CHAPTER 21

The Two-Legged Easel, Excerpts from Daedalus Monet’s autobiography:

(8.1) There is a window in my house where an angel abides, and encounters with the entity take the form of remembrances. One could liken the arrangement to living with an absentee boarder who only occasionally comes to mind when you find hair in the sink or furniture moved too impractically close to doors. Sometimes this angel seeks to gain my attention and throws items out of its portal. Vague remembrances, mostly: a hat lost to me in a wind storm, a half-eaten sandwich I did not care for and threw away, pencils (short, useless ones), discarded socks with fatigued elastic supports. Trite memories, to be sure, but all things reside first and last in recollection.

THE HAUNTED RUIN

He had walked away from too many women placed on pedestals, only to grieve all the more for having put them out of reach. In this instance, at least, his body dragged him over a line and up onto a shared perfumed pillow. Exhausted, neither of them spoke in the darkness. They lay side by side, yet did not kiss. Something would have to happen next. She would either have to send him away or they would fall asleep.

They fell asleep.

Michael drifted in and out of one of his strange themed anxiety dreams. It began with terrifying flying saucers that resembled shredded clouds. Seeing them fly toward downtown, he happened upon a former coffeehouse waitress he once knew heading in the same direction. Her face was still pretty and youthful, although her hands were aged considerably. She told him she was again working as a barista and that he should come to visit at her new place of employment. Michael soon set out to find the establishment, but was abruptly lost in a honeycomb of flimsy buildings made of plywood. They were so close together there was no differentiating between being inside or out-of-doors. Every turn put him at a step-up into another place of business still under construction; only cash registers and staring counter help were on hand to icily greet him. An occasional exit faced out onto a barbed-wire fence cordoning a street, but beyond this he was left with crawlspaces between walls to escape his guilt over not buying anything.

“Michael…?” Emma nudged his shoulder, whispering, “Those television people are snooping around outside the house.”

He caught the tail end of it. “It’s the pumpkin stealers.”

“What?” she asked.

He was not inclined to explain.

She insisted. “We can’t stay here tonight.”

He sat up to puzzle over her melodrama.

Emma was already on her feet and snatched a repacked suitcase from the floor. “I know where we can go and not be disturbed. Grab the pumpkin and follow me.”

A disoriented Michael climbed off the bed to navigate past what gowns remained in the floor. Incommoded by the jack-o-lantern, he proceeded out of the house and down the steep steps. With industry he wedge himself between a stuck seat and broken glove compartment latch in Emma’s car. She pulled away from the curb without turning on headlamps, although nothing was seen of the television news van on the street. Once they were down the block, they sped off toward the old highway. The accomplice would not ask where they were going, either in a specific or general sense. He was never one to ask a question to which he did not already know the answer. They drove further than they had ever driven together. The road ahead started splintering, growing darker and narrower with each change of direction. Without the benefit of signs, Emma charted a winding course deeper into the woods. Her passenger imagined every bush to be home to a snake, and every farmhouse to be lair to a serial killer. He could only justify his irrational fear of rural landscapes by quoting Sherlock Holmes on the subject: “The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

After the better part of an hour of driving, Emma stopped at a small house off a gravel road. No lights were on hand apart from those supplied by the car, which she left on to dash onto the porch; her shadow loomed large over the front door while she rooted in her purse for a key. With the way cleared she rushed back to shut off the car engine.

“Bring the jack-o-lantern,” she said.

Michael got out to the trebly cries of crickets: one for each star in the blackest sky imaginable. For some reason (and perhaps because of his napping dream) he was thinking of the Fifties film version of The War of the Worlds, where a couple sought refuge in an abandoned country house from a night sky raining with Martians. He passed into the dark residence to hear Emma going through a cupboard. Placing the pumpkin on a table, he asked the obvious, “Is there a light switch?”

She stayed in her clandestine vein. “That would only draw attention.”

The guest glanced around to appreciate none of the windows had curtains or blinds. A scratching sound was slower making an impression. His gaze was drawn to an exterior room off the kitchen where a mongrel with cocked ears peered in through a screen door.

“That’s the neighbor’s dog,” she explained, adding pointedly, “He’s not allowed in the house.” Emma moved over to the table with a scrounged-up candle and matchbook, and on lighting her wax stick placed it in the jack-o-lantern. Light trickled up faded wallpaper vines to lay bare a room as stark as the windows. “Come,” she announced. “I want to show you something.”

She led the way with the torch, flinging her shadow over her shoulder like a cloak to darken personal effects lining a hall. The pumpkin was set on a dresser in an unassuming corner bedroom before she leaned into a large chest of drawers with a mind to shove it; Michael pitched in to help uncover a crumbly gash in the wall. It was puttied in and painted over with a child’s tempera paints.

“It looks like a comet,” he remarked.

Emma ran her fingers over the wall, highlighting an indentation under the mural; it corresponded with the celestial body’s fiery white tail. “This gouge was made by a meteorite years ago. It punched a hole in the roof and passed straight down inside the wall.”

“Is it still in there?”

Turning to the door, she tapped a small black rock being used as a stop with her shoe.

“Then the art is a commemoration of the event?” he asked.

“It’s in need of repairs,” she explained. “I was hoping we could touch it up together.”

Michael said nothing when his host disappeared down the hall with an imploring smile. He surmised they were at a family home, and perhaps Emma painted the picture as a child. She quickly reappeared in the doorway in her bare-hosed feet, carrying a cardboard box filled with tempera paints and brushes.

“We only have blue and white," she lamented. The materials were set beside the work of art. “I should like to add some stars, too.”

The pumpkin was also removed to the floor; its light pushed the shadows higher on the walls to make a hole suitable to crawl in. The collaborator joined Emma at the baseboard and was handed a brush. It seemed strange she should drag him out into the middle of nowhere for the purpose of retouching a child’s painting, but it was not in his nature to question any scheme of hers, or to have a plan of his own. His unease about there being nothing between them and the dark countryside, except thin plates of window glass, subsided after a few minutes. The young woman was still in his old sweater, which grazed his sleeve like another shadow in the room. Rhapsodic flicks of dripping casein blue stood in for conversation until she at last confessed what he was pained to suspect.

“This is Evan’s house.”

The painter did not react.

“He’s a commercial photographer,” she explained, “and taught me everything I know about a camera. We’ve dated since high school.”

The guest was compelled to ask one relevant question. “Where is he?”

“He’s away in Idaho for a photo shoot.” She added, calmly, “Though he’s driving back tonight and should be here sometime late tomorrow morning.”

Silence returned, edgier than before; the painter’s brush, by contrast, was less keen.

Emma was getting good at reading his moods. “I know so little about you, Michael.”

It was par for his acquaintance that little background was solicited or given. Knowing him required sharing a kind of orphanhood with him: one of Dickensian self-invention.

Emma persisted. “Tell me something about yourself?”

“There isn’t much to tell.”

“But you write so much. You must have a lot to say.”

“I live mostly out of a sack: a toothbrush, a change of socks…”

“You’re between destinations?”

“No destination,” he replied. “Only the in-between part.”

“But what are your aspirations? Where do you want to be in ten years?”

He shrugged. “I’ll know when I get there.”

His answer dismayed her. “But you’re looking at it the wrong way round, aren’t you? The future is not a point of arrival. It’s a point of departure. You create your future from here—not there.”

He could no more refute her shrewd observation than he could explain why he gave the future so little thought. Dropping his brush into the cup of water, he leaned back to escape the overheated air of the pumpkin; a pair of eyes passed high over one of the windows.

“Jesus!” he yelped.

Emma peeked back, unworriedly. “It’s probably a deer. They like staring in when there’s a light.”

A knock arose on the front door and dispelled that possibility.

Michael would not panic if Emma was not going to panic.

The unexcited resident put down her paintbrush before venturing into the dark end of the house. Snippets of a friendly conversation escaped a gap in the front door, but it was more tone than distinct words. On re-latching the chain, she reappeared in the doorway. “It was a neighbor. He thought we were burglars.”

“The dog’s owner?”

“No,” Emma informed him, moving to re-cover the mural with the chest of drawers. “The stars can wait ‘till later.”

Seizing on her weary state, Michael pitched in another shoulder, and did not argue.

“Why don’t you get ready for bed?”

The guest looked to a connecting bathroom behind him.

With no further instructions, she stepped in the hall to pick up her suitcase and disappeared behind another door; the home wrecker was left alone to look out his bright fish bowl.