Trey “Tee” Handel had come to her in need. An assistant professor at a Virginia university, he had a new book of poems forthcoming, and it required cover art; a colleague had recommended Emma Miles, a 40-something professor in the Studio Art Department, and a series of prints she’d done, birds trapped in houses, churches, subway stations, currently on view at the University’s art museum. An exchange of office-to-studio phone calls and emails brought him, near the end of spring term, to the open door of the print shop, a long, tall-ceilinged addition at the back of a Gothic hall of painting studios.
Often he returned to this moment, wanting to remember it exactly. Not to embellish. To be faithful. The full-frontal, overwhelming acrid atmosphere of acids, solvents, resins. The dank musk of ink. Rackety ventilation fans. Someone playing De La Soul on a CD player. Light from tall windows falling like fables across tables, sinks, three hulking presses, a tall shelf of limestone slabs. Cases of type. Art books in teetering stacks. A hooded bath of acid.
Four or five students were working, one pinning dripping paper to a clothesline, another adjusting, then readjusting a plate, then covering it with a blanket of felt on the bed of a press. Several heads bent over rectangles of zinc and copper, beveling edges of plates with rasps, drawing with needle-tipped pencils Tee would learn to call styluses. Little baby-nail piles of metal filings on the tabletops. It was a hot May afternoon outside, and in here the fumes immediately had him feeling a little dizzy, off-point. A print shop’s like a medieval chemistry lab, she would later tell him, except without the safety features.
She was turned away from him, at a far sink, washing ink off a plate. What he saw first: her small shapely shoulder blades, bare beneath the apron’s necktie, the low collar of her blue tank top. Hair—brown?—though later he would know it to be coppery when not drenched with shadow and sweat—piled up in a nest of pins and plastic child’s barrettes. A few silver threads mixed in too. Two stray hooks of hair flat against her slender neck. Freckled shoulders. Above the sink, a red box with an exhaust switch, painted with a white skull and cross bones.
He would grow to love approaching her from behind, and it moved him that she liked this, too, unlike other women he’d been with who’d rejected such a gesture as shameful or submissive. Instead, after they became lovers, she would present her strong back to him, its tawny cream and oatmeal shower of freckles, with an authority that brought him to his knees. When he hadn’t shaved, she leaned back hard into the stiff brush of his jaw, mouth, as the old record player in his apartment scratched through Maria Callas or Joni Mitchell, or the boom box in his office emitted a soundtrack of Liszt, Ravel, Stevie Wonder. Coltrane.
When Emma Miles turned around that first day in the print shop, wiping her hands with a rag, what did she see? In the dim studio with its high, grimy windows—and given Tee Handel’s almost shockingly red hair and the way in his thick black glasses frames the rectangular panes shone white and obliterated his eyes—he seemed to be transubstantial, on fire, lit like one of Blake’s angels or some sort of beseeching, bespectacled saint.
They sat side by side in her cramped windowless office, more of a closet just off the studio, surrounded by piles of art books on tables and floor, the bristling walls stabbed with pins holding up printed pieces of paper, clippings from medical books, field guides, a calendar that was two years old, a postcard of an ocean view over which someone had drawn the criss-cross muntins of a window with black marker and scrawled the words “I don’t need a man. Just give me a window over the sink.” A bit dizzy from the fumes and his proximity to Emma Miles (he noted that she seemed not to shave under her arms), Tee stammered out his predicament: the need for cover art for a book of his poems. His first book. He praised the prints of hers that he’d checked out at the University gallery. And then, somewhat ceremoniously, shyly, he pulled a thick sheaf of paper from his messenger bag and rested it on top of an empty ashtray on the desk before them.
Beneath the small desk, their knees almost touched. As Tee talked, Em could not keep her eyes off the reddish-white hairs of his forearms, all brushed in the same direction, each a gilt and startled stroke that she felt an irresistible urge to draw, to etch onto a plate, and turn, in the acid’s bite, to flame. A desire to wet each glinting follicle with her tongue.
She shook her shoulders. What was happening to her, Emma Miles, middle-aged wife and mother? Her breasts tingled inside her apron in a way that had not since she was a girl and they were first starting to grow. Was this early onset menopause? She’d read somewhere that a kind of second-wave of, well, horniness could come on as eggs got old. Or perhaps he reminded her of someone? But who?
Emma instinctively hunted for a cigarette in the top desk drawer, then remembered that she had long ago quit smoking. She folded her arms across her chest. “So what kind of stuff do you write?” she asked, to settle herself. “What makes you think your poems would be a good fit with my work?” Tee was usually not one to miss an opportunity to talk about himself or his poems, if asked, as he rarely was, but first was about to disingenuously demur when she added, “and please don’t give me that crap about how writers aren’t the best people to ask to describe their own work.” She nodded her head toward the print shop. “Every one of those undergraduates has to defend their work on a weekly basis. They have to know how to talk about it.”
“Maybe,” Tee said, suddenly intimidated by this small woman and pressing his knees together to calm them, “we could just read one or two of the poems?” Not trusting his voice, which seemed in danger of vaulting an octave, he said, “maybe you could read one? Aloud?” Emma sighed. But she picked up the stack of paper and glanced at the title page.
“The Horologist’s Book of Hours? Horologist? Book of Hours? Sorry. Don’t like it. Smells like, like the academy.” Tee winced, he hoped imperceptibly. He slid his fine, strong hands, palm to palm, between his locked knees. He hoped the shaking didn’t show. Emma opened to a random page, with, she had to admit, some excitement. She was currently taking graduate courses in English, with an eye toward a PhD, and was just that morning reading the early poems of John Donne. Clearing her throat, she read aloud a poem called “Cocktail Hour.” “Hmmmm,” she said. She then read, to herself, over the course of ten silent minutes, “Therapy Hour,” “Coffee Hour,” and “Power Hour.” She liked the poems; they were terse, muscular. No fat in them, a mix of diction, a visual acuity she admired. They shimmered, a bit like this handsome, clearly vulnerable, talented man sitting beside her. She could see from the gentle wrinkles around his mouth and behind those glasses, and a bit of silver at his carroty temples, that he was about her age. Was he married? She saw no ring. Of course she didn’t wear one either, printing materials not friendly to metals. Was it just her imagination, or did he seem lonely? And why was she thinking about any of this at all? The poems, the poems, she turned back to them: there was a powerful sense of self-protection in their imagery and their questions that belied a strong reaching for something.
Tee waited, breathless. Em felt his pain. Her own heart hammered. How strange to be feeling things, anything, especially after the past year, when an unusual case of the blues had been nibbling at her, packing her torso with wet leaves. Was it aging? Lack of new direction in her work? Her lovely but increasingly testy and button-pushing teenage daughter? Her self-absorbed, distant husband, a big needy adolescent himself who she knew was having affairs, at least emotional ones? Hormones? She prized what independence she had, and dodged the lurking depression by throwing her energy into her students, her work. And now here she was, flighty and stirred up as a schoolgirl, sitting in a cramped room with a poet whose physical presence and tensile words made her feel she might ignite.
Emma put her ink-stained hands on top of the manuscript to steady them and indicated with her eyes and a quick jerk of her head a scrap of paper pinned right at eye level above her desk, on which was typed: “There is in us a world of Love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be. . . . Do you not feel yourself drawn by the expectation and desire of some Great Thing?—Thomas Traherne: Centuries of Meditations.”
Tee had by this moment already fallen in love with Em. But before he could ask, “you read Traherne?” She said, “How about Our Hour. For the title.”
“Done,” he said. And then he laughed, surprised at his own immediate yes. When was the last time he’d laughed aloud? But he couldn’t stop himself. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Was he weeping? Emma smiled. He looked about twelve years old. That flaming head of hair, the clouded-up eyeglasses. Then she laughed. She was afraid she might cry also, but she did not. They stood. They shook hands.
And this was how it began, if it were possible to narrate such a sourceless and inevitable story. She could have just emailed him some images to look over, of course, on his own, or asked him to pick one of the prints he’d already seen from the Museum show, but instead she offered to bring in work from home and have him come by her office to look through those prints and also some new work. There was a lot of talking at first as they invented ways to protract their time together, deciding upon one print, then choosing another. And he did love to hear her ask about him, to talk about his poems, he was so unaccustomed to that, and she was very insightful about them, in coffee shops, or on long walks that would take them away from campus and into the surrounding neighborhoods, where they peered into people’s yards to see what was growing, and never ran out of things to discuss. Then one night after graduation, at the start of a long weekend between the spring and summer terms, on the cusp of a trip she must take away to visit her husband’s family, they met on the mostly empty campus. She unlocked the print shop and led him into the cavernous, empty, unlit space. She locked the door and slipped the deadbolt. She stripped off her jacket, shirt, jeans, everything. She held his hand and led him to a table where she pushed her lithe body against his shirt, his canvas pants, her bare feet tiptoe on top of his boots. “Paint me,” she whispered, handing him an opened can of something and a brush. By the time pale warm dawn striped the window they were both naked and red as hennaed brides. They stood close, giggling, kissing, shivering in the lukewarm stream of the studio’s emergency shower, exposed to the stilled machinery of the shop, the file of high weakly lit windows, the green treetops, scouring themselves with the orange-scented granular soap used by the printmakers to wash lead and ink and gesso off their hands, as water scarlet as blood streamed in rivulets down their limbs, into the drain.
Tee had no idea what happened at home, with her husband and daughter. She never brought it up; he was afraid to ask. It horrified him to imagine anyone else touching her, so he avoided thinking about it. But the way she drew Tee’s fingers, tongue, everything into her every opening, eyes wet with wild discovery, made him believe that what happened between them was as unprecedented for her as it was for him.
She bit him, too, sometimes, her hunger so fierce, though he hesitated to bite back. Why? His reticence, fear, whatever it was, only made her more daring. Sometimes, in their aphagic heights when he could hardy see, she’d strike or slap him. But he was never able to do that in return, even in the moments when he’d go nearly blind, even when he sensed that she wished that he would give her that, almost more than anything else he could offer.
Wondering how Em managed to hide from her husband her body’s evidence, frottage was what she called the way her delicate, pinkish patch of pubic hair would form into minute, linted dreds after hours of lying, sitting, standing with him, or scratches, constellations of contusions from chair edge or table top or floorboard, nourished Tee’s vague hope that the couple did not have sex, or at least did it in the dark. How little Tee knew about his rival, only that he worked as in a government office in a city two hours away and kept a small apartment there during the week, that his parents lived in Ohio (hers, like Tee’s, were deceased), that the husband’s name was, of all things, Paul, plain old Paul, Paolo, Pablo, and that Paul was older, or looked older, than the artist who was now Tee’s infatuation and obsession. Privately, Tee called Paul “Gray Top” from the one glimpse he’d had of him across campus, fetching Em in a jeep, tall, lantern-jawed and military, with a thick silver crop of buzzed hair, flat on top.
Tee came to treasure any residual pains, nips, bruises she left behind; they became for him fetishes, talismans for the hours he and Em could not be together, and he was sorry when a bruise he’d watch bloom from plum to green to yellow eventually faded away altogether. And the times apart from Emma, sometimes quite long times—weeks, nearly two months that first summer when she traveled to Italy with her family—were surprisingly hard for Tee, who, past 40 himself, had never been married, lived alone, and was by temperament solitary.
He was startled by his sudden loneliness, by the intensity of his jealousy, during these stretches. Known for years by his friends as “the monk” for his habit of turning down invitations to dine out or watch films in favor of staying in to read, listen to music, or edit student work or his own poems, he’d passed through undergraduate and graduate school without lasting romantic entanglement, though since adolescence he’d had several passionate crushes, mostly on unattainable women—his professors, his ophthalmologist leaning in close in the darkened room, pressing the cool mask of the phoroptor to his face, flicking eligible lenses into place as he squinted at a white box of letters on the far wall, the doctor asking is it clearer now, or now? better here—or here? This way? Or this?—and Tee never being able say which, as his lap secretly hardened. For a while he had dated a woman in his department, a scholar on the critical side of things, an avowed feminist who dressed parodically in leopard-skin leggings and shaggy faux fur jackets, and whose scarlet bra straps always seemed to show at Steering Committee meetings, and perhaps not unexpectedly dropped by his office one morning to say that she was moving to Berkeley to live with Heather, one of her former graduate students. Another reason you took the veil, his friends would joke with him afterwards.
Em’s hunger for Tee moved him, awakening in him not a need so much, or yen for a solution, like that which had first brought him to her office toting his manuscript of poems in search of cover art, but a dawning awareness of lack, a profound want—something primal, unanswerable, beyond the fact of his being with her. Leaning into the fragrant arc of her back had made him feel that he, orphaned at fourteen, might belong at last to a story. As for her story, she about whom he was always thinking and about whom the more he knew, the less he knew: Tee had come to realize that Emma Miles, like one of her printed gilt birds beating against the black-etched bars of a claustral house seeking egress, deeply needed to be marked. Marked as in seen. And then she had disappeared, overnight, it seemed—inaccessible to him because, as one of the poets he loved had once written, he had, as lover, and not husband or father, “no rights in this matter.”