Ashes Read online

  "What about Hank?" he heard himself saying.

  "Ran off." She touched a dangerous stack of picture frames. "With an airline attendant. He decided to swing both ways, a double member in the Mile High club."

  "Not Hank?" John had always wondered about Hank, could picture him reverting to Henry and going to strange bars. Hank had been plenty man enough for Karen, though. Much more man than John.

  At least the old John. The new John, the one he was building, was a different story.

  A work in progress.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked.

  She turned and tried on that old look, the one that worked magic four years ago. Four years was a long time. A small crease marred one of her perfect cheeks.

  "I came to see you," she said. "Why else?"

  "Oh. I thought you might have wanted to see my art."

  "Same difference, silly."

  Same difference. A Karenism. One of those he had loathed. And calling him “silly” when he was probably the least silly man in the history of the human race. As far as serious artists went, anyway.

  "No, really. What are you doing here?"

  "I told you, Hank's gone."

  "What does that have to do with me?"

  She picked up a chisel. It was chipped, like his front tooth. She tapped it against a cinder block. Never any respect for tools.

  "It has everything to do with you," she said.

  A pause filled the studio like mustard gas, then she added, "With us."

  Us. Us had lasted seven months, four days, three hours, and twenty-three minutes, give or take a few seconds. But who was counting?

  "I don't understand," he said. He had never been able to lie to her.

  "You said if it weren't for Hank—"

  "Henry. Let's call him 'Henry.'"

  Her eyes became slits, then they flicked to the Andy Warhol poster. "Okay. If it weren't for Henry, I'd probably still be with you."

  Still. Yes, she knew all about still. She could recline practically motionless for hours on end, a rare talent. She could do it in the nude, too. A perfect model. A perfect love, for an artist.

  No.

  Artists didn't need love, and perfection was an ideal to be pursued but never captured.

  The work in progress was all that mattered. Anna under the floorboards. Cynthia beneath the canvas. Sharon in the trunk of his Toyota.

  And Karen here before him.

  His fingers itched, and the reflections of blades gleamed on the work bench.

  "I thought you said you could never be happy with an artist," he said. "Because artists are so self-absorbed."

  "I never said that, exactly."

  Except for three times. Once after making love, when the sheets were sweaty and the breeze so wonderful against the heat of their slick skin, when the city pulsed like a live thing in time to their racing heartbeats, when cars and shouts and bricks and broken glass all paved a trail that led inside each other.

  "You said that," he said.

  She moved away, turned her back, and pretended to care the least little bit about the Magritte print. "I was younger then."

  Karen didn't make mistakes, and if she did, she never admitted them. John didn't know what to make of this new Karen. How did she fit with this new John he was building? Where did she belong in the making?

  Art, on a few rare occasions, was born of accident. Or was even accident by design? Karen had entered his life, his studio, his work, right in the midst of his greatest creation. This making of himself.

  She walked past the collection of mirror shards he had cemented to the wall. Suddenly there were a dozen Karens, sharp-edged and silvery. All of them with that same fixed smile, one that welcomed itself back to a place it had never truly belonged. John's jagged world.

  "What are you working on?" she asked. She'd wondered such things in the beginning, when showing interest in his art was the best way into his head. Then she'd slowly sucked him away, drained his attention until all he could think about was her. She became the centerpiece of his gallery, the showcase, the magnum opus. And when at last she'd succeeded in walling him off from his art, when she herself had become the art, along came Henry who called himself Hank.

  "Oh, something in soapstone."

  The piece was on his bench. She hadn't even noticed. Her eyes were blinded ice.

  "Oh, that," she said. "That's pretty neat."

  Soapstone had a little give, some flexibility. You could miss your hammer stroke and create an interesting side effect instead of complete and utter rubble. Soapstone could be shaped. Unlike Karen, who was already shaped to near perfection.

  The soapstone piece was called "Madonna And Grapefruit." Madonna was a long graceful curve, skin splotched by the grain of the stone. Grapefruit was the part he hadn't figured out yet.

  He hadn't touched it in four months.

  "I'm calling it 'Untitled,'" he said. That statement was a lie for the piece called "Madonna and Grapefruit," but was true for the work in progress for which three women had given their lives.

  "Neat. You always were better at sculpting than painting." She looked again at her unfinished portrait on the wall. She added, "But you're a good painter, too."

  "So, what's new with you?" As if he had to ask. What was new was that Henry was gone, otherwise she was exactly the same as she'd always been.

  "Visiting. My old roommate."

  "The sky was two-dimensional," he said.

  "What?"

  "That day. That day we were talking about a minute ago."

  "Don't talk about the past."

  "Why not?" he said. "It's all I have."

  Her face did a good job of hiding what she was thinking. Marble, or porcelain maybe.

  "Where are you staying now?" she asked.

  He didn't want to admit that he was sleeping on the couch in the gallery. "I have a walk-up efficiency. Not enough elbow room to get any work done, though. That's why I rent this place."

  "So, have you done any shows lately?"

  He considered lying, then decided to go for it. "I won second place in a community art show. A hundred bucks and a bag of art supplies."

  "Really? Which piece?"

  John pointed toward a gnarled wooden monstrosity that sulked in one corner. It had once been a dignified dead oak, but had been debased with hatchet blows and shellac.

  "What do you call it?" Karen asked.

  "I call it . . ." John hoped his hesitation played as a dramatic pause while he searched his index of future titles. "I call it ‘Moment of Indecision.’"

  "Heavy."

  "I'll say 'heavy.' Weighs over two hundred pounds. I'm surprised it hasn't fallen through the floor."

  "And you made a hundred dollars?"

  "Well, 'make' isn't the right word, if you're calculating profit and loss. I spent forty dollars on materials and put in thirty hours of labor. Comes in at less than half of minimum wage."

  He was surprised how fast he was talking now. And it was all due to Karen walking toward the rumpled canvas in the corner, leaning over it, examining the lumps and folds and probably wondering what great treasure lay underneath.

  The artist formerly known as Cynthia.

  "Say, Karen, how's your old roommate?" The same roommate who wouldn't leave the room so they could make love in Karen's tiny bed. The roommate who thought John was stuck up. The roommate who was so desperately and hideously blonde that John wished for a moment she could become part of the work in progress.

  The distraction worked, because Karen turned from the canvas and stroked a nest of wires that was trying to become a postmodern statement.

  "She's the same as ever," Karen said.

  "Aren't we all?" John looked at the handles of the steak knives. They almost formed the outline of a letter of the alphabet.

  "I don't know why I'm here. I really shouldn't be here."

  "Don't say that. It's really good to see you."

  John pictured her as a metal dolphin, leaping from th
e water, drops falling like golden rust against the sunset. Frozen in a moment of decision. A single framed image that he could never paint.

  He looked at the oil of Karen. The endless work in progress. Maybe if he ran a streak of silver along that left breast, the angle of the moonlight would trick the viewer.

  If Karen weren't here, such a moment of inspiration would have brought a mad rush for brushes and paints. Now, he felt foolish.

  Because Karen was here after all. This was life, not art. This was life, not art. This was life, not art.

  He clenched one fist behind his back.

  Ah.

  Untitled.

  Sharon in the trunk of his Toyota.

  "The sky was two-dimensional," John said.

  "What?"

  "That day."

  "John." She picked up his fluter, a wedged piece of metal. Nobody touched his fluter.

  "What?"

  She nodded toward The Painting, the one that showed most of her nude body. "Did you like painting me just because you could get me naked that way?"

  A question that had two possible answers. Yes or no.

  The artist always chose the third possible answer.

  "Both," he said. "How's Henry?"

  "I think he goes by 'Hank' now. At least that's what his boyfriend calls him." Karen wiggled her hands into the pockets of her blue jeans. Tightening the fabric.

  John's fingers itched.

  "So, how's the job?" he asked.

  As if he had to ask. Accounting. The same as always.

  "The same as always," she said. "I got another raise last year."

  The ladder and how to climb it. Karen knew the book by heart, learned by rote at the feet of Henry who called himself Hank. Or was it Hank who changed his name to Henry?

  Such confusion.

  So many sharp edges and reflections.

  "Why are you here?" John asked.

  "I already told you."

  "No. I mean, really."

  She picked up a piece of colored glass, a remnant from a miniature church John had built and then smashed. She held the glass to her eye and looked through. Blue behind blue.

  "I got to wondering about you," she said. "How you were getting along and all that. And I wanted to see how famous artists lived."

  Famous artists didn't live. All the most famous artists were long dead, and the ones who swayed the critics during their own lifetimes made John suspicious.

  "I'm the most famous artist nobody's ever heard of," he said.

  She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the glass. "That's one thing I don't miss about you. Your insecurity."

  "Artists have to go to dangerous places. You can't get too comfortable if you want to make a statement."

  Karen put the piece of blue glass on the desk beside his mallet. She went to the portrait again. She pointed to the curve of her painted hip. "Maybe if you put a little more red here."

  "Maybe."

  She turned. "This is really sad, John. You promised you were going to throw yourself into your work and make me regret ever breaking up with you."

  He hated her for knowing him so well. Knowing him, but not understanding. That was something he'd never been able to forgive her for.

  But then, she wasn't perfect. She was a work in progress, too.

  "You can't even finish one lousy painting," she said.

  "I've been working on my crow collection."

  "Crow collection? What the hell is that?"

  "Shiny stuff. Spiritual stuff."

  "I thought you were going to make that series of twelve that was going to be your ticket to the top."

  He looked out the window. The room smelled of kerosene and decay.

  She waved her hands at the mess on the workbench. "You gave up me for this."

  No. She left him for Hank or Henry. John never made the choice. She wanted him to give up art. That was never an option.

  "I guess I'd better get going," she said.

  He thought about grabbing her, hugging her, whispering to her the way he had in the old days. He wanted her naked, posing. Then, perhaps, he could finish the portrait.

  "It was really good to see you," he said.

  "Yeah." Her face was pale, a mixture of peach and titanium white.

  She paused by the studio door and took a last look at The Painting. "Frozen in time," she said.

  "No, it's not frozen at all. It's a work in progress.

  "See you around."

  Not likely, since she lived two thousand miles away. The door closed with a soft squeak, a sigh of surrender.

  John looked at the portrait again.

  Karen here before him.

  Not the one who walked and breathed, the one he could never shape. This was the Karen he could possess. The real Karen. The Painting.

  He possessed them all. Anna under the floorboards. Cynthia beneath the canvas. Sharon in the trunk of his Toyota.

  John hurried to the bench and grabbed up his tools.

  The Muse had spoken. He realized he'd never wanted to build himself, or dream himself alive. Art wasn't about sacrificing for the good of the artist. Art was about sacrificing for others.

  For Karen.

  She was the real work in progress, the one that could be improved. The canvas awaited his touch.

  John uncovered Cynthia and went to work. By midnight, The Painting was finished.

  It was perfection.

  ###

  SHE CLIMBS A WINDING STAIR

  Outside the window, a flat sweep of sea. The ocean's tongue licks the shore as if probing an old scar. Clouds hang gray and heavy, crushed together by nature's looming anger. In the distance is a tiny white sail, or it might be a forlorn whitecap, breaking too far out to make land.

  I hope it is a whitecap.

  Because she may come that way, from the lavender east. She may rise from the stubborn sandy fields behind the house, or seep from the silver trees beyond. She could arrive a thousand times, in a thousand different colors, from all directions above or below.

  I can almost her hear now, her soft footsteps on the stairs, the whisper of her ragged lace, the mouse-quick clatter of her fingerbones on the railing.

  Almost.

  It's not fear that binds my limbs to this chair, for I know she's not bent on mortal vengeance. If only I could so easily repay my sins.

  Rather, I dread that moment when she appears before me, when her imploring eyes stare blankly into mine, when her lost lips part in question.

  She will ask me why, and, God help me, I will have no answer.

  I came to Portsmouth in my position as a travel writer on assignment for a national magazine. In my career, I had learned to love no place and like them all, for it's enthusiasm that any editor likes to see in a piece. So neither the vast stone and ice beauty of the Rockies, the wet redwood cliffs of Oregon, the fiery pastels of the Southwestern deserts, the worn and welcoming curves of the Appalachians, nor the great golden plains of the central states tugged at my heart any more or less than the rest of this fair country. Indeed, much of my impression of this land and its people came from brief conversations and framed glances on planes, trains, and the occasional cab or boat.

  So the Outer Banks held no particular place in my heart as I ferried across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke. To the north was the historic Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest in the country, which was currently being moved from its eroding base at a cost of millions. I thought at the time that perhaps I could swing up to Hatteras and cover the work for a separate article. But assignments always came before freelance articles, because a bankable check feeds a person much better than a possibility does.

  So on to bleak Portsmouth for me. At Ocracoke, I met the man who was chartered to take me to Portsmouth. As I boarded his tiny boat with my backpack and two bags, my laptop and camera wrapped against the salt air, he gave me several looks askance.

  "How long you going to stay?" he asked, his wrinkled face as weathered as the hull of his boat.

 
"Three days, though I'm getting paid for seven," I said. "Why?"

  "You don't look like the type that roughs it much, you don't mind me saying." His eyes were quick under the bill of his cap, darting from me to the open inlet to the sky and then to the cluttered dock.

  "I'll manage," I said, not at all pleased with this old salt's assessment of me. True, I was more at home in a three-star hotel than under a tent, but I did hike a little and tried to be only typically overweight for a middle-aged American.

  The man nodded at the sea, in the distance toward where I imagined Portsmouth lay waiting. "She can be harsh, if she's of a mind," he said. Then he pushed up the throttle and steered the boat from the dock in a gurgle and haze of oily smoke.

  We went without speaking for some minutes, me hanging on the bow as the waves buffeted us and Ocracoke diminished to our rear. Then he shouted over the noise of the engine, "Hope you brought your bug repellent."

  "Why?" I said, the small droplets of ocean spray making a sticky film on my face.

  "Bugs'll eat you alive," he said.

  "Maybe I can borrow some at the ranger station," I said.

  The man laughed, his head ducking like a sea turtle's. "Ain't no rangers there. Not this time of year."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Hurricane season. That, and federal cuts. Government got no business on that island no way. Places like that ought to be left alone."

  My information must have been wrong. Portsmouth was now administered by the National Parks Service, since the last residents had left thirty years before. An editorial assistant had assured me that at least two rangers would be on duty throughout the course of my stay. They had offices with battery-operated short-wave radio and emergency supplies. That was the only reason I had agreed to take an assignment to such a desolate place.

  Not for the first time, I silently cursed the carelessness of editorial assistants. "The forecasts are for clear weather," I said, not letting the boatman know that I cared one way or another.

  "You should be all right," he said. "Least as far as the weather's concerned. Still, they blow up quick sometimes."