What Beauty Read online

CHAPTER 2

  Belinda’s voice slides across our shared pillow, and I know the dream I was in ended a moment ago. Its kinescope image is lost inside my loud last breaths of sleep, coming in short rasps that bring me fully awake. Most mornings I’m less aware of this sensation, the sounds of a steam locomotive starting from a dead stop, then building in pitch as if the juggernaut were leaving the station. Sometimes I imagine, as I rise from sleep to hear this noise, the white-gray puffs belching from its smokestack. By the time that I open my eyes, all is gone, as it is again today. The room is bright with a cool, aqua color. Belinda wants food, is what I heard.

  Our heads lie at a good waking distance. We mumble “g’morn’n” to hide our breath, then kiss with elongated puckers. Outdoors, the city sends its engine rumbles and tool claques through the windows. Garbage trucks and delivery vans and the voices of workmen call short orders (“Back!” “Up, up!” “Whoa, now – whoa-whoa!”).

  Belinda’s face is already active this morning. Her eyebrows wiggle hello, and her nose grips itself in a shrug. Then, from below the covers, a hand slithers up like a sea snake, tinged green-blue from light refracted by the bed sheets. Her fingers waver to mesmerize me, taunt me, until the mouth opens to bare teeth — her white-tipped nails. I feel them gently scratch my temple.

  She has pulled her hair behind her left ear, dark hair that’s long and straight, which she hates and wants to curl. I happen to like her hair as it is, only it’s not my hair. Tousled around her face, it frames her eyes and nose inside an ellipsis that covers her mouth, much as a tailed animal does for warmth. Her open eyes reveal an intensity that shows she’s been awake for some time. Belinda’s irises hold the color of gold in twilight.

  “Do you want to be alone?” she asks. My All-American Girl, giving more than she takes.

  “No,” I say, and blink until tears clear away the goop, or whatever one calls that viscous fluid … discharge comes to mind but this isn’t right, and gives the thought a salty undertone I’m in no mood for. “Tell me something, or I’ll fall back into sleep.”

  “You talk funny,” she says in a half-whisper. The sea snake continues nibbling at my temple. “Don’t New Yorkers say fall back to sleep?”

  “I’m not from New York,” I remind her. “Neither are you. What do Nebraskans say?”

  “To sleep. We say fall back to sleep.”

  “Okay, it’s settled,” I mumble. “I do talk funny. It’s morning. I can’t be held to a standard. What time is it?” Her chafing nails have worked my brain back towards a doze, but this is not the time, so I shake my head and the friendly creature retreats to a safe distance. Once it’s taken refuge under the sheet, its teeth glint mischievously in the soft light. I ask, “Did I hear you whisper ‘omelet’ to me?” Her eyebrows move in a stitch of mischievousness.

  Somewhere it’s been told to me that her patience is my reward. This isn’t correct. Belinda’s nature, with all its traits she bears like some uber-appletree ripens its fruit, intermittently, so you can eat all season long, such nature defies city life. Blaring horns across Times Square does not bother her, nor some skel’s beggar-hand outstretched at Columbus Circle, or jackhammers spitting concrete shrapnel at her ankles, nothing can interrupt Belinda’s purposeful stride or conversation. She tells me it’s all theater and we’re actors who have to hit our marks, must not miss our cues, and be ready to ad lib when the scene flubs. It’s a great philosophy, I’m sure, and I’m lucky to have someone so aware and unaffected, and who loves me. Now she opens her hand — the sea snake becomes a springtime morning flower — and grabs the top of the blanket. Off fly the covers in a sharp hiss of fabric.

  I roll over and sit up on the edge of the bed. Behind me, Belinda gives a piglet’s squeal and I hear her footsteps dart across the hardwoods for dibs on the bathroom. The door shuts and, soon, water whinnies through the pipes. The wood slowly warms beneath my feet. I feel a chill in the air, something I don’t mind when sleeping under the goose-down with another body to hold. Only now, in my pajamas, the temperature is startling. Our building’s loft board, of which as lessees we’re not voting members, elected to switch off heating between May 15 and October 1. We’re into May, now, and the moisture I see on the inside window tells me summer is yet a wish.

  Complaints, though, I have none. The bedroom has space, is quiet, and becomes airy when we open the louvered windows. These windows were designed for factory work. They start at my chin and rise higher than I can reach, which leaves the room perfectly suited for sleeping and stargazing, but not so much for looking out at the street. I don’t mind, and Belinda, she won’t look through a window unless a calamity happens; she says this is what helps her to avoid shopping along 5th Avenue. It took twelve panels of sheers to dress our windows. Now we don’t feel anymore like we live in an old factory, but the oncoming summer light wakes us early unless we slip on eye masks. They sit on mannequin heads that I’ve plastered over, textured rough, and painted as twin tequila sunrises. I’ve set them on a pine mantel flush with the bottom sill. Little else is worth displaying because of its height and narrow shelf. We live on the second floor. From street level you can see the two heads at night, and they look (we hope) like a couple sitting up in bed, reading. In my hope of hopes, this fakery will work better than a watchdog, which is otherwise on top of a long list of forbidden accoutrements stated clearly in the lease manual.

  I lower my chest against my knees. Vertebrae cartilage crackles, something I’ve only noticed since graduating from my twenties. Today is Wednesday, Belinda’s busy day (tourists spend more “free” time at mid-week to take a horse carriage ride, an activity that breaks up the busy-ness of a NYC vacation); it’s also the day I’m supposed to spend most of my time at the art co-op, where I rent studio space. Before I can get there, though, my friend, Peter, has asked me to stop round his studio. He wants to consult with me on some lighting ideas he has for his upcoming show. He doesn’t want to be curated into accepting too dim or too bright or too white spotlights by the gallery owner. His list of don’ts is daunting. I’ve promised to bring my light meter because his is broken.

  I stand and walk in a circle, feeling more alive with the warmth of blood in my veins and the cold hardwood under foot. The day has begun.

  A faux black-lacquer Chinese objet d’art stands between the bathroom door and the loft door. I bought this for me when we moved in because Belinda’s wardrobe bulged from the walk-in closet, so trying to share that was pointless. Our bedroom used to be the manager’s office of this particular Gansevoort Street abattoir. It’s an oddly shaped rectangle, retrofitted with the big closet, soundproofing, and the enlarged bath (Belinda: “modernized” and “fun”). The walls are brick outside and, because the building dates to the 1870s, everything is plaster-and-steel-lathe inside, giving texture and subtle shadows, like sunlight skipping across a low-tide beach. The oak risers and moldings have been scraped smooth and left blonde as a newborn’s skin. We’ve painted the walls taupe, towards a mushroom tint, and inserted vibrancy through furniture and art. Our not-so-outlandish melding of possessions, once confined to two cave-dark apartments, now spreads through an arena-size loft given over to the descriptive Spartan senate.

  I like to look at our space, feel it beneath my feet, and walk around to admire the things we own. In this respect, to be in it. To commune. This space, like other spaces, has its importance to me; capacity and scope and boundaries are my methods for finding perspective (a park bench, a window frame, manhole cover, sculptured food, trees & bushes, pots & pans on the rack). Out-doors is freedom, in-doors is confinement; each is charged with its particular, and unique, presence.

  Details, details: the artist’s curse.

  I choose jeans and a brown knit pullover from the Chinese cabinet, and deposit my sleeping cottons on their shelf. I kick a pair of black Chuck Taylor’s into view as Belinda exits the bath. I throw a kiss and admire her slimness shaped inside a pink bra with matching panties, down which three brown sta
r-shaped buttons adorn a faux “fly.” I hold my clothes across my arm to drape my underwear-covered dick for modesty, and take refuge in the bath. My toilet is quick and tidy; I don’t waste time reading or toenail gazing. Only on Sundays do I dawdle, when I draw a hot bath in the claw-foot iron tub, and then I lie in soak; unmoving, unthinking, the dissembled creative energy released through my hot, open pores.

  While digging through the pantry for a yellow onion whose skin is firm, I come across a box of Cap’n Crunch. I’d bought it at The Grocery Garage months ago, longing for sugarcoated nostalgia. It has since remained unopened. Not in the mood for eggs, I grab the cereal and the salvaged onion, head to the fridge for what it has to yield, and finally dump all on the cooking island. The light here is neutral except in the morning when, like today, a swatch of sun bastes the dining table through the only window cut at a normal height. Even then, it is unusually large, a good five-foot-square, with muntined panes. We honor the yellow-cream goodness with potted plants. I like to cook with fresh herbs, so the thyme, rosemary, and basil pots give the table an eclectic jardinière look. A Turkish kilim of Ottoman design, in red and black, sits beneath the dining table, just in case we forget ourselves and want to play footsie. The carpet’s virgin wool is scratchy, but not dangerous.

  Belinda believes firmly in the division of labor. She also prefers not to cook, one of my own deep passions. Therefore, she doesn’t mind being the cleaner-upper. This does not give me license, nor do I take it, to use every hanging pot (the rack hovers like some crazed octopus) for seven-course meals, or even a messy spaghetti with bolognese sauce.

  Cooking is my meditation: the precisely demanded movements of knife against red and pink meats, yellow and orange vegetables, requires that my soft-tissue hands guide the blade to success or failure. Such concentration leaves the imagination open to ideas whose nature I’m seldom aware of until they blend in with the sounds of life. Besides all this, I’m more the three-pot cook, in all honesty. Your meat, starch, and vegetables. The spices are how a cook creates the dish’s flavor.

  Two eggs get cracked into a bowl. I add pinches of thyme and rosemary – verdant islands in a cholesterol sea – a grind of fresh pepper, and two dashes from the lighthouse salt cellar (carved from authentic Cape driftwood we bought on a week’s trip over the winter holidays — Who “winters” on Cape Cod? City slickers). I set the eggshells aside for plant fertilizer, and pick up a whisk. As my hand twirls to fluff the eggs, the weedy fragrances set my stomach into happy gurgling. Belinda once told me, soon after we’d met, that my hands were what first drew her to me. “They embody the rhetoric of the sculptor,” she said. “All the little nicks become scabby runes.” I think they resemble the skin on an acne-afflicted teen.

  Belinda comes through the bedroom door humming a familiar jazz melody. She has twenty feet to cross before reaching the island, and each step is a luxury when you’ve lived for two years, as she had, in a three-step-to-everything apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. She wears tan jodhpurs and black boots, with a woolen vest over a white tux blouse and bow tie. “I’m organizing coffee,” she says between whistled notes, and plants a kiss on my cheek as she hums, making a resonant vibrato into a flat percussive cymbal through my mouth. She pats my tummy for good luck, though I’m no Buddha-belly in appearance.

  “I’ll have the usual,” I say. “And thank you.” My feet dance-step at the island as I grab a pan hanging from the rack. I astaire across to the stove to light a burner, and slide the pan over the flowering blue flame. Belinda scoots behind me without interrupting my pirouettes. She starts water in the espresso machine that her mother sent us as a housewarming gift. This is her territory. I have little patience for the temperamental machine. She moves from island to cabinets like the girl who hated her ballet lessons, taking cups in one trip, saucers in another, sugar last.

  “I haven’t told you,” I say. “I woke up in the middle of the night. A dream, or so I thought. A bag lady asked me for change, and when I held out my hand with a few coins, she grabbed it and licked my knuckles. She had a green tongue.”

  “Gross,” says Belinda, and sticks her tongue out. Pink, long, wiggly. “Makes you want to skip breakfast. Unless you got back to sleep and dreamed of puppies.”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” I say idiotically, unable to think of a good come-back. “Except this wasn’t really a dream, but half a dream.”

  “How can it be half a dream? You can’t be thinking of teaching at one of the missions again.” Belinda believes in volunteer work, but only to the extent of keeping oneself safe: a crack-head bit me last year when I was filling in for a friend who taught clay sculpture to recovering addicts, yet unemployable and in need of something to do besides climb the walls of their half-way house, chased by the heebie-jeebies. The wound sent me to the emergency room for a tetanus shot. Five hundred bucks later, and the Downtown Community Center wouldn’t even reimburse me. “I call that martyrdom à la mode, my friend and only true love,” she says, only mildly mocking me.

  “Aw … now you’re just being sluttish.” I can say this because there’s no chance of getting her back into bed.

  She twists around at the table with cups in her hand and fixes me with a silent, vulpine growl. “Tell me your dream, Sir Lance-a-Lot.” Her pun comes from a precocious childhood devoted to driving her parents crazy with fear for, first, the loss of her virginity prior to marriage and, second, pregnancy by one of the town losers. Confined monthly to the house for punishment weekends when she was a teen, she locked herself inside her room with gothic romances, Bill Cosby comedy albums, and her mother’s True Confessions magazine. She regularly snatched the magazines from beneath her parents’ mattress for convivial reading in her punishment room. Later, at the dinner table, she recited the more salacious parts, re-formed as puns.

  Her delivery here is different: not so cunning, and unsweetened.

  “The dream came after the reality,” I say, and decide to jump ahead. “Guess who I saw in the park the other day?”

  She gives me a look of impatient indulgence. I don’t know why. “Okay,” she says with enough élan for a Hump Day morning before the first cup of coffee. “I’ll stab your riddle with a fork: You ran point-blank into a pack of Chicagoans and found yourself arguing the lofty tastes of New York thin crust, Nathan’s Famous, and Finger Lakes Riesling.”

  I don’t think her heart is in this. She’s almost sullen, and I haven’t a clue for the fallen attitude. Could it be the “slut” comment? No — she’s playfully adult and, as thirty approaches, less inhibited about damned near everything.

  Behind Belinda’s Midwestern congeniality lives a woman determined to — I’m quoting her — “outdo my Nebraska shortcomings” and “live up to standards” such as those Nebraskans who famously “left flatland in the rearview mirror” (a few previously named examples include Marlon Brando, Ruth Etting, and Johnny Carson, even though Carson was Iowa born). If she goes back home, it will be “only to reminisce with the locals” who didn’t have the guts to leave and, thus, could attest to the wise move she made “to find, if not a better life, at least one more exciting.” She won’t argue that this is an elitist attitude, maybe even uppity, but nevertheless believes she “and every other inner-country transplant must overcome a lot.” I take all of this to mean she answers questions no less ironically than that teenager who could make her mother blush, her siblings cringe, and her father laugh as only an insurance salesman must at the end of each day, whose gullet has been filled by the hard-sell and paperwork.

  To this many-facetted motto I say, Here-here! Otherwise, I choose to let out a fat raspberry to quantify and qualify the motto because, as we both know, NYC is a dirty cesspool of possibility if (with many fs countable in powers of ten) you’re able to pull yourself out of the primordial pool with legs already exercised for a marathon. Neither does it matter to Belinda that she isn’t an actress, singer, dancer, or talk-show host like her forbearing Cornhuskers.

  “I
should be stabbed for the mere thought of meeting ‘my people’ on any New York street,” I say, and let my legs wobble in mock death-throws. I recover, stand tall, and peer at her smirking puss. “Uh, you’re wrong, sweet girlfriend. What happened was I recognized a writer that used to be famous. A beautiful art critic and essayist. Her writing was beautiful, anyway. She was the darling of New York for ten years. Maybe more. Then she stopped writing. Ran away, or something like that. Don’t look bored! Listen, because here comes the good part.”

  “Oh, goody.”

  “She was dressed up like a bag lady.”

  “Wait,” says Belinda. “You mean the lick wasn’t a dream?”

  “Okay, that was made up.”

  Her manner changes, stiffens. She asks, “Dressed as a bag lady, or she was a bag lady?” Stiffer, yet, but I think I’ll play the indifferent bystander.

  “See, that’s the thing.” And so I explain everything. Belinda stands with arms folded, her face setting more firmly as I wind on with descriptions of odors, stains, oranges in plastic bags, and Henry the doorman. She doesn’t like what I have to say, which doesn’t bother me so much as her failing happiness. All because of a joke dream? A bad story? Where has my squealing piglet gone? Something lies waiting for me, and I only can hope to be prepared when it comes.

  “You followed a bag lady.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “That’s supposed to happen the other way around. And what’s with storming the citadel? The doorman could have called the cops.” My All-American Woman: available, feisty, but not a pushover. She’s able to mix it up across the office desk as she’d once done on the field hockey pitch. But I’m no pushover, either.

  “You sound a little testy this morning,” I say.

  “Do I.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  “It should be so easy. Not as bad as yours, evidently.”

  “You don’t have to be my adversary. Or my accuser.”

  “I’m your girlfriend. Your very words. Trust and control, remember.”

  I laugh, because the line is great fun. “Great-Grandma’s words again?”

  “You got it, brother. She was a homesteader. A Nebraska bug eater. Rubbed elbows with the Indians.”

  “I’m sure your grand-granny smoked a peace pipe in her day, but I’m not your brother.” This gets half a smile. “Do you know what my grandfather said?” I ask.

  “I think I’m about to learn.”

  “He said, ‘Always protect your gonads in a fight.’ It’s practical advice.”

  “Are we fighting? I didn’t know.”

  “No, we aren’t fighting. He was just an old man giving pointers on battling grannies who’ve been bogarting the peace pipe.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Good.” It’s a short okay, and shorter good. A one-two punch.

  “I thought so,” I say, some caution in my tone.

  Then she says, “It has also been noted, ‘Blissful love should be on guard / The thief of hearts, she lurks in men’s eyes.’ ”

  “Who wrote that?” I ask out of politeness, because I think I already know the answer.

  “A poet,” she answers. “A sentimental moralist. I was fourteen at the time.”

  “Hmm,” I utter. More politeness. I want to say something cute, such as … Fourteen is a tough age — when you’re thinking about boys, never been kissed, can’t get away from mom … but I’m frozen by what might come in return. Then I’m back on my horse: “I know the bag lady thing is weird,” I say. “It’s one of those stories you read in the paper, never seeing it for yourself. So I wanted to get up close before her obituary appears in the Times.” I was thinking of how this was possible. Belinda hardly notices, because whatever else is on her mind has taken over. She’s usually an attentive listener, active with questions without a smart-ass tone. Today she stares off, fiddling with the coffee machine well after the two cups have been filled and still sit under the double-spigot. I try to bring her back by losing my indifference. “Karen Kosek’s book once meant a lot to me. She said incredible things, at a time when the so-called teachers wanted names memorized, and dates regurgitated.”

  “And? Minus, okay, if you’ve found the female J.D. Salinger, or whatever, it’s a great sighting. Sounds like you’ve hit one out of the park, there. So tell your friends, just … I - I don’t get it. When you’re proven right about this bag lady, do you plan on getting together for tea? She’s just some crazy woman.” Belinda has snapped this out, which stuns me. She makes as if to breathe fire at the coffee machine. “I don’t have to care about her this morning, okay?”

  “I don’t think she’s crazy,” I say. “That’s the point.” This last word is ill advised. Belinda holds her temples by the tips of her fingers, pressed hard enough to make her skin go white beneath her nails, as though her brains will spill out if she should let go. This isn’t about me, I realize, or my stupid story. “Forget it. Let it go. Doesn’t matter.”

  I mean this because telling her once, even twice, is enough for Belinda. A third time and you’ll get shots fired across your bow, because what she doesn’t like is bothersome repetition. It’s why we work so well. People that go on about books, politics, relationships, or especially medical problems, are offensive to us. She respects my desire never to hear so much about her Kansas City Royals baseball heroes. I gladly overlook the bottomless bag of sports clichés she uses for side-comments on everything from toilet practices to jury duty.

  Belinda won’t ditch the subject, though. “Hmm. Sounds oddly creepy, honey,” she says. “The doorman is scary, too. Sure, it’s a good story. Or dream. Which did you say it was? I forget. Wait, I remember. Ha! Silly me.” She turns away. “I bet you have all kinds of things to tell her.” She walks away, setting her back to me. I stare at her woolen vest, her jodhpurs, the high black boots that always remind me of Napoleon on his steed, painted by Simon Meister (more realistic, less stylized, than the portrait conceived by Jacques-Louis David).

  I want to believe in the confidences we exchange. Thoughts, beliefs, the future as you see it match another’s – dreams and fantasies, plans and schemes – these mean something to a relationship. Small and not-so-important or big-and-life-defining, there is intrinsic trust when you tell a secret to someone whom you love. Karen K has a secret, and now I own part of that. I’ve given Belinda its scent. Rejected! Fine by me. There shall be others to trade, and still more to shuffle away after a nod and smile that conveys either empathy or indulgence. Watching for signs of disappointment — the coming day, my snoring, our life — I step back from the edge of her emotion that’s reached up to find a handhold.

  My vanity is such that I think I know people, can feel my way inside their bodies, through their minds to the hidden corners where dreams stack up like cordwood, all to make the shadow of the person appear inside a block of marble, from which the chips fall away and leave what is the human of the moment. Except, I don’t know people so well, not as I want to think I do. On Belinda, I’ve missed something that I should have observed (her silence; the way she’s carried herself; a splinter in her voice), a problem I would have caught last night, only I was back late from the studio, tired. I’d misinterpreted her piglet’s squeal as happiness, delight for the new day. What has set her off, I’ll soon find out. I’m old enough not to push, play games, act hurt. I guess whatever has just happened comes out of the recent past. Now I have to catch up — when my naivety settles.

  She faces me. “Sorry, Minus — honey, just … sorry. I love you, that’s what you have to remember.” I look at her, but she turns away to finish making the froth for our coffee. “I love you, too,” I say to her back, so she has something to hear, and has for herself. Maybe it will help, I think.

  I pour olive oil in the pan to coat the bottom, and drop in the sliced onions to a sizzle and pop, give them a flip, another, wait a minute as I smell the aromas mix, and then pour egg mixture over the veggies. The sizzle deepens and the yellow edges bubble and curl. I picture Karen K in the park yes
terday, that depressive sight of the wasted life, even if it has to be fakery. The egg sets up. I use a wooden spatula to lift one edge, let the remaining liquid run beneath and in twenty seconds it’s done and turned onto a plate.

  “I got a call last night,” she yells over the wail of the froth maker. The anticipation of this story makes me perk up. “Mom wanted to talk with both of us. She says hi, by the way. You were lucky to be out.” I grunt a note of encouragement that gets lost in the sounds of gurgling milk. I add a sprig of parsley to her omelet and bring her plate to the table. Belinda has poured a bowl of cereal for me and placed a hungry man-size spoon into the dry Cap’n Crunch kernels. Belinda continues: “Dad just bought her a new car. Step-daddy, not the other lion of the pride. That got me to thinking while she talked and talked – I mean really, two calls per week? I’m not an only child, nor her favorite – I got to thinking about, or I remembered, Carley Slope, this girl I knew at summer camp for, like, three years in a row. We didn’t live in the same town, and only met at camp. Summer friends, right? Carley was one of those fashion plates. I guess they call them shopping mavens now. Anyway mom is talking about car insurance and tire inflation and self-serve gas pumps, and suddenly I hear an Oh-by-the-way, did you know little Carley Slope died last year from brain cancer? I tell her, ‘Umm, no mom, I didn’t know’ – but I’m actually floored by the coincidence of Carley coming to mind just before mom has blurted the news of her death. I hadn’t thought of her, Carley, in like months. I almost wrote her a letter over Christmas! Now mom gives her death notice as if she’s reading from the A&P coupon sheet. Balls sailing in from left field again, right? Just weird.”

  “So your friend died at – what? – twenty-eight?” I need confirmation on something she has passed by on her way to recollecting a paranormal incident. I’ve added a year to Carley’s age (my guess) because it’s a year ahead of Belinda today, which, if she’s having death-comes-to-me thoughts, she’s got a year to look forward to. It’s not a joke, but it can help, if I need to exploit it within the next ten minutes.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she says. “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Imagine that letter coming back to me, ‘undeliverable to the dearly departed’.”

  “Or at least lately departed,” I say, as a way to lighten the fallen mood that surrounds our breakfast, barely at the table. Her lips merely twitch in response; there’s to be no humor after all, black or otherwise.

  As a taunt, I might think, the sunlight at that moment intensifies through the window, shocking the green-leaf herbs with its yellow light so that I can see a blue edge around the thinnest leaves. Okay. If this is all I’m going to get from Belinda about her friend’s early death, there’s no point in me chasing a pigeon in a park.

  I begin to turn away, but am caught by her jaw twitching uncontrollably, just below her little scar at the end of her chin she got from a roller skating fall as a kid. Her eyes fill with tears as she grabs the cups. I meet her at the space between the island and the table. She lets me place her head on my shoulder. “It’s a senseless death,” I say. “But it’s not you. You’re healthy as your horse, who’s waiting for you out there.” She nods. She shakes her head. She pulls away and goes to the table.

  “It’s not that,” she insists. “Or it is. No – it isn’t.” She sets down the cups and looks at me. I find on her face bits of pain that have changed her normally happy spirit to doubt and frustration. This too I must let go, for a while anyway. Otherwise the emotions will come at me instead of from within her, whenever she finally wants to talk about death. She sits at the table and picks at a nail, one hand turning the coffee cup in a circle by the handle.

  Belinda breathes heavily through her nose. “Okay. Enough. That’s over. Something else now.” She smiles at her omelet. “Bon appetite,” she says in a calmer, confident voice. Then she rattles the business section of the Times.

  I’m surprised, and happy, but far from content. History is not long for a person like Belinda. Not with how she lives so thoroughly in the present. To her, history comes in short bursts of powerful, shocking events, followed by strong emotions that can fuck up everything for the future (which is a longer consideration, if you change points of view). Her mother’s insensitivity won’t be forgotten. They barely speak now.

  As I pour milk onto the cereal, I think that, as suddenly as an unanticipated gift, Karen K’s enigmatic life has reached from some living grave, obscuro &etc, to touch me. This meeting was completely random. There’s the wonder if, like so many random coincidences — a nearby one being how Belinda and I met — its randomness has some synchronicity. I might even accept Personality-Based Fate.

  I glance at the front-page headline next to her dish: Democrats Pin Election on Man from Hope. “What’s this?” I ask. My interest in politics tips toward the local: tax deductions, road repair, subway price increases, and restaurant health inspection stories.

  “Some cracker from Arkansas wants to be our next president,” she says. “Looks like Reagan’s know-nothing VP is going to get a second term. All for going to war over oil.”

  “I’m almost sorry I asked,” I say. She makes movements in her chair to warn me there’s to be a rebuttal. I try to head her off. “Okay, enough current events for me. If I must think about what goes on out there, I’ll have to become a real citizen. Spare me that, please?”

  How she jockeys in her chair to point her entire body at me tells me she’s to have her say. “I want to know why, if America is set on being the world’s mercenary, why shouldn’t it fix the price for a barrel of crude?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply, because I don’t. “Although I’m confident all politicians have only the people’s best interests in mind.” I flip to the gallery listings of the Arts section and fold the paper into a neat rectangle. I cringe at the discovery of yet another unknown artist from deep-woods America smiling into the camera. Where do they find these people?

  “Minus Mouse, after every election the winners unravel what the losers have done over the four years they’ve held power.”

  “Done is right,” I say. “Now, if there were accomplishments instead of things done to us….” I leave the thought for dead, the same way politicians leave the people who elect them.

  “Doesn’t that hit you as an insane way to run a government? You don’t see sports teams doing that.”

  They’d do exactly that if they were losers, I think. Her fingers drum war beats on the table. I search the text for my lost place, and think with wonder, Every father’s dream-daughter: be your mate’s love, care for and accept care, but don’t take shit from anybody.

  “No, it makes perfect sense,” I say. “To them, I mean.” My logic makes no consolation.

  The newspaper lies discarded between us, folded in halves and quarters. Belinda has only picked at her omelet, but I’m not watching her. Half the meal lies uneaten, cold. A darker yellow has risen in the egg as the moisture has leached away, evaporated into the dry indoor air, leaving the food plasticine. There was a time when I would get miffed at people, food guests, for leaving uneaten portions on their plates. Someone has invited and prepared delicious food for you, I would think, So eat it! I felt disrespected. Who doesn’t like to eat? Obviously, some people, but they don’t count. Such emotions and memories now lay buried, and these days the simple act of cooking is a pleasure itself. If the food goes unfinished, I’m of the mind to say, “The garbage can is ten feet that-a-way!”

  To pass the time until she comes out of her funk (or fugue), I watch the light creep across the sofa and plank flooring. Our loft’s open-floor design takes its southern light from a bank of high windows, louvered open and shut by an old chain and gear system. Sheers hang end-to-end, woven from a rose-colored lace, whose pattern stretches across the sitting area’s second-hand, piney furniture whenever a visible sun drops below its meridian. These ghostly images give up vaguely human miens, in black or gray. Belinda wants to change the sheers now because “it’s all just so spooky,�
� but I’m in no hurry to borrow the nine-foot wooden ladder from the basement that I used to hang the damned rods.

  Opposite the windows is a spot in the room owning a singularly unique feature: a wooden arch separates my makeshift “home” studio from the sofa and kitchen areas. Belinda had only one idea in mind when she saw it. “It’s a shrine to all the slaughtered animals and the moo, oink, and baaa echoes rising out of the basement blood room.” I couldn’t refuse such eloquence. The Roman arch has fourteen-inch-thick maple timbers rubbed with beeswax that span eight feet and stand ten. Its aura is ecumenical, yet there’s no reason for its existence in this building of butchery and cold storage. Except, of course, if you believe Belinda. We calmly decided that we couldn’t know the answer for certain. This saved us from dreaming of neon hell, or worse, losing sleep.

  Loft living is simple: unless you decorate, you get the contemporary verging on Hitlerian sterility. We’ve put art on the walls, some of my own productions. On the chance times I come with prospective buyers in tow, I use the greater loft room as a gallery. A handful of busts, and a few of my more unusual chiselings, sit on pedestals along the walls. So far I haven’t found any need to hang a sign over the sidewalk door, but stranger things have happened. Between the sculptures hang our serial prints: German woodcuts, Dutch etchings, French lithographs, and American photography. We’ve focused on limited runs so they hold their value. The Rembrandt is a good example. I was able to buy it after a commission came my way, back in Chicago (the best time to invest, before the money is lost into bills and clothes and a frivolous vacation). I admire van Rijn’s etching every day, his clean lines, his perception executed without flaw.

  Below The Beegermeister are bookshelves screwed to the walls. The lowest shelf sags to the floor under the heft of fat-spine art books and museum catalogues, sculpture retrospectives and biography tomes tracing birth-to-death narratives of the masters, set between diminutive photos from their oeuvre. Higher shelves keep Belinda’s university text collection — history, philosophy, business books, and more picture books on travel and architecture (“European City Parks” and “Mediterranean Ruins” and “Get Outside!”). And then there is Belinda’s collection of sports books. She’s fanatical for America’s pastimes: football, baseball, hockey, and basketball. She hates soccer — too Euro-centric. Novels and cookbooks get a shelf, but except for some classics, the novels we read go out the door as soon as the last page is read, sold to second-hand stores or donated to hospice centers.

  The floorboards in the great room are rough finished timbers. To slide through the room on our socks with a child’s glee will cost us a trip to the splinter trauma ward at Mount Sinai or St Luke’s Med Center. We’ve learned to wear shoes or slippers before venturing from the bedroom.

  For the discount we get, much can be overlooked. Such little and big scars come with warehouse restoration. This isn’t SOHO, that artist magnet from the dilapidated Seventies — post NYC bankruptcy, post blackout — where getting any paying tenant into the failed factory spaces at least kept the gangs from setting up crack factories, and the homeless squatters at bay. SOHO has been climbing as NY’s “arts Mecca” ever since. Its buildings have space; but over the years, prices have risen like the executive elevators at the World Trade towers. This is how rents look from my dwarfish take-home pay and my meatpacker’s address. SOHO is Manhattan’s “hot property” this year and “location, location, location” is the mantra of RE mavens trolling the streets in color-coordinated cars and sports jackets.

  The Meatpacking District (from West 14th Street south to Gansevoort, and the Hudson River east to Hudson Street) is the newest cheap-digs. I don’t expect this to last, which is our incentive to buy or get out, even while the streets are still sketchy in daylight and starkly ghoulish after dark. The thing is, as luck would have it, when the BDSM cellars and gay palaces were closed down under Mayor Koch’s AIDS scare campaign (invented to clean up the city to ensure tourists didn’t somehow get cornholed without wanting to), empty buildings became plentiful, and residential zoning saved the day.

  We see the bright side of Manhattan loft luxury growing in a seedy neighborhood. You play street-smart rules and cab it to the door after ten o’clock, pay an extra fiver for the driver to watch your back until the steel door closes out the hall light, and live to see another litter-strewn morning. Now we’re three months into the neighborhood and we barely notice the grit. And since mid-April, four buildings on our block have showed newly lighted windows after sundown. We toast weekly to our three-year lease. We think this will be enough time.

  Belinda catches me in the corner of her eyes spying on her from the corner of my eyes. She cuts another square of egg with her fork, stabs it, and quickly eats the morsel. I suppress a cringe. She replaces the fork and pushes her plate away. Okay, I think, the food is not the problem, and neither was (I’m beginning to think) the late Ms Slope’s missed funeral. Belinda has been holding something else just below the surface, and whatever it is has got the better of her again.

  Meanwhile, I’ve been staring across the loft too long and my Cap’n Crunch crackles less dramatically in its milk. I get another spoonful into my mouth and feel its crispy crunch has diminished to limp and soggy. Oddly though (thanks to emulsifiers and additives), the flavor has held (sugar & spice) and that familiar, gluey texture takes me back to my seventh birthday party, the year before Tang replaced real orange juice to celebrate man’s creative dietary plan for his space launches and moon journeys. At the party we kids, a mix of little boys wearing colored shirts and little girls with ribbons in their hair, passed around two boxes of Cap’n Crunch, to the delight of my mother, who let us kids let it all hang out on our birthdays.

  Belinda shuffles her feet. I hear her toenails scratching one foot. Her fingers come up from her lap and drum the tabletop. She moves in her chair as if it has burs.

  “Minus?”

  “Yes, sweetheart.” The birthday memory scatters. I’m listening because I feel she’s really ready to pop; mortality images at twenty-seven is yet a possibility – or, when am I (me, Minus) going to sell more work than one sculpture per month (for which I have a fast answer: As soon as I make something new and exciting and … as soon as I think of what that something is.) – or, let’s move back to the Midwest. I’m ready for something new, too. Anything is possible.

  Another spoonful of Cap’n Crunch re-assembles my seventh birthday in a flash, but another flash — Belinda’s hand reaching over to cover mine — wipes it away for good. I find her eyes have grown sandy with melancholia, imploring me to a level of seriousness at which, I hope, I’ve just arrived. My face is set, waxen, but I don’t have time to swallow before she says, “When are you going to ask for my hand in marriage?”

  My head swivels in time to turn away from her, where I spew Cap’n Crunch across the window and not in my girlfriend’s face. Choking follows. I drop my head and look into the cereal bowl. White mucus runs from my nose, which aggravates my gasping lungs. Belinda hops up beside me, yells for me to raise my arms as she begins slapping my back. I want to tell her that backslapping is no longer the preferred method to ease a coughing fit, because it can further lodge any obstruction in the throat. Except I’m in the midst of the said fit.

  “I expected resistance,” Belinda says above me. “But come on, Minus, take it like a man! We’re in love –” slap-slap “– so betrothal is the logical –” slap, slap-slap-slap “– next step.”

  “I-” hack “thasss nod–” hack-hack “gimme th-thime ….” I want to raise my hands in surrender, but they’re already up. How does one signal “Stop!” in this situation? She stops. She starts to rub my shoulders. Then she shakes me like I’m a pinball machine that’s eaten the ball somewhere underneath the 10x Bonus slot, and if she can only knock it loose without tilting the game, she’ll score big. My right hand for some reason still clutches the cereal spoon. I drop this and wave my hands because, suddenly, the coughing has ended all by itself. I br
eathe again. My pipes sound raw, and are coated by viscous goop, but a few swallows take that mess down. Its slimy texture makes me instantly nauseous.

  Belinda sits and draws a steady smirk through my recovery. In all the scenarios of marriage hints played in my mind, this reaction was never part of the plot. I’d hinted at marriage myself, a while back, but not in ambush. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “Not so Hollywood cool, huh?”

  “I’ll say.” She straightens her vest and bow tie.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I say, my tone both conciliatory and insistent. “You caught me off guard, that’s all. Honey. If this had been me asking you in the middle of omelet chewing, I’d be picking herbs from your sinuses right now.”

  Belinda adjusts her tie again. “We’ve been living together for nine months, Mighty Minus. Babies are born in shorter time.”

  “Are you telling me you’re …” I don’t want to use the word.

  “Do I look …?” She too hesitates on the word’s threshold, as well as its implication.

  My mind forces my mouth to wait three beats. “Actually,” I say across a building, awkward silence, “you look like you could use an extra sandwich in your lunch pail.” She doesn’t smile, so I try this: “Let’s get back to the marriage thing. Nine months is not so –”

  “Nine months. Gestation. That’s not counting our dating calendar. Then it’s more than fifteen, sixteen — no, seventeen months. An elephant can pop something out in that time. We have to make something of this relationship.”

  “What’s this about an elephant?”

  “The gestation analogy.”

  “Oh – right.” I feel confused. “Don’t elephants take two-and-a-half years? Sorry. Just a joke.” I nod and shrug and smile, hoping for time to think, only she’s taken this as an urge for her to continue.

  “It’s about time you step up to the plate, boyfriend. Pick a bat. Get into the game and take a few swings.”

  Something drops and makes a splat. I look at the window and see a sight one doesn’t get every day. The spewed cereal has stuck to the window, and in its spray I can make out a pattern. Several patterns, in fact, which drops me into the imagination of a child: I see a snowflake, I see an ice crystal, I see a naked treetop, I see Cassiopeia’s brightest stars, I see the outline of a woman dressed in a beer barrel, I see cereal stuck to a window.

  “Babe,” I begin, “I think we ought to get to know each other’s live-in habits a little better. Nine months is –”

  “Nine months is plenty of time to know whether you want to spend your life with someone. You know my faults; you know my virtues. I certainly know yours. You don’t seem so flaky and bizarre as you read how artists can be. And it’s not nine months, it’s seventeen! We’re already living together. Before that I spent most nights at your place. You make me happy, Minus. I feel cherished by you. That says everything, in my playbook. I remember sitting with you at night and watching your eyes follow your hands as you chiseled rock into beautiful art. When you complained of fatigue I kneaded your shoulders and made you coffee. When you wanted my opinion, I gave it straight and you didn’t cop an attitude. You’ve always taken my judgment seriously. It’s that kind of feeling that I’m talking about. Because lady-friend critiques and bedtime partnership isn’t what this is all about. So I would sit here after work and watch you sculpt and think how can I really help you and help me at the same time? You make me want to come home to you. All the help you gave me with Gretchen, and the carriage restoration. You’re a beautiful man. You even cook for me! And you’re not the jealous type. They’re the fucking craziest. Okay, okay! No need for a list. What I’m saying is I feel loved, Minus.” She takes a breath. I stare in dim amazement. “There’s something harmonious with you and me. We get so much from each other. By being together … we enjoy life more. I’ve got a plan for us, boyfriend.”

  There’s a lot in my mind, but I can’t make the words come out. I finally say, “Well.” This is clearly insufficient. But everything else would sound like a repetition of hers. I hope she sees this as we sit kitty-corner at the table, my eyes filled with emotion. Off to the side, I see something drop.

  One of the orangey kernels has broken free from its hold on the window glass. I watch its drip trail creep down the window, leaving a white line like a ghost’s tear. The stuck kernels need something more. More body. More kernels. My hand drops into the cereal bowl, swirls around to grab kernels, and when I take it out, I’ve got a wad tucked beneath three fingers. With a sharp flick my fingers fling the cereal against the window at about the center of the figure. They hit and stick, nearly all holding fast. A milk dribble limps below a kernel; it reminds me of a newborn releasing his mother’s nipple.

  “What are you doing?” Belinda asks.

  I wonder if she’s thinking that perhaps she’s spoken too soon about the ‘not so flaky artist’ compliment.

  My hand swims around the cereal bowl again. I throw one, two, three more handfuls at the window, successive bombardments that produce minute sounds; cannonball pops falling into a battle-fury sea. I scan the effect from the first to the second to the third. This has possibilities. I grab the box and pour cereal into the bowl, and add milk. My hand dunks the kernels under the milk to soak them. The milk feels pasty, the sugar on the kernels dissolves under my fingertips, forming a glue. Everything is warm and gross. I don’t want to look at the mess; it’s what I swallowed a few minutes ago.

  I fling kernels randomly at the window. I try to hit the center. Once, twice, three times. Some kernels stick, others bounce off the window and drop onto the sill or into the potted herbs. One sits in the crook of a forked basil stem, the leaves twitching. On the window the stuck kernels have built a base. A woman wearing a beer barrel is the most prominent of my early imaginings.

  Belinda sits silently beside me as I muster another fusillade. This is one of the things I like about her, and what we like about each other: let the moment carry on to see what happens. She pulls her chair next to mine, turns it around and sits with her chin on its back. She watches me work. The sun beating through the window has changed color in the half-hour we’ve sat at the table. It pours white light onto the newspapers, the empty plates, the herb pots, and makes odd shadows and colors through the cereal kernels. I throw more cereal. Milk flies from my fingers. Kernels bounce left, right, back at me. The mounded cereal has made arms, a head, one leg attached to a torso. I add more cereal to the bowl from the box, stir, throw; add, stir, throw.

  There is duality happening on the glass. I think of it as my canvas or panel; a medium with chance solution. It isn’t sculpture, not in any traditional sense. More like a frieze. I think I can take the method away from the glass, somehow. What if the cereal kernels were molten metal beads? How would hot wax stick? These ideas give me a bump like no drug I’ve sampled. Behind me, Belinda breathes her calm frustration.

  “I haven’t forgotten you,” I tell her. “There’s something here that –”

  She pats my back. “Keep going.”

  More cereal makes the adhesion of the massed kernels stronger. But will it hold? It can’t, not on the window. Not for long. Perhaps if I helped it harden with a hair dryer. Belinda’s hand is on my shoulder.

  “I’m a traditional girl, Minus, and I’ll live in sin as long as the next woman, if it’s to help. But then things change, as they always do, as they must do so’s not to wither and die. Otherwise they will. Die, I mean. It’s nature looking for succor, not the succubus choosing her next meal.”

  Belinda isn’t usually one to issue a cri de coeur; she prefers a good kick in the shins.

  “I love you Belinda. I can’t tell you enough.”

  I have told her plenty, though, and my supply won’t run out before our time runs out. No list of bests and loves from me, but I do love to be with her, and I like how we can be in the same room doing different things and, suddenly, take a moment out of the time-pie to say something sweet, off-hand, sexy, or just about the
weather. Succor works both ways. Last week we made love three times in one day, the last in the hallway, where she hoped for the elevator to chime on our floor to bring on her “danger” orgasm. This is a sight that is indescribable, just to fit the term in all its metaphorical depth. But, do I point this out here, now, the contradiction between the traditional girl and erotically fun girl, without fostering misunderstanding? No. That would be a fool’s argument. After all, I’m just as loony, and kept up my end of the playtime bargain outside the elevator landing. Propriety prevents me (and as a gentleman) from describing further … ahem … manipulations. Suffice to say that we had to fast-step-it through our doorway, but were yet in bare-assed view of the retired couple, Mr & Mrs Manders. To all of that (which to some is plenty), there is this to add: I don’t plan on cleaning up this cereal mess for a day or two; not before I can sketch ideas for studio work. If my long-term commitment is to art, then I admit that all else is by experiment.

  “So don’t be bored. Take control.” This is me talking, advice I give Belinda when I hear her return from the bathroom. She’s behind me, somewhere. I hear feet pitter-pat on the floor, which is faintly childlike, or rodentine. I’m not sure which is better, worse, or not-to-matter. I say, “You have a day job that takes you around –”

  “Clippitty-Clop! Clippitty-Clop!”

  “– around the park, one edge to the next,” I finish. Belinda’s hackney coach is lunchtime and evening work; tourists; wealth-through-tips.

  “Of course, that could be my second job, mister Artist Dude.”

  “Now you’re talking. You know, you told me you came to New York with a reflex camera in your big brown suitcase. The time for using it is now, don’t you think?”

  Across my back, a sudden white-hot brightness rides before an explosive POP. Its intensity washes out the sunlight’s last chard, cast onto the green basil leaves. The sound shaves the nerve ends on my skin.

  “Like that?” Belinda asks. I hear her wind the film to the next frame. She kicks my chair to get me to turn around. Reluctantly, I comply. Her camera moves forward to home in on my nose. I shut my eyes, but the flash bursts through the thinly skinned barrier. I blink red-orange trails that remind me of summer sunsets on the Great Plains.

  “Just exactly like that,” I say. My sight echoes geometric shadows of burnt timbers. “Only with less angina-inducing effect to your subject, maybe.”

  “Candid shots suit me, not those stagy glam shots I see in Annie’s pics.”

  “Annie? As in, the little orphan?”

  “Leibowitz!” she exclaims. “Don’t you know anything?”

  “Some days I’m otherwise fooled,” I suggest. My notebook is out to sketch, plot, graph, metaphorize (or rhapsodize) the glob of cereal stuck to the window. “Although I wasn’t aware that you were on a first-name basis with Annie.”

  Belinda and I settle into an interlude. Our peace is quiet and subtle. I throw cereal; it hits the window. Camera flashes record the work. Our posterity. She hands me the camera so she can sit in the softer light that now comes through the window. I take three photos in fast succession; her hands move to different parts of her face. Cheek, chin, behind the ears. I hand the camera back and she wanders off.

  “Sculpture seems a particularly lonely occupation,” Belinda says. “I couldn’t talk to film prints like you do to your sculptures.”

  “I don’t talk to stone.” My voice is insistent. The answer is intended to grab some reassurance from her.

  “Don’t be absurd, darling,” she retorts. A small chuckle follows for emphasis. “I swear to myself, sometimes your verbal perambulations are going to leak into reality. It’s a scary feeling. If the sculptures begin answering you, I’ll become superfluous.”

  I turn around because I want to see the insanity in this woman’s eyes that I’m certain to find. I only find the woman I wish to marry; whom I want to ask in my time; the (somewhat) traditional guy to his (other-ly) traditional girl. White light shoots from the camera, held against her hip like a sci-fi weapon. In the flash’s afterglow, a brown spot with a spermatozoon tail leads my vision everywhere. When I look at Belinda her head is hidden behind the blind spot. Blinking is futile to make this monster go away. I’m afraid to see this as a sign; omen or otherwise.

  “Superfluity is unlikely,” I say. “Perhaps murder, though, if you don’t put that bleeping camera down.” She only performs a pirouette, nose pointed skyward, camera held at the end of the outstretched arms, and snaps herself in jiggling white light. “Anyway,” I explain, “I haven’t noticed.” This is an emphatically delivered lie, which I think she senses. I say, “Not much, anyway.” But this qualification is no less a lie.

  “Okay, settled,” she coos. “Any-who … cameras are the gadgets of friendly interaction. One can only converse with an actual person.”

  “Now you’re just making cruelties,” I say, and throw more Crunch kernels. The middle has fattened, like a rotund beach bather.

  Belinda pouts at me in the window’s reflection. “The joke is on me, dear-heart. Photography is just my hobby.” She disappears from the reflected view, like she’d been an optical illusion. “I want something else!” she yells from somewhere unidentifiable.

  “You have your carriage. You have Gretchen!”

  “Not enough.”

  Not enough? This is news to me. Then again, so was her proposal.

  I hear shuffling beneath the table, hands and knees moving across the big Turk carpet. Her hands touch my waist and her fingers walk up my ribs (she likes to count them). Then her warm-wet palms blanket the back of my neck, beside which she rests her chin on my right shoulder.

  “Have I told you that you’re speaking at the arts-culture roundtable?”

  I let Crunch kernels drop from my hand into the bowl. My voice hovers above a whisper. “You got them to accept me?”

  She nearly screeches a reply. “I told you I would!” Her lips touch my neck — or is this her tongue? “Your work got you chosen, Minus. That piece you wrote for ARTFORUM –”

  “That was not a piece. It was a letter to the editor. I’m no journalist or critic.”

  “Yeah, anyway. The committee liked it. They told me your critique of the critic is just what they expect from artists on the panel. They also want someone new (new-ish) to the city, and – I’m sorry about this, honey – someone who’s not yet established. Their words.” Her fingers trace my neck muscles beneath the skin. I dip into the bowl and throw cereal at the rapidly building mass. Their uniform shape, the kernels, make a landscape that is coordinated, balanced.

  “I only had to do a little promotion,” she says. “For what you are and will become. Lord knows the art grapevine is smug and snarky.”

  “Hmm,” I say in grunt-speak. “So … you’re my agent now?”

  She grunts in response.

  I begin to turn my head, but she joggles me just enough to keep the cereal montage in my field of vision.

  “It’s good,” she says. “Keep throwing, Minus.” She stops short of saying whatever it is she thinks it is; her words seem to float beneath the window like a caption. My hand pitches more cereal. “Very good. Seems so random at first –” She points, then lets her finger curl back into her fist. “It’s amorphous.”

  “Like a cloud,” I whisper. “The image shows itself when you let the shape open up.” My hand sends another fusillade at the sticky mass. “I like that. It builds a new reality with each toss.” I look at how sculpture can take over from the image on the window. It assumes a shape in my mind that protrudes from this two-dimensional frieze: a mother earth figure. Could be of Minoan origin, or Egyptian. No, not from Egypt. Nor, I think, Greece. Somewhere around the Mediterranean, though. Carthaginian? Maybe. The options simmer like vegetable stew. I need to do a museum walk to eliminate repetition and the faint smell of shit, that odor of imitation. “Do you see a face in there somewhere?”

  “I see Ullr,” she says immediately.

  “Who?”
r />   “He’s a God of Snow — or the snow god. Whatever. But he’s Norse. You find his face woven into the center of macramé mandalas from the Seventies. Flower Power stuff. You can pick one up at the flea market for five bucks, these days.”

  “Ugh. I don’t want that image.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t want that.” Her words are whispers of ghostly prescience. Then her real voice settles from the aether. “Don’t worry, dear-heart, you’re beginning something new here. Noodle around. You like that.” She nibbles at my earlobe — coaxing me to throw more Crunch, make new art, start a long-view project, or to come off the chair and fuck her.

  “You’re getting me hard,” I hear myself confess.

  She sighs. “A lot faster than the cereal on the window, I hope.”

  “Can you give me more minutes, please? Before –”

  She answers with a tongue bath across my ear, sending a thrill up my spine that breaks into a sprint. “Before nothing,” she says. Her hot breath, redolent with rosemary, whirls across my cheek. “You’re working.” She steps away and into my view, doing a little prance. At the end she turns quickly and her head snaps to face me, causing her hair to fly across her face, where it holds as a screen for a moment and then drops messily to her shoulders. The act weakens me, and energizes me — I can’t explain how the two work; no woman has ever before done the same for me.

  Belinda has no obvious beauty; hers is a sudden storm on the senses that comes with a fast rain laid bare by revelation. Her contrasts — the lazy shuffle, loud belches in public (but beneath the hand), how she slurps her soup — make us the conventional couple. For all this she has wit that dazzles me, and her Heartland demi-drawl wants to defy an articulated speech pattern.

  Work is work, and we both do it with focus and effort (even when she’s teasing me, because I’m fooling around – noodling – and the fun-play can be fruitful to the further ideas). Nevertheless, we both know how to trim time from the business of life to make more time-space as a couple. Minutes make all the difference: coffee in the park, our feet up on the sofa with books in hand, a meet-up on the street between horse-carriage rides and dog duties for an eight-block walk. These help us escape from life’s trappings and all the good work we need to do for the emotional side of survival.

  “By the way,” I tell her. “I’ve sold one piece already this month. So we’re ahead.” She tells me she knows this. The sale is on the books. “Okay, so there’s rent in the bank. I guess we can keep eating food, too.”

  Belinda says, “You’re too busy with your art to take time away for what modern artists need to be doing outside the studio.” Her voice is toned to mollify. “If you’re starved for examples, just look at what you’re making now. Sure it’s a mess, but you’ll tidy up. Meanwhile, you’ll look at it and brood, wonder about a thousand things. This is what you do. You need time to do it. It’s how you work. I know this. What you need, then, is representation. You need proper New York exposure, Minus Mouse. I’m not even talking about gallery owners demanding color slides because they’re shamefully ‘too busy’ to stop around and look at what you have with their own two eyes. That shit job is a job in and of itself.”

  “I don’t mind knocking on doors,” I say. “Pounding the pavement. It’s against how things are done these days, mostly, but, you know, there’s a certain tradition to that work ethic. It appeals to me.”

  “I know it gives you that needed sense of control over your destiny, honey, but today’s market demands a modern approach to the biz.”

  “Did you have someone in mind?” I ask.

  “I can’t say yet. Well, sort of.” Her look is pensive. “I need to let my thoughts fester. See which one turns into a boil.”

  Fester? – Boil? “Doesn’t sound so positive to me,” I say.

  “No more for now. Make art. I want to watch you throw.”

  Splat!

  We look at the window. The mound of cereal has fallen. We stare, defeated (I am) and exasperated (me, again). What Belinda feels is transmitted by a few tongue clicks, and a soft rub across my neck. A few kernels remain on the window, which has an opaque circle at its center, stretched down to the sill. The mess looks like someone has barfed; me, with this experiment.

  “The FaceCards meet next week,” I tell Belinda. “Viscount Bruce gave me a shout.”

  I’m under the table, cleaning up the cereal. I can no longer think of it as barf without feeling bile creep up my throat. “The viscount is hot for my subscription idea. And he’s warmed the others to it. I’ve been given the go-ahead to talk with them.”

  Belinda cuffs me upside my shoulder. I’ve gotten used to Belinda’s soft pats, cuffs, slaps, and pokes on my body. They are her behind-the-door expressions of our romance and friendship, something we Midwesterners “bless” each other with as often as shaking hands. I think it comes from a steady dose of Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and the other LoonyToons characters, killing each other in a blaze of gunfire or TNT, and then walking spic-and-span clean into the next scene. Add to that the The Three Stooges, and you can see our penchant for “love taps.” It’s no wonder the Cornhusker State couldn’t contain her.

  I take her cuff as encouragement. My scheme has precedence.

  She claps her hands, then stops and puts on a frown like she has just come across an empty treasure chest. “On the level,” she says. “Can that low flush be counted on to come up with any real money?”

  I raise a finger in counter point. “The viscount’s Cy Twombly stares at me all night long from its spot above the fireplace. The frame alone could probably buy this loft. And as long as I come up with the sculptures, they’ll play ball.”

  “Fair enough,” she says. “Remember what Al Davis preaches: Just win, baby!”

  I come out from beneath the table with my bucket and sponge. From somewhere, that out-of-left-field place she dislikes in her mom but otherwise appreciates from me, I ask a question that’s been on my mind since the cereal fell off the window. “How much time do I have to pop the question?”

  Belinda reaches over and holds my soapy hands. “Ohhh,” she says, taking her time, “there’s no deadline. I think – let’s say I only beat you to the punch on this one, Mighty Minus Mouse. Maybe it was not so terribly romantic of me, how I said all that stuff. Sorry. A girl has to take her chances, too, you know. Sorry, sorry. You’ll find your chance, too, honey.”

  I only half believe her confession. She’s not been one, if my memory serves correct, to back away from an argument, an opinion, or desire.

  She kisses me on the lips, and says, “I’ll think of this moment when I write a muse’s memoir.” Her breathing is close to my ear.

  I won’t disturb her thoughts (and memory) of today with a comment that is certain to leave us both with the jitters for the rest of the week. I don’t like to interpret her dreams, either; it’s enough to feel all the beauty in life within a single day of being together. Whereas … a muse? I’ve never thought of Belinda as muse, mine or another artist’s. Although she might well have been, back when she modeled for lots of (unidentified) artists. She doesn’t do that for me; and I won’t ask her. Scary thoughts come to mind, though: Is she moonlighting for another artist? A silly question, and it keeps me from saying something that would surely make her take back (for good!) her version of a marriage proposal. For a second I wonder how that could change the future, but that is too callow a move to seriously consider.

  Nevertheless, time has served nicely to dispel my beliefs in anthropomorphic muses, and especially the living-breathing sort with smooth skin and honeyed lips (these don’t exist either, but that’s how we want to think of a muse). Eyes that draw you, and through you the delicate lines, pigmented on linen or chiseled into stone. Inspiration comes from somewhere behind me, and I don’t ever want to look over my shoulder to see what’s there. That’s my version of spooky. So the question echoes in a chamber filled by two: Is Belinda’s revelation equal to the first spoken ‘I love you’ of a relat
ionship? I have no response to this question. Am I expected to say ‘I love you, too!’? I have no response.