by Ursula Pflug
He was sitting on her stool, bent over her new sketchbook. His antennae bobbed; they were so fine she hadn’t noticed them yesterday. A delicate smile played about his lips, secretive and knowing. It reminded Cassidy of the woman in that famous painting. His twin yellow scarves draped decoratively down his back.
She set the honey down on the poured concrete threshold. Had it taken the whole night for the impossibility of him to sink in? Yesterday she’d instinctively helped him as she might a hurt child. Just because she wasn’t a mother didn’t mean she had no protective feelings.
He licked his lips in concentration, dipping her best brush into an empty tuna can full of water. The sable brush had been the most expensive of her purchases, too fine to ever be used for stenciling borders, or découpage. She’d looked forward to being the first to use it. Cassidy turned and hurried back up the field stone path to her house.
She’d expected her feelings to stay outside with the sky, the garden, the shed, him. But they hadn’t.
His puce eyes. She wanted to look into them.
Henry came into the kitchen and put the kettle on. As so often, he wore his brown corduroys, his safety glasses perched on his dark tousled head.
“I thought you’d be painting in your new shed,” he said.
“The screen in the door is already torn.”
Henry nodded. “I’ve got lots of spare screen. It won’t take me more than a few minutes. I wonder how it happened?”
“Maybe a raccoon or a porcupine,” Cassidy said. “I’ve got some bulbs in there. Even people can eat tulip bulbs, you know.”
“I do know,” Henry said. “My mother’s family in Holland ate them during the war.”
“You never offer to do anything right away.”
“I am now.”
“Now I don’t want you to.”
“Why?”
“You built the shed,” Cassidy said. “It took time away from your radios. You shouldn’t have to fix it yet.”
“You haven’t used it even once and it’s been finished for a week,” Henry said.
“It doesn’t matter. Mosquito season’s almost over since we had those cold nights. You have to work tomorrow. You should go somewhere.”
“Where?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
“To the basement then,” Henry said and headed for the stairs.
Cassidy looked around the kitchen. The new curtains, though pretty, were no huge improvement over the blue blinds that had hung there previously. Not if she took into account how long they’d taken her to make.
She took a piece of paper towel off the roll that always stood beside the sink and sat down at the kitchen table, picked up the red permanent fine tip so fortuitously lying there, and drew a screaming face. It had no antennae so maybe it didn’t belong to the stranger. And she’d never seen him scream; he didn’t seem a screamer, somehow, although she supposed everyone and anyone might turn out to be a screamer if pushed hard enough.
sss
She wondered what the stranger painted in her book, with her Windsor Newtons. In his hands her book would just fill, as if by itself. And no one would wonder why he wasn’t decorating instead. Or gardening or cooking. No one would wonder at all.
He was still there the next morning, and the morning after that. Cassidy knew because she checked before she left for her bookkeeping job. He never noticed her standing at the shed door even if she coughed, or wore her heavy plastic gardening clogs and thumped a little on her way.
On the third day she cleared her throat and said, “You wouldn’t even have art supplies or a studio if it weren’t for me.”
He didn’t look up, not even to mutely show her what he was working on. He hadn’t torn pages out to prop against the vintage goose-neck lamp or pin to the walls, so Cassidy couldn’t see what he’d done. But he was a good way through the book, almost half, and wore the same beatific smile as yesterday. It was as if, drawing, he’d uncovered the secrets of the universe. Her pencils had grown short; her paint tubes were twisted and rolled at the bottoms.
Back in her kitchen, Cassidy picked up the same red fine point marker she’d used to draw on the paper towel and wondered about its provenance. She used these markers to write on the little plastic tabs she pushed into her flats to identify seedlings or seedlings to be. Somehow the marker had migrated from the potting shed to the house. It was the kind of thing that might happen to Henry, but not to her. She was the organized one. Not that it mattered much. She opened her decorating magazine and uncapped the marker once more.
She drew a screaming person seated on a full-page photograph of a white couch. Was it an advertisement for the couch, or for the flooring beneath the couch, Cassidy briefly wondered, but she didn’t take the time to scan the text and find out. Instead, she plunged into her drawing as if it were a pond, and she diving underwater. When Cassidy re-emerged she realized the screaming person she’d drawn had wings. And the wings were tangled in the lamp stand behind the couch, so that he couldn’t escape.
No wonder she’d hidden her art supplies beneath the bench. This was neither a bowl of fruit nor a vase of flowers but a depiction of cruelty. She was sadistic, this excursion into her own creativity made clear. Cassidy felt dirty. Still, the drawing was good, even scribbled as it was with a gardening marker in a decorating magazine. It was quite a likeness. In spite of her deep confusion, Cassidy felt a little proud of what she’d done. In school they’d always said she had talent. She’d set it aside; she wasn’t sure where or why. It wasn’t as if she could blame the children she’d never had for taking up all her time.
But Henry touched her shoulder. He had crept up at some point, come and stood behind her. “You better let him go,” he said.
“But I did let him go,” Cassidy said. “The very first day.”
“He won’t leave till you ask for your things back,” Henry said.
How long exactly, had Henry known her secret? But then, that had been the point of Henry, right from the beginning, hadn’t it? Someone who could know her all the way through and not judge. She sat, still staring at her drawing. She didn’t say anything more to her husband, but she definitely didn’t want him taking his gently kneading hands from her shoulders.
“You don’t think I’m a bad person because I drew him like this?” she finally asked.
“I’ll bet you anything he drew you too. I’ll bet you he drew you drawing.” Henry caressed her hair and for some reason Cassidy was swept back to their beginning. She’d known Henry for a long time but one day had been different. There’d been a storm, and she’d turned the sign so it read “Closed” and locked the door in the dusty comfortable bookstore where she worked. Afterward they’d held each other in a different way, each needing reassurance they were still real, still separate, still had names.
Drawing made her feel a bit like that.
“I’ll make a stew,” Cassidy said, getting up. She’d wash the floor; she’d spend what remained of the weekend at flea markets looking for a new table for the guest room. The one there now was ugly, even after she’d painted it in a complicated faux finish, precisely following the instructions in her magazine. She’d already forgotten what the carefully rendered surface had supposedly been an imitation of.
“No,” Henry said. “Why do you think I built you a studio?”
“It’s just for plants,” Cassidy said.
“It is not,” he said, prodding her gently in the ribs.
She knew he was right. Cassidy got up and marched out the kitchen door and down to the shed. This time, she didn’t stand timorously peering through the screen, mumbling accusations and hoping the stranger would notice her. Instead, she opened the door and spoke loudly.
“Give me back my stuff,” she said. “It’s not yours.”
“I know,” he said.
“What did you dra
w?” Cassidy demanded.
“See for yourself,” he said, and turned the book around to face her.
Trembling, she opened the door and stepped inside.
It was just as Henry had said. The stranger had drawn her drawing. And unlike in her drawing of him, he’d pictured her happy, if a little transported.
He handed her the sable brush. “It’s your turn,” he said. “You already know you can do it.”
“I do?” Cassidy asked.
“Remember how you drew me?”
She lowered her head, ashamed. “I didn’t mean…”
“You were ashamed of me,” the stranger said. “That’s why you made a hurtful drawing. You were afraid and wanted me to suffer because of it.”
“Why should I be ashamed of you?” Cassidy asked.
“Because I’m not grape vine stencils. Or faux marble stipple effect. I’m not any of those things.”
She looked at his hands. There was the same fine veining in them as in his yellow wings; more like the veins in a leaf, she thought now, than anything else. “What should I paint?” she asked.
“What did you plan?”
“Flowers,” she said, after thinking for a moment.
“Then paint those.”
Cassidy took the brush from him and dipped it in a pool of aquamarine on the ceramic palette. With the wet brush she conjured outlines of flowers on the nubby white expanse of Arches paper. The brush swooped this way and then that, and before long Cassidy felt it again, that pull, a loss of self as intense as sex, but of a different kind.
sss
When she surfaced she saw pistils, stamens, petals; florid, penile, fluted, scalloped, rippling, tumescent. She observed these qualities scattered throughout her painting, again disturbed by her own work. It was true flowers were the sexual organs of plants, hell bent on attracting pollinators. So why had she never seen it before? Except, of course, she had, or she wouldn’t have just painted them that way. Maybe she’d always pretended not to notice, afraid to be unladylike, and it was only in her art that her vision re-emerged, bypassing her filters.
But like her drawing of the visitor tangled in the lamp, the intensity scared her. If she had a show, all the neighbours would see what she was really like.
Not like them. Not one bit.
“It’s so good,” the stranger whispered. “Like Georgia O’Keefe.”
“Who?”
“Look her up. She’s your soul sister.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I can submit to the annual Water Colour Society exhibition,” Cassidy said.
His puce eyes met and held hers. They were fathomless and deep. “I’m not like a grape stencil on the bathroom wall,” he said again.
Cassidy felt a little swoony.
“What happens if I don’t?” she asked. She tried to give him back the sable brush but he didn’t take it.
“Then I die,” he said.
“Really?” It seemed so extreme. Again, she tried to give the brush back.
He fluttered his hands, no no no. Pleading. “Please,” the stranger said.
She began to cry, shaking her head. Her flowers resembled open mouths, open vulvas. It was too much! She knew now why she’d stopped drawing. She couldn’t look at what emerged. She could even less consider putting her visions out into the world for others to see.
He took her by the shoulders, tucked his long slender finger under her chin.
Forced it up.
His gentle puce eyes were whirlpools. She’d drown in them forever; she knew it for a fact, but better than gasping for air every hour of every day.
Washing Lady’s Hair
“I HEARD YOU COULD GET Rick Sutton’s sculptures here,” the woman said, “for half the Yorkville price.”
Coiffed and slender, she wore an equally slim black suit that smelled like money. Feeling shabby, Karen wished she’d gotten properly dressed, but maybe her vintage flowered dressing gown, smudged mascara, and vaguely matted hair could actually help. Shadow always said people came to the gallery just to feel they were a part of something.
“You can,” Karen said. Maybe the woman thought if she had one of Rick’s animals, her life might change, just a little bit. She might be right too; Rick’s work was that amazing. Karen knew it wasn’t just because Rick was her boyfriend that she thought so—his work actually sold, and not for pennies. Well, sometimes anyway.
“Show me,” the woman said, and Karen had only to point to the ceiling where a manta ray, three feet in circumference, hung from a chain.
“It’s six hundred dollars,” Karen said. “Which is half of what you’d pay uptown. And it’s his newest, so truthfully he wanted to keep it a bit longer, but…” She made an ingratiating gesture.
“I’ll have to think about it,” the woman said, “Not that it isn’t gorgeous.” She hesitated before asking, “Do you happen to know where I can get any Green?”
Karen just shook her head no, as Shadow had instructed. Green wasn’t scheduled, but it wasn’t exactly legal either. Shadow and Rick had both tried explaining the difference between selling and personal use, between synthetic and leaf, between last year and this year—a bristling confusion of facts that, just when it was about to cohere in Karen’s mind, always chose to disintegrate instead. Like a sea urchin she’d just stepped on, but not before it poked her sharply in the soft sole of her foot.
The woman gave her a disbelieving look. “But I heard.”
Karen just shrugged, returned to the desk, leaving the woman to browse. She opened the little metal box that served as cash register, sorted change into appropriate compartments. The box was dependable in times of power outage, which was often. Everyone was dumping their smart phones in favour of stacks of clipped together file cards, and email, no longer reliable, was out. Green Magic sported a meeting area consisting of a spotty Wi-Fi connection and more importantly, comfortable seating. There was no charge for use of the embroidered couch and the connection; people who met at the store sometimes ended up buying clothes or art.
Beside the couch, a metal stand housed fabric paints, mason jars of brushes, and a stack of white tees Shadow had liberated from the dumpster behind a Spadina jobber. Karen took the top shirt and stretched it over a painting board. She’d let an arty customer try her hand at painting a shirt to take home the week before, and now Shadow charged people for the pleasure. Karen figured it was the first thing she’d come up with that her boss had approved of.
Karen sighed, staring at the shirt. People who had never dived could hardly be better painters than her; they didn’t have a wealth of undersea imagery in their heads to draw upon.
The door chimes rang, startling her. The woman had finally left. Karen wouldn’t tell Shadow; he’d complain she could have closed the sale.
No sea here. Karen missed the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally she took the streetcar to Cherry Beach, just to sit there looking at water. Lake Ontario was so big you couldn’t see the other side, but there were no breakers and no jellyfish and it didn’t smell of salt. Of course, the Strait of Georgia didn’t have much in the way of breakers either. She’d grown up in Vancouver but she’d never spent much time on the island, outside of Victoria. Some friends of Rick’s had told her it wasn’t really the ocean till you’d built a bonfire on Long Beach, brought hand drums and tents or—if it was summer—just curled up in a sleeping bag. No one else around for miles. It wasn’t really Green till you’d done that. Back then, she still thought her life would change just by being with Rick. It had, too, but not quite in the way she’d hoped.
Still, they’d been in Toronto, now, for over two years, and some things were definitely better.
sss
Back in Vancouver they’d mostly sat in their east side basement apartment heating little pots of green paste on their hot plate. Once it was warmed, they rubbed the paste gently into each o
ther’s skin where it was thinnest: temples, neck, the insides of elbows and knees. Waiting for it to begin, staring into each other’s eyes, smiles of delight deepening and widening. And there it was: a popping sound, like squelching through soft clean river bottom mud. But it was more than that; it was a popping feeling, her skin transmogrifying. Karen would look then, just to make sure what she felt was also what she saw: Rick’s hand wasn’t just a hand anymore but also a whale’s flipper, the flipper brushing her own, that of a green sea turtle.
Shape shifting. It was electrifying.
Rick never disappeared entirely when Orca arrived. Karen still felt the warmth of primate skin, the hardness of the bones within, the slender bird feet tendons. She knew if she pressed just so, his tendons would move, just a little, and at the same time she’d be touching skin that was slick and rubbery and wet, so alien it left her breathless. Cetacean skin.
Sometimes the change arrived mere moments after dosing, sometimes it took hours to achieve. They chanted and drummed to bring it nearer. They closed their eyes and tuned into the process with every scrap of energy and will, and—something like love. Definitely something like passion. Wasn’t prayer in the end just that, an expression of passion for the divine?
Walking, they’d talk about everything that was wrong with the world. If it was up to Rick, he’d have been born as a pre-industrial revolution European peasant. Then, even if his land wasn’t his and most of the products of his work, whether it was a lamb or a vegetable or a loaf of bread, went to the owner, well, at least he and his woman could sit on the broken back step peeling apples and looking at the moon. They’d tell folk tales to the little ones, and someone would get out an instrument and someone else would sing, and the apples would be organic because no one had ever even heard of pesticides back then, let alone invented them.
Karen had shared Rick’s daydream about a feudal existence with a Green Magic customer once and he’d told her she was romanticizing a brutal existence. Which was probably true but you had to hope there was a better life somewhere. Maybe for some, the implausible fantasy lay in the future.
