Terry Persun's Magical Realism Collection

by Persun, Terry

  We all agreed to try to help Lewis this time, even though there was much fear spread into pine needle and underbrush from being exposed to seeing nature in a distorted manner. We had all grown used to him. He was the first human who entered into common thought in this area, and his presence had created a mountain of learning, a mountain of new experiences for us all.

  When Lewis returned from his date, I was careful to probe him slowly. Sometimes, after long contact with other humans, he stayed in their thought and refused common thought. He had to loosen up or fall asleep for me to enter.

  Late that night, he began working on his painting. There was no trace of the feeling which went with the hallucinations, none of the boxed-in, hard-to-breathe sensations which had followed him around for the next hour or so after the incident. There was only the visuals, and that is what he wanted to get down. But he didn’t actually have the pines pull out their roots and walk, nor have the rock already in motion, stopped by a stop-action photograph. What Lewis painted was the ability for the rock to move. He put in the brush strokes of a tree about to lift its roots from the ground. He put in fear and horror, centering the work on dirt and ground, the possibility of catastrophe. He put in the most primitive and frightful aspects of nature, the most dangerous, all in a series of colors and shapes, and he left out all understanding, all innocence. He worked through the night, making pot after pot of coffee in the small drip coffee maker near the sink. He worked the paint into the canvas like stain works into the grain of a wood plank. Some natural items, a bush here, a series of leaves there, were painted in the way they actually were present in nature, balancing the skewed area, placing innocence amid disaster, tension along with release. Let me relate the sensation in human terms: it was as though you were walking down a dark alleyway alone and had to pass by several rough looking men standing in a group. Fear would rise up inside you, even though, to that point, they posed no danger. Furthermore, you would try not to show any fear by walking as casually as possible. That is what the painting portrayed.

  Late the next morning, Lewis collapsed onto the couch in the loft, but not before he watched the sun rise and the light climb down from the trees and along the grass in the field. A fog rose from the floor of the woods and from the dense grass of the field. Lewis wished for the momentum to go outside and experience the morning, but it was not in him. His exhaustion overtook him and he fell asleep almost immediately after he lay onto the couch.

  The cottage creaked as wind broad-sided it. The morning had awakened the insects to another day, flowers bloomed in the field, and all the trees drank from the sun. Time had passed sufficiently enough that the enchanted forest became calm, the animals played freely as though Lewis’ hallucinations had never touched them.

  Lewis dreamed short rushes of images and people throughout his sleep, and I experienced his date of the night before almost as though I had been there with him.

  It had started out well. Marie invited him into her apartment for a drink before dinner. “Scotch? Wine?”

  “Wine,” he said.

  “White?” Her eyebrows rose in question. Her black hair held to her face, curled around her cheeks, and her brown eyes opened wide to accept him.

  “White’s fine.” Lewis rubbed his hands together as though it was cold outside. He looked around nervously, sucking up image after image from the apartment. It was a color-coordinated, one bedroom flat. The sofa and chair matched in pattern and style, prints were framed and hung to augment the furniture and to add depth and color to the room, not for their individual artistic value. A doorway, without a door, led into a kitchen barely large enough for a small table. Marie offered the drinks from a portable bar located along one wall of the living room.

  “Thank you.” Lewis took the wine and turned away immediately. “Nice place.”

  “Thank you. Coming from an artist, that’s a compliment.”

  “I’m not a decorator. If it’s not on canvas, I’m lost. Really, I don’t much care whether a house is done-up perfect.” The tone came out harsh, and he recognized it immediately after he said it. He turned and Marie looked a little distraught. “I’m sorry. That came out all wrong. It’s just that...”

  “You don’t care about home decorating,” she finished the sentence for him, while staring into his eyes. Her tone was just as sharp, and Lewis didn’t know how to respond. Finally, she said, “Don’t be alarmed. I care more for home decorating. So we don’t agree. You know, I’ve only been acquainted with your name, I wouldn’t recognize one of your paintings if you pointed to it. Don’t be embarrassed.” She drank from the wine glass, her eyes still on him, peering over the glass.

  “Oh,” Lewis searched for something more to say, but found nothing.

  “Don’t think about it, we have other things in common.” Her whole expression changed to warm and inviting. It was done with a turn of her head, a slight closing of her eyes, a nod.

  Lewis wondered how he could duplicate the change on canvas.

  “We do frequent the same grocer.” She smiled, then walked over and took Lewis’ arm. “Come along, we’ll sit on the sofa together and get acquainted. I just hate going to dinner and trying to introduce ourselves during the constant interruptions. It’s better if we’re well acquainted. That way we can talk around the interruptions without worrying all that much about impressing our date.”

  “Impressing?” All Lewis seemed able to do was repeat a word.

  “Yes, don’t you want to impress me in some way? I know I want to impress you. Otherwise, why date at all? If I’m not interested, I don’t go out. I can buy my own dinner.”

  “You probably can.” They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, both turned facing the other.”

  “Bet on it.”

  “What else should I bet on?”

  “That I’ll let you know if I’m not interested.”

  Her frankness didn’t help to calm Lewis. His nervousness also increased when he realized she could care less about his paintings. To that point in his life, except for Brittany, whom he never felt he deserved, women were there because of his work, in one form or another. Marie posed a new situation, a new problem. Yet, with her outspokenness and honesty forcing them down the road of conversation, to this point mostly hers, Lewis eventually relaxed and began to talk. From childhood to marriage to breakdown to divorce, if one wanted to know facts, they were available in magazines. There was nothing factual about his life that he could hide even if he had wanted to. But he didn’t want to. Marie was much too open for him to care about holding anything back, so when he talked of Christopher or Brittany it was because it was fact and Marie accepted it all in stride.

  “You miss them,” she said.

  “Christopher.”

  “Not Brittany?”

  “At first,” his voice was calm, his knee up on the cushion between them, his hand loosely holding the wine glass. “Eventually I got over her, I guess. It’s an odd thing. I’m not sure if I really loved her.”

  “All men say that when it’s over.” She mocked him with a wave of her hand. “I never loved her anyway.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all. I was a fanatic about having her. For a while I believed I couldn’t paint without her. By the time I found I could, she was pregnant and we married.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “I know, but there was still that,” he shrugged, “need of some sort. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “You don’t have to.” She touched his knee, then took his wine glass from him. “A refill?”

  “Yes, please.” Lewis followed her with his eyes, turning to sit straight on the sofa. Marie was slightly hippy and had a broad back, but you’d never get that from looking at her face, which was thin and well-highlighted with reasonably high cheekbones and full lips. She had small ears and a rounded chin, dark eyebrows, which lifted and fell at choreographed moments throughout a conversation, and which were used to bring out the warmth of a smile or the seriousness of a stateme
nt. Her brown eyes could be quite large or quickly turn to slits like a rodent’s. Lewis tried to get a sense of her from behind as she poured the wine. He envisioned a short stump and a hay bale, an odd combination, but he was converting her, slowly, into more or less natural elements. When she turned to greet his intense stare, she turned her eyes away quickly, then as though re-adjusting her skirt, her face came back with an equally intense expression. This was the second time she had looked at him in such a manner and although it should have put him off, and, in fact, would have had he been in a different situation, such as inside a large room with many other guests, he actually felt excited by her. There was a feeling of intrigue and danger that she emitted that threw Lewis into sexual fantasy land. Without thinking, he said, “You’re amazing.”

  Her expression changed as she asked what he had meant.

  “Oh, I was just, ah, thinking out loud.”

  “I hope it was a good amazing.”

  “The best. Really.” He sat forward to take the wine glass from her. “I mean it,” he said, his hands shaking.

  “I believe you,” she giggled, an odd sound coming from her, but fitting under the circumstances.

  Her hair bounced nicely just as it had at the supermarket, and Lewis translated its movement onto canvas. It had been some time since he’d actually thought of painting a woman as he once had with Brittany, but a work was building inside him. Lewis serendipitously rose his glass, “To a good dinner together.”

  Marie was caught off guard, but retrieved the expression and lifted her glass to his. “A good night, then.”

  A little more small talk and they went to dinner. Lewis drove, opening doors for her before and after the drive and at the restaurant. “I hope you like Italian food,” he said.

  “I eat anything,” Marie said smiling. When they were seated, she said, “This is really wonderful.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes, I only met you this afternoon and here we are having dinner,” she said.

  “Was it too rushed?”

  “Not at all, that’s what I mean. There was none of that long wait for a phone call, that scheming to see you at the grocery store again, none of it. I love this. This!” she pointed towards the middle of the table, “is how relationships should begin. At a run. Just meet someone, ask them out and get to it.” She laughed loudly.

  Lewis laughed along with her even though he knew that it had all happened by accident. Still, he enjoyed his time with her immensely. The rest of the evening they talked and laughed like old friends. Lewis felt euphoric and, by the time coffee was served, they knew more about one another than mere facts. They had a meeting of minds. They found that they both loved to walk in the woods, only I’m sure Marie didn’t include common thought in her life, and spend long evenings gazing out at the sky and stars. Because of that, they decided to walk through the park after dinner. It was a clear night and the stars would be plentiful.

  When they arrived at the park, Marie got out of the car almost before it stopped, a by-product of too many drinks. She twirled around in the lot, looking up to the sky. “This is beautiful.”

  Lewis’ energy level was wearing thin. His outward self began to retreat once in the presence of the trees and squirrels.

  Marie didn’t seem to notice how quiet he had become because she was still rambling about the coolness of the night and the brightness of the stars. She ran ahead, then returned.

  Lewis walked slowly and watched how fluidly she ran from him and how excitedly she ran back. He tried to stay alert, “You don’t get out much, do you?” he joked.

  “Not like this.” She held his hand with both of hers and walked backwards down the path. “Are we going to go by the lake?”

  “To see the stars shine off the water.”

  “Do they?”

  “You haven’t seen?”

  “Not here.”

  “Then you’re in for a treat.”

  Marie rotated herself smoothly around to his side and placed one arm around his waist. “Hold me,” she said, turning into him.

  Lewis stopped and held her. The sensation was unusual. Most of his female accomplishments were interested in his hands, wanting to be touched by them, or interested in going to bed, right away. She seemed to want to be cuddled, an unusual situation, vaguely reminiscent of his relationship with Brittany. He held Marie tightly and could feel her breathe. Her hair smelled sweet, almost like candy. Lewis rubbed his hands up her back and, upon impulse, took her face between his palms, to look at, to study, but her reaction was from what she understood him to be doing, and she forced her face close to his and they kissed. Lewis felt her nose touch his, felt her teeth when she moved her mouth from side to side. His eyes closed and they held one another for a long time.

  “Oh,” Marie said, almost like a sigh.

  “We should see the lake.”

  “Should we?” she whispered, then kissed him again.

  It flashed through Lewis’ mind that Marie was making all the moves. He felt as though he should do something, so he reached around for her breasts. They were larger in his hands than he had remembered them being from sight.

  She pressed into him, then pulled away. “You’re right. We should see the lake.”

  Her sudden change surprised him, but at the same time was a relief. He felt odd letting her be so aggressive, yet even more odd taking her breasts in his hands. He liked being with her, but felt at odds with those feelings.

  As they made their way to the lake, they stopped to kiss and hold one another three more times. Lewis managed to unbutton one button on her blouse and push his hand in over her bra, feeling her flesh bulge over the top of it. He was glad when they arrived at the lake and she buttoned herself up. They stood together, almost like statues. Lewis, at least, felt like a monument placed into the world, to reflect the inner meanings of nature. He actually thought that, that he was on the earth for that reason, to teach, in a way, even though he felt he had so much to learn himself.

  CHAPTER 17

  JEFFREY WAS MILDLY SHOCKED when he heard of how tight Lewis and Marie had become in such a short while. “This is hard to believe,” he said.

  “What, that I found someone without your help?”

  “No,” Jeff wrinkled up his face. “I’m positive that’s happened before. It’s just that...”

  “She’s normal?”

  “Well...”

  Marsha appeared in the kitchen doorway. She looked tired. “I like her already.”

  Lewis had visited Jeff and Marsha almost as soon as they returned home. Robert was outside with friends.

  “So do I,” Lewis said.

  “Hey, I feel like you two are ganging up on me.” Jeff looked at one, then the other. He had a peculiar expression on his face, half joking, half serious.

  Marsha laughed, then Lewis joined in. “We’re not ganging up, “Marsha said, “we just don’t see what’s wrong.”

  “I didn’t say anything was wrong. I haven’t even met her. She’s just not his usual. That’s what I said.”

  “You should be happy. You’re always saying he should find someone more average.”

  “Average? You say that?”

  “Lew, I only mean...” Jeff glared at Marsha.

  “Forget it,” Lew said. “She’s not an art bimbo. I know that. She doesn’t, or didn’t, even know my work.”

  “She probably doesn’t know, or hasn’t even heard of half the people I handle, then,” Jeff said.

  “That’s only five artists,” Marsha put in.

  “According to Lew she’s never heard of three of them. And I shouldn’t count him. That leaves two.”

  “Nobody knows Barnaby. Does he even sell?” she asked.

  “Thanks. My wife, my friend,” Jeff said to Lewis, introducing Marsha sarcastically.

  “He’s right to handle Barnaby Schott’s work, it’s good,” Lewis said in Jeff’s defense.

  “Yes, but he’s still not well known.”

  “You’re
right, Marsha,” Jeff announced. “Anyway,” he said, “we were talking about Marie. I like what I hear about her, too.”

  “It didn’t sound it a few minutes ago.”

  “Sorry, dear,” he smiled.

  “She’s pretty important, huh?” Jeff addressed Lewis, “or we wouldn’t be discussing her like this.”

  “I’ve only known her two weeks.”

  Jeff pumped his arm insinuating the human sex act, and glanced at Lew out the corner of his eyes.

  “Jeffrey!” Marsha yelled.

  “Well?” Jeff said.

  Lewis smiled and got up from his chair. “I think I’ll keep you guessing.”

  “Oh, boy, my fantasies are pretty graphic.” Jeff got up and followed Lew past Marsha and down the hall. “They include nude bodies, paint, lots of earth colors pasted on unearthly parts.”

  “Are you going to follow me into the bathroom?”

  Jeff laughed out loud and stopped just outside the bathroom door. “Don’t think about Marie in there. I don’t want pee on the walls.”