No, he didn’t know that there were two of them there to guard the house, to watch through the long and moonlit night. It didn’t matter. She was glad of his presence. She curled herself into the hollow in the ground between the three saguaro, and she waited, shivering, long ears cocked, listening for the baying of the Hounds.
❋ Davis Cooper ❋
c/o F. M. Martino
New York, New York
H. Miller
Big Sur, California
June 15, 1948
So Henry,
Anaïs tells me you’re strapped again. I’ve enclosed a check—just add it to the tab and pay me back when you’re a filthy rich celebrity. I’ve sold the property I inherited in England, so Anna and I are fine for a while, and it costs us very little to live in the desert. Even a poet can survive out there.
You know, you’re already a cause celebre in an underground way here in New York. Half the young poets who showed up for my signing last night were more interested in the fact that I knew you, you bastard, than in Exile Songs. I can’t quite get used to being the older generation at thirty-five—hardly an old man yet. These kids all want to recreate the cafe life we lived in Paris before the war. Impossible here. New York is too fast, too slick, and too jazzed up for that. Where can you linger over coffee or wine, trade books and ideas, argue, make love? You eat, you drink, you vacate your table or the waiter will throw you out.
I’ll tell you, after arguing with Anna about coming, I find I don’t want to be here after all. I’m in Frank’s old rooms on 13th Street, just down the block from Hugo and Anaïs. My plan was to stay in the city three weeks, head on out to Caresse’s place—where Dalí and his wretched wife are staying—then back to Tucson next month. But after a week of New York I am ready to catch any train headed west. I want silence again, and vast blue skies. I want the heat, honest earth underfoot. I can’t sleep here. I don’t think I’ll sleep till I reach the mountains and Anna.
Where is the man I used to be? All those things I’ve missed, the crowded streets, the talk, the advertising cant, all worthless now. There is poetry in this man-made place, but its language is stilted, its vision is grey, it holds no interest for me anymore. I see now that it is not only Anna that Red Springs Canyon has claimed after all. I need the wild. I need the source. I need a land where sun and wind will strip a man down to the soul and bleach his dying bones. I want to speak the language of stones, even if there is no one but Anna to hear, and patient old friends like you, Henry, and Pablo, and Anaïs.
Frank is angry. I’ve cancelled two signings in order to get out of here. Exile Songs is having the success I’ve always craved, but I no longer care. It feels odd to sit signing copies of the book when I’m no longer the man who wrote it. I hung onto that man just long enough to finish the poems, correct the proofs. The war is over. It’s time to go on with the lives we are making now. I’ve agreed to stay in Manhattan through Friday and go to lunch with Pat Clarke from Scribners, if only to mollify Frank—or else, he threatens, I’ll need a new agent.
Did you hear that Anna has six paintings hung at the Wallace Gallery this month? My entire trip has been worth it just to see them shining like small, perfect jewels in that grey city box of a place. When you come through Tucson, you’ll see her new work. Her vision is witchy, disturbing, uncomfortable—and beautiful. Bring your own paints when you come, old boy. There’s nothing like the desert light.
Yours as ever,
Cooper
Chapter Four ❋
Tonight they have won.
Dusk is hard to breathe, it catches
in my throat, and I am less a man
than a hunger. Waiting.
—The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper
Waking up in Dora’s house, Maggie felt none of the sense of dislocation she’d had her first morning at Cooper’s. She woke to the homey smell of bacon frying; the sound of bathwater running; the warmth of a plump tuxedo cat draped across her stomach. The guest room was still under construction, so they’d bedded her down on the couch instead, in a cozy living room of fat thirties’ chairs, hooked rugs and patchwork quilts. The beautiful desert morning light streamed through curtains of old ivory lace.
But for all of its charm, the room was an absolute mess, filled with lumber, tiles, tools, art supplies, books and papers piled on every available surface. Maggie pushed away the urge to tidy it all up—that streak of the Puritan in her that her granddaddy said must have come from her granny, since he was a slob himself. She smiled, thinking of her grandfather. She’d give him a call later in the day. She eased herself out from under the cat and the cat continued to purr.
Dora looked up from the stove at the other end of the L-shaped room. She was wearing a bathrobe covered with pictures of cowboys and cartoon cactus; her long copper-colored hair was loose and tousled, hanging in Botticelli curls. “Coffee?” she asked.
“Bless you,” Maggie said, coming to take the mug from her hand. “This is a wonderful old building you’ve got. How long have you been working on it?”
“Oh, off and on for a couple of years, whenever a chunk of money comes in. Which isn’t very often these days,” Dora confided cheerfully, “so at this rate we may never finish. Which is exactly what happened with the place we were rennovating before this, downtown in the Barrio. We’re setting a new style: the construction-site look. Don’t you think its trés chic?”
“Oh indeed.”
Dora switched the radio on to the local public radio station. The music of Pycard’s Gloria filled the room with rich choral voices. Maggie listened closely. It was not her ex-husband’s recording of the piece but some other, and the tension left her shoulders. Sometimes it seemed she could never go far enough to escape from Nigel.
She sat down at the table, pushing aside piled lumber, laundry, and two wrestling cats. She craddled the coffee mug in her hands, enjoying the music, the chaos of Dora’s kitchen, the smells of breakfast to come. Sunlight streamed through vines over the windows, heavy with clusters of purple blooms. Between the windows hung a large framed drawing depicting a very different view: birch trees in a field of snow, rendered in charcoal on white rag paper in an angular, abstracted style. It was an attractive piece of work, if not quite exceptional.
“Is this your drawing?” she asked Dora.
“That’s Juan’s, that one, and the paintings on the wall to the left of the fireplace.”
Maggie crossed the room to look at the paintings. They were all paintings of northern woods.
“Vermont,” Dora explained to her. “That’s where I’m from. And where we met. Juan did a painting residency at Bennington College, when I was a student. But you can’t keep a desert boy from the desert. I knew when I married him I’d have to pull up stakes and come down here.”
“This is lovely work,” Maggie said. “But why no paintings of the Southwest?”
Dora shrugged. “Beats me. He spent years painting the desert. Here. Texas. New Mexico. Even down in Sonora. Now he doesn’t like those paintings anymore. I don’t know why. They’re beautiful. But he just doesn’t like them all of a sudden. Do you ever feel like that with your writing?”
“All too goddamn often,” Maggie said with sympathy.
Below the paintings, a framed photograph stood perched on top of a table’s clutter. She picked it up. It was a wedding picture: Dora in an antique dress, Juan in a tux, and what seemed to be one huge extended Mexican-American family crowded in behind them. Dora had not only married a desert man, she’d married a clan.
“Yep, those are all del Rios,” Dora confirmed. “It’s an old, old family in these parts. And huge! I still can’t keep all the names straight. Half of them live in Tucson, and the other half over the Border. They’ve all been really sweet to me since I moved down here with Juan.”
Maggie put the picture down again. She asked, “So what do you do here? Are you an artist too?”
“Me? No, I work in a gallery downtown. Typing and filing and watching the shop, min
d you; nothing glamorous. And I tend bar in a hotel three nights a week. You know the kind: a kitschy Border motif and we all have to wear fruit on our heads. The tourists seem to think that’s Mexican.” Dora rolled her eyes. She turned back to the stove. “I’ve always liked to hang around with artists, though. The boyfriend before Juan was a painter too. And the one before that called himself an artist, although he liked the pose more than the work.”
Maggie laughed, commiserating. “I had one of those myself, in my misbegotten youth. He was totally romantic, and totally a mess.”
“You got it. Mine was Mr. Romance: bedroom eyes, and those nice strong hands that sculptors always have … ummmm. I’m a sucker for that. He gave me the best two weeks of my life, and then the worst two years.” She flipped the bacon out of the pan and onto a plate. “Do you eat meat? Never mind. I’m making pancakes too. I’d better make extra for Fox. He always turns up hungry.”
Maggie was still exploring the room with her usual curiosity, which she liked to blame on her journalist training although she’d always been that way. Above a crowded desk in the corner were several prints in simple wood frames, images of fairy tale creatures formed out of tree roots, limbs, and leaves. “Are these by Brian Froud?” she asked, and Dora turned and nodded. “I like them. His work has the spirit of Cooper’s poems—the later ones, I mean. In The Wood Wife.”
“That’s why I have them there,” Dora said. “To tell you the truth, I like Froud’s work much better than Anna Naverra’s—but I don’t dare say that in front of Juan! Cooper gave me these reproductions. He has one in his study.”
“I saw it.” Maggie looked down and picked a book up off the desk. The Spine Witch, by Dora del Rio. It was a small edition, barely bigger than Maggie’s hand, printed on beautiful creamy paper, the type letterset in the blackest of inks. The frontispiece was an etching by Juan. The publisher was Rincon Press. Maggie looked up at Dora. “So you’re a writer,” she said.
Dora flushed. “Not like you are. I just make up my own books. Little limited editions like that one. The Spine Witch is an image from one of Davis Cooper’s poems—well, you know that. He gave me permission to write a story about her. It’s kind of a children’s story.”
Maggie took the book over to the table. “What do you mean, you’re not a writer like I am? A writer is a writer. What’s Rincon Press?”
“Oh that. That’s me as well. They have an old letter press at the back of the gallery that I use to set the books. I learned about printing and hand-binding from a class at the university. I even made the paper—it’s got bits of cactus spines embedded in it, see?”
“And you don’t think you’re an artist? Girl, you’ve got a modesty problem. This is lovely work.”
Dora shrugged, turning her back to Maggie as she cooked. “It’s just … well, you know how it is. We’ve been concentrating on getting Juan’s painting career off the ground. When that happens, then I’ll have the time to do a few things myself.” She turned suddenly. “That sounds terrible doesn’t it? Like I’ve no life or ambition of my own. But I honestly enjoy supporting what Juan is doing. When I look at his paintings and then at my little books, the books just don’t seem as important. He’s a very gifted painter.”
“I used to think that way,” Maggie told her. “I supported my ex-husband all through the lean years at the beginning of his career. I stopped writing poetry and hustled my butt getting every magazine assignment I could. Cooper was furious with me but I wouldn’t listen; I was in love, and ready to join that long tradition of the little woman behind the great man, god help me.”
“Then what happened?” Dora asked her over the hiss of batter hitting the grill.
“I think I had this romantic vision of being The Artist’s Muse—but instead I was just The Hardworking Wife. And the muses were all the ladies that my husband had on the side. The ones that didn’t fuss about electric bills. We broke up right before he made it big.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Nigel Vanderlin; have you ever heard of him? He’s the director of Estampie.”
“What’s a stampy?” Dora said, the spoon in her hand dribbling batter onto the floor.
“An Early Music group. It’s been quite successful. Who would have thought that medieval music would end up on the Billboard charts? Not me, anyway. I thought Nigel would be like all my poet friends: known by a handful of people who care for the stuff, and thoroughly ignored by all the rest.”
“So he made it big, and then he went and left you? What a rat,” said Dora with disgust.
Maggie shook her head. “Nigel’s not so bad. Leaving the marriage was my idea. And ever since he came into money he’s been trying his best to help me out. But the thing is, I hate it. I don’t know why. He considers it perfectly reasonable to give something back after living off me, but it makes me uncomfortable all the same. There’s freedom in earning your own living.”
“If he’s not a rat, then why did you leave?” Dora asked her curiously. “The ladies on the side, I suppose?”
“For a lot of different reasons, really. One of them was that he was unfaithful, but that was only part of it—the easiest thing to pin it on,” she answered Dora honestly. “The truth is more complex than that. Our unspoken assumption that Nigel was the ‘real artist’ in the family was at the core of what went wrong between us. So you be careful of that, you hear?”
“I hear you,” Dora said with a smile. “And I’ll think about what you’ve said.”
Maggie smiled back at the younger woman. She had that feeling one got on rare occasions that here was a friend returned from a long absence instead of stranger newly met, and one could plunge right into real conversation without the months of small talk first. When it happened this way, these were the friendships she found she tended to keep—unlike the other kind, the fleeting ones that came and went like the ocean tide, dependent on such transient things as a shared neighborhood, a class, a job; chance meetings in foreign cafes; the rolling dice of circumstance.
Juan came out of the bathroom then, his dark hair wet, smelling of soap, tucking the tails of his paint-streaked denim shirt into his jeans. He kissed Dora on the top of the head and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Good morning,” he said to Maggie. “Did you sleep all right on the couch?”
“Just fine. I had a furry foot warmer all night. I’ve missed having cats around; my own cat is still back in L.A.”
“Well take some of ours,” Juan said magnanimously, ignoring the murderous look Dora shot him. “We used to have just one, fat old Moose there. Then she had kittens and somehow we never gave any of them away. I suppose we should be grateful Moose didn’t have a dozen.”
“Ignore him,” said Dora. “He makes out he doesn’t want them, but he’s the one we have to blindfold every time we pass a FREE KITTENS sign. I wanted to leave Moose with my sister in Vermont because of all the coyotes around here. He’s the one who wouldn’t leave her behind.”
“She’s an excellent mouser,” Juan protested.
“So are the coyotes,” said Dora.
“And she’d miss us,” said Juan, in a smaller voice.
Dora smiled. “Admit it. It’s you who would miss her, not the other way around. Moose loved those woods in Vermont.”
“Juan,” Maggie said, “your paintings of Vermont are beautiful. I’d love to see your studio.” She saw a wary look pass between Juan and Dora, and she added, “If that’s all right?”
“Of course,” Juan said a little too heartily. “You can take a quick look while we wait for Fox.”
Dora looked troubled, and Maggie was sorry then that she had asked him. Perhaps his dissatisfaction with his old work extended to his new work as well.
She followed Juan over a cobbled yard to an old stone barn that reminded her of England—except here there was no green covering of thick ivy and old rose vines. Just the grey granite stones, the inevitable cactus, a scattering of red desert poppies. The morning air was crisp and fresh, but s
oon it would warm up again. A haze lay on the mountain peaks, promising another hot day.
Inside, the barn was spacious but the studio was crowded nonetheless, with tables, easels, shelves of fat art books, sketchbooks, pigments, sculpting tools, buckets of plaster and clay. Raw linen canvas was draped over the rafters; the floor was covered with bright splashes of paint. Walking into an art studio always gave Maggie pangs of jealousy. The tools of writing seem so much less romantic. Her computer. Her printer. A stack of fanfold paper. A legal pad of scribbled notes.
The room had a familiar turpentine smell that would always mean Tat and London to her. The walls were covered with drawings on large sheets of creamy paper: spiral designs and Celtic knotwork rendered in smudged black charcoal. Some were simple repetitions of patterns, others had images trapped inside: rabbits, deer, foxes, owls whose shapes were rendered as part of the overall pattern, tucked into the intricate designs. The entire effect, from one angle of the room, was a bit like Morris wallpaper. From another, it was simply obsessive, disturbing, although Maggie couldn’t say why.
She looked instead at the canvas on the easel. It was streaked with pale ghosts of color. She realized its image had been wiped away by the paint-soaked rag discarded on the floor. The other canvases in the room were blank, or had their faces turned to the wall. On the table was a single sculpture, and Maggie moved closer to see it.
It was the image of a man with the horns of a stag, formed from some kind of plaster or clay of a terra-cotta color. Unlike the other work in the room, this was in fact a breathtaking piece. It, too, was disturbing, but compellingly so. The body was crudely rendered, a simple cylinder, roughly textured and wrapped with knotted leather cords from which hung hag-stones, copper beads, and a single feather, pure white. A pattern of simple spirals ran around the figure’s base. From the shoulders up, the figure had been more realistically sculpted, the slanted eyes, the thin, stern face with lines etched across the cheeks. Stag horns arced from the figure’s brow, carved of mesquite wood.
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