Emma whisked him down Broadway at a heady pace. The cooler air out-of-doors was almost as invigorating as her unabashed enthusiasm. The painter continued to be struck by her height: how her high heels put her dauntingly at eye-level. Her stature and gait made her vintage dress look haute couture, and as she bounded ahead, it occurred to him she was wearing the same jasmine perfume as the night before.
Beyond the trace of henna in her long dark hair, her bohemianism was all but subsumed by a sensibility that would have been more at home in the dog-eared pages of old copies of Vogue. No glaring tattoos labeled her as conventionally counter-culture—not that tattoos would have mattered to the ogling men passing by on the sunny sidewalk. The young woman stopped at the corner to pull yet another sweater from her bag. It was a black and beaded affair with short white cuffs turned up like calla lilies at the elbows; its prim-and-properness, however, barely made a dent in lessening eye traffic.
They soon arrived at a dilapidated Seventies Nova that, after the initial shock of it wore off, seemed to oddly fit its eclectic owner. Michael reeled to piece together a picture of this creature before him. Emma had invented her glorious self out of improbable parts, betraying, in his estimation, the best kind of genius. She opened the backseat of her car to rummage through a vast shoe selection in the floorboard. He stood at the curbside and watched her sort through heels and sandals, and with the patience of a man willingly under a spell. On finding another pair of shoes to her liking, she switched them out before the two hopped in the vehicle and proceeded on their way.
Emma’s old car was a clunker with charm. Little plastic dinosaurs were epoxied over the glove compartment, and a cowry shell necklace hung along with a crucifix from the rearview mirror. Michael looked for a place to rest his feet among the diet soda cans and footwear. He soon situated his long body in the space left him, although the ceiling upholstery drooped on his head like a hat.
Emma swatted the fabric away, only to watch it comically drop back down on him. “This will be fun!” she insisted.
The graduate student took her new friend to a local Irish-style pub called The Third Policeman. On entering the establishment, the tall man needed to scrunch to get into a narrow, dimly lit corridor. High-backed wooden booths, painted in red lacquer, jutted out on both sides; plastic tiffany-knockoff lamps hung precariously low from the smoky ceiling. Emma disappeared into a crowd, yet held on tenaciously to Michael’s arm; he did not resist for fear of losing it. She threw up her hand and a corresponding gesture came from a table in a dark corner. Another coffeehouse waitress was seated there, and it was only in making better visual contact Michael recognized her as Cleopatra from the party.
Emma formally introduced her. “This is Erica.”
The fellow barista did not bother to stand up, but pointed her cigarette at the man like a finger. “Mr. Large Latte. Half decaf.” (Women in coffeehouse employment often refer to regulars by their drink names.)
Emma pushed Michael down by the friend on the bench and moved to sit across from them. “Erica’s thinking about becoming a lesbian,” she volunteered.
The plucky woman flicked her ash. “Well, it’s not official yet. I’m still waiting on the paperwork.”
Erica was low-built and curvaceous. Her bobbed black hair was tinged with the colors of comic book pages, and her ice blue eye shadow clumped as she squinted out from under her bangs. She was going for a Mata Hari-look, and presumably a couple of years older than her friend. She was attractive in a quintessentially big-boned midwestern way, and smoked like she meant it. While Emma was a rank amateur at cultivated aloofness, she was a seasoned practitioner.
“Are you the one who posted the advertisement for a model at the coffeehouse?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered nervously.
“What do you pay per hour?”
Michael backtracked. “I haven’t decided, yet. I’m still settling in.”
“Not a lot of money-making opportunities in this town,” she complained.
Emma extolled her coworker. “Erica’s thinking of going to junior college.”
Michael, uninterested, locked eyes with the waiter. Inspired by his choice of hamburger and fries, the two ladies ordered the same.
He looked over at Emma with surprise. “I thought you were a vegetarian?”
The graduate student fluffed up, saying, “Most of the time, I am. But today I’m celebrating!”
Erica was a bit peckish. “Kill the fatted calf, for Christ’s sake! I’m starved!” She then turned to Emma, incidentally. “What are you celebrating, anyway?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I paid my rent this month.”
Both women laughed simultaneously, and in that inscrutably synchronized way young woman have. The older man tried to maintain a low profile at the table while conversation turned to topics of mutual interest between the baristas, although he could not help viewing Erica with a critical eye. Emma then said something that pricked his ears.
“Tanner came by the coffeehouse today to tell me he was just awarded the Nadir-Kaufman Scholarship for next year.”
Erica was arid. “I’m sure ‘Jacques the Troll’ won’t be happy about that.”
Michael dipped in. “What’s his story, exactly?”
Emma shook her head. “Jacques is the perennial graduate student in the fine arts department. He keeps changing his ‘area of concentration.’ Right now he’s into performance art, and mostly poses in professors’ yards as a kind of protest over the disparate pay rates between faculty and associate instructors.”
Erica was in a mood. “Last year he posed out in front of one of the sorority houses, conveniently near one of the bathroom windows. The only thing convincingly ‘ceramic’ about his performance was his perpetual hard-on.” (The diminutive artist clearly did not impress her.) There was another flick off ashes. “Speaking of freaks, I heard the old wino was killed yesterday at the construction site.”
Emma showed concern. “How?”
“Rumor has it he was killed by a falling beam. I guess his metal detector didn’t give him much of a heads-up.”
“That would be a horrible way to die!” the friend exclaimed.
Erica snuffed her cigarette out, grunting, “Beats mistaking antifreeze for liquor.”
Emma winced at the caustic humor.
“Here’s the kicker, though.” The coworker was chomping at the bit with some juicy dirt. “Someone who saw the body being loaded into the ambulance said his eyes were gouged out.”
Emma chagrined. “What?”
Michael commented coolly, “A construction beam wouldn’t gouge his eyes out.”
Erica rose in her seat. “I didn’t say it was a construction beam that did it.” Her face then darkened with delight. “I’m thinking it was more like a satanic ritual.”
The painter dismissed the suggestion. “That sounds like something out of a movie.”
The photographer whimpered. “I hate scary movies.”
The gossiper went on. “I heard the police found all kinds of cell phones and iPods in his trash bag. And none of it appears to have been stolen.”
The friend interjected, “Where did he get it all?”
Erica shrugged. “Stuff stupid students dropped, probably. They practically shit their parents’ money. Most of them don’t have the sense God gave to a stack of dinner napkins.”
“Do you know any of this for a fact?” Michael quibbled. “The gouged-out eyes? The sack of goodies?”
“No,” she snipped. “But he was just a crazy old fart. Folks are bound think all kinds of things.”
After their food was served, the curt friend ate hers expeditiously, with no dawdling. She chewed with her mouth opened, and between her rough language and her nicotine varnish, Michael could not see her being a good influence on Emma. His opinion was already prejudiced by her outrageous behavior at the party, and she gave him no reason to amend it. The older man suspected her counter-culture guise was a defense, and perhaps out of any insecurity she might have felt about being a college-age female not in college in a college town. Her outsider status was probably as much imposed on her as freely embraced. Regardless, the painter did not have to suffer her barbed company long. She promptly got up to leave after scoffing down the last of her burger. He was wondering why she came at all. (It could have been to give Emma a backdoor excuse to terminate the “date” if lunch did not go well.)
With the friend gone, the meal took on a different character. The talkative grad student continued to only pick at her hamburger, eating most of the patty, the pickle, and torn-off bits of the bun. Her plate by the end looked like a child’s subterfuge: a rearrangement of food intended to convince a parent there was somehow less of it. She soon dispensed with the pretense of eating to pull out a stack of photographs from her large bag. They were allowed to spill over the table in a cascade.
The quality of the artwork was impressive for someone still a student, and Michael was never begrudging in his praise for things he liked. The opportunity to play professor also gave him another way of conversing with the young woman. Emma’s photographs of industrial, rustbelt decay were clearly an allusion to American Precisionism. But instead of using the angularity of light and shadow to heighten the majestic geometry of “manifest destiny,” she was using the shadows to convey “twilight of empire.” The de-peopled quality in her work was reminiscent of De Chirico’s haunted cityscapes, where there is a prevailing sense of a momentous event having just been missed.
The photographer was both impressed and unnerved by his hunches as to her thinking. His insights were more substantive than anything she was getting from her teachers on campus.
Michael had an uncanny talent for being able to crawl into the headspaces of other artists. Even as a music student, he had amazed peers by identifying composers from stylistic fragments played on the piano. This ability could be turned on any number of subjects, including human behavior. Yet such judgments proceeded from an analytical nature, which meant they were strictly pro forma and rarely translated into actionable intelligence.
By the time the impromptu critique wound down, table conversation had turned casually to subjects unrelated to school. The painter took advantage of the close proximity and low bar light to study his young companion’s face with uncharacteristic abandon. Emma’s skin possessed a delicate translucency, as if Adolphe Bouguereau, the French Salon painter, had built it up in layers of feathery white scumblings. At some point she slipped her black-rimmed glasses back on, undoubtedly to lend an air of sophistication to her bubbly chatter; but her youthful turn of mind could not be so easily masked. If anything, the spectacles only made her eyes dance all the more, like kinetic sculpture. The rest of her was equally animated. She employed her body to accent grammatical flourishes, shifting her weight from hip to hip or tilting her head to insert commas for dependent clauses. Her hands pushed away the air for emphasis, and pulled back with flicks of her wrist to encourage agreement. Yet for all her guile, there was little artifice in her manner as she talked. She may have still been in college, but her combination of swagger and charm was of a woman in full command of her talents.
In the course of the extended lunch, Michael came to realize someone over his shoulder was succeeding at distracting Emma. He wanted to see who was buried in the shadows, but before he could form a plan to do so the person in question came up to the table on his way out with a colleague. It was the professor from the party.
“Emma,” he said in a greeting, glancing down at the scattered photographs. There was a possessive glint in the look he bore her, and insincerity in the smile he threw Michael.
The photographer’s nod of acknowledgement came as an afterthought.
The professor was cordial. “I hope when you feel more yourself, you can model for me again.”
Emma’s reaction seemed pleasant enough.
The two men moved on to the door.
“Feeling yourself?” Michael inquired. “Have you been ill?”
“My father died last month after a long illness. I had to leave school for a week.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
With all her showy feathers tucked down, the pictures were raked off the table and back into her bag. She was suddenly younger than he could ever have imagined.
“And your mother?” he continued.
“We don’t talk much.”
Michael approached his next topic cautiously. “Was the man who was just here a teacher of yours?”
Emma fiddled with the clasp on her purse. “His name is Seth Bowles. He helped me get my scholarship. I modeled for him, once.”
The emerging picture was not a good one. Michael would not probe further for fear of discovering more than he wanted to know. There was a gesture on her part to grab the bill; he quickly snatched it away.
Emma protested. “I’m putting this on my credit card. This is my treat. I invited you out, remember?”
The painter was unwontedly adamant as he stood up with the check in hand.
His lunch companion could see his thinking, so quietly relented.
Chapter Nine, Section Three/ Back/ Contents Page
Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.