Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  The next morning my body was heavier, my pocketbook lighter, and my head pounding from the excesses of the previous evening. But hey, you only go around once. God knows, Chase’s untimely demise and Toni’s betrayal demonstrated that we get no guarantees in life.

  After several cups of strong black coffee, courtesy of the Days Inn desk clerk, I got back on the road and aimed my car toward North Carolina. Destination: Asheville.

  The rain had ended overnight. The morning dawned chilly and fresh and bright, and I had the sense that I had driven through some invisible barrier into another world. The air had lost that fishy smell that hung along the banks of the Tennessee-Tombigbee. Sluggish brown creeks gave way to clear streams that burbled over rocks and tumbled downhill in a flash of white water. Long before I anticipated it, I crested a rise just outside a little town called Travelers Rest and got my first glimpse of the mountains.

  I pulled off on the shoulder and sat there staring, my hands gripping the wheel and my breath coming in shaky gasps. People talk about the majesty of the Rockies, but there’s no beauty on earth like the Blue Ridge. The Rockies are young mountains, high and hard and angular and bare. These are soft with age, dusted with snow like powdered sugar, and wreathed in mist. Trustworthy mountains, unchanged and unchangeable. Blue and purple and dark green and gray, folded together in layers. I could feel their steadi ness, a comfort like old flannel, as if they were embracing me, drawing me in and welcoming me home.

  I knew better, at least in my mind. Home was back there, four hundred miles behind me, where I’d lived all my life, where my husband was buried and my restaurant sat waiting and everybody knew my name.

  Where I’d have to go back to, eventually.

  The thought gave me no pleasure. So for now, for just a little while, I’d let the mountains enclose me, let myself pretend I belonged. Pretend I was coming home.

  All the tourist brochures used words like “artsy” and “diverse” to describe Asheville, and I reckon they were right. The city seemed to be populated with aging hippies in blue jeans, young musicians who serenaded on downtown street corners, middle-aged women with tattoos who played African drums in the square. It was a little bit like being in a foreign country, except that everybody spoke English. Not a blessed thing like Chulahatchie, that much was certain.

  But since my goal at the moment was to get as far away from Chulahatchie as possible, I determined just to relax and enjoy the diversity. I found an available room at a bed-and-breakfast on Montford Avenue, near downtown, and signed the charge slip without even looking at the price.

  Map in hand, I found my way down to Biltmore Village and spent the afternoon wandering around the shops. At five I ate a chicken quesadilla at a restaurant called La Paz, and at six went across the street to the Biltmore Estate, which was already lit up for Christmas. I whipped out my Visa card again and joined a gaggle of other out-of-towners for the candlelight tour. We all gaped and oohed and ahhed at the sheer size and opulence of the place, while a string quartet and a Victorian caroling group entertained us in the background.

  The Biltmore was impressive, especially when you consider it used to be a private home, but I sure as heck wouldn’t have wanted to clean it. And I couldn’t help thinking about Boone, who undoubtedly would have had a thing or two to say about the flocked wallpaper in the bedrooms.

  A couple of days later I went up to the Grove Park Inn, where they were having their annual gingerbread house contest. The Grove Park, now that was amazing, with its huge lobby and two fireplaces big enough to park a Volkswagen in. Much more to my taste—lots of stonework and simple arts-and-crafts designs.

  I wandered through the hallways, looking at the gingerbread house displays and wondering if I could have done that. These weren’t your basic gingerbread houses, with four walls and a roof—they were gingerbread mansions, edible castles, large as the most elaborate dollhouse. I discovered a white-frosted antebellum with a wide front verandah that reminded me of Peach Rondell’s house in Chulahatchie. A three-story Queen Anne with a tiny, intricate balcony under the eaves. There was even a gingerbread version of the Biltmore, complete with all the towers and turrets and a little gingerbread greenhouse off to one side.

  After the gingerbread display, I took a glass of wine out to the Sunset Terrace. Chilly as it was, I stayed and stayed, watching the play of light and color over the western mountains. The tangerine ball of the sun hovered just at the top of the ridge, scattering gold and pink and purple into the clouds. Then it slipped behind the peaks, and the sky deepened to plum and navy blue, and a single star came out, a pinprick of light against the darkness.

  Peace seeped into me along with the cold, and I found myself praying once more, wishing on that star, calling out to the universe. Not yelling this time, but whispering, a single word: “Help.” As before, no answer came, but at least I felt a little more comfortable with the silence.

  I stayed until the cold worked its way down to my bones, then went back inside and warmed up in front of the huge fireplace. At last I retrieved my car from the valet, tipped him five dollars, and headed back down the mountain toward my B&B.

  I was sitting next to the fire in the parlor, eating a toasted turkey sub, when my landlady—or innkeeper, or whatever she’s called—slipped in behind me and cleared her throat. “Oh!” I jerked, and spilled crumbs down my front onto her Oriental carpet. “Sorry. I guess I ought not be eating in here.”

  “You’re fine. Nothing a quick vacuuming won’t fix.” She settled into the chair opposite me and smiled. “So how’s your visit to Asheville? Having a good time?”

  I looked at her, for the first time, really looked. I had only seen her twice—once when I checked in and then this morning at breakfast. She was younger than I initially thought—early forties, maybe. Wildish auburn hair, Irish eyes, very little makeup. She wore a sweeping kind of blue-green floral skirt with a matching T-shirt and an oatmeal-colored cable-knit cardigan. Her name, I thought I remembered, was Nell.

  No, that wasn’t right. Neal. Neal McLellan.

  I roused myself to answer her question. “I’ve been to Biltmore, and shopping, and to the Grove Park. Think I’m going to go over to Wall Street and the Grove Arcade tomorrow, and just kind of wander around downtown.”

  “And how is it for you, traveling alone?”

  The innocent question was a punch in the gut, and before I could stop them, tears welled up to choke me. Much to my surprise, Neal didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable when I began to cry, nor did she apologize. She simply waited.

  There was something about her—something welcoming, like the mountains themselves. Ageless, eternal. As if she had nothing better in the world to do than sit there forever, being available to me, listening to whatever I chose to say.

  “It’s been a hard year,” I said. And then, without planning it, without even giving it permission to come out, I began to tell her about Chulahatchie, and about Chase, about Toni and Boone and Scratch and Tansie Orr and Marvin Beckstrom. I confessed everything, sure as if I’d suddenly turned Catholic and she was a priest: my shadow side, my anger, my depression, my best friend’s betrayal.

  At last it had all been told, and I was empty as a sucked-out frog.

  “Maybe you need to work some of those emotions out,” Neal said.

  “Isn’t that what I just did?” In spite of the gravity of the moment, I found myself laughing. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump on you.”

  “I’m glad you felt comfortable talking,” she said. “But I might have something else that would help as well.”

  She got up, went to a small desk in the corner, and pulled a trifold brochure out of a drawer. When she came back she was smiling.

  “Take it,” she said. “It’s this Saturday. I’ve been signed up for months. You can have my place.”

  I looked down at the brightly colored brochure. The Painting Experience, it read. An unprecedented journey into the wild territory of painting directly from intuition. It’s a
leap beyond the predicted and expected—a venture into color, form, and image, where no rules apply.

  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said. “I’m not an artist.”

  “That’s the whole point,” Neal said.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant, the whole point, and I couldn’t figure out how it would help, to save my life. But I thought, why not? Asheville was an artsy place. I could be artsy for one Saturday.

  “All right,” I said at last. “Thanks. It should be fun.”

  • 22 •

  The painting studio was on the fourth floor of a building adjacent to the Pack Place art gallery, with tall windows overlooking Pack Square. All the walls were covered with heavy cardboard, and in the center of the room were tall triangular stations created from what looked like refrigerator boxes. People—mostly women—were milling about, getting name tags, laying claim to a painting station, settling themselves in a circle of chairs at the back of the hall.

  Lots of people.

  Strange people.

  Not like people from Chulahatchie.

  I swear, I’d never come across the likes. I might as well have been picked up by the scruff of the neck and set down in some kind of circus. There were three women with crew cuts, two with dreadlocks, one with a purple Mohawk. More tattoos than I’d ever seen in all my born days. One woman was a dwarf who barely came up to my waist.

  I slapped my name tag on a station near the window, went to the circle of chairs, and chose a seat next to the most normal-looking person I could find. “I’m Dell,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “Suzanne,” she said. She turned and smiled, and I saw the nose ring. “This your first time?”

  I nodded.

  “Me, too. My husband, Tad, thinks it’s a waste of time and money, but a friend of mine did it and said it changed her life.” She laughed. “Maybe that’s what Tad’s afraid of.”

  How, I wondered, could a weekend painting workshop change somebody’s life?

  “I’m not expecting anything quite that radical,” I said. “I’m just here to have fun.”

  Suzanne opened her mouth to say something, but was interrupted by a shushing from the woman next to us.

  “Welcome,” someone said. “My name is Annie, and I’ll be one of the facilitators for this weekend’s workshop.”

  I turned my attention to the far end of the circle. It was the dwarf—or maybe they prefer to be called little people, I don’t know. She had curly blonde hair and sparkly blue eyes and a wide, easy smile that showed a mouthful of white teeth bracketed by deep dimples. From the waist up, she was more or less normally proportioned, but her legs were short and bowed, and she carried a little plastic step stool around to stand on.

  “Our other facilitators are Betsy, over there—” A tall woman in faded blue jeans raised a hand.

  “And Evonne—” She pointed behind me, and I turned to look. The woman with the purple Mohawk. Of course.

  “How many of you have attended a Painting Experience workshop before?” Annie asked. A few hands went up. “For the rest of you, let me fill you in a bit. This workshop is not about technique. It’s not about learning to paint a pretty picture. It’s not about the product at all. This is called process painting, and it is exactly what it sounds like. It’s about entering into the process, and letting intuition and emotion guide you.”

  A murmur went around the circle, and Annie gave a little laugh. “You may not like what you paint. You may not like the emotions it brings up in you. Some of you may find the process painful, but it can also be immensely healing. So I encourage you to set aside your strategic mind and let flow what needs to come out onto the paper.”

  This all sounded a little bizarre and New Agey to me, and I wondered briefly when they were going to break out the crystals and incense. But I kept my seat, determined to see it through, and listened while Annie laid out the guidelines: the importance of silence in the studio, how to use the paints, what the schedule for the day would be, how the facilitators would help. “Now,” she said at last, “let’s go over to the paint table and see what we have to work with.”

  Within minutes we were all at our stations, and the studio had gone so quiet you could hear brush strokes. I stared at the blank paper in front of me without the faintest idea where to begin.

  This wasn’t about art, Annie said. It was about process. It was about tapping into something inside.

  My gaze fixed on the bright whiteness of the untouched paper, and my eyes began to water. I had three colors in my palette: bright green, bright blue, and bright yellow. Happy colors—sky and grass and sunlight.

  I wet a brush, dipped it in the sky, and moved toward the upper third of the paper. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. My hand began to tremble, my knees buckled. I retrieved a chair from the circle and sank into it, still staring at my untouched white page.

  My life. Brittle, blank, and empty.

  My throat closed in on itself, and I couldn’t swallow. I wanted to run for it, make a mad dash for the door before the walls closed in.

  I felt a nudge at my elbow. Annie stood there, watching me closely. With her standing and me sitting, we were just about eye to eye.

  “Having trouble getting started?”

  I didn’t trust my voice to speak. Instead, I nodded.

  “What are you feeling?” she asked.

  I thought about it for a minute. “Like I’m going to throw up.”

  This didn’t faze her. “So you’ve got some unwelcome emotions churning in your stomach?”

  I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but then in Chulahatchie people didn’t talk much about emotions. “I don’t know the right way to do this.”

  She laid a hand gently on my shoulder. “There is no right way. You’re feeling something, and you don’t like it.”

  It wasn’t a question. I shrugged and nodded again.

  “What’s your first instinct? What do you want to do?”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “Run like hell.”

  To my surprise, she laughed. “Lots of people feel that way when they first get started. But let’s assume you’re going to stay. What color is this emotion?”

  My rational mind could not wrap around that question. She might as well have asked, What did your last alien visitor look like?

  Without thinking, I said. “Black. Kind of a sickly greenish black.”

  Annie went over to the paint table, brought back a cup of black paint, and tipped some of it onto my palette next to the green. I jabbed the brush into the paint and mixed the two together until it felt right, a dark slimy green like toxic mold. Then I looked back at the pristine white paper.

  “Don’t think,” she said. “Just paint.”

  I slashed at the paper with my brush—hard, violent cuts angling down from the top and then across again, sideways. I’d never experienced anything like it, this white-hot rage I felt with every stroke. Like I had a huge butcher knife in my hand instead of a paintbrush, and had set out to kill some midnight intruder into my ordered and peaceful world. I could almost hear that screeching Psycho music in my head, the scene where Janet Leigh gets stabbed in the shower. When I came to a stopping place, I was breathing heavily, and tears streaked down my cheeks.

  Annie had disappeared.

  I sank back down into the chair and looked at what I’d painted. It was ugly, wounded, gashed open, gangrened.

  It was me.

  But it was something else, as well. Two dark rails of paint, wider at the bottom and narrower at the top, bisected by horizontal bars.

  A ladder, reaching heavenward.

  No.

  Not a ladder. A railroad track, climbing up a mountain pass, heading straight toward . . . a black hole, a blotch of paint at the top of my paper.

  A tunnel. A threatening dark cave that could harbor all kinds of dangers.

  Annie was back, standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.

  “I hate it,” I said. “It’s hideous
and disturbing, and I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t make you feel anything,” Annie said quietly. “Maybe it simply reflects what you already feel.” She pointed toward the top, where the rails merged into darkness. “Tell me about this.”

  “It’s . . . I don’t know what it is,” I said, even though I was pretty sure I did. “A cave, a tunnel.”

  “Where does it lead? What’s inside?”

  I gritted my teeth and resisted the urge to slap her silly. She was watching me with eyes as blue and deep as the Caribbean Sea, and as I met her gaze, something came out of her and into me. Peace. Courage. Willingness.

  Whatever it was, it broke my resistance into about a million pieces.

  “I have no idea what’s inside,” I said. “But I reckon I need to find out.”

  I never had therapy myself, but Toni had told me about hers after Champ died. This was a lot like what she described—becoming aware of dark places inside you where you didn’t want to go. But you had to, if you were going to get better. Had to bring the light in there and see what was lurking in the corners. Had to lance the boil, even if it stunk to high heaven. Had to make friends with your shadow side.

  Shoot. What I’d already seen of my shadow side, I didn’t like the first little bit. If I’d had my druthers, I woulda preferred to just seal it up and let it rot and never think about it again.

  A memory came back to me, the time Boone read me Flannery O’Connor’s story about Hulga-Joy Hopewell with her Ph.D. and her wooden leg. I don’t recollect the whole thing, but I still remember that description of Hulga-Joy like it was etched on my brain: The look of someone who has achieved blindness by an act of will, and means to keep it.

  I guess we all understand what it’s like to will ourselves blind. The problem is, once you know there’s something in that dark place waiting for you, it’ll haunt you ’til you turn around and look it in the eye.

  So I went into the tunnel.

  Reluctantly, dreading every minute of it, terrified of what I might find, I inhaled as much of Annie’s courage and peace and willingness as I could hold, and forced myself to step into the black void.