It wasn’t that the painting was shameful. It was art. The thing was Alexander had chosen to paint me nude to the waist, or almost. The top of my right breast was covered by my long blond hair. Then, around my middle, there was the drape of a white dressing gown that seemed, in the narrative of the painting, to have slipped from my shoulders. Behind me, out the window, were the apple trees, the plum, the pear. They were in bloom when Alexander began the portrait. There was fruit before he finished. One glorious afternoon when I was done posing, Alexander fed me a handful of sun-warmed plums, the color of bruises.
The next day, as I sat for him, I imagined what it would be like if Alexander grasped me hard enough to leave such bruises on my upper arms. Not that he had ever touched me, you understand, except for our tangos up the steps and then the occasional adjustment of a curl here, a limb there.
I cannot describe to you what it is like to sit, day after day, half-naked before a man who considers you with total concentration, but does not, as far as you can tell, desire you. After a while I began to hear a ringing in my ears that I finally recognized as the chanting of cloistered nuns raised in endless adoration to their Lord. Brides of Christ, deprived of those most elemental of human needs.
As the painting neared completion, Alexander grew more enthusiastic. “This is going to knock them dead,” he crowed. “I can’t
wait
to see their faces. After this show, just you wait, Georgie Ann…” He paused, and my heart stopped, waiting for the next words. “…I’ll never have to sell another house.”
That was not exactly what I longed to hear.
For, by now, of course, as you know, clever reader that you are, I was completely besotted with Alexander.
I could spend a day on a consideration of any single detail of his person. Take his hair. The heft of those dark strands, the way they whorled back from his temples like lifted oars. The sweet feathering at the nape of his neck. The glistening of clean pink scalp at the part which I longed to taste. The warm sun-baked smell of the dark locks that brushed against my cheek when we tangoed.
Mother had been right, damn her. She’d promised if I went outside I would find diversion. I had, and now I was not only diverted, but distracted almost beyond bearing. I had Alexander, I had The House, and I had neither.
Yet, in my mind, I held them close, the two inextricably bound. I filled hour after happy hour imagining life with Alexander in The House. He would paint in our second-floor aerie while I sat and read. I could see us in the kitchen preparing dinner together. I chopped neat little mounds of onions and peppers and garlic while he sautéed and stirred and tasted. There we were, sitting side by side in matching chairs in the living room. I read the front section of the paper, he the last. Upstairs, on a night drenched with rain, we embraced and the room rocked with love, threatened to lift off, to take flight, to soar out above the apples and pears, to knock the plums into jam.
I carried one of Alexander’s handkerchiefs in my pocket at all times. I had stolen it, of course, when he wasn’t looking. I caressed the fine lawn with my fingers, read like Braille his block-lettered monogram.
Once, a lifetime ago, back when I was an assistant professor of English, my department chair, an old roué if ever there was one, reached in his pocket in the middle of a department meeting, and pulled out a pair of black lace bikini underpants upon which, absentmindedly, he blew his nose.
I tried to think that I wouldn’t titillate myself in my solitary hours with a pair of Alexander’s briefs, but, had I the chance, you never know.
It was about this time that Mother began saying, “You know I love having you here, Georgie Ann. Hope you stay forever.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Dear, are you really looking for a house, or is there something else going on?”
As I watched Mother’s mouth, it transformed itself into Alexander’s. You could take a walk upon his bottom lip, it was that generous. The curves of the upper lip were like the fenders of a ’55 Buick. I traced it in my dreams.
Mother said, “Whatever you’re up to, you have to move forward or backward, darling. Forward, preferably.”
“Yes, Mother.” I smiled.
Then came the August day when Alexander announced, “Tomorrow the painting will be finished.” The heat had made a damp cap of his hair, waving it close to his head. He looked like Julius Caesar. “And,” he added solemnly, “I think you ought to know, there’s someone interested in the house.”
The temperature plunged sixty degrees in an instant. I froze.
“My house?”
“I’m afraid so, Georgie Ann. Now, like I said, if you would only go back to work, we could get you a mortgage. Have you thought about it?”
No. Of course not. I had convinced myself that a miracle would occur. My portrait would bring enough for the down payment on The House. Then Alexander would propose. We would live happily ever after, in The House, of course.
Alexander said, “School’s about to start soon. Could you ask the university to take you back on? Even part-time, that would be a show of faith for the mortgage company.”
Go back into the classroom? Speak to sweaty youth about the marriage of true minds? Why, I could no more do that than I could ankle into Kroger’s for canned peaches or plums when all the sweet bounty I ever needed awaited me at The House.
“No,” I choked. “I can’t.”
“You ought to think about it, Georgie Ann.”
Then, before I had time to absorb what Alexander was telling me, August was over, and Labor Day fell quickly behind it, early that year. Sharpened pencils. Back to school. The Season had opened. Mother began planning for her annual opera pilgrimage to New York. Alexander was frantically preparing for his upcoming triumph in Atlanta. When he called, barely once a week now, it was to try to convince me to come to his show. The Callendar Gallery attracted serious collectors, he said. My portrait would be the centerpiece. Everyone would want to meet the model.
That was out of the question, of course. Step not only into the world, but into the spotlight? All those eyes…. The very idea was preposterous.
The night of the opening, I drove over to The House. I would sit on the steps and imagine Alexander in his glory. But when I pulled into the drive, the first thing I saw was a little strip attached to the For Sale sign.
Sale Pending
. I saw red, the blood flooding behind my eyes. My head threatened to explode. I uprooted the sign and tossed it into the trunk of my car. It would suffocate there. It would die. There would be no
Sale Pending
.
Nor would I deign to give the matter further consideration.
I could control my thoughts and my actions. Hadn’t I proved that, long ago? I had come
that
close to doing away with myself, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t killed William either. I had withdrawn, and with that, had overcome.
So, calmly, I sat at the top of the stairs, just outside the door of the master bedroom where Alexander and I had passed so many happy hours. I thought of well-barbered men in dark suits, women in small-shouldered dresses of black and gray and taupe three hundred miles away in Atlanta, staring at my breasts. They would do it ever-so-politely, of course, with the soft murmurings with which well-bred people communicate. I imagined their eyes going wide as they looked, and their mouths making little O’s.
I pulled a plum from my pocket. Mother’s housekeeper had brought it home from the store. I bit into the purple flesh. The juice filled my mouth, not with the nectar of summer but with a tart thin syrup.
I sat at the top of the stairs until there was no more light, and then I felt my way out, the details of The House familiar as a lover’s bones. Back in my bed at Mother’s, nightmares stalked my sleep. The next morning I couldn’t remember much of them, but I felt queasy, as if a buzzard’s wing had brushed me.
I held my breath for Alexander’s call. Three days later (three years, three millennia) it came. The show had been a great success, all the work sold. My portrait had gone for its extravagantly hopeful asking price. A Japanese automotive executive was taking it back to his home near Kyoto. I closed my eyes. I could hear temple bells and people murmuring in a foreign tongue.
“However,” Alexander said, then paused.
I didn’t wait to hear his next words. I knew what they would be, couldn’t bear to hear them from his lips. I hung up and dialed Charlotte. Then I drove out to The House once more.
Even though I’d been forewarned, the new sign, with its red banner, SOLD, was a shock. But not for long. I uprooted it and buried it, along with the earlier sign, in my trunk.
I was sitting at the top of the stairs when Alexander found me, just outside the master suite with the wonderful northern light that I had hoped would someday awaken the two of us, entwined in one another’s arms.
“I knew you’d be here,” he said.
“And I knew you’d come.”
“Georgie Ann, I’m so sorry. But it’s over. You wouldn’t do a thing to stop it, you just sat, frozen, and now the house has been sold.” He dropped a hand to my shoulder. I shrugged it off. He frowned. “You must let it go.”
I didn’t say a word.
Alexander sat down beside me. He took my hand. His touch was cold. I could feel the lies that he’d so carefully rehearsed coursing through his blood. They fell from his mouth like little red ice cubes out the refrigerator door.
“I warned you,” he said, “that someone was seriously interested in the house.”
I raised my hand and stopped his words with my fingers. Then I stood. “Let’s dance, one last time,” I said, and stood upon the hardwood of the upper hall.
“Yes.” He smiled. “Let’s.” I could feel his relief. I was going to be a good sport.
He’d feared, of course, that I would go mad. That I would foam at the mouth. That I would scream and roll on the floor. That snakes would sprout from my head and strike at him. And well he should fear. Had he thought I wouldn’t know?
That one call to Charlotte was all it had taken to confirm my fears. First Alexander had stolen my image with his paints and brushes and sold it into geishadom. Then he’d used that boon to buy The House. It was that magical north light, he’d told Charlotte. It had changed his life. He simply had to have it for his own.
Would Alexander be living in The House alone? I’d asked.
Yes, she said. At least she thought so.
She was lying about that, I could tell.
And so, I slowly raised my arms to Alexander’s for one last tango. He held me close. I smelled lemons. I heard the crashing surf. My breasts pressed against his chest, unwanted, unloved. We marched in slow Argentine splendor across the hardwood floor.
Then back. Then forth again.
The third time, as he spun me out away from him, his heels came very very close to the lip of the top step. I had been watching carefully for this angle, this moment. Then, I simply let go, and the centrifugal force of our swing propelled Alexander backward as surely as if he had been pulling on a rope which had snapped.
He tumbled down, step after step, head over foot, and landed with a sharp crack of his head and neck on the old oak flooring below.
I swooped after him. Leaned over him. Pressed my face close as if for a kiss.
Help me
were his last words.
No
was mine.
Once he was gone, I brushed my lips across that place at his nape where the dark curls feathered so sweetly, then headed for the door and the nearest phone to call 911. A terrible accident, I cried. Please come.
Too bad. So sad. Such a handsome man. And poised on the brink of fame.
The murmurs came from every quarter.
But that didn’t bother me at all. No more than did that last image of Alexander, his neck askew, lying at the bottom of my stairs.
I step over that spot twenty times a day now, with nary a quiver. Like I told you before, my self-control is strong as granite. You could erect a gravestone of it, it would last a millennium.
Besides, I have so many other things on my mind these days. My new job keeps me hopping. Charlotte says she’s never seen anyone catch onto real estate so quickly. She’s forgotten all those months I spent house-hunting. And Alexander was a very good teacher.
But, wait, wait, you say. How could I so blithely jump back into the world, bypass the cloister of the academe for the rough-and-tumble world of commerce? Easily as if I were changing my clothes?
The answer’s simple. The winning, and then the renovation, of The House—my passion, my heart, my soul—required heroic measures, not to mention oodles of cash.
One does what one has to do, for love.
Some You Win
Clementine Jones was leaning out the back screen door of her neat lemon-yellow cottage on New Orleans’s Prytania Street. “I’m going to kill you,” she hollered, her pretty brown face twisted up like one of those fake voudou dolls the tourists bought in the French Quarter.
Her son, Bonaparte—twelve years old and four feet, six inches, and ninety pounds of creative energy—sat about twenty feet up in a magnolia tree. He was listening to Clementine with only half an ear.
He was mad at his mama. This bright and beautiful Saturday morning she’d been vacuuming in his room when all of a sudden she’d stomped into the kitchen where he was dunking powdered doughnuts in his café au lait and snapped, “What’s this?” Clementine was holding a stack of twenty-dollar bills in her upturned palm as if it were a rattlesnake.