I see Audra standing out in the blackening October evening, just in front of the garage, no jacket on, hugging her arms to her body. The warm light from the open garage door cuts a perfect amber square all around her. I peel myself away from the bay window in the living room and sit down on the nearby couch. That drawing of the upside-down raven looms above me. Painstakingly rendered. Fine pencil strokes. Impossible. I could swear I’ve seen this before. I look at it and look at it until my vision glazes over.
I turn my head and look back out the window. In the time between first going up to Audra’s studio and now, it’s like a shade has been dropped on the whole world, as if opaque, chewy molasses has seeped into the air. Late afternoon slipped into evening; too soon it will be night. I get up and go to the kitchen, splash some cold water on my face in the deep, white sink, and dry it with a clean linen hand towel. I go sit down in the living room again. My prayers have left me. There are no prayers left to hold on to.
I hear the door from the garage open and then close. I clear my throat quietly and sit up straight, wanting to look alert, back to my usual composed self. Audra pauses at the entrance to the den. She looks at me. I cannot read her. The skin of her face is awake and vibrant, every pore alive and singing, red splotches on her cheeks and the tip of her nose. Her coppery hair is wild, a little frizzed, a little windblown. And perfect. Her eyes are bright, keen, communicative of something—but I can’t read what. What are you thinking, Audra Colfax? What will you do with me?
“Audra—I cannot tell you how very sorry I am,” I say in my gentlest, most acquiescent voice. “I was a maniac back there. I apologize for it. I’m—I’m not normally like this. You know that.”
“I’ve seen hints of it, Max,” she admits in a small voice, as if it pains her. We look at each other. “When—when you feel threatened. When you don’t get your way.” I am stunned by her gall.
Bitch.
“I’m not threatened by you,” I snap. Audra tips her chin up as if to say, Clearly. She looks a little afraid for once. But also defiant. Could it be any other way with her? “It’s just—it’s been an intense time. And then my ankle—and I drank too much with the Vicodin,” I shake my head. “And, and being here. With you. Alone.” Audra watches me impassively. “You know how I…admire you.” She is made of stone. Of marble. Hard. Immovable. I want to bash her so I can see if she’d crack, chip, break. Anything but this unyielding facade.
“You want to sleep with me,” she says plainly. The world seems entirely silent and still. I swallow but say nothing. “I’ve always known this.” The seconds pass in terrible slowness. There is nothing to do but to face it now. Denying it would do no good.
“But I’m not imagining our…chemistry. Our connection.” Every word is an effort. A heavy silence falls between us. She breathes in through her nose and exhales deeply.
“I’m cold,” she says, “I’ll light a fire.” She walks toward the kitchen. “Why don’t you get cleaned up for dinner.” A child being sent away. I can’t tell if it’s a mercy or a punishment. I watch her leave.
Back in my room, I’ve changed my shirt and rinsed my face again in cold water. I’ve combed my hair. I look like a reasonable middle-aged man now. Not a maniac. I pad out into the bedroom and look down at my laptop on the bed. I grabbed it before I beat my retreat upstairs, the thing feeling like a ticking bomb waiting alone in her grandfather’s office. I work up my courage, sit down, and open it. The screen glows to life before me. My inbox is still there on the screen. It takes a moment to refresh. A few new student emails populate. Some spam. I scroll down to find the email from earlier—the one addressed to Moss.
It’s not here.
But it has to be. I saw it. I didn’t delete it. I don’t remember deleting it. I scan the inbox backward and forward. I check trash. I check the spam folder. Nothing. I type in the keyword moss into the search bar at the top. A few things pop up. A read email from three years ago that mentions an art theorist named Rochelle Mossier-Bard. A read email from eight months ago hyping a new installation at the Museum of Fine Arts called “In Conversation with Moss & Lichen.” An unread email advertising the Mosso luxury apartments in San Francisco. But that’s it. I close the email window and shut down the laptop entirely. I sit there for several long moments. I saw it. Didn’t I? I feel like I’m losing it.
I go down into the kitchen where Audra is starting a fire in a small, devastatingly charming fireplace set in the rock wall with some matches and kindling and a small ball of lint from the laundry. When it catches to her satisfaction, she turns to me, ties up her hair, and says that I’m in charge of keeping it going. There is a little alcove built into the stone beside the hearth holding kindling and smaller split logs. My outpost. I work in silence, and she does, too, preparing dinner. The fact that she will not condemn me or absolve me for what I have done, for what she knows I want, does not soothe. It only heightens my sense of danger. This woman who holds my career, my life in her hands. This woman who wants me completely at her mercy, it seems. The silence is gutting.
“Can you handle a glass of wine, or are you going to be a lunatic?” She looks up at me from her work tearing apart a head of lettuce. Her voice teeters on coldness, but her face is neutral. Imagine a student speaking to a professor that way. Imagine it.
“Yes, I—I can handle it,” I say dumbly. She leaves her immediate work, wipes her hands on the dish towel slung over her shoulder, and opens a new bottle of wine. The faint, crackling smell of smoke from the fire and the deeper, more savory scents of the meal she’s making for us fill my nose. It is intoxicating. The sensory stimulation pulls at my mind as I watch Audra move fluidly around her kitchen. She pours me a glass of merlot but does not bring it to me. She leaves it at the very edge of the countertop nearest me. The extension of half an olive branch only. I stand up from my stool, get the glass, then return to my post. She returns to her salad.
The wood-burning smell evokes memories in me I would rather not contemplate. Romantic evenings with Misha in Cambridge. All the times we made love in front of her fireplace. The way she so often yielded to me. I see her body. I see her face. But now, in my mind, her eyes fill with tears. Her face is wrought in fury, in disbelief. Not ecstasy. I’m remembering when she figured out that I’d thrown the latest draft of a building plan—a proposed children’s museum in Amherst she’d been working on for months—into an early-morning fire. This was four Januarys ago. We’d been fighting about having a child. She wanted one. I didn’t. I look into Audie’s fire now and see no curls of paper, no geometric lines, no dimensions, no room names. Misha’s pain from that experience helped me create one of my best works that year—a long, languid, purposefully two-dimensional woman draped almost like tissue paper on a hook. Lots of blues, whites, and browns. That’s what Misha was like right after that. Flattened. Punctured. Blue. Stuck. I named it The Draft. It sold from the gallery in twenty-six days. At a nice price, too. I bought Misha a bracelet with part of the proceeds.
And there were other fires. The butter-ginger flicker of fire from a potbellied stove in a small, dark cabin. Sheltering a girl made of the very air at Lupine Valley. When she couldn’t stand to go home. When she couldn’t stand anything. She came to me. She always seemed to me a sickly swipe of ochre, fire, harvest corn just gone to mush. She would weep and weep these diamond tears—I would have her go over everything with me again and again—until those heavy tears made trenches in her face. Then, when she was ready for me, I would draw her. Paint her. Capture her. In her truth. In her cracking, diseased amber, in her misery, a spiritual jaundice.
I prod the logs, whose embers are lava orange, melting, deconstructing.
Hi, Moss
I poke at the logs aggressively, desperate to banish my darkened memory.
Focus. I need to focus.
Focus was my home at Lupine Valley.
I shiver despite the heat and take a breath.
But no one knows of my time there. No one knows. One crisis at a time.
I need to engage Audra, try to soften the tone of the room, which feels hard and icy. I have broken something between us. I need to fix it. I have to. I think of my colleagues at the institute. Of what they would say if they knew about this. About how I just behaved. What it could mean for my job. For the reception of my work, past and present.
“Don’t tell me you cut your own wood, too?” I say, trying for exasperated-impressed.
A tense silence extends during which I grow sure that Audra is not going to reply. She is not going to grant me a modicum of grace.
Finally, she concedes. ”I have it delivered by the cord in the spring so I can stack and season it in the garage over the summer, little by little,” she says, half sighing. She clears her throat, breathes in through her nose again. “Then in the fall I cut the pieces down into kindling and smaller logs.” She’s chewing on something now, testing for flavor. “So, I do need to do some leg work, actually, yeah.” I look at her, that kitchen towel draped over her shoulder, her hair pulled back. She’s wearing a white bodysuit with her beat-up old jeans. She looks a little sweaty and a little feline and completely divine. A shiny flicker at her collarbone. Some delicate pendant or other. She licks Italian dressing off her thumb then sets out two gorgeous-looking garden salads in front of her on the cool marble island; verdant, crisp spinach, arugula, and escarole with crunchy, cold, red onion rings, candy-red cherry tomatoes, and a scattering of homemade croutons. The salads are in wide, white ceramic bowls. “Come. Eat.” She gains a stool at the island herself, picking her fork up hungrily. She pats the stool beside her. An invitation. I hang the fire poker and join her, stowing away the knowledge of its presence. My knife, the poker—items in an imagined arsenal against a danger that doesn’t exist.
“God, is this good,” I say after my first harried bites. I may never have had a better salad. The crisp coolness of it against the swelling, humid warmth of the kitchen is delectable. She nods and continues munching along herself. After a few more bites, she goes over to the cooktop and stirs the chopped potatoes—Maine grown—in the oversize boiling pot and opens the door of the lower double oven to check on the dinner rolls. “Almost time to start the filet.” Filet mignon. She’s gone all out for us. “Oh—and the asparagus.” She hurries over to the fridge to grab it while I happily eat, an anxious rabbit.
“It smells amazing in here,” I tell her, watching her every movement. She nods, coming back to the counter and standing beside me, finishing up her own bowl of greens. We are quiet as we finish eating, my anxiety growing with every empty moment. I close my eyes, finding our avoidance of the topic unbearable. My outburst. Her correct assumption about my motives and agenda. What is this? What do I do?
Audra just continues to work.
My phone buzzes an alert from my pocket. I hesitate and then check. A new email. Sweat that’s not from the heat of the room breaks out on my skin like a rash.
To: mdurant@biva.edu
From: thedevil@kingcity.me
Subject: M + M
Mantis is nothing but the name of a bug.