Red Audrey and the Roping

by Jill Malone

  “You don’t live in a vacuum, Jane. Just because you disassociate, doesn’t mean we all do. All these compartments; all these different characters you conjure up to deal with the people in your life. I’ve watched you in a room with people, Jane, and you always seem like you’re alone. You’re so focused on yourself—this self-obsession of numbness—that you’re hollowed out. Sometimes when I’m talking to you I just wait for the echo.”

  “My self-obsession of numbness?”

  We were off track. The train derailed, crushing villagers, suburbs, an entire city. This had started with me being outraged. I was the one with the legitimate issue.

  Earlier that afternoon, Dr. Adams had called me into her office to stage an intervention. It was priceless. She sat on the edge of her desk in front of the red-cushioned chair and talked to me with a practiced maternal murmur. Hands folded in her lap, legs crossed at the ankle, her blue earrings—dolphins—battered against her neck as she told me what a fine job I was doing. How my students consistently achieved high marks. How the midterm feedback from my student evaluations had been positive. My peers found me a pleasure to work with. Excepting one little issue, she added. An issue, she said again, not necessarily a problem.

  She paused. I looked at the stacks of books on the floor, the crumpled heaps of paper strewn about the desk, the shelves, the other chairs, the disarray of academia, then stared back at her. Her forehead furrowed with gravity. It was tough. Whatever was coming was tough. I concentrated on her earrings.

  With a tremor in her deep rich voice she asked: Was it drugs? Did I have a problem with drugs? My moodiness, my attire, my erratic behavior all spoke to a drug problem. How could she help? she asked. She wanted so much to help me. The blue dolphins bobbed importantly. My students loved me. There was so much to stay clean for. I was all potential (I’m paraphrasing). I had my whole life ahead of me.

  Naturally, I was outraged. Who the fuck did she think she was, accusing me of having a drug problem? I’d eaten at her house, for Christ sake. Had my students complained? No. Then what the fuck was I doing in her opium den of an office talking about a non-existent drug problem with a woman who had just finished telling me my students were doing well and even liked me?

  I mean, if we wanted to start reading into things, why not read into the fact that her office was a fucking sty? How about reading into that one? What does it mean when someone is disorganized? Maybe they’re on methamphetamines. Maybe they’re ruining their lives with heroin. Maybe they have no integrity. Maybe they’re just slovenly. Maybe, had she ever considered, people had character flaws and drugs weren’t a factor. I mean, what the fuck? Here I relied on this argument a number of times, as I stood and backed toward the door, stepping carefully around the towers of books in the walkway. I mean, seriously, I intoned with as much moral dismay as possible, what the fuck?

  She let me get to the door before she called out: “I’ve scheduled an appointment for you with the nurses’ office. You take a complete drug test Tuesday morning—hair sample, blood, and urine. This is non-negotiable and I encourage you, Dr. Elliot, not to take it to the Dean. As the head of the Classics Department, much is left to my discretion, and the more quietly this is handled, the better for all of us, especially you.”

  I let the door close on her. My temper flared inside me like kerosene.

  I’d driven straight to Audrey’s and busted into the studio, where she was working on a chalk drawing of a kite or a hang-glider—something winged.

  “Is it legal?” I demanded after walking her through the saga. “They can’t legally make me take a drug test, can they? I mean, I took one for UPS, of course, but that was different. That was company policy. Everyone had to take one. This is just me taking one because some asshole voiced a suspicion that’s completely unfounded.”

  Audrey had said nothing.

  “I mean, there will be a certain sense of vindication when the test results are negative, but I resent being made to do this. It can’t be ethical. It can’t be legal. Isn’t this an invasion of my privacy? Some rights are being violated. I feel really violated. Maybe I should call the ACLU.”

  “Maybe you should just take the test.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I think you should take the test. Adams is right; it’s in your best interest to keep this whole thing quiet. You clear your name and that’s the last you’ll hear of it.”

  “I’m not a fucking drug addict.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s wrong to make me take this test.”

  “I know you’re not a drug addict, Jane. But you can’t blame them for being troubled by your behavior.”

  “You cannot be serious. You think they have a right to do this to me?”

  “I think they’re responding to—I think you’re different and they’re responding to that. They’ve noticed something’s wrong and the only thing that fits with what they’ve observed is drug use. I think they genuinely want to help you; they’ve just misdiagnosed the problem.”

  The light was failing through the windows and the room darkened around us, blurring the chalk lines more desperately on the easel. I’d always loved the studio; it was like being inside a lantern. The large windows made everything brighter and the smell in the place was crisp and tangy with paint. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I’d come down to the studio and look at the works in progress, trying to decipher the strokes of Audrey’s vision—to glimpse her imagination taking shape.

  Something inside me was rotten. I felt ill, even in this room of light. I left and walked the three blocks to her flat. Audrey would have to clean up before she followed me, and I tried to settle myself, to mute the festering inside my belly. I thought I could taste bile.

  It was dusk when Audrey climbed the stairs to the flat. On the landing, I heard her shoes drop in tired thuds. The door sighed closed and then she was in the kitchen, pouring a whiskey. Wasn’t I betrayed? Wasn’t I wronged?

  I sat on one of the barstools and waited for her to comfort me. Now that she’d had time to think about the ludicrous proposition of an employer forcing me to take a drug test—surely once she’d considered from a rational perspective she would see that I had no alternative but to call the ACLU. No one turned on the kitchen light as night crept in.

  “The drug test is not the issue, Jane. This is about you. This is about hiding in your clothes and smarting when you lean back in a chair. You don’t see it, but everyone around you senses the change in you. I move my hand sometimes and you flinch. You claim you’re numb, but I think you feel too much. Bruises and scars, cuts down your back, you’re so pale now that you look anemic. I don’t understand why you let this happen. I don’t understand why you let him do this to you.”

  She waited but I wasn’t speaking.

  “You with Nick affects you with me. You with Nick affects you at work, and you with Emily and you with Grey. We’re all related to this sick shit. And I don’t understand where your impulse comes from. You’re a brilliant, cocky woman and you keep going back to this sadist as though you want to be punished for something. I don’t understand it. We never talk about this. Why don’t we ever talk about this?”

  Her look then was my father’s: excepting this we might be happy. Oh the triumph.

  “My self-obsession of numbness.”

  And then I hear it. It echoes right through me.

  XXXXII.

  I didn’t want to tell this part. I’d like to say the Saturday evening I came to the photography studio with takeout from the Thai restaurant down the street, Nick admitted that he’d wanted to quit as well, he was frightened too, we’d agreed. I’d like to say no hard feelings. Didn’t we both deserve that much?

  In the studio, the air conditioner droned through the ceiling vent, the air felt cold and unnatural, and most of the lights had been turned off since the staff went home at 6:00 p.m. I set the boxes of Thai on a couple of stools and called out to Nick. All that day, I’d debated writing a letter instead of c
oming to the studio to see him, but I knew he’d argue, he’d want the personal debate, and I’d regretted following my coward’s instinct before. In the end I had to say over so he believed over, so I believed over.

  He came out and smiled at me, unrolling the sleeves of his clay-colored oxford, buttoning the wrists, his eyes a deep beautiful green. I thought of Audrey’s painting of a woman in a wooden chair with an egg balanced in her palm. The woman’s hair dark and shorn, her dress hiked to her knees, legs bare—the collapsed elegance of her posture and the egg and the pristine chair. I was never gentle. When Nick tried to kiss me—his unmarked wrists at my hipbones—I pulled away, turned my face, thought traitor, traitor; meaning myself, naming him and the practiced humiliation we’d inflicted on one another in the dark, our habit of carelessness.

  And I felt it then, the purity of it burning through me: rage. The myths—the scaffold of myths—that constructed me, I doused in turpentine and lighted. I’d thought pain would be another path to love, the long way round. If my grief were etched on my skin—the vulnerability of the girl on the kitchen floor unaware that a car engine has turned over in the garage—then my grief would be a real and visible wound, a wound that could heal. But it hadn’t worked that way: now my body was scarred too. Even from this distance I have no adequate explanations. That evening in Nick’s photography studio, I set a fire, and expected a glorious consumption of the room and its contents, I expected cinders as I showed him my wrists.

  “Look at me. Look what you’ve done. Look at me. You fucking sadist. You fucking demon. It’s over. It’s all over, you mother-fucking psycho.”

  The shock of his face, the horrible stillness of the room, the sickness pitching through my belly and singeing my throat, my mouth, my nose; I trembled with the taste and the hum of it. I rushed forward and punched him in the throat; our bodies hurtling backwards into the stools scattered curried pork, green beans, pad thai noodles across the tiled floor.

  Camera tripods collapsed into an arbor of light stands. The floor slick and stinking of coconut, an overturned stool rammed into my back; clay in my vision field, I tried to kneel: blood in my mouth, on our hands, from his nose. I dropped my arms, taking shots to my jawbone as though knuckles could change anything.

  Maybe they could. Maybe it should’ve taken more to move me. Maybe less.

  All weekend under the banyans, I slept, fevered dreams, my face covered with a bag of frozen peaches. I kept the lights off in my studio, moved little, avoided the bathroom mirror. Monday morning, I biked to Longs Drugstore and phoned Dr. Adams to say I’d been hit by a car while cycling downtown Sunday afternoon. She told me to take as much time off as I needed, that she’d find someone to cover for me. Her worried voice, “Take care of yourself.”

  Then I phoned Human Resources at UPS and fed them the same story, said I’d be out for the week recovering, as if come next Tuesday, I would be a new and better girl, a girl without a finger-painted face. I bought more frozen peaches, milk, frozen apple juice concentrate, bananas, and vanilla extract, planning to live off milkshakes the entire week.

  Tuesday afternoon, I woke to voices outside the studio, Grey demanding the keys and jostling them into the lock, and then Emily’s face peeking around the doorway: “Honey?”

  “Janie, you inside?” Grey called.

  I’d sat up on the futon, the sleeping bag swaddling me in the cold, shadowed room.

  “Oh my god,” Emily said, half extending her arm as she walked toward me, her hand suspended awkwardly in midair. “Your face.”

  “Janie, are you alright? Why didn’t you call us? I have to hear from some chick in HR that you got hit by a car?”

  Emily sat beside me on the futon while Grey knelt at my knee, peering into my face as though he meant to read my fortune.

  “Have you seen a doctor?” Grey asked anxiously.

  “Jesus,” Emily said, taking one of my hands in hers. “Look at your fucking knuckles. Where the hell did this happen?”

  All the lies. The years of lies. I looked from one pair of brown eyes to the other, wanting so much not to disappoint either of them anymore.

  Emily looked at Grey, anxiety a dialect between them, as she whispered, “Maybe she has a concussion.”

  “It wasn’t a car. Nick and I had a fight Saturday night.”

  Grey stood up, yanked his hands through his curls, “He did this to you?”

  “I hit him first.”

  “Janie, he’s got eighty pounds on you, it doesn’t fucking matter if you hit him first.”

  I shook my head, incapable of explaining properly, “It’s over now.”

  “What do you mean it’s over?”

  “I gave him the sentence, he added the punctuation.”

  “Oh, I see, those bruises are just a grammar lesson.”

  “Stop it, Ryan.”

  He looked at Emily, his body posture a question mark.

  “You’re going to let this go?” she asked me.

  “You’re going to let this go? You’re going to let this go?” Grey repeated, his voice strained, incredulous, like feedback reverberating off the hardwood floors.

  I leaned back on the futon, too tired for more, “It’s over.”

  I woke in the night with Grey asleep next to me on the futon, his hand clasping mine so tightly that some of the cuts on my knuckles bled. Emily dozed in the chair beside us, she smelled of cigarettes. When I touched her thigh, her eyes opened immediately.

  “How did you get that scar on your eye?”

  She leaned forward in the dark, her fingertips light against my eyebrows, her voice soft, “I fell down an escalator when I was five.”

  “You were right,” I told her.

  “About what, honey?”

  “You can’t keep it in the bedroom.”

  “Shhhh,” she said. Her hair brushed lightly against my face, and I struggled with sleep while she traced each eye, down my nose, around my lips with her fingertips. Outside, a dog barked. The traitor is free, I thought. The traitor is free.

  Eleven days. I hadn’t seen her for eleven days. The bruises a ghastly yellow, but less painful, Audrey’s blue eyes scanned my face as she stood at the threshold of her studio, before moving back from the doorway to let me enter. Inside the cool white room, four large windows high on the walls invoked the muted reverence of a church despite the strong smell of paint, tarps thrown on the ground, and the ugly, speckled smock Audrey wore. Wooden shelves stretched to the ceiling on my right, for paint, pencils, chalk, drawing pads, brushes, pails, and razor blades. Behind her easel, several rows of canvases lined the floor.

  She’d disappeared into the back, and I propped my bicycle against the door, wandered over to her easel to examine a charcoal sketch of some strange creature—a large, vague bird. Around the studio Audrey had tacked various pictures from newspapers and magazines, poems ripped from The New Yorker, maps of every conceivable place.

  She returned with a cup of tea for each of us, handed one to me, then pulled the stepladder away from the shelves, perched lightly, and watched me take a sip. Jeff Buckley’s Grace played on the stereo in the farthest corner of the room. The tea tasted of ginger and chamomile. Her gray, paint-flecked smock rested midway down her thighs, and her hair looked especially wild as though she’d been shaken fiercely. She still hadn’t spoken.

  “I thought once I got here I’d think of the perfect thing to say and then I’d be able to convince you that—that I’m bringing you my best intentions. But somehow I’m not even convinced. I’m sorry I met you like this. I wish I were braver—”

  I faltered then, shook my head, stared at her small brown clogs. I’m afraid to love you, I wanted to say. That horrible way. I’m afraid to love you fiercely.

  The light changed in the studio while she sat there, slanting through the window sudden and bright over her shoulder. Her hair orange, brown, red—the light shifted across us. My tea went cold. I crossed to her and crouched so that our heads were level; her knees parted, the cup
at rest on the step above her.

  “A man woke on the floor of a room he did not know. Beside him were the bodies of his two children, his wife. A knife lay next to his wife’s hand. His family dead, the man took up the knife and stabbed his chest, but the skin did not break; the knife made no mark.

  “The man ran from the house, down to the cliffs below his village and threw himself onto the sharp rocks below. His body remained untouched; he lived. He stood in the market square, offering money to anyone who would challenge him in mortal combat. Many tried, but no one could so much as bruise him. The man joined armies, fought as a mercenary without armor, returned unscathed from every battle. His body never wearied, never aged.

  “Years passed and the man journeyed to the throne of the gods. He called out to them, ‘You gods, I curse you. Cowards! Schemers! I defy you.’ But the gods only smiled, nodding.

  “‘You are weak,’ he told the gods. ‘You are afraid of me.’ One of the gods came forward, and said: ‘She killed the children that you might live unchanged. She killed herself that you might be immortal. You are protected. You are free.’ The god returned to his throne. ‘Free?’ the man said and began to laugh. ‘Free with no choice, no death, no companion?’ But the gods only smiled, nodding.”

  A worrying, inscrutable expression stared back at me from Audrey’s face. She didn’t move. Forgive, Audrey, forgive. I wanted to suspend myself from the ceiling like a potted plant or a tired spider. To be sketched into a different animal and rested on the floor of this cluttered white church. In the end, all I had to offer her were stories.

  “After my mother died, I used to walk every afternoon to the mango grove and tell myself stories. It was like love, returning every day to that loneliness, to our ghosts, trying to remember the precise words my mother had used, the way her voice had shaped the telling. Audrey, I’m better than this. Let me prove it.”

  A single fat tear slipped down her face. I realized then the chalked sketch on the easel was a dragon, not a bird.