by Ann McMan
She still made time, however, for her sacred ritual every twelve hours. Grace suspected that this proclivity of Grendel’s would never change.
Grace shucked her regalia and sat down to check her email messages. There were two new ones since that morning. One was from Grady, asking if she’d like to use the cabin the upcoming weekend. He offered her the boat, and said he wanted her to have another shot at staying out there before they cleaned the place out and got it ready to sell. He also asked her to collect any of her personal belongings and bring them back with her. “I know how hard this is going to be for you, and I’m sorry to ask you to do this,” he wrote. “But Karen wants to move on this as quickly as possible, and you know how she is when she gets how she gets and has her mind set on something. Let me know for sure if you want to head out there, okay? See you around, G-diddy.”
Grace smiled at Grady’s use of his wishful nickname, and sat for a minute, staring at the computer screen.
Damn. This whole thing was a serious drag. She really had no right to be as upset about it as she felt. It made sense for Grady and Karen to want to maximize their resources and buy a house. They weren’t getting any younger—and they had small children to raise.
But to lose access to the cabin on Butler Island—permanently?
That sucked. And it especially sucked coming on the heels of so many other losses.
She shot a quick note back to Grady, telling him that yes, absolutely, she’d take him up on the weekend offer. In fact, she’d find a way to blow off her Friday morning classes so she could get an extra day out there.
Why the hell not? She was going to be quitting tomorrow, anyway . . .
The second email was from her new editor at Algonquin Books. She’d followed up and sent Grace copies of all the contract offers. Grace had already written back to CK’s buddy at Artist Management to formalize her relationship with him. It looked like his efforts would net him a solid 15 percent of any royalty money Ochre earned after publication.
That sucked, too—but she understood that this was the way things worked in the book trade. Without his contacts, no one at Algonquin would’ve looked at her pages twice. Hell . . . once. Like most mainstream publishers, Algonquin did not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Her editor also forwarded a link to a New York Times article Grace hadn’t seen yet. “You might find the attached interesting,” she wrote. “Looks like your girl’s whereabouts is no longer a mystery. This makes your book especially timely, and we may want to get with our catalog people to try and expedite publication. This can sometimes happen if the manuscript is clean, as I suspect yours is, and doesn’t require many rounds of changes. Be thinking that idea over, and we’ll discuss once you return the e-signed documents.”
Grace clicked on the link to the article and about fell out of her chair when the story displayed on her screen. “A de Kooning, a Theft and an Enduring Mystery,” the headline read. Below the byline was a photo of a security guard at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, posing with “Woman Ochre,” which had finally been discovered hanging behind a door in the bedroom of a modest ranch house in New Mexico. The painting, which had been missing since its theft in 1985, had been positively identified, and returned to its rightful owners at the museum.
Grace’s head was spinning. Ochre had been found? And not as she had imagined—languishing in the subterranean salon of some moneyed, off-the-grid collector in Milan or Paris. But in suburban New Mexico—hidden behind a door in a ranch house on a mesa.
It was an incredible and unlikely end to one of the art world’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
And it was an outcome that took her thoughts about how she’d end her own epic tale about the painting and its captivity, and blew them to proverbial kingdom come.
What the hell would she do now? And why wasn’t her editor reacting to this news the way she was?
It didn’t make sense.
She read the rest of the story and shook her head in amazement.
The article about the painting’s discovery provided a few more details about the initial theft. After “Woman Ochre” had been slashed from her frame on the day after Thanksgiving in 1985, the security guard at the museum recalled that the couple deemed responsible for the theft seemed odd—and commented that one of the two perpetrators appeared to be a man dressed as a woman.
To Grace, the discovery of “Woman Ochre’s” whereabouts was a paradigm shift. What did this revelation mean for Grace’s Ochre, and her fictionalized sojourn with so many imagined captors? Was Ochre’s entire journey now just the product of simple illusion, writ large? Did the truth now revealed make her story cross over from the realm of magic realism to skirt the edges of fantasy or science fiction?
She really had no idea. She was going to have to live with the information for a while and see what would shake out from what she knew would be countless hours of thoughtful rumination.
Correction. Not countless. She had to solve this puzzle, and soon—especially if Algonquin now wanted to try and expedite publication of the book.
It was ironic, really. Ochre was like the antithesis of T.S. Eliot’s wayfarer in The Four Quartets. At the end of her exploration, she would arrive where she started and know the place—not at all.
Grace had an inkling that she was on to something.
Perhaps that was the key for Ochre? To understand that being returned to the sterile environment of a cold museum hall constituted a captivity greater than all the others?
Yeah. She closed her email browser and opened the manuscript file.
It was time to write.
# # #
Day morphed into night faster than Grace could’ve imagined. Grendel’s escalating complaints about wanting her dinner finally succeeded in distracting Grace from working on the novel. She also knew she needed to set the book aside and prepare to make her clandestine way to Abbie’s house.
After she fed Grendel, she grabbed a black jacket from the hall closet.
Do people dress in dark clothing for this kind of thing?
Why did they even bother to sneak around? It wasn’t like half the campus didn’t already know about their trysts.
“C’mon, girl. Let’s go outside and go pee-pee.” She clapped her hands to get Grendel to follow her to the backyard. Once they were outside, she gave Grendel a good scrub of the ears and a big Busy Bone.
“See you later on, pal.”
She left the porch door ajar for Grendel, just like before.
Just like before? Good god . . . I’ve become a real floozy. Agnes would be so proud.
But this time, Grace was resolved not to spend the night with Abbie. Until her status at the college was resolved, she had no desire to toss any more kerosene on the flames of her failed career prospects.
The walk to Abbie’s along back streets took only about ten minutes. Grace was fortunate not to pass anyone she knew. And it was easy for her to cross the quad and head toward the college library, which was conveniently located behind the president’s residence. All Grace had to do was veer off the brick sidewalk and duck unseen behind a conveniently placed hedgerow—and voila! She was on the patio at the side of Abbie’s house.
Sure enough, Abbie had left one of the big patio doors unlocked, and Grace stepped inside with far less ceremony than her last nocturnal visit to the house. She was trying to decide which way to head to find the stairs that led to the upstairs apartment when she heard Abbie’s voice call out to her.
“Grace? I’m up here. Turn right at the door and head to the end of the hallway. You’ll see the stairs on the left.”
“Okay,” Grace replied. She followed Abbie’s directions and made her way to the second floor of the big house. Abbie was in her small but nicely appointed kitchen, standing at a countertop cutting up raw vegetables.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I got next to nothing to eat all day and I’m famished. I very nearly ordered us a pizza.”
Grace walked over to where she
stood and hesitated only a moment before kissing her on the cheek.
“I’m famished,” she said. “And why not order a pizza? You don’t have to defend your culinary peculiarities to anyone now. You be the boss.”
“Really?” Abbie stopped chopping. She looked down at her mound of what Grace knew were locally sourced veggies. “Screw nutrition,” she said, and dropped her chef’s knife. “Where’s the phone?”
“Beats me,” Grace said. “I’ve never had the privilege to breathe this rarified air before.”
“Well that’s not true.” Abbie rolled her blue eyes. “As I recall, you breathed quite a bit of this rarefied air the other night.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t count. You never actually gave me a tour. Besides—if memory serves, I was doing a lot more gasping than breathing.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Oh, it’s no one’s fault,” Grace clarified. “And I’m certainly not complaining—so don’t draw the wrong inference.”
“Uh huh.” Abbie wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “I just hope that like most scientific experiments, it’s replicable.”
“I see you have the entertainment portion of the evening figured out.”
Abbie laughed. “The phone is on the small desk behind you. If you would kindly hand it to me, I can call Mimmo’s and order our dinner before giving you the grand tour of my pied-à-terre.”
Grace gave her the phone. “Great idea—but Mimmo’s doesn’t deliver.”
Abbie plucked a card off the side of the refrigerator. “Yes, they do. It seems that rank has its privileges. What do you like on yours?”
“Anything but onions,” Grace said.
“Okay.” Abbie began to dial the number.
“Or olives. I really hate olives,” Grace added.
“No olives,” Abbie said. “Okay.”
“Oh, god—no anchovies.”
Abbie dropped the phone to her shoulder. “Anything else?”
“Well. I don’t really eat banana peppers, but I can pick them off if you like them.”
Abbie sighed. “Hello,” she said into the phone. “This is Dr. Williams at the college. I’d like to place an order for home delivery. That’s right—for my residence. I’d like a medium pizza with extra cheese. No. No other toppings. Right. You have my credit card information? Great. Thank you. Forty-five minutes is perfect. See you shortly.” She hung up.
“Extra cheese?” Grace asked.
Abbie glared at her. “If you tell me you hate cheese, this relationship is over.”
“Oh, no. I love cheese.”
“Well, thank god.” Abbie put the phone down on the countertop. She eyed Grace with suspicion. “You’d better be telling the truth.”
“I promise,” Grace insisted. “I love cheese almost as much as I love you.”
Abbie looked surprised by Grace’s casual declaration—but nowhere near as surprised as Grace felt at just blurting the words out like that. The problem was—she meant them. Literally.
Well. Not that part about the cheese . . .
“I just said that, didn’t I?” Grace asked her.
Abbie nodded.
“Oh, god, Abbie. I’m sorry. I know that makes me sound like a real loser. Don’t let it scare you off, okay?”
“So, you only meant the phrase anecdotally? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes. No.” Grace closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, Abbie was still regarding her with an odd expression. “What’s the right answer?” she asked. “You tell me.”
“I can’t tell you what’s right for you,” Abbie said. “But I can tell you what’s true for me.”
Grace could feel her heart pounding
Abbie took a step closer and bent toward her. “I love cheese,” she whispered.
Grace socked her on the arm. “Asshole.”
Abbie laughed merrily.
Grace sulked.
Abbie ended their standoff.
“Buck up, amoureux,” she said. “I love you, too.”
Grace tried not to smile like an idiot, but she couldn’t help it. Abbie was smiling, too.
Grace closed the distance between them and pulled Abbie into her arms.
“So, about this tour . . .” she began.
“We have forty-five minutes,” Abbie said.
Grace kissed her. “Then we’d better work fast.”
# # #
When Grace got home early the next morning, she was greeted by an email from her department chair, Sharon Glaspell. Sharon asked if she could meet her at the academic dean’s office on Thursday at 2 p.m., after Grace’s one o’clock class finished. Grace wasn’t at all surprised to hear from Sharon—although she was impressed by how quickly she and the dean arranged to meet with her so soon after Bryce’s salacious allegations.
No flies on them.
She’d thought long and hard about whether to tell Abbie about all that was likely to transpire in a few days, but she decided against doing so. For one thing, she knew Abbie would try to talk her out of resigning—and, Abbie being Abbie, would probably threaten to resign herself, as a means toward salvaging Grace’s career.
She couldn’t let that happen. Especially not after going through the ceremony yesterday and gaining an even profounder sense of what all Abbie was bringing to the college and its broader community. Losing Grace would be a blip on the college radar. Losing Abbie at this juncture? That event would be cataclysmic for the burgeoning morale of the place—not to mention, a blow to its improved academic standing.
Grace would land on her feet. She always did. And now with the offer from Algonquin, she had a world of new opportunities to explore.
Besides, she’d have precious little opportunity to exchange two words with Abbie between now and the end of the week. The board of trustees was on campus because of the inauguration, and they were holding their biannual summit meetings with campus leadership over the course of the next two days. Abbie would essentially be under lockdown for the duration.
Maybe that would end up being a good thing. It would allow each of them the chance to get some emotional distance and clarity—something in short supply lately. Especially for Grace.
She was meeting CK for breakfast at Maple City Diner. Grace had suggested the place because it was outside the town limits on Swanton Road, and that meant there’d be less chance they’d run into students or other members of the faculty. She wanted to fill CK in on her plans, and she didn’t want to risk being overheard—or having CK overheard when she erupted and told Grace to have her fucking head examined.
As usual, CK was already there. She was reading a magazine article and was most of the way through her obligatory maple shake when Grace joined her. There were also two mugs of coffee on the table.
“How can you drink a milkshake first thing in the morning?” Grace asked, tossing her messenger bag onto the seat in their booth.
“How can you drink that bland, six-dollar coffee water that’s sucked through a vacuum tube?” CK replied before taking another loud slurp of her shake.
“À chacun ses goûts.”
“Seriously?” CK rolled her eyes. “It’s clear you’re spending too much time with our new President.”
Grace picked up a menu. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing, did I?” CK closed her magazine.
Grace noticed the title. Helix. “You got an article in there?” she asked.
CK made a face. “In this piece of sophomoric pablum? Hell, no. I was previewing some content to see if it were dumbed-down enough for my 101 students. Sadly, the articles contain too many three-syllable words. I wonder if Highlights Magazine has any issues devoted to the principles of quantum mechanics and its relationship to relativity?”
“Probably.” Grace shrugged. “Highlights was always my go-to resource growing up. It taught me to understand that my mind would always betray me—and that horrible things would last forever.”
&n
bsp; “See?” CK brightened up. “Perfect. Those are precisely the driving principles behind my work.”
“Who knew quantum physics had so much in common with the Roman Catholic Church?”
“Oh, good god. Are you still in sackcloth and ashes over Sister Maury Povich, or whatever in the hell that lesbo activist ex-nun’s name is?”
“Mary Lawrence,” Grace corrected. “And, so what if I am? Being an unrepentant apostate doesn’t give you the right to throw stones at people of faith.”
CK looked at her with incredulity. “That has to be the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Grace said. “Because that’ll take the sting out of what comes next.”
CK narrowed her eyes. “What’s that?”
“I’m meeting with Sharon Glaspell and Eddie Meeker on Thursday—at their request. Care to guess why?”
“Oh, lemme see. Does it involve a walking asshole with no dick and three first names?”
“That’s a big ten-four,” Grace replied.
“That fucking waste of skin. So? He did it? He ratted you out?”
“It would appear so.”
Their server appeared and deposited two big platters heaped with pancakes, home fries and bendy bacon.
“Thanks, Jessamyn,” CK said. “Did you heat up the syrup?”
“You bet, CK.” Jessamyn waved and wandered off. “Give me a holler when you need more coffee.”
Grace gaped at the mounds of food.
“Whattsamatter?” CK asked. She was already liberally dousing her pancakes with the thick, amber-colored syrup. “You know I always order for you. It saves time because you’re incapable of commitment.”
“It would take me the rest of my natural life to eat all of this.”
“Well, that’s the beauty of pancakes. They expand to fill the time allotted. Besides,” CK added, “I only need one more purchase on my Pancake Punch Card.”