Retreat to Love

by Greene, Melanie

  FireWind was becoming more and more routine. With Angelica and Brandon keeping mainly to themselves, it was just the six of us who piled into Lizzy’s studio to see In Sickness and In Health, which she’d completed more than a week ahead of schedule. It was the first time since the Margie-dictated studio visits we spent any extended time discussing art. Mostly we expressed awe; she’d captured vulnerability and dependence and raw struggle when she’d put the two figures together. Caleb took some slide shots for her, Wren directing the angles and presentation.

  With ten days left, I finally brought up Caleb’s return to San Jose.

  “I’m not going back.”

  “Scuse me?”

  He laughed and grabbed me for a twirl in the air. Good thing we were in the doe’s clearing or I’da hit the underbrush. “Ash, you think I’m gonna pack up and leave the love of my life sweltering in Texas without me?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Oh, don’t pout.”

  “What? You make, apparently, all these plans and schemes and don’t bother to mention them to me?”

  He hugged me gently to him this time. His arms. His scent. His teasing soft voice. “Sweetie babe—sorry, just sweetie. I didn’t know when you wanted to talk about it. I was going to say something a billion times, but you’ve still been so sad, I don’t want to intrude with all my plans for our happily ever after.”

  I widened my eyes. “Happily ever after?”

  “Well, why not? You never know. We may as well go into it planning for forever.”

  “Great, no pressure or anything.” But the thip-thump of my heart wasn’t from a flight or flight instinct. I thrilled.

  “No, no pressure. Seriously. But I’m not going through life regretting missed opportunities. If right now I feel like we could be happily ever after, I’m going to proceed like I may be right.”

  “That’s just. I mean, I love you, you know I do. But, isn’t it dangerous?”

  “Dangerous how?”

  He was daring me to meet his eyes, but I looked into the branches of the black willow instead. “I dunno. Just, dangerous. It makes the fall so much harder when you discover it won’t work out.”

  “Ash. Come on.” Then he physically created eye contact, his hand calm and steady on my jaw. “Ash, do you have the slightest of inklings it won’t work out?”

  Then he shook my head at the same time I, hesitantly, started to shake it myself.

  “See? We’re fine then. There’s no reason to plan a lot of half-steps and ‘what if’ out clauses. Come on.” We’d reached my porch, and I sat on the step beside him. “Let me tell you what I’ve been thinking about, and you tell me which of the things are good for you, and which ones scare you, and which seem terrible. And we’ll go from there, okay?”

  I nodded, slipped an arm behind his waist. The gentle press of his weight against my side felt made for me. Damn him his confidence, anyway. I still wasn’t sure he was so right, and considered this just more of his dictatorial take-charge-and-make-gazpacho nature.

  But the plans were okay. Some of them. No way was I going to move back into my damn rental, which I was now sure had totally the wrong karmic balance for me, and which wasn’t big enough for the two of us to work in at any rate. My sublease had already emailed about extending the lease, when I’d said I would be going straight to Gran’s after FireWind.

  I didn’t want to go as far as Northern California. And Caleb had been adding distance between himself and his parents since he’d figured out their trick of turning him into their arbiter. As he ran down his ideas, we stuck on two plans. He could move into Gran’s with me, or we could find someplace new entirely. He was partial to Arizona.

  As if I could just up and change my entire life.

  To be with him.

  As if my entire life hadn’t already changed.

  Not just because of him.

  I couldn’t imagine leaving Gran’s behind, but I couldn’t fathom living there without her. I vibrated with Caleb’s gentle suggestion that moving there—even with him—would just exacerbate my loneliness for Gran and make it harder for me to establish my own space to work and live. “Would you ever let her fabric closet get as messy as you keep your studio here?”

  I just shoved my shoulder into his side. But I suspected he was right.

  That night, mid-darkness and peacefully quiet, I burst into giggles.

  “Hmm?” he asked, mellow and deep laughter in his throat.

  I shook my head a few times before I could answer. “The very thought.”

  “Come on, it can’t be that funny.”

  “No, Caleb, really. Me moving to Prescott to hang out in the desert with you? Where it’s all hot and dry and people don’t know how to make decent iced tea?”

  “How d’you know they can’t make iced tea? You’ve never been.”

  “No one who don’t live between the Rockies and the Appalachians knows how to make decent iced tea. It’s documented.”

  “You’re so full of it, babe.”

  I pinched his arm.

  “Okay, then, you’re so full of it, Ashlyn.”

  “Be that as it may be. It’s still bizarre to be planning this.”

  “Why? You’ve got nothing holding you back.”

  He must have felt my flinch. “Oh, baby, I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t. I just mean, in general, like Lizzy has a job waiting for her and Rafael has his kids.”

  “Rafael has kids?”

  “Two of them. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No! When did this come out?”

  “I don’t know. Last week sometime. Oh, I do know; I was down trying to get some pictures of Hester and he was walking around, started telling me how much his little girl loves peacocks. She’s one of those pink fairy princess kind of kids.”

  “So, not to be rude, but where’s the mom? And why is he sleeping with women the first night here?”

  “Aren’t you the nosy one?”

  “Yes. So tell me.”

  “Make me.”

  “I will, if you’re gonna be like that.”

  His three-second window of opportunity to speak ran up, so I pounced and tickled.

  Later, he rolled over and said, “Uncle, I’ll tell.” He kissed the back of my hand and murmured into it. “His girlfriend got pregnant when they were in college and they got married and then when they graduated their daughter was born, and then she convinced him to get a vasectomy.” Adorably enough, he shuddered. “And then divorced him the next year. He gets them all summer now they’re older—that’s why he wanted to go on retreat now, so he wouldn’t be anxious to work when they’re staying with him.”

  “Damn. You sure know how to withhold information.”

  “Come on, how’s it relevant to anything?”

  “Goddess, Caleb, how is anything relevant to anything we gossip about? It’s gossip! You get some, you share it with me, I share it with Lizzy and Wren. It’s the way the world goes round.”

  “Women.”

  “Sure, women. We’re all horrid beasts. I notice your inherent blame of the ex-wife in Rafael’s story. It could quite easily have been the way he sleeps around or the way he refuses to pitch in around the household. Or all of it together.”

  “Wow, a misandrist diatribe. At two in the morning, no less. If I promise I’ll change all the diapers and read all the bedtime stories, will you save the ranting for daylight hours?”

  “Okay, I’ve only just decided to move to the desert with you, and you’re naming the children. Slow down.”

  He turned and propped himself on his elbow. “You’re coming with me?”

  I smiled, which maybe he couldn’t see in the dark, but I could hear his, so maybe he knew. “Yeah, Caleb, I’m coming with you. But I want to go, alone, to Gran’s for two weeks first. I want to help Bernadette sort it all out.”

  She and Dermot and Matthew had gotten through a lot of the estate stuff and were dividing possessions without rancor, but both
uncles would be gone by the end of the week and there were personal effects and paperwork piles to sort through. And I needed to get the rest of my stuff out of the rental and figure out what to take to Prescott. And I kinda needed to talk some more to Bernadette; it had all been so flustered and unfocused after Gran’s death.

  Caleb would just have to find us a place to live on his own.

  Our future had been on my mind since before Bernadette’s birthday party, but I never expected to go from tentative discussion to thousand-mile-moving plan in the space of a few hours. My breathing hitched with the return of my racing pulse.

  “Ashlyn,” Caleb traced whispery fingers along my hairline. “Thank you. Thanks for trusting me on this, I know it’s not easy.”

  I exhaled. “No, it’s not. But in some ways it’s easier now than it would have been before.” I stared at the moon-glow through the curtain. Not to get all anthropomorphic again, but it seemed to be winking at me. Gran used to wink when she wanted to quietly signal my doing something well.

  I winked back at the moon and tucked myself in tighter against Caleb. We drifted off together.

  I yawned through our penultimate breakfast prep, and Caleb wasn’t much better. He just nodded when I suggested we order yogurt and toppings for a parfait buffet the next morning. And just let Margie try to prevent me serving packaged muffins.

  “And just think, next week we have to make dinner,” he grumbled as he cleaned the waffle iron. Since we’d been away for the funeral, Sargie’d had the new Team Three (Wren and Lizzy) trade breakfast/lunch weeks with us, which meant they were now done with all of their FireWind cooking. And it had already occurred to us to feel pressured with the expectations of making the very last of the communal dinners. Week Eight was nigh.

  After lunch, back in ValeSong, I gathered together the sketches I’d done in that studio. All of the Patchy Men pages were a mess, and I culled them for a few showing my progression through it, as well as a couple with motifs I liked but hadn’t used. I couldn’t hardly look at the Chains of Love layouts, so I moved them directly to the recycling pile, except for the one from my first FireWind morning.

  Once those were organized out of the way, I added notes to the plans for the mosaic series, and sorted through the scrap pile to find some Pima broadcloth I could test out my bleach-dyeing plans upon. There was a largish section of a pale pink as well as a damask that struck me as particularly tile-like, so I stretched it on a smaller hoop and carried them both to the sink.

  Half of the broadcloth I brushed over in a crazed fashion, going for the look of cracked plaster, and on the other half I traced a grid of bleach, then carried it out to the clearing to set in the sun. I tried the grout lines effect on the damask but it didn’t look like it would take well. I put it in the sun anyway.

  Straightening, I saw Wren walking up the stream from her cabin. I waved, but she didn’t notice. Or didn’t care. I started to call out, but, for whatever reason, didn’t. I was suddenly exhausted; drained. Things were not going well with her, and I just couldn’t blame myself. Normally I blamed myself for all of the inter-personal problems around me, but this time, I just couldn’t.

  Still, there was the news about Rafael, so I checked the angle of the sun and went to Lizzy’s to tell her. She was gratifyingly titillated, and after she’d shown me the rough cut of a small soapstone figure provisionally titled Lonely Loner, I brought up Wren’s walking away.

  “Ash, don’t be putting me in the middle here. I don’t let her talk to me about you two, and I won’t let you talk to me about her.”

  “She tries to talk to you about me?”

  “As you do her, so don’t get stroppy. I’m your friend, I’m her friend, and if the two of yous want to work it out and be friends as well, it suits me beautifully. If not, I’ll just be friends with you separately.”

  “Wow. I guess I didn’t know we weren’t still friends. I thought this was just a rough patch.”

  “And why shouldn’t it be?”

  I shrugged, guiltily. “I dunno. It should be. She’s not …” then I stopped myself from complaining. “I’ll see if we can’t work it out.”

  “Good.” Lizzy was better than most at declaring a subject closed with just her tone.

  But Wren wasn’t at dinner, and Caleb and I retired early, worn out. He tried to slip out without waking me Saturday morning, but the shower noises roused me, and together we plodded to the kitchen and silently set out all of the food. Part of it was being too groggy to talk much, but part of it was the syncopation of having worked together so often in that space. He handed me bowls when I was gathering the table setting, and I nudged myself closer into the pantry when he needed to get to the fridge. Our choreography was a security blanket whenever I startled myself by remembering we would leave FireWind to start an entirely new life together.

  Anyway, maybe our silence was infectious, ‘cause the breakfast people who showed up (Wren, Theo, Lizzy) were notably quiet as well. I was going to try and talk to Wren when we were done clearing up, but the only one left at the table was Theo.

  “Hey,” he said as Caleb and I emerged from the kitchen, holding water-wrinkled hands.

  “Hey,” Caleb replied. These two were quite the conversationalists.

  “Listen, can you guys come by my studio?”

  Well this was a first. Theo had been spending a lot of time in there working, from what Caleb had seen while walking past between our own rooms. But he’d never asked anyone to see his stuff since the Angel by Starlight showing. We didn’t hesitate to join him.

  In his den he started pacing some, but kept us facing the window so we wouldn’t see over the low wall into his studio. “When I was gone, you know, in the hospital? Okay, so that was a bad time for me, but it did give me a lot to think about. You know, artistically and all. And emotionally, but that’s different stuff, that’s not why you’re here.”

  Caleb and I traded glances, still unsure exactly why we were there.

  “So what I said before, remember? About the way the work just comes to me, I don’t control it?” We nodded. “Yeah, I know, well, I know now, that was just a lot of bullshit. That was just my way of avoiding confrontation if I offended anyone. I mean, I offended people a lot. I still do, I don’t think that’s changed, I don’t think I want it to change, right?” Again we nodded. His pacing—a cross between professorial and maniacal—combined with all the nodding was making me dizzy. “Because offended is a visceral reaction, and that’s what I want, is something visceral.

  “She,” he spat the word towards the north, “doesn’t understand about visceral, even though it’s what she does, too. She doesn’t think of it like that, which is why she won’t ever really make a masterpiece. If she was looking for it, that’d be one thing, because she has the skill and imagination for it. But she’s not, she thinks it’s all beauty and light or something. But not me. I know about feeling it,” he punched his small intestine, “feeling it here, getting offended and getting repulsed and getting angry, and having it come from something exterior, something presented to you, something so powerful you can’t look away from it but you want to, you want to but you’re drawn to it.” He stopped. “Do you know what I mean? Am I explaining it well?”

  Personally I wanted people to be irresistibly drawn to my work for different reasons, but I knew well enough what he was getting at.

  A deep breath from Theo. “Right, so now, after being there and all, after thinking about this, I can say yes, I do intend to procure the reactions I get, I do want to be in control of my art. Okay?” More nods from us. “So that’s what I’ve been working on since I got back, and I’ve got a canvas I want to show you two, if you’ll look, and tell me, honestly, what it makes you feel, right? What’s the effect, what’s the deep down gut reaction, right?” He gauged us. My head was spinning but I must have looked on board. “So come in.”

  Caleb followed me following Theo into his studio. He walked all the way to the easel, but the two of us stopped
short in the doorway. Gradually we moved apart a little and closer to it.

  The canvas was mostly in reds and blacks, heavily overpainted and almost three dimensional just from the paint layers. A pale gray skinny body, naked to the waist, lay on a stretcher between two red-suited paramedics. The tube emerging from his throat ended at the lip of a gleaming steel basin in the lower left quadrant of the painting. Emerging from the tube were the contents of Theo’s torn-up soul: a profusion of aspirin tablets, torn canvases, shards of his heart, and primarily, a crucifix upon which was mounted a smaller but more intricate version of the gray Theo, the feet end of the crucifix itself emerging from the labia of a be-winged Angelica. She was fellating the dick-shaped lens of a camera.

  I glanced at Caleb. He was still contemplating the painting. I glanced at Theo. He was contemplating Caleb. Then he smiled wryly at me, eyes gleaming. “It makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  “But you want to keep looking, right?”

  No point in denying it. “I do.”

  He nodded. “Look, then.”

  I went a bit closer. The details were articulate and deft. As in Starlight, he used light and shadow to suggest emotion and highlight the storyline. The first thing you studied, despite it being among the smallest of elements, was the crucifix Theo. But you didn’t see it until you had taken in the scene as a whole: the medics blurred by quick action, the tragedy on Theo’s brow, the betrayal of the Angel. I moved away, to a chair.

  “Well?” Caleb had moved away as well, and was looking at Theo.

  “Man, it’s great. It’s repulsive, but great.”

  “I do feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach,” I agreed.

  “Seriously, now? You’re not just trying to prevent me o.d.ing again, right?”

  Caleb barked a laugh. “Well, I wasn’t until now. Damn.”