CHARLOTTE

The painter had a heavy Brooklyn accent, the dancer a coarse fleshy face. The poet spoke so quietly she could barely hear him. The composer was British; his accent was as posh as the Queen’s. Before the performance was half over, the auditorium was almost empty. The painter’s abstract backdrop was interesting enough. It was the poet rambling and the dancer flailing to the composer’s discordant score that drove all except the hard-core away to bars, or keg parties, or movies in Saratoga Springs. Charlotte begged her roommate to stay.

Charlotte and Cece Gold had been thrown together freshman year. Despite their differences, they’d roomed together ever since. Cece loved clothes, and frat parties. She played bridge. She was an English major intent on landing a husband. The object of her affection, a law student named Bradley Aronson, had slipped an impressive diamond on her finger over Thanksgiving vacation. She flexed her hand to admire it.

“Sorry, I’ve had enough,” she said, and abandoned Charlotte to the company of a couple of underclassmen.

Charlotte sat pinned to her seat like a bug. When it was over, the poet, who had finally found his voice, ordered them to line up on the lawn. Charlotte hesitated before she stood with the few remaining students and followed him out the door.

Friday night. Saturday. Sunday. She blamed her dizziness on the lack of sleep, the peculiar diet of brown rice, burdock tea, farmer’s cheese and overcooked root vegetables, and all the traipsing around in the dark until dawn, chanting, “Om, shanti, om.”

“To clear our heads,” the poet said, and leaned into the dancer who hip-checked him and giggled.

The poet and the painter looked disheveled. The dancer wore white tights and a striped boat-neck. Charlotte tried not to stare at his muscled ass, or the impressive bulge between his legs. He was tall with eyes like slits. She knew he and the composer were supposed to be a couple, but he was paying an awful a lot of attention to the poet, which, to her eye, hadn’t escaped the notice of the composer.

The composer stood apart, browsing through a book about mushrooms. It was a beautiful old book, cloth bound. Mycology of the Pacific Northwest was embossed in gold on the cover and down the spine. His tweed jacket and wide-wale corduroys were more country club than artsy. He had two first names: Martin Harold.

The chanting droned on through Friday and Saturday night into Sunday at dawn. As the night evaporated, Charlotte watched the sky turn colors—first purple, then red, before melting into an orange haze; she fell asleep in the grass only to be jolted awake by the poet, shouting, “Time to sign up!”

She fished around in the pocket of her jeans, pulled out a crumpled tissue, and blew her nose. She was looking for somewhere to toss it when the poet handed her a list of choices: a dance master class, a paint demonstration, a poetry workshop, or a reading by the composer. That sounded like a neat trick.

Martin Harold had opened a folding chair under a tree. His voice was mesmerizing. When he read “. . . most, or all, of the upper surface of the cap is reproductive, and is folded, broadly pitted, or wrinkled in most species,” and held the book up to show off the color illustration, he winked at Charlotte, and she snarfled a laugh. It looked just like the tip of a penis.

Sunday night in the shower Charlotte felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Sheets of photo paper meant for her final project lay imageless in their bright yellow boxes.

Cece had been holed up all day in the library studying for finals.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Cece called in to Charlotte.

The due date for Charlotte’s senior project was marked on her desk calendar: May 10, 1967, only nine days away. She’d wasted two precious days listening to Martin Harold talk more enthusiastically about his passion for chasing mushrooms than his music. Her photographs of the rolling hills of hog country and the avenue of pines leading to Saratoga’s mineral baths were too bland, too predictable. She cleared the fog off the mirror, slicked her hair back off her forehead and saw a landscape she’d never seen before. The next day she took the first of the portraits, tondos so tight all she could frame was one eye, her nose, half of her mouth, black and white, high contrast hills and valleys of open pores. She called them self-portraits, although she knew that was a misnomer. That was not what they were. Never about her “self.” Never.