The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  “Hey,” he said.

  Seth nodded a greeting.

  “You look wiped,” Phil said.

  “Rode forty-two miles today, pretty average,” Seth said with a shrug, “except for one delivery to Midtown. I damn near exploded my heart. Guess what the package was.”

  “Fuck,” Phil said. “Don’t make me guess. I fucking hate guessing games.”

  “Tennis shoes.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit,” Seth agreed. “Some guy wanted his running shoes for his weekend in the Hamptons. I got them from his club, and took them to his assistant at his office. She and the shoes took off in an eighty-thousand-dollar Lexus.”

  Phil was a lifelong city resident and too jaded to find this truly insane, but it was worth a laugh, and that was enough for Seth. It wasn’t the same as the camaraderie he had in the Corps, but it was close, close enough to trigger a little of the endorphin rush he used to get sitting around after patrol with Doug, Brian, and Manny. Normal tolerances.

  “It’s a fucking crazy way to make a living,” Phil said. “Playing in Manhattan traffic? Crazy.”

  Seth remembered the sweet rush of adrenaline, the conviction of his invincibility as he blew through light after light. A shiver skittered up his spine. “You’re a Marine,” Seth scoffed. “You’re calling bike messengers crazy?”

  “There’s crazy and then there’s really crazy,” Phil said. “That’s what you’re doing with your life?”

  He was doing exactly what he wanted to do with his life. “I make better money than I did in the Corps,” Seth said, like it mattered.

  Phil grunted. “You want falafel?” He waved off Seth’s automatic reach for his wallet. “I’ve got it.”

  He walked up to the bar, waiting to order. Someone switched one of the TVs to the news. He caught the tail end of the MacCarren scandal update, then a story Seth was already too familiar with: reports of more deaths in Afghanistan. Two dead, four injured. His gaze switched from the TV to Phil, knocking back his draft beer.

  “—The whole thing was a total fucking waste of time.”

  The speaker at the table behind Phil, with his beard and nerd glasses and his flannel shirt unbuttoned over a Bright Eyes concert T-shirt and carefully cuffed sleeves, was three microbrews to the wind and holding court for the people gathered around him. His commentary registered when Seth walked into the bar, but biking forty miles a day left him too tired to take offense at civilian attitudes, another advantage to making his living with his body. The guy offered a steady stream of opinions about US foreign policy, the complete debacle that was the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with totally uninformed opinions on the war, the fallout, the geopolitical situation in the Middle East. Adrenaline dumped into Seth’s nervous system, and he went into hypervigilant mode, gaze flicking from the TV to the hipster to Phil and back again.

  Phil’s shoulders were hunched, his face growing more and more stony with every use of geopolitical situation. The next thing Seth heard over the cut to commercial and a cheer from the Yankee fans was a fragment of a sentence that sounded like “dumb enough to join . . . deserve to die.” That was all it took. Phil’s face went from stony to blank.

  What happened next took less time than it took Seth to set his glass on the table and rise. One second, bearded guy was standing in Phil’s vicinity. The next second, he took two giant, stumbling steps backward into a crowd of people, his arms flailing like a pinwheel in a stiff breeze. Beer arced into the space he once occupied, and glass shattered. Stifled screams and gasps filled the air, the half of the bar that wasn’t protecting glasses or plates had their phones out and pointed at the scene.

  Seth shoved his way to Phil, standing over the bearded guy, who was now sprawled on the floor. He had one hand cupped to his nose, blood trickling down his cheek and jaw. He stared at the red liquid, then looked up at Phil, who stood over him, shoulders hunched, fists clenched, brows lowered, breathing through flared nostrils like the bull on Wall Street.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” the guy on the floor all but shrieked.

  “My brother was dumb enough to join up and defend your right to say what you said,” Phil said. “He died doing it. Show some fucking respect.” His voice was a whisper, but Seth heard it loud and clear. So did the guy on the floor. His eyes widened, and he had the look of someone who’d gone from pleasantly drunk to stone-cold sober in the space of a heartbeat.

  Seth took hold of Phil’s upper arm and got half his body between him and the dude on the floor, purposefully turning his back on the guy to show he wasn’t a threat. “Let’s go.”

  Phil turned to look at Seth. Seth stared back, not flinching, into eyes a startling shade of blue, the color of the winter sky over the mountains, and as impenetrable as a layer of ice. The lights were on, but nobody was home. As Seth watched, some form of humanity returned to Phil’s face. He looked at the guy bleeding on the floor, then at Seth. His brows slightly furrowed, he blinked, and Seth knew he had no memory of what he had just done.

  The bartender leaned over the end of the bar. “You have ten seconds to get him out of here or I’m calling the cops.”

  “We’re gone,” Seth said.

  “I didn’t mean . . .” Phil started.

  Seth took a firmer grip on Phil’s arm and turned him toward the door. “Go.”

  The crowd parted for them, eyes flickering from Seth’s tattoos to Phil’s bloody knuckles to their haircuts. He shoved through the door with a little more force than necessary to open it, and found himself in the lingering heat of the day. The parking meters seemed to sway in the heat rising off the sidewalk. He let go of Phil’s arm, but kept a close eye on him as he paced up and down the sidewalk. He felt dizzy, a little sick to his stomach from the adrenaline flooding his system and no easy way to burn it off. He did what he always did and channeled it into Phil. “You okay?”

  Phil shook out his hand and looked at his bleeding knuckles. “What did I just do?”

  Seth braced up on the sidewalk and watched Phil pace, his hands linked behind his head. “You don’t remember?”

  Phil shook his head slowly, then said, “Some hipster jerk-off said something about anyone stupid enough to sign up deserved to die.” He stopped pacing, linked his hands together and slid them over his buzz cut. Hands still behind his back, he looked at Seth. “That would do it,” he said. “That would set me off. Shit.” A rough exhale, then, “I was hungry, too, and they make damn good falafel.”

  “I’ll get a couple of orders to go,” Seth said, and went back inside. The bartender’s eyes widened. “I just want the falafel,” Seth said placatingly.

  “Couple of minutes,” the bartender said, eyeing him warily.

  While he was waiting he checked on the hipster, now sitting on a barstool with a napkin clasped to his nose. “I think it’s broken,” the kid said.

  Seth took one cursory look at the slow trickle of blood saturating the napkin. Phil had pulled his punch. “It’s not broken,” he said in tandem with a woman standing beside the guy.

  “I’m a nurse,” she said in explanation.

  “I’ve had mine broken twice,” Seth said.

  “He’ll be fine,” the woman said. “He’s sorry for running his mouth off and being a dick.”

  “My friend’s sorry for talking with his fist,” Seth said.

  The bartender called out Seth’s order. The kid stopped him before he claimed it. “I am sorry for his loss,” he said grudgingly.

  They all were. Everyone was sorry for a dead soldier or Marine, but that’s where it ended. They didn’t understand Phil’s loss, or what he was going through now, three months out of the Corps, missing his brother, no idea what to do with his life next. Seth was as clueless as the kid. There was no road map, no story, no movies made about What Happened Next, when the mission ended not in victorious homecomings and a fadeaway shot of a big family meal, but rather in body bags, explosions, and dust that never seemed to settle. “He was my fr
iend, too. My brother,” Seth said, and snagged the warm brown paper bag.

  He had this. Doug was gone, and Phil was his responsibility now.

  Outside the bar he collected Phil with a tilt of his head and started walking back to the motor home. Fat droplets of rain smacked the sidewalk as they walked, but they made it back before Mother Nature got serious. Seth unlocked the door and led the way inside. Phil stepped up and closed the door behind him. “You weren’t kidding when you said you lived in a motor home.”

  “Who’d joke about that?” Seth said as he set the food on the small table.

  Phil eyed the spokes Seth had trued, dangling from the frame over the window. “Looks like the shed in Twister, the one full of scythes, just before the big one hit. Is it legal?”

  “There’s no law that says it’s illegal,” Seth said, tipping his hand back and forth. Rain spattered against the windshield and the aluminum roof. Within moments the intermittent drops became a steady deluge. Seth flipped on the lights, automatically noting the full charge and the battery from the day’s earlier sunshine. He switched on the TV he hardly ever used when he was alone, and they ate while watching the game. It was normal. Two guys eating dinner, drinking beer, watching a game. Exactly the kind of thing that would help Phil keep it together.

  “It’s five months today,” Phil said during a commercial for razors.

  Five months. Five months since the day an IED went off and killed Phil’s brother, Doug, and two other Marines, Manny Lopez and Brian Gibson, riding in the same Humvee. Five months since Seth watched a giant fist of fire burst inside the vehicle carrying his three best friends in the world.

  That’s why he lived in a land of asphalt and cement and concrete canyons, a place so noisy all he heard was silence, far away from wadis and dusty roads and explosions. Hell yes, he knew exactly what he was doing with his life, and why. It didn’t matter how much he thought about Arden’s fierce, fragile face or the pale gold of her hair. He had responsibilities to his friends, to the loved ones they left behind. Phil, Doug’s younger brother. Brittany, Brian’s wife, a widow at twenty-three and a single mother to a seven-month-old son. Manny, who let Seth observe, draw, record their daily life as Marines, but eventually teased him into putting away his sketchbook and joining the group for a meal, a movie, a game of basketball. Semper Fi never ended. Faithfulness never ended.

  “I know,” Seth said.

  “It’s supposed to get easier,” Phil said. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat, swallowed hard, and the tears gleaming in his eyes didn’t spill down his cheeks.

  Seth eyed him in his peripheral vision. Phil had started drinking long before he met Seth at the bar, and if he was anything like Seth, he slept better with another human being breathing next to him.

  “Why don’t you stay here tonight?”

  Another throat clearing. “Sure,” Phil said.

  Together they transformed the dining area into a single bed. Phil rolled out Seth’s surplus sleeping bag. They were both too accustomed to camp life to find the arrangement awkward. Seth stripped to his boxers, brushed his teeth, then lay down on the bed at the back of the space, arranged his pillows behind him, and turned on the TV over the motor home’s queen-size bed. He was accustomed to sleeping on a narrow cot, which meant he could use the other side of the bed as a dumping ground for his laptop, cell phone, books, magazines. The drawing supplies he hadn’t touched in months, pencils, colored pencils, a barely touched watercolor kit, charcoal and pastels and the bundle of Moleskines from his last tour, were stuffed in the bottom drawer of the bedside table, always at the periphery of his mind. He focused on the TV and let his mind wander through his to-do list. Pick up a few groceries on the way home from work tomorrow; the messenger backpack made transporting a week’s worth of groceries easy. Convert the stash of cash in the coffee can into a money order and send it to Brittany. Call his parents, distracted academics caught up in the frenzy of a new school year, and not thinking much beyond the relief that Seth was home in one piece.

  His phone vibrated in the pocket of his cargo shorts. When he pulled it out, fading from the notification screen was a text from Micah. Can you sub for René on Sunday?

  He had met Micah when he made a delivery to his studio and walked in on the tail end of a life drawing class. He ended up walking out with the model. They struck up a conversation while he was waiting for his next delivery, and it turned out that modeling in the nude actually paid like whoa and goddamn. He turned around and walked right back into the studio, and told Micah that if he ever needed a sub, to keep Seth in mind. He tried not to think about what his fellow Marines would say about his sideline. Taking an art class in order to see naked women would make perfect sense to them, but being the one posing on the pedestal would’ve made him the butt of jokes, including jokes about butts, for the rest of his life. The money was part of the reason why he was doing it. The other part was that Manny the trickster would’ve found it hilarious, and a great way to get laid.

  That was a bad idea, for two reasons. First, he didn’t want to get taken off Micah’s roster by causing a shitton of drama that nobody needed. Second, when he modeled for classes at NYU or City College, most of the students felt far too young to him. Everyone involved was above the age of consent, so the difference in age wasn’t all that significant, eight to ten years, but the difference in experience was so vast it felt impossible to cross, and ultimately felt like cradle robbing.

  Arden’s class was different. The interesting thing about the drawing class last Sunday was the sense he got that he was not the most wounded person in the room. By the end of a front-line tour of duty, everyone was wounded in some way, from the sheer stress to death—killing, seeing friends wounded or killed. Arden seemed shell-shocked, dazed, the expression on her face reminiscent of Marines who had a big fucking explosion go off next to them. He remembered what that felt like: the total absence of sound, the flare of light burned into your retinas, the settling dust giving everything a hazy, unreal patina. Arden looked like she’d been through a firefight, no doubt about it, and the lines that remained made her face as interesting as any he’d ever drawn.

  He skimmed his thumb over his phone’s screen, thinking it through. She was pretty. Really pretty. In the light streaming in through the west-facing windows overlooking Central Park, her hair was a multilayered blond, with strands of gold and silver and wheat hanging tousled around her shoulders. Rich and gleaming and vibrant, all at the same time. It looked like it hadn’t been brushed since she got out of bed, which made him think of her in bed. He would’ve sworn her eyes were brown from the way the light slid through the irises, but when he sat across the table from her during the break, they were clearly Elizabeth Taylor violet. Again, rich and vibrant, surrounded by the pale skin of someone who spent every second indoors, and shadows under her eyes that told him she was getting about as much sleep as he was.

  He could hear Manny. Why you gotta be looking for a project? Millions of single girls in the city happy to welcome a Marine home, and you focus on the one who looks like she dropped her ice-cream cone.

  He wasn’t looking for a project, especially not a woman with friends who lived on Fifth Avenue, and wore a ruby ring the size and shape of an oyster shell. He owed too much to people who laid down their lives for his. He wasn’t going to waste the time or energy giving something to someone who didn’t need him. He’d model for her class, and keep his mind on the people who needed him.

  No problem. See you then.

  He sent the text to Micah and added the appointment to his calendar. Ignoring the pang of disappointment inside him, he set down his phone and turned onto his side. Phil had started snoring on his cramped bed in the dining area. This was his life now. He was a former Marine with obligations to the dead, working as a bike messenger and an artist’s model, and he had no regrets. As much as he wanted her, it wasn’t going to happen. The last thing Arden needed was a man like him.

  * * *

  W
hen he woke up the next morning, Phil was gone. Seth pulled on his bike gear and started searching the apps for a Brooklyn-to-Manhattan run.

  – THREE –

  “Don’t say a word unless I give you the okay. Not one word.”

  Arden stared at her cousin Neil as the elevator doors slid closed on the crowd in the lobby. That wasn’t going to be a problem. Her stomach had crawled up to the top of her throat and lodged itself at the back of her mouth around the time Derek opened the SUV’s back door and used his big body to clear a path through the gauntlet of photographers, reporters, news cameras, people with their cell phones held up and recording her every move, and people she assumed were victims of the Ponzi scheme, based on the way they were screaming obscenities at her. Once she was inside the Midtown building that was home to Levinsky, Strewthan, MacCarren, and Martin, the furor died down, but the aftereffects left Arden with a heart thumping like a twitchy rabbit’s hind leg and with a very familiar tightness in her chest.

  Neil finished thumbing away at his iPhone, then slid it into his jacket pocket and shifted his briefcase from his left hand to his right. He reached out and gripped Arden’s hand, then gave it a tight squeeze. “How’s Aunt Lyd?”

  Arden’s heart fluttered in her chest like a trapped bird. She’d spent most of the week in East Hampton, holed up in Breakers Point, the house her family had occupied in one form or another for over a century, alternately arguing with and consoling her mother. “Devastated,” she said. “One minute she’s furious with Dad and vowing never to speak to him again. The next she’s chastising me for not calling him since that day. Then she’s pleading with me to fly to New Zealand and find Garry, who seems to have disappeared into another dimension.”