Quiet settles upon us, and I can feel him growing agitated. His face is set, and I know he wants the uncomplicated fantasy back. His verdant archer. His wilderness goddess. I do not oblige immediately; I do not return his dream to him just yet, because I don’t want to. But after a few minutes, I’ll relent. I don’t want him to be miserable or, worse yet, to spiral into one of his moods. Not yet. The weekend is so young, and there is so much promise for what it could hold.
“Sorry about that, Audie,” he says, his voice strained with the effort of playing nice with me. I don’t like that nickname—Audie. In fact, I hate it. He’s the only one who calls me that. I let another solid minute or two pass in silence.
“Sorry I snapped at you, Professor. I am—that was…out of line.” I look over at him, my face seeming to plead for absolution. His face brightens, bit by bit, as my hardness recedes, as he pulls the apology and angst from me. He thinks he’s regaining the upper hand. He looks satisfied. “I’m probably just a little tired. And…well, I dunno—wound up.” My voice is gentle and cryptic and maybe mildly flirtatious. I let him have it. This gift. A bit of that wolfishness from before creeps back into the lines of his face, the glint of his teeth. I relax. There he is. The predator I’m fully prepared to face.
“How far to your place?” he asks, shifting in his seat.
“Not long, now.”
Thesis
Her Dark Things by Audra Colfax
Piece #1: I Remember It Stark
Oil and mixed media on canvas. 36″ x 24″.
[Close-up of a brown enamel lantern, chipped and shining. The metal curves in a never-ending arc off the edges of the canvas. The bulb in the glass center is half burnt out, eggshell, heavy cream, white, its light dusky. Found objects incorporated throughout by layering.]
Note on torn graph paper found under the drawer liner in the downstairs bathroom of the Dunn residence.
I cut myself again. Deep this time.
Mom said come NOW to the
hospital or I’ll call the cops, Cindy. I stayed shut up and bled all over
the floor
a ruby Jackson Pollock on white tile
the cops came
an ambulance came lights came everything came. AT me.
Brady
came to visit me at the hospital
the next day. held my hand.
it’s like a sludge
builds up in me, thick and oily. inside my veins and bones and lungs and eyes and brain.
Leaves me no ROOM.
Some die-cast mold getting drowned with liquid metal.
TRY explaining that when they ask.
They gave me new pills and a therapist. Again.
—Nov87. CD.
Note on a yellow sticky note found pressed between the pages of the family cookbook in the Dunn kitchen.
will anyone EVER find
my HAUNTY little scrawlslip in with the beef wellington?
—Jan88. CD.
Note on ripped-out paper from a spiral-bound notebook with faint food stains found in the birdhouse on the Dunn property.
Got my GED today, a year late a year later
than graduation
than Brady.
Mom and dad and Brady were real proud.
Had little starty-stoppies here and there and there
cutting and trying to kill myself and cutting and cutting again
disruptive disruptions eruptions irruptions
all along the way
in middle school disrupting in high school so many
disruptions distractions marks all over my body
but I did it
I am better
somehow
mostly intact
—Jan88. CD.
Note in tiny handwriting on a scrap of note paper found inside an empty Kleenex box in the attic of the Dunn residence.
All I’ve ever wanted is to go to college
for art
application deadline is coming right up, I told them
they say Cindy wait hold your horses stick around a whole year
see how you feel in a year (we worry you’ll stop taking your pills)
think on it (we worry you’ll stop trying, remember November?)
save up some money (let us watch watch watch you to make sure your heart still beats beats beats)
Get a steady job (close by, let us help you stay alive)
I see them and I hear them and I see into them and I hear through them and I appreciate the thought but I’ll die here of stasis if not of my own hand
I have dreams, aspirations
bigger than this place
they said if you still want to study art after a year, fine, fine art study fine want to study fine art fine
but you’re on your own
if you want to study business and you wait we’ll pay for it
think dad wants me to work for him
dunn & daughter he’d like that not sure I would
waiting a year taking my meds going to therapy
I’m doing well now, so
we’ll see
don’t know if I can stand it
here
another whole year, though
—Jan88. CD.
Note on Lisa Frank stationery found in the landscaped rock wall outside the Dunn residence.
I baked a cake today
it came out really good
dad was wild for it mom was
crazy about it
which felt good
to make them feel good
like maybe I could be okay
like maybe we could
—Jan88. CD.
Note in tiny handwriting on scratch paper with red ink doodles found folded in Cindy Dunn’s bedroom side table.
I sketched today but it wasn’t really
a sketch.
I sat in my room with my old
brown lantern
with the sticker from that class trip to
Bar Harbor.
I remember it stark.
I drew
in the orb of its light
in the dark of my bed
a circle
over
and over
again with my pen until it cut through the paper.
It was a slick oily
black smear. Shiny like a beetle’s eye.
Brady took me out to
dinner at Thelma’s Landing.
I wore my favorite summer dress despite the frigid cold
I felt like an electric spark
a sunflower.
We fucked after
at his place.
He likes my crazy ass a good bit but I don’t know why.
He’d say he’s my boyfriend
I bet.
He’d say he loves me but
but.
—Jan88. CD.
Note on yellow legal paper found crumpled in the crawl space beyond Cindy Dunn’s bedroom closet in the Dunn residence.
Dad caved, paid the application fee for college so
art.
I saw a tiny smile in him when he said don’t
tell mom.
—Jan88. CD.
Juniper
May 4, 1988
It’s just past midnight, and I’ve still only driven as far as Greenville. The streets are dark, and everything is closed. Nowhere to stop for a quick bite. Nowhere to pick up a pack of smokes. I haven’t eaten since Kittery. I haven’t had a cigarette since Bangor. I glance down at the ashtray in the console and see the litter of butts sticking up like gnarled fingers. It’s a long drive from Washington, DC, to King City, Maine. Eleven hours and change if you don’t have
to stop for anything and you avoid major traffic. A naive map calculation. In reality, it’s maybe thirteen, fourteen hours total when you factor in reasonable breaks to gas up, eat, piss, stretch your legs, and smoke.
Add two more hours to that if your girlfriend of four months, Rita, breaks up with you just before you leave. Morning of. No warning. Two added hours in which you try to figure out what the fuck is happening, and why. Two hours to reach the conclusion that she was never really okay with you going away for a job for four months. That she had no interest in trying long-distance. To realize she didn’t love you enough to hold on that long. Two hours to cry, then rage, then plead, then promise, then rage again, then storm out, finally, at around eight thirty a.m. instead of six a.m. like you planned.
I was speeding through New Jersey before it registered that I have no home to go back to once the job is over. I lived in her apartment.
Zero fucking cigarettes left.
The farther past Greenville I get, the darker and stiller the world seems. No streetlamps. Barely a car on the road. The sky is indecipherable from the crowding pines that strike up like walls from the sides of the road. I’m tired. Hungry. By the time I finally find my way into King City and to the sneaky little dirt road that will take me up to Lupine Valley, I’m moments away from wondering if I’ve gotten myself lost. But King City—which is no city at all, but more of a village or territory—is like that. It’s a surprise when you find it. Some of the depression and agitation begins to lift as I realize I’ve made it. Back here, to this special place where I’ve always felt most myself.
The marker at the end of the rutted dirt road is understated: a small flag hanging limp from a pole affixed to a tree. My headlights catch the flag’s familiar image as I turn up the drive—three craning stems of sun-faded, purple lupine flowers.
I bump my way up the winding road, which is more like a glorified dirt path, moving slowly, carefully through the dark, the big WELCOME TO THE LUPINE VALLEY ARTS COLLECTIVE sign seeming to spring toward the road halfway up. I feel greeted. Taken in by the classic periwinkle- and cornflower-blue lettering, the painting of lupine stalks on a green hillside. After the day I’ve had, I almost want to cry. It’s my seventh such return to this place, and every time, it forms a lump in my throat.
The farther I go, the more the place reveals itself to me: the sandy horseshoe pitch on the right; a piece of fencing emblazoned with a black stallion mural to its rear; the path on the left that leads to the ropes course high in the boughs of the trees; up and on the left again, the pottery studio with a kiln, the chimney at rest for the night.
At the tail end of the snaking road, the tunnel of trees opens, dilating wider and wider, and I feel like Alice falling through the rabbit hole, ending up somewhere decidedly more magical than the place I’d just been. The Lupine Valley Arts Collective. A thirty-acre patch of wilderness at the center of which thrives a beating, uniquely humane heart—a collection of tidy, utilitarian cabins and outbuildings sprinkled among the trees at the base of Little Chickadee Mountain. A place filled with potters, painters, sculptors, crafters, woodworkers, fiber artists. Artists. Making and collaborating. The well-worn paths between buildings are like blood vessels linking cabin to cabin to mess hall to latrine to studios.
Even in the dark, I can make out the colorful handmade flags sentried around the village, some tied into the branches of trees, some hung from poles off cabins, stitched with the seasons and years of their making. From a tree on my left hangs a blue-and-orange flag with a purple planet in the middle: Saturn with all her rings. Ahead, on a pole near the communal fire, is a limp flag in black and white stitched with words I can’t quite make out. Hanging from a pole off the side of one of the nearer cabins is a flag embroidered with complicated pink, red, and purple flowers that proclaims in big, block stitching, ART OUTLASTS ALL.
A giddy smile overtakes my face. I’m back.
Art in the form of lawn ornaments is sprinkled everywhere: rock piles painted and stacked into little temples, fairy houses, druidic walls; thin birch limbs bent, gathered, and lashed together into creeping, living archways inside of which are sculptures glittering with broken shards of colored glass; welded and sculpted metal birds flocking in the grass as if pecking for seed, others perching on tree branches in fantastical nests made of steel wool and glass beads. Large, ever-evolving landscape murals of Little Chickadee Mountain cover the side of the mess hall. Everything is infused with a childlike freedom and whimsy, from the ROY G. BIV markers staking out the paths in every direction to the prettily threaded hammocks that hang under so many of the trees, waiting for a body or two to crawl inside and sleep under the stars.
The glow of candle and lantern light inside cabins punches the darkness out in perfect squares. The ever-present central bonfire in the Village Commons is aflame, a polestar around which all the cabins radiate. We gather at the fire after supper almost nightly for drinks and discussion, to talk art, to socialize, to seek advice.
Well, I think you truncated the annealing process just a bit too much. That’s why you didn’t get the hairpin bend you wanted in that section of your iron fence.
I knew Picasso, you know. We were nearly lovers once.
My work was put on display at the Met in 1968, but by then it was long overdue; I just didn’t appreciate it the way I should have.
I see a few people moving between the buildings. Could be other staff like me, here a few days before the new cohort arrives, or it could be students staying on from the last session.
I crackle up the drive toward the heart of things and finally see him, the closest thing to a mascot a place like this might have: Old Gus. He’s standing out front of the main office cabin, face turned upward to the speckled sky, his trusty camera around his neck. Seeing the way the campfire light splashes the surrounding tree trunks and cabins sparks a sense of wholeness and belonging in me. Unfathomable when I set out this morning, after Rita. Unfathomable on the New Jersey Turnpike as I thought about my homelessness. But of course, I was wrong about that. I realize this now. And with such clarity. This is home. Has been home since I first started coming in the summer of 1983. Everywhere else—the colleges and universities I’ve attended, the apartments I’ve rented, Rita’s loft in DC, even my parents’ house in Pittston, Pennsylvania, are auxiliary locations. This is my home. I found Lupine Valley back in ’83. Lupine Valley found me.
When I get out of the car, Old Gus—the camp’s longtime managing director—looks at me appraisingly, and I can’t stop the first smile of the day from cracking my face. He doesn’t talk for several long beats as I approach him.
“You look older,” he says, his voice worn and chapped. I shove my hands in my jeans pockets and stand next to him, looking up into the sky at his shoulder.
“I was here only four or five months ago. The fall term, Gus.” I laugh.
“Nevertheless,” he says. “Nevertheless.” We’re quiet for a while, the only sounds the snaps of the fire, a muffled voice or two in far-flung cabins, and the rustle of the wind in the trees. “It’s late,” he says.
“Hope I didn’t keep you up.”
“Aw, no. I’m not much of a sleeper. Not with these boys and girls up here.” He points at the stars in the sky. “Gotta keep an eye.”
“It’s been a long day, Gus,” I say, rubbing my neck. “Where are you sticking me?”
He turns to look at me, his face rumpled but delighted. “No getting stuck for you.” He smiles, a few teeth missing. “Come along.”
To my astonishment, praise be to Old Gus, I’m assigned one of the nicer private cabins. It’s called Motif. All of the cabins here are named after art terminology. Motif. Tone. Shade. Texture. I think it’s a little joke Gus must have come up with, because when people describe where they’re staying, they’re forced to say things like: I’m in Focus; I’m in Symmetry; I’m in Shape. Motif is set slightly back from the Village Commons, tucke
d under an ancient pine.
“You’ve earned it,” he says, igniting an oil lamp for me as I sling my things down in relief. “You’ve either taken or taught one term here each year for the past five years. Sometimes more than that.”
Motif is an 8’ by 8’ square with a thin single mattress on an iron frame to the left side, a mini potbellied stove set in the back right corner with some metal flashing behind it, a petite wooden desk and chairs set under the front-wall window to the right of the door, and an oversize, well-worn trunk set at the foot of the bed. The cabin is ascetically clean, but years’ worth of paint and dye splatters flecks the place regardless. A kind of nostalgic kaleidoscope.
He takes photos of me setting my things down haphazardly in the cabin. Then he takes pictures of the haphazard things: my hiking pack, sleeping bag, sketchbook, duffel of paint supplies, tin coffee cup. Gus is always taking photos. He likely thinks of himself mostly as a documentarian, capturing the camp’s seasons and generations, but every once in a while, one of his photos is truly compelling, not just descriptive. He usually manages to sell those photos to a dealer down in Portland or at art fairs in Greenville.
“Who’s here?” I ask.
“Three cooks, two maintenance, two cleaners. Now, counting you, six instructors. You’re the last to arrive. Seven students. Will be twenty-three when the rest show up this weekend.” He adjusts the camera strap around his neck.
“So seven carry-over artists are here from the spring term,” I say. “Pretty good.”
“Yes, indeed. Two sculptors, three painters, a metalworker, and a mixed-media artist. All very good.” Gus buffs the lens of his camera. “Can’t remember if you know any of ’em.”
“And how many fresh faces?”
“Ten brand-new to Lupine, six who have been here before at some other point. You may recognize a few—maybe you overlapped at one time or another. Hard to say. My mind ain’t the steel trap it used to be.”
I nod and think about the cohorts I’ve worked with in the past. Most students who come to Lupine Valley are in their twenties or thirties, with some talented young outliers coming in their late teens. Every once in a while, we get older students, people in their sixties or seventies. I even once had an eighty-three-year-old lady in one of my sessions. Some of the people who come here are bona fide professional artists able to sell their stuff and live on what they make. Lupine Valley is a respite from the world, a place to get back to basics for them. Some are weekend-warrior types or retirees who want to have An Experience. But most of the people who choose Lupine Valley are like me—holding some sort of formalized training in their specialty and wanting to indulge in largely unstructured time away to simply create and develop and challenge ourselves in nature and in the company of other like-minded souls. Most of the instructors are in their forties or fifties. I’m twenty-eight. A little bit of an outlier there.
Dark Things I Adore Page 4
