With Judi Justin

In the wreck and wrack of memory resides a single image: her face. I remember it when I’m not remembering it. I remember it when I’m gazing at it. The massive bony head turned in my direction, studying me. The wall-eyed stare which admits no glimpse of any world beyond the dirt-smeared windows. Her broad thighs tightening the folds of a beige dress printed all over with tiny green apples. Nothing luscious in those apples, no trace of longing that compels me to let my fingers drift across the fabric, trace the coarseness of thickly folded skin beneath. When she’s staring at me, fixing me with eyes that gleam in her oddly angular face, the brown hair wafting girlish around her Medusa-like countenance, I have no choice except to return her gaze while—inside me—something cramps and shifts and my fingers twitch because I want her life, lacking one of my own.
         I cross her girlhood bedroom, everything as pink and frilly as might be expected. She can no longer access this room, though I’m permitted to wander it at will. And I spend so many hours up here, it’s true, that I’ve lost the sensation of hours passing. Her bedspread’s the luscious hue of a just-faded rose, frozen against snow. Sometimes, when I know Al isn’t in the house and Christina’s sitting on her chair in the living room below, the soiled yellow newspapers positioned beneath the legs, I love to lie on this bed with my hands behind my head and imagine her here in all her virginity, her just-budding breasts pushing up a white voile nightgown. Did her hand ever stray between her legs? Did she ever gaze at the rubbled ceiling and imagine the love of a young man like me? Or was she as pragmatic, as accepting, as she is now, knowing inside her bones that sometime the disease’d strike and she’d never be allowed to leave the house, though she can crawl upstairs on her belly?
         Such ruminations torment me.
         I know she’s dignified. Know she’s missing nothing in the sere-grassed world that calls to me daily to gaze at a scrub-barked tree and paint. But … still. She’s my muse.
         And I long for her to be happy.

But “happiness” is a complex emotion. That’s what my father always told me, who never achieved anything approaching the euphoria I experience painting. Pa’s a conflicted man. You can’t paint Treasure Island and your own vision of the world, too. And if you paint Treasure Island too long, replicating the swashbuckling book illustrations that your public hungers for so steadily that—like a whore with a perpetually stiffened clit—you can’t bear to disappoint them, then you fix your gaze on what’s inside and discover there’s nothing there except a vision of the Rolls you bought to keep your pleasure-loving kiddies happy.
         Then you struggle and struggle to get back, painting silly, garish sunsets over ponds while you keep playing the part, big tunic’d bear of a man with delicate tapered feet in kid leather, but what you discover is that nobody takes you seriously anymore: and, fuck, you can’t see inside objects the way you once did, your brush trembles when you let it glide outside Robin Hood’s young-boy body, and phrases like “Sherwood Forest” and “Bold Men in Valor” and “Shades of Derring Do” take on so much meaning that you can’t remember what it felt like to have an original thought.
         Because I love my father, I like to pretend that his painting still matters.
         But it’s my hatred for him that fuels me, keeps me flickering blue-flamed against a thousand night skies I lie under with my hands behind my head as I do everyday on Christina’s childhood bed, something forming behind my consciousness, burgeoning into a blackness behind my eyes. If I didn’t hate anyone, I wouldn’t be able to paint. It’s what helps the dark hills, shadow-mapped, mount before a sky that’d shine saccharine otherwise; it’s what makes the canines sprout glinting in a caved-in mouth, the orgasmic shiver that makes you lose consciousness, that makes your eyes roll back in your head until you’re blind and adore your own dying.

I want to stay up in her room, but she keeps calling me back down. “Andy,” she shouts, the rasp of a fattened crone. “Andy?”
         Sometimes I pretend I don’t hear her. Not to be mean, but just because I can’t bear to leave her virginal queendom. Ballerina music box fat with years of dust that tufts like a fur coat when I pass. Delicate sensuous curtains gone black, billowing out from a cracked window, a window I’ll never close though I almost live in this room.
         I’m the man who walks without leaving footprints, who inhabits souls and then withdraws—an unconsummated fuck.
        “Andy.”
         I creep downstairs on the cat feet that always startle her. There, in the center of the room, by the old wood fireplace, she sits on a beat-up chair, the stained newspapers stacked up thick beneath her, a dim green ribbon plaited in her hair because today’s a festive day, and she knows it: today the work on her painting begins.
        “How’re we going to get outside?” she asks. Then, squinting at the window: “Andy, it’s too foggy.”
        “Let me take care of everything,” I say. “The grass isn’t really all that damp.” Then, like a bridegroom, I swoop in, tug her against my chest, cradling her, her big head under my chin.

I carry her as far as I can away from Olsons’, until the gray house with the rotting windowframes shines a less threatening edifice through fog. I carry her until my heart swells like an edematous organ, and sweat pungent as sea salt runs from my forehead into my mouth. Straining, I hoist her higher because she’s an overweight woman, has a tendency to slip. She never utters a sound, frightening in her New England stoicism, and I recall the time she was reputed to limp home from school after falling in the road, whispering, “Why does everything always happen to me?” But that time was long ago, and any lingering terror Christina possesses about the implications of her illness—perpetually misdiagnosed—have been layered over with toughness.
         Unlike Beethoven, I reflect, she won’t die railing at the Heavens; instead, she’ll simply close her eyes, slip away so silently it will probably be hours before anyone notices.
         Part of me admires this grim-lipped trait.
         Another part finds it terrifying.
         When I’m far enough away from the house, I place her on the grass. Her legs are propped before her; I squat, rearrange them, spread them until I realize that I’ve posed her suggestively, so I line the legs up more discreetly, the sides of her knees touching. She leans back on her strong, fatty arms, and I scrutinize the pose until I realize it’s too casual. I want her to look toward the house, yearn for it as sanctuary and confinement (for me as her most beloved jailer).
        “Christina,” I say. “I’m sorry—I’ve got to move you. The pose is all wrong.” She stares up at me with the blank face that haunts my dreams, the bloodless visage of a woman in her coffin.
         Don’t be ridiculous, I think, and hoist her again.
         This time I prop her on her belly, her face pressed against grass. “Sorry,” I say, and help her up on her arms, force her upright until her legs straggle behind and only the back of her head’s visible, that brown-gray, girlish hair, a tension across the shoulder blades: it’d be difficult for an experienced model to hold this pose.
        “Look at the house,” I command her. “Look at the house,” and I know she does, though I can’t see her expression, nor she mine—the expression of a man who realizes that he’s made a mistake, that the image he had isn’t graceful or mesmerizing but the forced manipulation of a cripple.
        “Relax,” I say suddenly, and she collapses onto her breasts, breathing hard.

After I’ve left her by the fire, stoked the flames with Al’s poker, shifted the logs so I know she’ll stay warm; after I’ve rubbed her wet limbs down with a big, dirty towel I’ve collected from Al’s shower, I find that we have nothing to say—and now it’s time to leave. I hope Al will be home soon, though there’s no promise of that. An embittered man since his livelihood was severed from the sea, he enjoys tying one on—ale or port or New England beer—at the local pub. He never abandons Christina though he’s frequently not in the house, which is fine, because she revels in silence as much as I do.
         I button up my sheepskin-collared coat, tramp on the dirt road back to Betsy’s and my place, a house and studio adjacent to Pa’s because I’ve never been able to leave the land where I grew up. There, Pa tutored me as well as Henriette, Carolyn, Nat. Sometimes I feel the tug of the umbilical stretching all the way back to that house, though it’s Pa I’m attached to, the successful illustrator, failed painter, not the mother who birthed me, who’s a warm, comforting presence without any ideas of her own.
         A high white moon splits the black, starless sky, so hazy it appears to float. A whippoorwill calls; the brief, bursting barks of a wolf. I stride alongside the fence that leads up to Karl Kuerner’s place, which is as subliminal and surrealistically frightening as a dream, a farm where dressed-out animals—pigs and deer—hang upside down, bound with leather straps slung around their hooves until the dead animals bleed out in dream-patterns on dirt. Fertility, I think. Blood-irrigation. I ball up my fists, jam my hands into my pockets, wish I were home already though Olsons’ is summoning me back, the image I can’t get right, the world I can’t arrange, the dream fragment I can’t classify.

Betsy meets me at the door, the glow of a hurricane lamp tossing orange light behind a blouse white as a sand dune, a black riding skirt that flows to her ankles. The meticulousness of her dress is partly what makes Pa classify Betsy as a lightweight, though I find the contrast between her locked-down demeanor and the woman who arches her hips in bed exciting. Without a word she descends the porch steps, slides her hands inside my collar, molds her fingers around her neck, thumbs tracing the jugular; the shock of her warm flesh on this frosty night makes my groin tighten; then, she unbuttons the coat, her fingers tracing the front of my flannel shirt until I smile.
        “Come on in,” she says, “and tell me about your day.”
         I oblige.
         Inside, the old tin pot of coffee’s on the stove, scenting the air with a black, scalded pungency; she’s made pancakes in the frying pan, places three before me when I sit down at the kitchen table; she hands me my fork, picks up my coat, hangs it in the foyer.
         I’m very hungry so concentrate on the pancakes when she arranges herself across from me. Eat, I hear her willing me silently, eat—and I do because I belong to her as I used to belong to Pa; one jailer has replaced another, yes; I devour all my pancakes, though the edges are burned, making them difficult for me to stomach; this is the tacit secret between us: nothing matters as much as the painting, not her, me, our relationship: the beauty of our marriage is that we’ve accepted this from the beginning, and—for us—there can be no other recourse.
         After I’ve finished the pancakes and drunk deeply from the mug of hot coffee she’s pressed into my palms, she leans forward with a napkin, wipes my mouth. “Now,” she says. “Tell me about your day.”
         Gazing down at the table, pen marks from my sketches scarring the oak, I tell her about the difficulty of the pose, Christina’s disfigurement.
        “Silly boy,” Betsy comments when I’m through, and laughs. “Didn’t you know she was crippled?”
        “Yes, but—” I study my nails, half-moons of grime. “I just don’t want her to look grotesque.”
        “She is grotesque, Andy. How can she look beautiful?”
         I stare out the uncovered window: bright sky I could drown in. “I don’t know,” I whisper. “There’s got to be a way.”
         But Betsy—who’s much more clever than me—knows. Without drawing the blinds, she rises, unsnaps her black skirt, lets it fall, hurries out of her panties and starched blouse and bra. Her white body in the shadow gleams like something elemental, polished, the nipples stark-red as rubies, her wild, uncombed bush like black flame. “Paint me instead,” she murmurs, “my body instead,” as I stumble up, reach for her, Christina’s Medici head floating inside my mind, Christina’s thick-boned head wafting through my consciousness as I spread-eagled Betsy on the wool kitchen rug, trap her ankles with my big, shoed feet, open her with watercolor-stained fingers, enter her with the silence of death itself, which is how we both like it.

Fortunately, the Olsons never lock their house. So it’s easy for me to slip in at five a.m., while both of them sleep. Al’s passed out by the guttering fire, his old fisherman’s cap hung on one peg of the chair, his stubbled jaw tilted ceilingward as he dozes. And Christina’s curled up on a straw pallet in the corner. I study them both for a second, feeling as fond as I did of the toy soldiers Pa gave me when I was ten. How I loved to pose them in fight attitudes, their bayonets knocking as I urged them to rush together. I’d kill them at will, accept never a protest. I feel this way about the Olsons: that they’re the human toys some kindly God’s placed at my disposal to amuse myself with, love.
         I hurry upstairs, pull my painting supplies out of boxes in the attic, cart them down: the easel, fresh canvas, palette box, the rinsing water and turpentine for my brushes. I carry them outdoors, set them out on the grass, misted gray with fog. I’ll alternate painting from reality and from memory for weeks. And, when I’m painting from memory, I’ll do it in Christina’s childhood bedroom so I can feel steeped in her essence, while I render her massive head atop Betsy’s body.
         I prop up the easel, straighten the legs, hoist it and bear it downhill till I’m a safe distance from Olsons, gazing up at that gray dilapidated house softened by fog; I study the house for a second while I finger the envelope in my pocket, the first letter Betsy’s written to Christina.

The sun’s still the milky gold I’m accustomed to in New England, its fire muted by a white mist that clings to the landscape so everything in Maine looks runny, as if you’re peering at things all the time without being able to take them in.
         Today it’s the grass that fascinates me: I’m besotted with stubble. It woos me, tantalizes me, spiky as a woman’s yellow pubic hair. I bend closer to see it though I don’t want to become like the Pre-Raphaelites, painters so obsessed with detail they’d have to count blades of river grass before recording them. Here, the grass represents something else, though I can’t quite fathom it. A psychology? Pathology? Consciousness? I rub my fingers over its stubble, sink them into the coolness beneath fraying tips, the sweep of black mud sleek as Betsy’s breasts when I stroked them in the dark; I’m aroused and summon Christina’s gargantuan, cut-stone head, wall-eyed gaze. Enough grass, I decide. I’ll paint Christina first. I grip my boar’s-bristle brush, approach the canvas, put one line down for Christina before realizing I can’t render her yet: I have to create the world that surrounds her first, a universe she can dwell in as object among objects. My fist seizes up, relaxes: and then I’m painting, Goddamit. Painting.

At lunchtime I decide to mail the letter, so I board the ferry into town, the land crusty as a crab as the shore recedes, the outjutting rocks wet-looking with sun, and my mind’s abstracted, floating, as if it were detached from the physical Andy, the pragmatic Andy who lays black lines down with deliberation against canvas. I never talked to her today. But it was okay: she knew better than to call out as I rounded the stairs, though something in her countenance, in her eyes, suggested a hot suffering. No matter: painting’s the thing. And when I’m submerged in this water world of my mind, mouth bubbles wafting up delicate, poppable, I rise abstracted, slow-drifting as a dream image, to avoid risking the Bends.
         I disembark, walk briskly down the street, skirt the temptation of cafes where old farmers gum up their experiences with words that can never help them; I dodge the tourist traps, too, find the big blue mailbox on the corner, check to make sure there’s no return address, deposit the letter.

I’m sick today. The flu? I hope I didn’t give it to Betsy, though there’s not much danger of that: we didn’t kiss lass night, only fucked. Lightheaded, I ignore my symptoms because I have to paint. My brush traces the grass growing tufted off canvas, a wild entity assuming its own fervent life, and then I’m not painting; then it’s not me laying down the gray wooden planks of the house until it builds itself up, a miniature domicile a little Christina and Al could inhabit. The sun trembles across the horizon; a pink sky flames into ash. I stare into the depths of a star-studded night, the first sensation of vertigo wafting me so I’m laid out against the horizon; then, I pick up my easel and paints, carry them into the house.
         In all these hours, Christina hasn’t moved though the papers beneath her chair are soaked. She lifts her head when I enter; I nod and tramp upstairs, into the hot, fetid darkness of the attic, where I crouch on my hands and knees, my mind separating suddenly from consciousness to drift mothlike against the attic window: I watch it there, fluttering.
         Then, I lie down on my belly, the wood scratchy against my cheek. In my dreams, the thump-thump of a peg-leg: Pa’s painting Kidnapped again. I open my eyes. No Pa staring down. In the blackness Christina’s struggled wormdeft upstairs, the thuds I tracked those of her fat body striking the stairs. She’s sound asleep now, her enormous head against my hip, her wet lips parted so the blackness of her mouth looms near, her dark-scented breath coating my own teeth.
         I gaze at the stone bluntness of her skull then stroke her hair before my hand wanders down, traces my zipper, falls suddenly away.

When I wake up, I’m coughing, and Christina’s gone. I forgot to go home last night. Maybe I can plead sickness as an excuse—God knows I feel awful. I stumble downstairs, walk out into a glare so blinding I can’t see a thing—atypical sun. Then, down the hill, I spot Christina in the pose we tried out on the first day of the painting. She’s stretched out on her stomach, her back arched. I shudder, cough, run downhill. “Not like that!” I shout, and Christina gazes up at me, unblinking, as I shift her elbows forward, tug down her sweatshirt, smooth it out, push her chin up then step behind her, scrutinizing her girlish hair, stroking it until the postman, bag slung over one shoulder, hands her the envelope I mailed yesterday.
         She clutches it, staring down. Forgets to hold the pose. I’m standing behind her, grinning. “Who’s it from?” I demand, struggling to keep a smile out of my voice. She shakes her head, still gazing.
        “I don’t know,” she responds, in as soft a voice as I’ve heard from her. “There’s no return address.”
        “Well … who do you think it could be from?”
        “Don’t know,” she responds more shortly. “Don’t get much mail here.” Then, she glances up. “You need me today?” she asks. “For posing, I mean?”
        “No,” I reply. “That part’s done.”
         She hesitates. “But it happened so fast,” she says. “I thought there’d be more.”
         We study each other, not speaking.

Betsy and I have a brunch date with Pa today, one we don’t dare ignore. Of course I’ll be late. I dash back up to the attic, find my coat in a corner. When I run outside, Christina’s crawling uphill, the envelope in her left hand, the paper smeared black with mud as she ascends, a fat-bodied worm in her thrashing. I nod but don’t stop because I’m late: Pa and Betsy’ll flay me alive.

I always have an odd sensation when ascending the porch. How would anyone feel, relocating yards away from the house where he grew up? Living with Pa was an education in every sense of the word. As kids, Anne and Henriette, Carolyn and Nat and I were never allowed to lounge; we were expected to perform like the budding young artists we were, creating plaster casts, drawing busts, Pa correcting all our work as seriously as if we were never children, a high-pressure environment that would’ve killed off weaker kids though Ma took the edge off; also, the fact that I was a sickly boy, prone to bouts of pneumonia and all manner of half-diagnosed ailments, meant that I never had to be quite as conscientious as the others.
         Plus—as Pa’d always affirm—I coasted by on my charm.
         Fuck: I’m doing it still.
         When I open the screen door, Pa’s inside, on a purple-velvet chair across from Betsy, who’s dressed in an ankle-length, green-satin gown that reveals her voluptuousness … though only tastefully: while Pa often refers to her as “the prostitute who stole my son,” there’s nothing undignified about her. Her back’s too stiff, though: they’ve been fighting again. And why not? Pa hates her. Before Betsy, he was the only person allowed to control me.
         Now they have to fight over their ownership of Andy Wyeth.
         Betsy doesn’t notice I’ve come in: must be my cat-feet again. I grin until I enter her stream of verbiage, attend to what she’s saying. Pa’s wire-rimmed spectacles slide down onto the tip of his nose; he repositions them one-fingered, taking in her words with a calm which belies his rage. Pa’s a slow reactor, which often confuses people.
        “You’re jealous,” Betsy’s saying. “Because you never took your painting seriously. Whored around with that goddamned illustration until—”
        “Betsy,” I say. “Please, please: be quiet.”
        “It’s true,” Pa says, a little sad. “You’re right. I sold out.”
         Betsy looks confused. “Just so you know: I’ll be managing his career from now on.”
         Pa hesitates, Then: “I’m sure you’ll do a spectacular job.”
         I look at Betsy; she won’t meet my gaze. Good thing, too: I could just about kill her now.
         Then Ma, the peacemaker, enters, carrying a serving dish of pastries. “Brunch is served,” she says, scanning each face though her emotional radar’s not keen enough to detect any disturbance. “Come on, everybody. The others are waiting.”
         I rise too quickly. Betsy stands up, crosses the room, reaches for my hand, winces without looking when I refuse to take it. Behind her, Pa’s secret smile, meant only for the Golden Boy.

The stench of the meat on my plate. Grayish, cut-up (courtesy of my mother), it resembles no other game I’ve sampled. I poke at it with my fork. Betsy, beside me, gazes around the table with a stare so glazed she almost looks retarded. I know she’s terrified that she’ll catch hell from me later. And she should be scared: nobody interferes with my relationship with Pa. I look down the long table, reveling in the presence of my siblings: Henriette in her pastel dress and bright orange beret; stumpy, glowering Carolyn, the family eccentric—the only painter in the family who’s better than me; mechanical-minded Nat; sweet-tempered Ann. All the children have had trouble moving away from N.C. permanently, though we’ve made intermittent forays, perhaps.
        “What the hell is this meat?” I ask Betsy, sotto voce. “Christ: it smells like roadkill.”
         Ma, whose senses are always attuned to her children’s imaginary disasters, hears me but doesn’t take offense: “That’s a fresh-dressed buck from Kuerner’s.”
         I recoil. “Karl killed it?”
        “Of course,” my mother replies.
         Around me, the others eat ravenously, except for Betsy, who’s still too distressed at her encounter with Pa. I gaze down at the gray bits on my plate, picturing the last deer I saw at Kuerner’s, hung up by his hooves, his lovely eyes glazed as two stomach flaps bled out onto dirt below.
        “Andy,” Pa says, his mouth crammed. “Aren’t you hungry?”
        “Andrew’s delicate,” Betsy says suddenly. “He can’t just eat everything put in front of him.”
         Pa’s face tightens. “I think I know my own son.”
         Both he and Betsy look at me then; Pa draws a slow and careful breath.
        “Andy,” he says. “Tell me what you’re painting these days.”
        “I was thinking about painting Christina Olson. But now maybe I’ll only paint the house, the grass. She’s—too deformed, I think; I don’t feel like I can put her on the canvas. Seems a little creepy.”
        “Good decision,” Pa says. “The world doesn’t want to look at a cripple.”
         Beside me, Betsy’s sudden breathlessness. I gaze down at my plate, absorbed in my venison.
        “Andrew Wyeth,” my mother announces suddenly; startled, everybody looks. “Do you have a cold?”
        “No,” I say, fork poised mid-air though I haven’t dared taste the meat. “The flu, Ma.”
        “And you still have an appetite?”
        “Uh—apparently so.” She hasn’t noticed my restraint.
        “That’s my Andy,” Ma says, to the table at large, Nat smiling behind his hand. “That’s my Andy,” and I study my fingers resting atop the tablecloth, knowing what each of them is thinking: Give him a fucking medal.

Betsy wakes me in the night to roughhouse. The bed’s a mess, the gold-leafed comforter strewn halfway across the floor, the top sheet twined dramatically around her neck. As I rock forward into her, she catches my gaze sliding across that sheet. “Come on, Andy,” she says, placing both ends in my hands. “Just a little. You know you want to. You paint much better when you’re angry.” I laugh, grip the sheet ends, knot the sheet loosely around her throat, tug while I thrust. “Ow, big boy,” Betsy says, and then I let go; Betsy falls back onto the bed, the sheet rumpling behind her back. “I didn’t hurt you?” I ask— “did I?” and trace the delicate cords on her neck, the basin below her jugular, as tenderly as if I were reimagining her in paint. The skin’s red, but there’s no hint of a bruise. “Thank God,” I say, and Betsy—ever the good sport—smiles. I close my eyes, withdraw with a pop, wince at my cooling cock. Betsy still lies there, legs akimbo. “Close your legs,” I say, shortly, sounding for all the world like my Pa, and she does, a muscle in her cheek contracting. Closing my eyes, I stumble up from the bed, remembering the time I stood there on the porch, just a kid, and Pa accused me of a theft I didn’t commit, then slapped me.
        “Did you deliver the letter?” Betsy asks. “To Christina, I mean?” and I open my eyes, find myself in the bathroom, turn the water tap to hot, lean my forehead against the mirror glass, picturing—as I hadn’t before—Christina ripping open the letter, sitting there on her piss-stained chair, reading it over several times, and then calling Al, both of them discussing it until the night grew long and dark and I was still at home with Betsy.
        “You have to write more,” Betsy continues, from the bedroom. “One’ll never do the trick. Give you what you’re after.”
         I rub my mouth, tasting Betsy—sweet and sour. “Why?”
        “Because—she’ll need more convincing. So she doesn’t think it’s an aberration.”
        “Don’t you think it’s cruel?” I ask, studying my receding gumline.
        “Cruel? Andy, you’ll stop at nothing to get the painting you want.”
        “But I don’t even need her as a model anymore.”
        “What about when she sees the painting, though?”
         This gives me pause—because I know that she’s right. I look at my mouth, the mouth of a young-old man, too tight, pursed, dry. Then, I hook one nail into my gumline, scrape up a bit of cereal. When I’m dead, it won’t matter if my teeth have rotted out. Or that her clawed hands trembled, gripping the stationery.
        “You’re right, I suppose.”
        “I’m always right,” Betsy says, and pats my back as she exits to the kitchen; I watch her ramrod back as she leaves: once again, Kronos has swallowed me whole.

When I return to the Olsons’, it’s evening and the chimney’s smoking. I love how I can come and go in this house, as if I were Christina’s renegade brother or lover. Sometimes, nights, while Betsy sits home with her list of contacts, plotting my incredible career, Christina and Al and I just sit in front of the fireplace and talk about nothing. Which is everything, when you think about it. The color of the sea at dawn—blue-gray, streaked with lavender A rock Christina found outside her front door, broken, so she had to scoop up the shards. Al’s favorite story, about the actor Robert Montgomery, who ventured into their house once and—because of the smells—had to run outside and vomit. Christina’s pet story, about how someone tried to give her a wheelchair and she had Al throw it off a cliff into the sea.
         When I step inside without knocking, I see them both huddled by the fire, a moose throw wadded up on Christina’s lap, Al sucking on his corncob pipe. And I think how I won’t have this forever. Someday I’ll arrive and one of them will be dead and—before you know it—men will arrive with nails and boards to shut the place down. And the house will be sold and then I’ll have only Kuerners’ dark-hearted farm to roam
         I rub my throat because it’s closing. Walk up to the fire. I’m not ready to see what’s in her lap. When I am, I let my glance dart up her legs, swing past the moose throw, land on the thick cream pages spread across her lap. My face flaming, I lift two fingers, fan them open across my cheek. Then:
        “What’ve you got?”
        “A letter, Andrew,” Al proclaims, then bites down on his pipe stem to contain his smile. “Christina got a letter.”
        “Who from?”
        “I don’t know,” Christina murmurs. “We can’t tell, Andy. It didn’t have a return address. And it’s typed.”
         Betsy’s old Remington. “Well … what’s it say?”
         Christina’s cryptic smile: my walled-eyed Mona Lisa. “I’d best keep it private. Might make you blush.” She glances at her brother. “Al? You ready for sleep?”
         He pauses. He’d never admit he’s exhausted. “Could use a bit of shut-eye, s’pose.”
        “Let’s both of us get to sleep, what d’you say, and leave Andy here to paint.”
         Smiling so wildly her broad face fissures, she slides off the chair, lands with a thump, starts her corner-bound crawl.

I wait till they’re both asleep, Al in his chair, Christina on her straw-ticking pallet. Then I grab the oil lamp, ascend the stairs. I have to pass Christina’s room to get to the attic, the ghostly curtains billowing. I creep inside, touch her ballerina box. She must’ve wanted dance lessons—every girl does. I lie down on her bed, cross my hands behind my head, stare up. Ceiling cracks. Rubble. Dust clots that have dangled for years. In the end, what’ll be left when she’s gone? A dirty pink room? Or will anybody even be able to tell it was pink? Will it be so bleached then, by color and salt air and time—
         I recall the letter. The one Betsy wrote. The thought of it compressing my chest. But I’m healthier than my father. Healthier than the baby he and Ma stillbirthed, a death Pa never recovered from. But just that one letter, I think. That one and no other. Because—
         Because Christina’s tamped her hope down so carefully that I can’t bear to resurrect it, to see those stark eyes flicker with a sudden passion.

I pause inside the attic, blackness everywhere. I’ve decided not to paint her amalgamated, attach her head to Betsy’s body. Wouldn’t that be faking it? Artistic sleight-of-hand? But I can paint her in a different way. Can paint her as the battered house and the brown, stubbled grass and sky.
         I place the oillamp on a crate. It’s just enough light to paint by. Plus, I’m no longer in control. I watch my hand mix colors. Make the first sweeping motions against the canvas. This line. This blade of grass. A cracked gray board. A ladder propped up against the house. The shed off to the side. And the sky, sky, sky. I’m swimming there now. Dissolving inside that blue. It swirls around me. Smothers me. Presses down against my skull. The weight of an individual Heaven, this one that belongs only to me, only to Christina, the one she’ll revisit when she’s dead. Her afterlife in my painting. It’s not so crazy—I’d live in Michelangelo’s Heaven if invited. Wyeth’s cells and spirit dispersing across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It’s not so crazy, I decide, watching my fingers tighten, gripping the brush. To paint is to be in love, to embrace the irrefutable whole, to find no disfigurement in anything. That’s it. Perfection. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.
         I’m finished now. Done. I drop my brush into its water glass; I’ll rinse and clean it tomorrow. The house, shed, field, sky. Christina’s biography. Nothing else needed. I smile, scrutinizing it, though I’m rarely satisfied with my work. Then—discovering that I’m sweating in the frigid attic air—I unbutton my flannel shirt, peel it off, crush it between my palms, create a makeshift pillow on the floor.

When I wake, a sliver of light’s penetrating the windowglass; there’s a weight on my shoulder; my neck bones feel stiff. I rise slightly, a strand of brown hair in my mouth. For a second I’ve forgotten last night: then I remember, the landscape rushing back, and I smile, careful not to disturb her big, bony head while she sleeps. I didn’t hear her crawl in. Maybe she got lonely. Maybe she wanted to read me her letter. I would’ve smiled, listening to the contents. Though I knew them already. Betsy read me the letter after we made love.

Dear Christina Olson,

You don’t know me though I’ve admired you for awhile. I understand that you’re sick. That you don’t get out much. That there’s never going to be a possibility that—someday—we’ll meet. It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to tell you that time’s a strange thing; at least for me it is. You see, we went to grade school together. And I don’t know what you look like now (or how sick you really are), but I remember you so vividly from that time—what a pretty girl you were! Slender. Strong-legged in a beautiful pink dress. Maybe you’ll remember how you raced me to school. How you raced me, Christina—and always won. I haven’t seen you in decades, but I’ll never forget those days. You haven’t forgotten them either, I hope. For me, there’s been hard work ever since, on my dad’s farm, and the sun setting and rising—just too many days. But I remember those talks and the races we had in school as the best days of my life.

Fondly,

Your Not-so-Secret Admirer

        Glancing down at Christina’s face, I know she was able to fill in the gaps. Concoct her fantasy friend out of the richness of imagination. Because everybody’s had a friend like that, I think. At least one—at least once. A secret friend that they could confide in, that they could sit with in the long, cool silence of dusk, the fireflies rising with their green-bulbed shinings at twilight. And for me, that friend’s Christina. I touch, so gently I know she’ll never awaken, the contours of her heavy breasts. Then, feeling the energy that signifies Paint, I ease her head down gingerly on the floor, I stand up before the landscape while Christina still sleeps, and render her, finally, as I see her, pure dark eyes in a smooth-skinned face, the Christina I never met but have always missed, a lovely, slender girl in a simple pink dress, her brown hair wind-blown as she stretches her body in yearning toward a house she’ll never leave until she’s free.

TERRI BROWN-DAVIDSON is on the full-time fiction faculty at Gotham Writer's Workshop and is an assistant editor at Zoetrope: All Story and the managing editor for Literary Potpourri. Her first book, The Carrington Monologues, is available from Lit Pot Press. She holds the Ph.D., M.F.A., and M.A. in English and creative writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in more than 700 journals, including Triquarterly, New York Stories, Hayden's Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, In Posse Review, and Puerto Del Sol. Her chapbook Rag Men won The Ledge competition, and she's received more than forty national awards for her fiction and poetry, including the AWP Intro Award and a Yaddo fellowship.