CASSIDY WAS RIVETED BY HIS HANDS. They were trying to disengage what looked like yellow gauze from the torn screen of the door to her new potting shed. He was picking at the gauze with those long fingers, at once sensual and gnarled, an expression of great intentness and some worry creasing his long handsome face. She thought perhaps it was his favourite scarf. She herself might wear just such an expression if her favourite scarf, a fine purple silk brought from Rome by her sister Mara, had caught on a protruding nail.
But how had the screen torn in the first place? It looked like he’d been trying to break into her new shed, tearing the screen to unlock the door from the inside. It served him right for catching his scarf on the snags. It had taken Cassidy so long to get the shed in the first place. She re-potted plants in it, and kept her gardening tools neatly organized. Henry had little use for trowels and spades and cultivators and wasn’t likely to pinch and then lose them.
“Could you help?” the man asked. He had a low fluty voice; it sounded a little foreign.
Cassidy began to unhook the yellow gauze from the tiny, clawed metal ends of screen. He made a face when she did that, and twisted his entire body quickly. Cassidy saw his back then, saw how the yellow gauze was attached to his shoulder blade. How the other shoulder had a matching scarf, this one draped magnificently over his arm, almost alight. Not moving but capable of movement, she was sure.
She unhooked ten or twenty tiny metal ends of torn screen from the yellow gauze. She thought he might have nerve endings there, and so she was as careful as could be, as if removing slivers from a young child’s tender feet. Not that she knew much about that.
The stranger craned his neck; trust in his pale grey green eyes. Puce, his eyes are puce coloured, Cassidy thought, using a decorating word from one of her magazines. He moaned a little, and turned back around. Perhaps it had hurt him to face her, twisting the yellow gauze that was heavily veined as if by the finest of tendons, the softest of cartilage. More like a bird or a bat than a butterfly.
At last he was free. “Mind if I stay here for a couple of days?” he asked. “I can’t quite leave yet.”
“Shall I bring you food?” Cassidy asked.
“A bit of honey might be nice,” he said. “Otherwise I can graze.”
“Graze?”
“Not like a cow,” he said. “More like a hummingbird or a bee.”
“Oh,” Cassidy said. “I’ll look for honey and if we’re out I’ll buy some.”
He nodded. “Unpasteurized if you can find it.”
And Cassidy went back to the house and read decorating magazines. There was nothing wrong with their house that several thousand dollars wouldn’t fix, but now that they were semi-retired, they needed to hold on to their savings.
“This dresser,” she told Henry when he emerged from his basement, “would look quite nice with a coat of white or palest yellow.”
“Or puce,” Henry said.
“Why puce?”
“It’s a funny word, that’s all,” Henry said. “Like chartreuse. What colour is chartreuse again?”
“A kind of yellow-green,” Cassidy replied to Henry’s back. He was already receding, having poured himself fresh coffee. Soon she’d hear his footsteps on the basement stairs. He was refurbishing old tube radios. The tubes were dangerous to work with, he’d once explained. He mostly did it to occupy his time, and because he enjoyed it. Luckily, because his skill was rare he was occasionally paid nicely. He only worked in the hardware store a couple of afternoons a week now, doing the ordering and such.
“And a vase of fresh flowers,” Cassidy said to no one in particular.
She’d meant to spend the day in the potting shed drawing. She’d recently bought a good sketchbook and watercolours, and real coloured pencils, not the cheap ones children used. She’d had to drive forty minutes each way, because Brookside only had a crafts store. The art supplies store in Stony Creek boasted a little espresso machine. The owner made her a cup before she rang up Cassidy’s things. Cassidy downed the tiny cup, and drove home very fast.
She’d make notes instead of painting right away, just as she did for her decorating projects. She would plan her paintings in advance. A vase of flowers first, she thought, and then a bowl of fruit. And on the third day, a tall thin man with puce-coloured eyes, his yellow wings caught on the torn screen door of her shed. Thinking about him, she felt a little giddy. She was afraid to go down to see whether he was still there, or even to peek at her art supplies, which she’d stashed under the bench after she got home from Stony Creek.
Cassidy called goodnight down the basement stairs to Henry. She went up to bed, holding her glamorous feeling for the stranger close to her heart.
In the morning she hunted through cupboards till she found a dusty unopened jar of honey. She and Henry put sugar in their tea and coffee; she must’ve bought the honey to use in a recipe she’d clipped. She remembered it then: orange honey cake, supposedly a traditional rural cake, although she’d never heard of it till she’d read the article. She’d clearly never attempted it either; the unopened jar of honey was proof.
He was sitting on her stool, bent over her new sketchbook. His antennae bobbed; they were so fine she hadn’t noticed them yesterday. A delicate smile played about his lips, secretive and knowing. It reminded Cassidy of the woman in that famous painting. His twin yellow scarves draped decoratively down his back.
She set the honey down on the poured concrete threshold. Had it taken the whole night for the impossibility of him to sink in? Yesterday she’d instinctively helped him as she might a hurt child. Just because she wasn’t a mother didn’t mean she had no protective feelings.
He licked his lips in concentration, dipping her best brush into an empty tuna can full of water. The sable brush had been the most expensive of her purchases, too fine to ever be used for stenciling borders, or découpage. She’d looked forward to being the first to use it. Cassidy turned and hurried back up the field stone path to her house.
She’d expected her feelings to stay outside with the sky, the garden, the shed, him. But they hadn’t.
His puce eyes. She wanted to look into them.
Henry came into the kitchen and put the kettle on. As so often, he wore his brown corduroys, his safety glasses perched on his dark tousled head.
“I thought you’d be painting in your new shed,” he said.
“The screen in the door is already torn.”
Henry nodded. “I’ve got lots of spare screen. It won’t take me more than a few minutes. I wonder how it happened?”
“Maybe a raccoon or a porcupine,” Cassidy said. “I’ve got some bulbs in there. Even people can eat tulip bulbs, you know.”
“I do know,” Henry said. “My mother’s family in Holland ate them during the war.”
“You never offer to do anything right away.”
“I am now.”
“Now I don’t want you to.”
“Why?”
“You built the shed,” Cassidy said. “It took time away from your radios. You shouldn’t have to fix it yet.”
“You haven’t used it even once and it’s been finished for a week,” Henry said.
“It doesn’t matter. Mosquito season’s almost over since we had those cold nights. You have to work tomorrow. You should go somewhere.”
“Where?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
“To the basement then,” Henry said and headed for the stairs.
Cassidy looked around the kitchen. The new curtains, though pretty, were no huge improvement over the blue blinds that had hung there previously. Not if she took into account how long they’d taken her to make.
She took a piece of paper towel off the roll that always stood beside the sink and sat down at the kitchen table, picked up the red permanent fine tip so fortuitously lying there, and drew a screaming face. It had no antennae so maybe it didn’t belong to the stranger. And she’d never seen him scream; he didn’t seem a screamer, somehow, although she supposed everyone and anyone might turn out to be a screamer if pushed hard enough.
sss
She wondered what the stranger painted in her book, with her Windsor Newtons. In his hands her book would just fill, as if by itself. And no one would wonder why he wasn’t decorating instead. Or gardening or cooking. No one would wonder at all.
He was still there the next morning, and the morning after that. Cassidy knew because she checked before she left for her bookkeeping job. He never noticed her standing at the shed door even if she coughed, or wore her heavy plastic gardening clogs and thumped a little on her way.
On the third day she cleared her throat and said, “You wouldn’t even have art supplies or a studio if it weren’t for me.”
He didn’t look up, not even to mutely show her what he was working on. He hadn’t torn pages out to prop against the vintage goose-neck lamp or pin to the walls, so Cassidy couldn’t see what he’d done. But he was a good way through the book, almost half, and wore the same beatific smile as yesterday. It was as if, drawing, he’d uncovered the secrets of the universe. Her pencils had grown short; her paint tubes were twisted and rolled at the bottoms.
Back in her kitchen, Cassidy picked up the same red fine point marker she’d used to draw on the paper towel and wondered about its provenance. She used these markers to write on the little plastic tabs she pushed into her flats to identify seedlings or seedlings to be. Somehow the marker had migrated from the potting shed to the house. It was the kind of thing that might happen to Henry, but not to her. She was the organized one. Not that it mattered much. She opened her decorating magazine and uncapped the marker once more.
She drew a screaming person seated on a full-page photograph of a white couch. Was it an advertisement for the couch, or for the flooring beneath the couch, Cassidy briefly wondered, but she didn’t take the time to scan the text and find out. Instead, she plunged into her drawing as if it were a pond, and she diving underwater. When Cassidy re-emerged she realized the screaming person she’d drawn had wings. And the wings were tangled in the lamp stand behind the couch, so that he couldn’t escape.
No wonder she’d hidden her art supplies beneath the bench. This was neither a bowl of fruit nor a vase of flowers but a depiction of cruelty. She was sadistic, this excursion into her own creativity made clear. Cassidy felt dirty. Still, the drawing was good, even scribbled as it was with a gardening marker in a decorating magazine. It was quite a likeness. In spite of her deep confusion, Cassidy felt a little proud of what she’d done. In school they’d always said she had talent. She’d set it aside; she wasn’t sure where or why. It wasn’t as if she could blame the children she’d never had for taking up all her time.
But Henry touched her shoulder. He had crept up at some point, come and stood behind her. “You better let him go,” he said.
“But I did let him go,” Cassidy said. “The very first day.”
“He won’t leave till you ask for your things back,” Henry said.
How long exactly, had Henry known her secret? But then, that had been the point of Henry, right from the beginning, hadn’t it? Someone who could know her all the way through and not judge. She sat, still staring at her drawing. She didn’t say anything more to her husband, but she definitely didn’t want him taking his gently kneading hands from her shoulders.
“You don’t think I’m a bad person because I drew him like this?” she finally asked.
“I’ll bet you anything he drew you too. I’ll bet you he drew you drawing.” Henry caressed her hair and for some reason Cassidy was swept back to their beginning. She’d known Henry for a long time but one day had been different. There’d been a storm, and she’d turned the sign so it read “Closed” and locked the door in the dusty comfortable bookstore where she worked. Afterward they’d held each other in a different way, each needing reassurance they were still real, still separate, still had names.
Drawing made her feel a bit like that.
“I’ll make a stew,” Cassidy said, getting up. She’d wash the floor; she’d spend what remained of the weekend at flea markets looking for a new table for the guest room. The one there now was ugly, even after she’d painted it in a complicated faux finish, precisely following the instructions in her magazine. She’d already forgotten what the carefully rendered surface had supposedly been an imitation of.
“No,” Henry said. “Why do you think I built you a studio?”
“It’s just for plants,” Cassidy said.
“It is not,” he said, prodding her gently in the ribs.
She knew he was right. Cassidy got up and marched out the kitchen door and down to the shed. This time, she didn’t stand timorously peering through the screen, mumbling accusations and hoping the stranger would notice her. Instead, she opened the door and spoke loudly.
“Give me back my stuff,” she said. “It’s not yours.”
“I know,” he said.
“What did you draw?” Cassidy demanded.
“See for yourself,” he said, and turned the book around to face her.
Trembling, she opened the door and stepped inside.
It was just as Henry had said. The stranger had drawn her drawing. And unlike in her drawing of him, he’d pictured her happy, if a little transported.
He handed her the sable brush. “It’s your turn,” he said. “You already know you can do it.”
“I do?” Cassidy asked.
“Remember how you drew me?”
She lowered her head, ashamed. “I didn’t mean…”
“You were ashamed of me,” the stranger said. “That’s why you made a hurtful drawing. You were afraid and wanted me to suffer because of it.”
“Why should I be ashamed of you?” Cassidy asked.
“Because I’m not grape vine stencils. Or faux marble stipple effect. I’m not any of those things.”
She looked at his hands. There was the same fine veining in them as in his yellow wings; more like the veins in a leaf, she thought now, than anything else. “What should I paint?” she asked.
“What did you plan?”
“Flowers,” she said, after thinking for a moment.
“Then paint those.”
Cassidy took the brush from him and dipped it in a pool of aquamarine on the ceramic palette. With the wet brush she conjured outlines of flowers on the nubby white expanse of Arches paper. The brush swooped this way and then that, and before long Cassidy felt it again, that pull, a loss of self as intense as sex, but of a different kind.
sss
When she surfaced she saw pistils, stamens, petals; florid, penile, fluted, scalloped, rippling, tumescent. She observed these qualities scattered throughout her painting, again disturbed by her own work. It was true flowers were the sexual organs of plants, hell bent on attracting pollinators. So why had she never seen it before? Except, of course, she had, or she wouldn’t have just painted them that way. Maybe she’d always pretended not to notice, afraid to be unladylike, and it was only in her art that her vision re-emerged, bypassing her filters.
But like her drawing of the visitor tangled in the lamp, the intensity scared her. If she had a show, all the neighbours would see what she was really like.
Not like them. Not one bit.
“It’s so good,” the stranger whispered. “Like Georgia O’Keefe.”
“Who?”
“Look her up. She’s your soul sister.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I can submit to the annual Water Colour Society exhibition,” Cassidy said.
His puce eyes met and held hers. They were fathomless and deep. “I’m not like a grape stencil on the bathroom wall,” he said again.
Cassidy felt a little swoony.
“What happens if I don’t?” she asked. She tried to give him back the sable brush but he didn’t take it.
“Then I die,” he said.
“Really?” It seemed so extreme. Again, she tried to give the brush back.
He fluttered his hands, no no no. Pleading. “Please,” the stranger said.
She began to cry, shaking her head. Her flowers resembled open mouths, open vulvas. It was too much! She knew now why she’d stopped drawing. She couldn’t look at what emerged. She could even less consider putting her visions out into the world for others to see.
He took her by the shoulders, tucked his long slender finger under her chin.
Forced it up.
His gentle puce eyes were whirlpools. She’d drown in them forever; she knew it for a fact, but better than gasping for air every hour of every day.