the dead; it seems so much more useful than flowers. And you have a really interesting body—sort of angled and sexual—sinewy—like your fuck is outside your clothes.”

  “My fuck?”

  “You know how people wear their fuck?”

  “My fuck is outside my clothes?”

  “Some chicks wear their fuck in their face, a lot of guys wear theirs in their eyes, some people wear theirs deep in their bodies, like you’d have to root for it, yeah? You know, your fuck, that sense of sexual awakening? You wear yours outside yourself like it’s an orbit around your body. Call it a sexual glow. You’ve got a sexual glow.”

  I’d blushed. I could feel my head going red like some goddam convent girl. So I wore my fuck outside my clothes. So maybe that explained something. Didn’t we all leave ruins behind to mark our place here? I thought of an archaeologist finding my bones with the photographer’s beside this pool. So they would burn these white sticks in homage to the gods and to create an awkward euphoria. The women covered very little of their bodies. Tense and primitive creatures, they crafted cement containers to hold undrinkable water.

  The archaeologists could not know about his eyes, though. How the hazel color would sometimes darken into a remarkable green, like this moment as he attempted to convince me that he was not an ax murderer, not even a pervert. I’m just a photographer, his eyes assured me, an interesting guy you should get to know.

  To alleviate feeling like a coward, I agreed to the photo shoot and gave Nick Reinhart my work number. Because I was a coward, I left without telling Emily goodbye.

  XIX.

  Nick called me four days after we met poolside. The photographer was at ease on the phone and made me laugh despite my best efforts at gravity. He told me about a fencing match he’d won the previous evening.

  “Fencing?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, I fence in an amateur league.”

  “You mean in the bee suit with the wiggly sword.”

  “Bee suit and wiggly sword are technical terms. We’re very informal at our matches.”

  “Seriously, you fence? I thought fencing died out when men stopped wearing white gloves and plumed hats.”

  “There are a few of us beekeepers left. I’ll bring you to a match sometime and you can give us pointers.”

  “Wow, a fencing photographer. They should have put that in the documentary.”

  He’d been scouting locations at Punchbowl and had found the perfect gravesite—beer, lanterns, incense, sushi rolls, and sharkcake—if I still wanted to model for him. This time, he made the proposition sound completely natural, not in the least perverted.

  “There’s just one thing,” he said.

  Apparently, normalcy was too good to last. My skin tightened around my throat.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t date my models.”

  He paused. It felt like I was supposed to speak, but I had no idea what to say.

  “OK.”

  “It’s too hard on the reputation. So this’ll really just be me taking pictures of you. I don’t want a crew out there affecting the mood of the piece or making you uncomfortable. Usually I don’t even mention this sort of thing, but I wanted to make it clear that I’m not trying to seduce you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So I’ll meet you at Punchbowl Friday morning at seven.”

  “What do you want me to wear?”

  “Anything but black.”

  Had I come off as so desperately interested that I had to be told there was no chance? I stared at the phone, looking for some confirmation. What the fuck? What was the deal with people making all these weird rules for human interaction anyway, as if no one could be trusted? I didn’t want him to seduce me. I just wanted to be involved in his process. I wanted to be his subject.

  I biked to Punchbowl Friday morning with a change of clothes in my bag so I could go straight to class afterward. The graveyard was deserted except for one of the groundskeepers who manipulated the sprinklers for full exposure, his landscaping tools secured in a Rubbermaid trashcan in the back of a golf c
art. I changed from my biking shoes into Birkenstock sandals and chained my bike outside the Visitor’s Center, planning to wait for Nick in the parking lot.

  I had a view of the road from the lot and watched an orange car navigate the curves toward me. Wide and shiny in the bright, clear morning, the car drew nearer; a peculiar burn lit in my belly, a recognition. When the car stopped in the parking lot and Nick climbed out, one arm extended in a quick wave before he began pulling his equipment from the trunk, I felt my body shiver. He drove a vintage orange Camaro.

  “You biked here? No wonder you have a killer body.”

  He stopped smiling when he saw my face, let his bags slide to his feet, and rushed forward to grab my arm.

  “Are you alright? Has something happened?”

  He looked around wildly as if to find a villain escaping into the immaculately pruned shrubbery. I concentrated on his face, determined to keep him in focus, the green of his eyes startling against his red oxford shirt. My grip on his arm all anchor.

  “I’m OK, just startled.”

  “By what?”

  “My mother died in that car.”

  I pointed to the parking lot, my eyes never leaving his. A wild notion rushed through my head that maybe she lived. Maybe she had taken her car to Oahu. Maybe she was safe and had another family here. Maybe she lived.

  “What?” He hung on to me and something like terror flooded his expression.

  “My mother died in an orange Camaro.”

  Suddenly I was crying against him, sobbing heavily so that he had to gather me into his arms to keep both of us from collapsing. His beekeeper arms firm and thick, though his shoulders were not nearly as wide as Grey’s. I wept against him loudly, shamelessly, the certainty that my mother did not live here or elsewhere as deep in me as marrow.

  “OK,” he whispered. “OK. I’ve got you. You’re alright. I’ve got you. You’re alright.”

  Fuck. I put my hand up as if to touch his hair which fell around his face like loosed cord, but didn’t. Up close, his nose had a large bump on the bridge; his eyebrows thick and dark; his lips thin as grass blades. Without wiping my face, I stepped away from him.

  “Now I look like a proper mourner,” I said.

  A smile flickered across his face, and I turned toward the cemetery. He grabbed his bags with his left hand and kept his right on my arm as a brace against further explosion. Not for a moment had it occurred to either of us to abandon the shoot. He guided me down the central staircase to the core of the crater, looking over at me occasionally to reassure himself that I remained stable. Deep into right field, we stopped at the site he’d chosen. Beyond the huddle of gravestones, trees cut to resemble the sparse bend of a bonsai swirled and bowed.

  While Nick set up his equipment, he asked me to kneel in front of the grave and just observe. Sliced and fanned on a narrow green plate, the fishcake and sushi arched like a rainbow. A fat Buddha, incense at his feet, crouched beside the elaborately inscribed stone, commemorating a World War II soldier who’d died in 1944.

  “Can I borrow your lighter?”

  Nick tossed it to me and I lit the incense. Sitting before the grave was an intimate gesture—like reading someone’s diary or watching a guy zip his fly—and guilt spread over me even as peacefulness did. Kneeling at this grave felt like peeking behind the veil to the little fellow with the levers, and I imagined the man honored here, gone for more than fifty years. I imagined being his widow, his daughter, his mistress. He’d died at thirty-three, his body still firm, hair still full and dark. Or maybe not, maybe he’d been bald and wiry. It was impossible to say and did not really matter. Opened miniature kegs of Orion beer in front of the stone revealed enough. That morning, I sat for hours as Nick worked around me, oblivious to most of his process save the click of capture, letting the incense gird us as the sprinklers droned.

  “Can I take you to lunch?”

  “I’ve got my bike.”

  “We can throw it in the—”

  “I should get to class.”

  “I thought you didn’t teach until one.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “It’s not even noon.”

  I nodded. The smell of sushi had made me hungry, but not hungry enough to ride in his car.

  “I’ll tell you what. How about I take you to dinner this evening instead? That way we won’t be rushed. I’ve—I’ve got a Chevy Impala I’m restoring, and I’ll pick you up in that, OK?”

  “You don’t date your models.”

  “I haven’t paid you yet.”

  “Don’t quibble.”

  “Let me take you to dinner. I’m just going to worry about you all day anyway.”

  “Don’t. God, please don’t worry about me. I feel like an idiot. I don’t need pity or a guardian. I was surprised, you know? I was overwhelmed and I wigged out. It’s not a chronic condition.”

  I felt the lie the moment I said it. Wasn’t grief my chronic condition? Who the fuck was I kidding? Nick dragged his hair back from his face and looked at me steadily. He knew the lie as clearly as I did. He’d been so perfect all morning—suppressing any curiosity he had about the circumstances of my mother’s death; letting me weep like a fucking child and not once mentioning any of it; not pressing me—and now he refused to argue.

  He watched as I changed my shoes and unlocked my bike. The beekeeping photographer and the girl-freak—my T-shirt smelled like incense and I wondered if his did too.

  “Destroy the film.”

  “What?”

  “Expose the film now and I’ll go to dinner with you.”

  “It won’t change anything that happened today.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant. Can’t I change the way we’ll remember this: a girl at a gravesite; a coffin car; eyes the color of chlorophyll? I wanted to punch his nose, to flatten that bump on its bridge. We’ve always kept a record of mourning and struggle. I thought of Sisyphus rolling his stone uphill forever. Don’t we ever progress?

  “Expose the film.”

  He unzipped his bag, pulled five rolls of film, and knelt on the pavement before me. Later when Emily asked, Why Nick? Why then? I thought about that moment in the parking lot as he drew film out one handful at a time, the exposed frames spiraling onto the pavement, bouncing cheerily: all his hours of work, the morning spent at his feet. Nick worked deliberately, his eyes narrowed with focus, his dark hair often sliding across his face until he snagged it behind his ears in one seamless gesture. When he finished, he secured his bag and faced me.

  “You aren’t a vegetarian, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  I biked out of the parking lot, and when I looked back, he was still watching me.

  XX.

  Light glared through the pale greenhouse of my classroom, sifting among us as though it were hunting, or scavenging for roots. My class rattled off their third declension nouns as I listened to the symmetry of repetition and chorus: two dozen twenty-year-olds chanting a language that hung in the room like perfume.

  Language so clear, so defined that during recitation only the verbs were out of context, the present imperfect. Kyle fumbled with his translation of Ovid, surfer bangs riffled with a nervous gesture of his hand. During a debate about the meaning of Achilles’ fate, a British Lit major, Annabelle, who’d scored perfectly on each exam and homework assignment, drummed a pencil against her lips and stared out the window onto the common. Here we could talk like the dead: epulatus eram, epulatus eras, epulatus erat, epulati eramus, epulati eratis, epulati errant. Here we spoke of love potions and sons of centaurs with deliberate formality. Here treachery translated to proditus, a harmless enough word in Latin. Emily had said I frightened her, the way nothing moved me.

  XXI.

  Grey and I arrived early at Catacombs for the Flapper Party—men in tuxedos, women in short, loose-bodied dresses with cigarette holders and chic, feminine skull caps—to find the dark bar crowded with f
reaks. We had hoped, at 6 in the evening, to be among fifteen overzealous people seat-saving for two exclusive sets featuring the slick croon of Diana Waelly, The Remake Queen, in this swank and enigmatic jazz cave. Instead, descending the stone steps into the dim, smoke-clouded cavern, we collided with swirling teenyboppers, tourists, and way too many old men in top hats for my taste. But we pressed through to the bar anyway, counting on a couple of whiskeys to make us more social.

  Grey was wearing a tuxedo for the first time in my memory and looked ravishing. Every girl in the place—as well as a number of men—glared at me insinuatingly as if only blowjobs could keep such a guy at my side. I’d worn a sleeveless rouge-colored dress, a black headband with a peacock feather, slingbacks, and my best intentions. The queue to order drinks stretched back for centuries.

  “Every chick in here hates me,” I told him.

  “I hate you too.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You actually combed your hair tonight, didn’t you?”

  “It won’t last. My hair has a mind of its own.”

  “You look really good, actually. Taller.”

  “You’re darling. Are we staying here?”

  “Have to,” he said. “The gang’s all coming here and I volunteered us to be place-holders. I’m not getting stuck at some table by the men’s room. We’re going to be close enough to see the sweat on Diana Waelly’s upper lip.”

  “You should have fed me. I’m in a filthy mood.”

  “We can get something to eat here. Shit, grab that table and I’ll get the drinks.”

  Four elephantine girls had labored off their stools, and begun the slow procession toward the door, so I snaked their table and waved down a waitress to order a plate of calamari and two house salads.

  “Service is delayed tonight,” she began.

  “No worries, I’ll pass the time with some whiskey.”