Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 21

by Kelly Link Gavin Grant

  A woman was already seated in the half dark at the Americans’ big table. A fleet of tiny votive candles bobbed in a trough of water. Arla's white face was sketched with shadows like the fibers of asbestos. George had never noticed the crossbeams of the rectory ceiling before. She was actually eating an apricot.

  "Christ, Arla."

  "They knew all about me,” she said lightly.

  She must be teasing, he thought. She was teasing, to catch him off guard—what did she mean by it? He remembered, long ago—before London—she had implored him for a likeness, a bust, she laughed at the word. He had thought, as if it were a parlor trick, a five minute portrait in the street, one of those pedestrian bridges in Paris, the Seine an instant background brushstroke.

  Maybe he had tried to tell her he wasn't a human Polaroid, not even a quick study. He didn't remember. “Just give it a go,” she shrugged, or pressed—he had felt he wasn't savvy enough to know how much it meant to her. “I just want to see what you see, George."

  * * * *

  Now she said, “It was my idea,” as if to comfort him. “You're allowed confidantes, you know?"

  His face was hot. “What an assumption,” he said stiffly.

  In his darkest hours he had not even conjured a reunion like this. Moving toward her was like finding himself naked in a dream. Trying to find a telephone booth or a cigarette kiosk against a jeering, tidal crowd.

  She was wearing a straight black skirt of a rather unflattering length. It seemed to cut her in half. His eye longed to smooth her out. “Anyway, George,” she was saying, as if they'd left of yesterday, “I've brought work—"

  Just for a moment he allowed himself to see her in full color. Instead of in clay, symbol.

  * * * *

  The Americans, like blustery fairy godparents, shunted them off without even pretending to offer supper.

  They crossed the street, George leading slightly and Arla slanting behind him. In the last of the daylight he could see the stickiness and shine of the thick polyester material. She made a point to grimace at the church.

  "So it feels just like home, eh George?” she said, as if for her it was a completely bizarre predilection.

  It was absurd, playing they didn't know each other.

  He wanted to say, suddenly, as it came to him, he had stalked the cathedral yard under cover of darkness the same way he had dreamed of her, was finally permitted to drop through a hole in the roof, the skylight of her bedroom, a pinkish moon crushed between clouds above them.

  He started to reach for her but she ducked theatrically as if she were shrugging the weight of the church's dense shadow.

  * * * *

  She had a laptop on which she could rearrange pop songs for a company that processed and sold “atmospherics.” It seemed you didn't even need a keyboard. After supper she put her headphones on again for her abdominal regimen. George could hear the bass, a remix of a Peter Gabriel song, then Frank Black of the Pixies. Living alone, he had quit listening to music.

  She called the abdominals her futile flying. He noticed her long stomach muscles were distended from overuse. She didn't mind if he watched, but then it was like brother and sister, wasn't it. A relationship of proximity; toneless, shared origin.

  She had a retro style that revered a garish, generic sense of childhood. If anything she'd lost weight. Someone else's childhood, thought George. Two braids, a shrill schoolgirl's blouse too tight across the shoulders. Maybe it was ironic in London. Sex was ironic in London, he thought. Here his stone house was pitch black at night, a dark that blotted out conversation. He opened the sheets and she came to him. He didn't need to know if her eyes were closed or open.

  * * * *

  On Sunday they drove four hours to the beach. Arla left her headphones in their room—she called it her room, as if she were checked into a quaint little auberge with an empty bureau. She stuck an unmarked cassette in the car's creaky player. Her new boyfriend was a musician.

  George carried their rolled-up towels through the dunes. He had heard about this beach from a bunch of backpacking Australians, not just topless but girls playing volleyball nude, a rainbow of pubic nests, labia hanging between their legs like earlobes.

  "Christ,” she said behind him. “I don't see you in a hurry to strip, George Mueller."

  He didn't know what to say. It hadn't occurred to him, that he would remove his clothing.

  Everyone wants to see you, Arla, the leverage of tendons behind your knee like the hinges on a jewelry box, even the gizzard skin of your elbow.

  She ignored his silence. “You're positive you don't want me to take any photos of your statues back to London?"

  The businesswoman.

  * * * *

  He didn't dare say it. Perhaps it was a flabby accord, the couple who eat together once a week after they're divorced just to feel the fight gone out. They choose a cheap place exactly half way between their new, separate flats, order the curry.

  "They're hardly statues, are they,” he said.

  He lived in a stone house in a stone village and he couldn't afford to work in stone. Not unless it was a commission; “Well how do you get a commission when you're hiding out in bloody France?” Arla seemed genuinely frustrated. He had never worked in wood, or papier-m?ch?, or how did they put it? Mixed Media.

  * * * *

  She wouldn't take off her bathing suit. “Come on,” she said. “I'm not twenty."

  A girl with a white-blond bush flounced by. He found he couldn't raise his eyes to her face. Neither to Arla's face nor to the face of the naked stranger.

  He squinted across the green water, Arla beside him in her sarong and one piece. He was a doggy paddler. His patchy English back turned red against the brisk sea surface. Arla would only dip her hands, rinse her sweaty forearms.

  She rolled onto her belly and took his hand. “White hands, George,” she said. “Clay hands.” He felt himself shrink in her grasp. Was this the time to say it? When he couldn't have made love even if he wanted to?

  But he had promised himself he wouldn't talk. Just to have her out here was enough. Not about the past or the future. Not their respective mums, who they'd left in sooty rooms with tax payers’ rights to be buried at the base of the cathedral like tulips. A day at the beach! Afterwards they'd sample the white wines of Saumur, oysters, drive home drunk. Listen to her cassette tape.

  * * * *

  He had put in an appearance a year ago at the birth of Aggie's double progeny. One of England's greatest gothic cathedrals. He stole up to the roof like a schoolboy. The footholds came to him like a mother language. It would have been fine if he'd brought something to drink but they were all drinking from oversized plastic cups, his family, there was no flask he could slip in his pocket. He clamored across the slate to Arla's skylight anyway. The girlish room was kept up, perigee of the mother's orbit. The same yellow coverlet made of something slick and shiny and purchased at the local bazaar, three china dolls propped on the pillow.

  As a boy, he had never noticed the way the sky seemed even further away when you were up here. Now he thought it retreated from the cathedral spires.

  * * * *

  "Don't mistake geography for love,” she'd said into the wind on London Bridge the last time she left him. “Like a stupid pop song, Christ, being from the same place."

  He had said, “I didn't need it spelled out for me."

  * * * *

  Now Arla slept with earplugs. “Since I don't pass out pissed anymore.” Otherwise the night sounds impressed her dreams, she told him.

  "It's quiet enough here, though,” said George. He watched her forage for her eye cup and the same old squirt bottle of saline solution.

  He was stuck in the doorway. She looked at him almost accusingly, her pale eyes bloodshot.

  God, he thought, there's a reason women put on weight after thirty. Her breasts were flaps of flannel. He wanted to feed her something with a fat cream sauce, he wanted to hold her.

  S
he pushed her earplugs along the table with a finger made of horn. “So do you want me to sit for you or am I to be the headless woman?"

  Ah, she had switched tacks. “She's called Our Lady of Lost Love,” he corrected.

  "Not, Arla,” she said. She was a rare woman, comfortable saying her own name aloud. She said it beautifully, followed the syllables over a waterfall. She pulled on a tight camisole.

  "I touched a nerve dropping in,” she said.

  "Hardly. Remember I called you."

  "Well if you want me to sit for you—” She was all bluff and business again, offering her favor.

  "Don't trouble,” George muttered. Her vanity was insatiable.

  She pressed the earplugs in and mouthed goodnight.

  George got up, passed across the stone floors barefoot. The house was a park where they could take their separate evening strolls among the statues.

  * * * *

  When he woke the earplugs were lying on the crate that served as a bedside table. Little bites of foam that had spent the night inside her. They were the slightest bit discolored in the opal morning light. She was at the desk he had rigged for her on the other side of the bedroom, her back to him, spread eagled, the chair too low for her.

  "This is a first,” he said, pulling the sheet over his bare torso like covering one of his own busts. “You awake before me."

  She was reading the time table. He was aware that it had been a week. Not all of August. Only one week. She said, “I've got to get back tomorrow."

  * * * *

  A boy on a slate roof: There was a small hollow in the sky like a tide pool. Untouched by any orbit, not even the chimney sweep, fog from dreams, a boy hidden there. He wanted to see her as he remembered the moon from that roof—unclothed, rose quartz, held up against a great body of water, sky, ink, crushed velvet.

  We are from a town so small you can count the chimneys, they would say to the people in London. They met music people at the parties she was invited to. There were a few painters he met at the studio where he rented a nude model for five pounds an hour.

  He and Jerome claimed the three chimneys on their row house roof. There was a year—he was ten and Jerome twelve, he thought—they dropped love notes down her chimney. Wafers of paper came back up with the peaty smoke, flags on fire, wishes granted or consumed. They watched the notes turn to grey ash against the cathedral.

  * * * *

  On the last night he left her sleeping in his bed and went downstairs. Bare feet on stone. She had taken out her braids before bed. Her hair was crimped and shiny.

  Strangely, he felt like working. His hands were moist in anticipation of the clay. He unwrapped the remains of a torso-sized chunk, massaged its chapped skin with water, cut off a piece with a length of wire, and re-wrapped it.

  He began to pull a forehead from a brow with his two thumbs. He made rhythmic circles at the temples. His hands moved for an hour, until he had a face. It was a blank, classical, female mask. With his wire he sliced away what would have been the back of the head. It was about Arla's size, he figured. He soaked his hands in a bowl in the big soapstone sink and then wiped them on a crusty towel designated for clay. He washed them under the running water. He picked up the mask. The clay was soft and malleable. He went upstairs quietly, even though Arla slept with earplugs. In the wet early light, her face was already clay colored.

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  Two Poems by Lauren Bartel

  Zerry

  She always wears her hair in two long braids, they fall straight down her back and her part is straight.

  She wears a leather coat, plucks nervously at her sleeves.

  She is not pretty.

  Swinging, her braids caught my notice this morning.

  She was walking in front of me.

  For one absurd moment, I wanted there to be a lover.

  One to rise every morning and draw a line down the back of her head, part her hair with his fingers, taking longer than it would take so he could sit behind her while she patted on makeup or yawned or held a mug of tea.

  This girl who was not pretty and never spoke with firmness or to any of us.

  She turned and I saw she was not smiling, going a different way than me, hadn't noticed that I was behind and wishing for her.

  She always wears two straight braids and they do not twist when the wind picks up.

  Milk Glass Moon

  The moon is a porcelain dish, a delicate, shallow bowl that cups the sky, the hand of a kitschy china shepherdess, pale sleeve outlined against pale fingers with chipping gold line.

  White against a black that is not quite black, but the color that black appears in old children's books.

  Goodnight moon in a blue-gray sky.

  And the moon has spilled light,

  Halloween yellow, and it becomes a halo.

  I have seen things all day;

  a shadow without a shadow-thrower slid along the sad contours of my small kitchen while I watered the plants after dark.

  A young boy turned his head back and forth in a carriage that an old man pushed toward me until I saw it was only sand for the sidewalk ice.

  Blue lights like summer lightning, or a camera flashing, or a metallic bead appear straight in front of me all the time.

  I had a dream about a ghost touching a man and he grinned all cocky and squinting and I was afraid, walking alone in the dark to work this morning.

  I looked for the tracks in the snow before I crossed to unlock the door but he had hidden his well, riding on the backs of ghosts.

  When the sun rose, it stayed hidden, the world remained blue, no yellow or red, only ultramarine, black and white.

  The snow and the clouds were the same, luminous cobalt until the magical, effusive light of dawn had faded.

  I got home disoriented, stood on the porch staring at the moon and waiting to see something else.

  A boy in the saucer rolling over in his sleep, a crack of lightning or falling power lines, heavy with snow, my own bedroom lights on and someone moving inside the room, sighing, typing, putting on her nightgown, lighting candles.

  There is only me and I am off balance but I don't want to take my hands out of my pockets to catch myself.

  Little milk glass fingered moon.

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  The Postern Gate by Brian Conn

  It is Christmas eve. Rain rushes black down black walls. There is something in particular about all of this; it is something I have had in my mind for a long time. There are women and men moving about inside this place, mounting stairs and unlacing boots. There is one monk struggling down the forest path. The trees grow tall and spare as though straining against something.

  I have heard of monks who say the world is their home, but this monk is not at home in this forest. A spiteful wind flings rain under his hood, and in the bluster of the boughs overhead there is a threat. His face is round, pumpkinlike; his nose is squashed; his hands are wide and flat, like pancakes. Do not mistake his simple expression for enlightenment: it is merely distraction. He is imagining that he is somewhere else.

  On the steep slope above a dell, the trail has washed out. A muddy ledge remains, not wider than the span of a hand. The monk reaches for an overhanging branch to steady himself, and the branch dumps an icy stream of rainwater into his palm; his sleeve falls away, his palm overflows, and water races the length of a broad pink scar that runs from his wrist to his elbow.

  Let him wait for his balance. It is good that we have him with us tonight. The castle of the local warlord is a secretive place, poor for a castle (no moat, no ditch, no rocky crag; it looms abruptly from the forest, governing only an empty glade) but shut up tight against the rain, stones sharp in the dark, doors massy behind iron bands. It is good that we have with us someone accustomed to unwelcome.

  His intention is to dance lightly across the ledge, one two three steps, then steady himself at the next branch. At one his feet slip away from him as though t
he mud were goose-grease. Two finds him sliding down the washout, twisting to keep his lantern dry, and three leaves him hip-deep in a bank of sodden leaves. The rain redoubles. The monk feels something cold creep between his toes. He has not hurt himself, and the lantern is still alight, but he does not bear this indignity with monkish stoicism: as he stands, sloughing off the mire as best he can, there is a tightness in his face. He moves to rejoin the path where it reaches the bottom of the dell. Covered in leaves and mud, the materials of the forest, does he now feel more at home? He begins to shamble.

  What is he doing here? The look on his face says it is something he has done too often. I think he sometimes forgets whether he is coming or going, in the way that a swimmer, sucked down by the current, may forget which way is the light and which the brine.

  Half a mile on the straight road will bring him to the castle. He knows the bolts are thrown and the guardhouse silent; he knows the great gates will not open to anyone tonight. He knows there is a postern.

  Behind the postern, half a mile through twisting corridors and narrow stairwells, a bundle wrapped in white stirs uneasily in the white arms of a maid. Its whimpers vanish against the rain. Should it wail, they will hear it in another room, and wonder from which stairwell the sound comes.

  The maid is proud of her errand. What is in her mind as she makes her way through the empty corridors? Vertigo, perhaps: it is rare that she comes into the world above. Defiance, a bit. She is no longer under the protection of her mistress below, but in the domain of the Lady of the castle (who need scarcely concern us: thin hair and bleached eyes, a blotchy complexion, she tries nevertheless to toy with men). The maid must keep strong lest she fall prey to the careless whims of the Lady's subjects.

  She rounds the corner and climbs three stairs. She listens for the sound of footsteps. This way is the mouse-hole where the mouse startled her last time; but she is not one of the fainting women who live aboveground. She pictures herself a courtesan in a green dress: dainty feet and fine powders, a head filled with straw. One who loves knowledge, one who is not afraid—that one must have her roots in the earth. And here is the turning where in the summer the light is like a cathedral and one looks up. What a din at the room with the square door! She hesitates in the gloom. The door is closed. There is a draught, but here there is always a draught. The walls are scarcely solid around that room. The boys boast falsely that they have been there; the women fear it.