The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  Then it smoothed out. “Seth. You scared me half to death.”

  “Sorry,” he said, as much to the driver as to Arden. The big guy relaxed, or pretended to relax. He knew how to handle himself. “You said you weren’t coming.”

  “I changed my mind,” she said, her voice either shaky or obscured as she crouched to pick up the scattered art supplies. He leaned the bike against the polished brass pole holding up the building’s door-to-curb awning and helped her. “Okay? Got everything?” he asked, stopping himself just short of patting her down like he’d pat down Manny to make sure he had everything, straps tight, locked and loaded.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll walk home, Derek. Put the car away and head home yourself.”

  She looked around quickly, lifted her chin, and strode up the awning. Seth followed in her wake, wheeling the bike next to her, a little bewildered. She seemed to relax once they walked through the heavy brass doors. “I’ll take that, sir,” the doorman said, and reached out one white-gloved hand for the bike. He was good with faces, clearly remembering Seth from a couple of weeks ago. “Ms. Cottlin said to go right up.”

  He pushed the elevator button for them. The doors closed, leaving Seth and Arden in a square space of gleaming brass. She stared straight ahead, breathing shallowly. In the twenty-four hours since he’d seen her last, something had happened to her face. The skin clung more tightly to the bones, and her eyes, never vibrant, were full of ghosts.

  “You okay?” he said quietly.

  “Fine,” she said. “I just . . . didn’t sleep well.”

  He recognized that for what it was, a lie told in the hopes that if it were repeated often enough it would be true. He stayed silent when the door opened and Betsy swooped down on Arden. She gave Seth a quick glance and clearly modified what she was about to say.

  “I’m so glad you could make it,” she said, giving Arden a quick hug, then pulling back to peer into her face. “How’s Lydia?”

  “As well as can be expected,” Arden said, obviously falling back on platitudes.

  Betsy’s gaze sharpened, then she took Arden’s hand. “Come help me with the wine,” she said, and drew her down the hall into the kitchen.

  Seth dropped his messenger bag to the floor in the hall, and walked into the living room that looked over the park. Micah was there, as were Sally and Libby, wine in hand, discussing a trip to the High Line for a nature drawing class. Seth gave them a quiet nod, poured himself a glass of ice water, and stepped to the side, waiting for the class to begin.

  Waiting for Arden to come out of the kitchen. When she did, she had a wineglass in hand, Betsy’s arm around her shoulder, and a little bit of color in her face. All that did was take her from deathly pallor to ICU resident. Something was going on there, something she wasn’t letting him see.

  Betsy nodded at Micah. “Seth, if you please,” Micah said, and waved into the circled easels.

  He shucked his cargo pants and button-down shirt, draped them over the back of a red leather chair, and resolutely did not look at Arden when he walked into the pool of sunlight on the parquet floor. Micah ran the class through the warm-up poses, then broke to arrange the platform for a long sitting. Seth ended up sitting twisted with the bulk of his upper body weight on his right arm and shoulder. It was a complicated, spiraling pose, and based on the absolute silence in the room, engaged everyone quite nicely.

  He could see Arden in his peripheral vision. Without having seen a single thing she’d drawn, he could tell she was surrendering to the process, dropping into the act and art of drawing. Micah wandered among the easels, making quiet suggestions, adding a quick line now and then to demonstrate something. When he reached Arden’s easel, Seth saw his eyes widen.

  “You’ve been practicing,” he said in a tone Seth had heard rarely in other classes. Impressed surprise. Enthusiasm even. “You’re moving from surface, from contour lines to character, personality, essence, to unity. You’re present to that possibility, open to it, without trying to make it happen.”

  “No pressure there,” Betsy said from the other side of the circle. Laughter. Even Arden smiled, but her face was still pale. She looked at him without seeing him, a pattern that continued through the break—when Betsy’s housekeeper brought out trays of chocolate-dipped strawberries, cheese and crackers, fruit, and little slivers of cake—through the second session, right up until Micah called time.

  “Draw every day. Whatever you see. Try to focus on nature, things made and well used. It’s okay to copy other artists. Go to the Met or the Museum of Modern Art and copy drawings. It will help you find your voice, give you something to incorporate or push against,” he added over the clamor of sketchpads closing, pencils and erasers sliding into pencil bags.

  Seth made his circuit of the easels, saving Arden for last. “Can I look?” he asked, keeping his eyes on her face.

  “No,” she said, rapid-fire. “Not yet.”

  On one hand, he understood. He didn’t want anyone peering into his sketchbooks from the war, either. But on the other hand, he wanted to know what Arden’s weary, battle-tested eyes saw in him. The desire sat oddly in his chest, perched like a bird at the very end of a swaying branch, kept out by the other birds, huddled together, taking up all the strongest spaces.

  She stuffed the pencil case into her bag. “Come over tonight?”

  Again with the undertone. He kept his back to the other people in the room, protecting her from prying eyes.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  Seth took the elevator to the ground floor, reclaimed his bike from the doorman, walked outside and turned north, then leaned the bike against the building’s corner. Spent the five minutes he waited for her trying to identify how he felt. Anticipation. Uncertainty. Disloyal. Alive. Not sure how to go on. Confident that something else was bothering Arden.

  When she walked out of the building, sliding her sunglasses onto her face, she hit him like a ton of bricks. Same white-gold hair, same pale skin, same big hollowed-out eyes. The khaki pants and linen shirt looked rumpled. She should look like a lost child, fragile, in her too-loose pants and her scarred skin. Instead, all he could see was strength, like something stripped away everything and left only the core of her. Steel. A little nicked, like swords actually used in battle. Scuffed. But still steel, still deadly.

  “Don’t be anyone else today,” she said when she reached him.

  He fell into step beside her, wheeling the bike between them. “Fine by me,” he said. Right now he wasn’t sure who he was at all.

  She hung back for a moment, then came up on his other side, like she wanted to get closer, no obstacles between them. He stamped down on the sweet sensation spreading through him. “Does Betsy lay out a spread like that every time she has someone over?”

  Arden nodded. Smiled, if you could count a bit of a quirk of lips a smile. “We met at boarding school. Her parents worked abroad so she shuttled between school and camps. Sometimes she’d stay with us over a holiday. She loves having a place of her own, welcoming people, feeding them.”

  If Betsy could get Arden to eat, he’d stand naked in her living room every day of the week. “You didn’t eat much.”

  “I haven’t had much of an appetite lately.”

  They reached her town house. He hoisted the bike onto his shoulder and waited while she unlocked the door and keyed off the alarm system. “Can I get you anything?”

  “I will if you will,” he said with a little smile.

  “Of course.” In the kitchen she opened the fridge and pulled out plastic deli containers containing various cold salads. A loaf of French bread was tucked into a bread box on the counter. She loaded up a battered tray, black lacquer with a dragon inset, which had to be an antique, handed him the tray, then picked up her drawing bag and led him up the stairs, but didn’t stop in the living room.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “May I draw you?”

  He loved
the polite way she asked, like this wasn’t what they did, him stripping off his clothes for her, then fucking her. “Sure.”

  “I want to do this in bed,” she said.

  He loved that about her, polite request, then bam, the sharp left into the unexpected. “Whatever you want,” he said.

  “You can eat and loll at the same time, right?”

  “A decade in the Marine Corps and I can eat and do just about anything,” he said, and followed her down the hall.

  The bedroom windows overlooked the backyard, which was saying something in Manhattan. From this vantage point, Seth could see Arden’s garden, enclosed by a high brick wall, and the brick path running the length of the narrow space, the flower beds cut back and neatly mulched for the winter. A weathered table and chairs for two sat on the tiny brick patio, a closed umbrella standing guard between two raised planters filled with chrysanthemums.

  “Nice,” he commented. Central Park was half a block away, and she had a yard, too.

  “I prefer the rooftop deck,” she said as she pulled back the white duvet and top sheet. “More sunlight.”

  “There’s a rooftop deck?”

  “I’ll show you sometime,” she said distractedly, then set the tray to one side of the mattress and gave him a little nod.

  “Where do you want me?”

  She sat on one corner, crossed her legs like a little kid, and tucked her hair behind her ears. With her back to the windows, he had a hard time seeing her expression. “Get comfortable,” she said.

  The room shimmered with the things they weren’t saying. He stretched out on his side, crossed his legs at the ankle, and braced his weight on his arm. It wasn’t the most comfortable position to eat, but he’d make do. He took one of the little plates and set it on the sheets in front of him, then added some of the sliced bread, cheese, a few carrots, and a couple of cookies. It was no wonder she and Betsy were so thin. They set out mouthfuls of food then picked at them like birds.

  She set her sketchpad on her knees and bent her head. He ate slowly, trying not to get crumbs in the sheets, watching her, not caring if she noticed, trying to figure out what she saw. Based on the pattern of her glances, she was working on the line from his shoulder to his hip like her life depended on getting it right.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said, pinching together bread and cheese. “Come here.”

  “You’re distracting me,” she said, but obediently scooted forward a little, then bent even farther forward and opened her mouth for some bread smeared with a spicy lobster dip.

  She didn’t back up, but stayed within arm’s reach. Concentrating. Blocking something out. He’d seen it before. Done it before. Reached for lines and hash marks and shading because as complex as they were, they were less complex than reality.

  He popped the cookie in his mouth, then reached out and ran the tip of his index finger around the knobby bone of her ankle. One slow circle. Pause on the pulse tripping beside the bone. Another circle, bigger, just as slow, not stopping this time, nudging up the leg of her chinos.

  “Am I distracting you now?”

  “A little.”

  Her voice was fainter, her gaze fixed on the sketchpad, and pink bloomed on her cheeks and throat, as if the color in her skin drew its strength from her voice.

  The room was cool, the air-conditioning a faint hum, the sunset colors leaching to city-style perpetual, artificial twilight. He’d never seen night so black until Afghanistan. Daylight was the same, but night, night was different here. It caught Arden’s hair, lay over it like a sheet of dirty silk, threw her face into relief. He found himself memorizing her cheekbone, the plane underneath it, the curve of her ear, the way the muscles tensed and slackened as she concentrated, then lost it under his finger.

  Hand up the leg of her pants, he rolled forward, getting his knees under him.

  “Stop,” she said, and flipped to a new page.

  He stopped, hand still curved around her calf. What felt smooth three seconds earlier now felt awkward as hell, but she was sketching madly, face alive, drawing, of all things, the line of his back and the curve of his ass. She made him aware of his body in ways he’d never been before. With a shock, he realized that’s how he could make this okay. He’d just sublimate the ache in his chest into physical desire. That was fine. Getting obsessed with her strength, needing her for that, was not fine. She could need him, use him as her muse, but that’s where it ended. He pushed aside the vision of her as honed steel or a knight and angled his head just enough to get his point across.

  “Okay,” she said, and he completed the move, leaning in to kiss her.

  Her mouth opened under his, lips soft and warm, swollen from her biting them as she worked. He licked first the lower, then the top, the edges of her teeth.

  “I can’t work like this,” she said, the words of a complaining diva, but the tone one of laughter.

  He bit her lip, then spoke against her mouth. “You want to draw?”

  “Yes,” she said, like she was explaining the blindingly obvious. What he heard was Maybe. No.

  “I’ll get out of your way,” he said, and shifted sideways to put his mouth to her bare shoulder. The shirt was loose enough that he could shift it with his mouth, first to her neck so he could kiss the round curve of her shoulder, the bump of bone under the skin, then to the edge of her shoulder so he could kiss the collarbone. His lips crisscrossed over the scars there, then nuzzled into the hair falling against her throat.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “Car accident.” Her pencil scratched against the paper, more slowly than before, but still assured.

  “What are you drawing?”

  “Your feet. Your . . . um . . . instep. No, arch. Not instep.”

  He smiled. Slipping concentration. Good. He remembered his feet in Afghanistan, the way the skin would rot and peel after weeks of patrol, how they’d stumble back behind the wire and take turns bullying each other into taking care of their feet. The doc always came around for a check, but there were twenty-two of them and one of him, and he’d walked patrol with them, too. So they did it for each other, because it took some of the weight off the doc’s back. Because they loved one another.

  “You have adorable toes,” she said.

  He blinked against the sting in his eyes. She reached out and stroked a single finger down his arch. “Not ticklish?”

  “Not really,” he said, and held himself still while she learned his foot, the flat of his heel, the curve around his arch, the pad of each toe, then picked up the pencil again. He shifted his weight.

  “Are you looking down my top?”

  “I am now,” he said, and peeked. “Take it off.”

  “That’s not how this works,” she said, then made an inarticulate noise of protest when he gripped the hem and pulled it up. The pencil went one way, the sketchpad another. Her bra, a pale coffee brown silk, looked familiar.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Irresistible,” she said, distracted.

  He’d seen it on a mannequin there on a delivery earlier in the summer. Sitting back on his heels, he reached out and brushed his thumb over her nipple. While he wasn’t looking at the sketchpad, the line quivered when her nipple peaked. He did it again, and watched her eyelids droop. He sat back on his heels, but she held out her hand.

  “You, too,” she said, and nodded at his shirt.

  Never in his life had he regretted buttons more. He made swift work of the first two before she muttered, “You’re too fast, or I’m too slow. Slow down.”

  Class was easy, because boot camp erased any inhibitions he had after years in locker rooms. Shuck everything, sit or stand or stretch. Hold the pose, because any physical challenge shut down his brain.

  This was hard, on her bed, in her bedroom. She was watching him, not quite the dispassionate artist, not quite a lover, but close enough. Close enough, when the last thing he wanted was to get close. He slipped the t
hird button from the placket, feeling more self-conscious than he did when he undressed for a big class at CUNY. It was hard to sit under her gaze when she not only saw him, she saw into him. Maybe not through, not yet. It wouldn’t take long.

  He shrugged out of the shirt and tossed it to the floor.

  “Tell me about it,” she said abstractly. “The tattoo.”

  He controlled the flinch. “It was Manny’s idea,” he started. He pulled out his phone and showed her the picture of the four of them, laughing—that was his background, his screen saver, his reason for living. She studied it carefully as he named them, tracing her fingers over the image. “When our first tour finished, we decided to get tattoos.”

  “Why that one?” she asked, handing back his phone, returning to her sketchbook.

  “We all got the same one,” he said.

  She filled in some section, middle of the page. He kept his eyes resolutely forward. She didn’t want him to look. He wouldn’t look. “Why that one? When I first saw it, I thought it was a cross.”

  “I was a kid when I enlisted. Seventeen. I graduated early so I could join. I used to draw fantasy stuff. Dragons. Trolls. Elves. The epic quest, Lord of the Rings stuff.”

  Her gaze flicked up to him. He’d startled her out of her trance, and he wasn’t going any deeper, how he used to daydream about quests, missions, companions, a band of brothers he’d never had. “What?” he said defensively. “I was a kid.”

  “It’s very cool,” she said.

  “The guys used to mock me, until I started drawing them.”

  “I have brothers,” she said. “Mocking seems to be part of the Y chromosome.”

  He laughed. “Eventually they wanted me to draw them. If I did a quick sketch and handed it out, it turned into a thing, a badge. New guys knew they were in when I drew them. It was just a thing I did, you know? Always with the fantasy elements, never meant for it to be anything else. But when the tour was over and the four of us were back home, we got drunk. I was drawing stuff, Manny decided the sword was sick, and we got tats of it. It made sense at the time.”