The Waiting Room

by Cetti Cherniak

Amy Bernays - "Her Shadow"

As she entered the ophthalmologist’s waiting room, Ashlee Dustin found herself surrounded by gray heads. A hunched, skeletal man in a wheelchair, one bony shoulder jutting into the air above his drooping skull. A fat, anemic woman with a bandaged eye and weeping sores on her bare, crepey arms. Ashlee swung back her chocolate-brown hair with a toss of her head, sat down stiffly in one of the chairs, and picked up a magazine from the table beside her. She was angry, angry, angry. She wasn’t yet fifty – too young to be facing the possibility of blindness. Before Christmas, it was just a slight darkening around the edges. Now it was February, and it seemed she was looking through a tunnel. “Vision loss is slow for most patients – ten or twenty years,” the doctor had said. “For a few, it’s rapid – a matter of months.” Maybe she was one of the few. It wasn’t fair. After all the other deprivations she had had to face, now this.

A tall, white-haired man wearing brown tweed trousers and an English driving cap shuffled in briskly and sat down in the chair across from her. His face was deeply creased, and white stubble stood out against his tanned cheeks. He began fumbling in his leather briefcase, and she winced at his pathetically unmeetable urgency. The skin on the backs of his knobby, agitated hands was transparent and marbled with soft, blue veins. Turning away in disgust, she opened her magazine and started to read. At least she could still do that.

After a few minutes, her attention was distracted by an unusual sound. It was a slow and regular puff of air like the ffftah, ffftah of a heart-lung machine. She looked around, but could not make out the source. She thought one of the elderly people in the room must be gasping, but there was no sign – a heaving chest or a grimace of distress. Suddenly she noticed that the man with the briefcase was staring at her with a peculiar expression, resolute, steady, almost animal. Without looking down, he was moving his right hand swiftly over a pad of paper that was perched on his lap. My God, he was sketching her. At the same moment she realized that the gasping sound emanated from him; yet he betrayed no sense of self-consciousness. The calm oblivion of his dilated pupils resting gently in gold-brown irises, almost orange like harvest moons, sent a shiver of shame and fear and a strange, sad kind of yearning from her head to her toes, and she quickly averted her eyes. Her heart pounded. Heat flowed over her chest and abdomen. She dared not look up again from her magazine, but could no longer make out anything on the page. She wished she could disappear.

“Mrs. Dustin,” a nurse called out, and Ashlee started to rise from her chair, expecting to feel relief. Instead, she was nearly pushed back into it by a huge wave of reluctance, breaking against her chest like a white-cap against a rock. She quickly regained her balance, and, trembling, gathered up her shawl and purse and followed the nurse out of the waiting room. She kept her eyes on the nurse’s back so as not to lose her way. She wondered at herself. It was odd, inexplicable, yet there it was, some kind of – desire – pushing to the surface and unfurling as brazenly as the velvet-green shoots of new corn she squatted to watch every spring in her garden. A desire. A desire for what? To stay and speak with the old man, to question him about his life and his art. But no matter, the moment was past. She would never see him again. She toddled along after the nurse down the corridor to the examination room, resisting the urge to put her arms out to feel the walls. Life was like that – one moment things presented themselves to view, and the next, they vanished into a dark periphery, before a person even had a chance to understand or appreciate them, or to act on the thought. All of life, it seemed, was like slowly going blind, image after image encircled by opacity, an unconnected series of momentary events slipping into nothingness.

“Sit here,” said the nurse, guiding her by the upper arm to the examination chair. “How has your vision been since the last visit?”

Ashlee explained how it had been, and watched blank-faced as the nurse jotted down some notes and set out a row of instruments on the counter along with several bottles of eye drops. Her eyes burned and anger simmered under her olive skin as she fought the darkness back. There was still so much she wanted to see! Then it came to her what it was she had wanted to ask him. She wanted to know what he saw in her form that was worth honoring with his artist’s eye. More than that – she wanted to see the sketch.

“The doctor will be in in a moment,” said the nurse, and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Ashlee tapped her heels against the railing of the examination chair as they swung an inch off the floor. More waiting. Waiting to be seen, forever waiting to be seen. She’d always resented her meager representation in the family photo album. No one else in the family had taken an interest in keeping a visual record. And even when she could get her husband or one of the kids to take a photo of her against their complaints, the picture was invariably poorly focused and poorly composed. Only she, it seemed, had an eye for color and design, for that marriage of order with chaos that constituted beauty. In her backyard she’d once photographed rare white bloodroot blossoms against the black spring muck. She’d captured a cicada in the act of laying its eggs in a gash it had made in a summer sapling, its orange eyestalks bright against the curling green bark-skin. She’d frozen her fingers shooting dusty purple vortices of cabbages against lemon-veined autumn leaves, blue-white frost filigrees on winter windows, and the last few ice-crusted crimson crabapples hanging heavy on blackened branches. Time moved always on, today would not stay, and even our memories would fail. Why hadn’t her husband understood this, the urgency of the moment of now?

He had been dead now a year, and she wondered whether he had ever truly seen her. To be looked upon, to be seen! Yes, that was what she wanted. To be painstakingly scrutinized by a piercing consciousness, to be entered into deeply, past the veneer of the habitual self, deep, deep into the aching folds of the silken center of her unknownness. Often, as she walked naked from the shower to the bedroom, Bill would look up bleary-eyed from his newspaper for a moment, then continue reading. Sometimes he would not look up at all. He did not look her in the eye when they had sex. She tried leaving the light on in the bedroom, but he would always get up and turn it off. He failed to notice when she rearranged the furniture or painted the porch. She had never felt his eyes caressing the contour of her brow or her nostrils or the snaking caverns of her ears, the twisted rise of her collarbones, the slope of her thigh muscles hugging the knees like tongues, never caught him in the act of noticing her calves, firm as Bosc pears, or the gentle curve of her big toenail, glossy with fine longitudinal ridges like an acorn. No, she had never been held in anyone’s eye, held, beheld. And the hope of it was buried now in cold clay.

A poster on the wall showed a series of landscapes as they would appear to people with various eye diseases. She saw the tunnel-like Retinitis Pigmentosa landscape through her own tunnel, a hole within a hole. As a child and even into adulthood, she had sucked the world in through her oily gray-green eyes without restraint, filtering nothing. She remembered everything too. She knew that going blind would not keep her from remembering. She remembered every piece of gravel embedded in every sidewalk, every pore of every orange peel, every page of every well-read book. Going blind would not make the world invisible to her; no, much worse – it would make her invisible to herself. What kind of a creature was she anyway? She had only the bathroom mirror to give her answers, and every day it was somehow different, yet somehow the same. She could never see her whole self in mirrors anyway – it was only the left side or only the right side or only the back or only the front. And there were parts of her so foreign that no one but herself had ever seen them or wanted to. Did they exist then, or had she only imagined them? Maybe she had even imagined that her toenails were like acorns. Until she witnessed her full, living image held unflinchingly in the mirror of another’s eye, how could she be sure of it?  How could she be sure of anything?

She heard Dr. Samuels fidgeting with the door knob, and tucked away her ridiculous musings.

*     *     *

Sunday was bright. A fine snow fell against the pavement like the powdered sugar her mother used to sprinkle on homemade donuts, sugar falling, falling sweet and cold from the low sky, melting at her feet. She said a silent prayer as she walked to church, cold in the teeth and the muscle and the bone, wrestling with the fact that she could no longer drive. It would be her first time attending the Westside congregation. She just couldn’t stay in the old house any longer, alone with memories of Bill, the children grown and gone, Bill Jr. now in college. And the money from the sale of the house would keep her decently for the rest of her days in the modest apartment. Snowflakes sprayed her forehead and cheeks as she watched her breath billowing out from between her teeth and disappearing into the wind.

The meetinghouse was warm and dry, and the smell of the carpet felt slightly astringent in her nostrils. She stamped her feet. The sound of the organ was a familiar comfort, and she took a seat in the back of the chapel, deciding to leave on her coat until the heat could penetrate. Families fidgeted and clerks fussed about with clipboards. The ever-busy Mormons. It had been a lot of years since she’d converted to marry Bill, but she still found the business atmosphere disconcerting. The commotion subsided as the bishop rose to the pulpit. His speech was crisp and economical as he reported on the success of youth camp, made room assignments for Sunday School, and went over the upcoming calendar. Finally he sat down while saying, “We will prepare for the Sacrament now by singing hymn number one eighty-four, Upon the Cross of Calvary.”

After the hymn, the congregation sat in relative silence as the priests blessed the bread and water and the deacons passed the trays up and down the aisles. Ashlee prayed wordlessly with her eyes closed. She had prayed more in the past year than ever before. Ironic, she thought, that Bill’s dying should bring her closer to God than his living. Their prayers together had always seemed rote and formal, as if they were ashamed to be intimate with God together. Whether Bill was intimate with him now or not, she did not know. A car wreck doesn’t prepare a man’s soul for communion. Half-blind, groping prayers now bridged the gap between her soul and God’s in a more intense and immediate way than words ever had, and she felt she was learning to listen for perhaps the first time in her life. Her physical hearing seemed to be increasing in sensitivity too as her eyes failed – she could hear the rubbing together of the deacons’ pant legs: right-left, pause; right-left, pause. A baby began to fuss followed by footsteps and the swoosh of the rear chapel door. Then, something else. Ffftah. Ffftah.

Her heart jumped. Had she imagined it? She opened her eyes and panned her head slowly from side to side, scanning the congregation. To her right, on the other side of the aisle, a crop of white hair, the ruddy cheeks sprinkled with stubble. He turned his lion’s eyes at her, and she quickly averted them.

After sacrament meeting was over, she hurried to the ladies room, flushed, slightly dizzy. She went into the stall, pulled up her skirt, and sat down on the cold toilet seat. The hot urine felt good gushing out. Scared, that’s what she was. How silly – why should an old man scare her? And what in the world was he doing here? She did not know that there were Mormon artists. It seemed incongruous somehow. Mormon chapels were barren of art. According to Bill, the frontier survivalist culture of the early Mormons simply had no need of it. She came out of the stall smoothing her woolen skirt and straightening her sweater. A portly woman in a black and white checked dress was washing her hands at the sink, over and over, slopping on copious quantities of liquid soap. She turned to Ashlee with red lipstick framing huge teeth – to Ashlee they looked like the boards of a whitewashed fence – and introduced herself as Sister Pettigrew.

“You must be new!!” she said. Her voice was forced into a girlish register inside the thick throat.

“Yes, I just moved in last week.”

“Oh! Where are you from?!”

The two women dried their hands on the stiff white paper towels, and Ashlee noticed Sister Pettigrew staring down at her unpainted fingers, on which there were no rings. They walked and chatted down the hall to the Sunday School classroom and sat down in adjacent chairs. Ashlee felt the taut blubber of Sister Pettigrew’s thigh pressing against her own through the fabric of their skirts. She closed her eyes and listened carefully. The artist was not there.

Sunday came around again in its relentless way, like a spoke on a monstrous wagon wheel. The weather was a bit warmer and the wind didn’t fight Ashlee’s progress as she walked to church. She thought maybe the bishop would give her a calling this week. She would like to work in the nursery, to hold the babies and sing to them, to play and clap and dance. How nice it would be to enjoy babies at her leisure instead of with her face shoved up hard against poverty’s brick wall, the way she had raised her own five. As they’d grown, though, things had gotten better, and she was grateful. She was determined to be grateful. She took a seat on the back row, starting to feel hopeful about her new life. Being single was not as bad as she had feared – in fact, each day she felt more and more alive. She felt somewhat guilty that she did not miss Bill more than she did. But the truth was, it was exhilarating to be alone, even in spite of her eye problem. She couldn’t take photographs any more, but she would keep busy with church work, and in the spring, with her daughter’s help, she could still plant a garden, maybe in the lot next to her new apartment. She could travel and visit all the places and relatives that Bill was never interested in seeing. Maybe she could even write stories as she had always dreamed of doing. Even though the scope of her vision was shrinking, she was thankful for the quality of the circle that remained. And if it failed entirely – well, she would find beauty in other ways. She had wonderful children, and two sweet grandbabies. Counting her blessings, as the popular hymn taught, really did make her feel better. Sunlight played in through the windows and laid down warm, yellow strips along the pews.

As the congregation began to sing the second line of the opening hymn, the old artist strode in and without hesitation sat down in the open space next to her in the pew. She looked straight ahead and felt her muscles tense up. Didn’t he know that in Mormon meetings men weren’t supposed to sit next to women who were obviously alone? It was one of those unwritten rules. Blood pounded in her neck. Why did he have to disturb her newfound peace, with his stubble and his gasping and his veins? She was ready to think of new life, new beginnings, and he only reminded her of decay and death. Ffftah. Ffftah. She should feel sorry for him, but she did not. It was because he seemed not to take his own mortality with a proper head-hanging attitude, that’s what. He stood tall and he walked into churches the way he walked into waiting rooms – as if he owned the whole planet, as if no one had a right to be repelled by him.

As the meeting progressed, she carefully lowered her head and bent it slightly toward him to get a peek. He seemed to pay no attention to her and moved his arm very slowly, deliberately, over the back of the smooth wooden bench. His breathing slowed and quieted and she felt herself being lulled by it into not an unpleasant sense of familiarity. He smelled faintly of pine needles. Finally she got up the nerve to turn her head all the way to get a good look at him. He was really not so fearsome after all, not as ugly up close as she had imagined. His shoulders were muscular for an old man. His eyebrows were white and stiff like his hair, which had remained pressed against the top of his head when he took off his cap. His bristly cheeks seemed windburned, and she began to imagine that he had once been a young man, probably a rugged sort like the dockmen she used to watch working the riverfront where she’d grown up. Being old was maybe just a veneer. There was no reason to be bothered by a veneer. She turned her attention back to the speaker at the pulpit. He was reading from the scriptures.

“By reason of transgression cometh the fall, which fall bringeth death, and inasmuch as ye were born into the world by Water, and Blood, and the Spirit, which I have made, and so became of dust a living soul, even so ye must be born again into the kingdom of heaven, of Water, and of the Spirit, and be cleansed by Blood, even the blood of mine Only Begotten.”

Blood, water. Birthing. Ashlee recalled with satisfaction the rich sensations of her own births – her bag of waters bursting, always while she was standing – the warm gush, then the trickling down the legs. She recalled the blood-streaked mucus plug that always came at the beginning of labor, the way she would kneel down and stare at it in the bottom of the toilet bowl, steeling herself for what lay ahead. She remembered the warm, bright stream that always flowed out with the placenta at the end and seeped down into the crack between her buttocks. She remembered the pain. Most vividly she remembered the weight on her chest when the seconds-old baby was placed there, a hot, dense, slippery mass with the cord still attached, who looked up at her with virgin eyes. Many women she talked to had been numbed or knocked out for their births, and never really experienced them. Ashlee had never understood that. She considered childbirth too spiritual an event to miss, and, except for one, had had natural births, the last two at home attended by midwives.

“That was so manly,” Bill had said after having heard her in the next room panting and groaning all day to give birth to David, their fourth. It was one of the few compliments he had ever given her. But how could the most exclusively womanly act in the universe be “manly”? It had confused and irritated her at the time, but she hadn’t really known why, and had brushed it off, needing to tend to the new baby. But now she considered – if God used birth to describe salvation, he must really want us to understand the process of birth. If we fail to understand birth, we fail to understand Jesus. This is because – it came to her like the first labor pain – Jesus is not the father in the hospital lobby. Jesus is the mother in the birthing bed.
When she looked up, the meeting had already concluded and people were filing out of the pews. She hurried to gather up her things. Church was best that way anyway, she thought – preaching my own sermons to myself!

The old man turned toward her in the pew and watched her zipping her purse. He didn’t speak. Words were not his language, after all, he told himself. He never knew what to say to women, and he’d given up trying years ago. At his age, he wasn’t interested in changing his ways any. No, she would either like him or she wouldn’t, and it didn’t matter either way. What luck to run across her again – and in church! Finally, something good might come of his irrational sense of Sabbath duty. He’d sat down intending to look at her – and who could stop him? Looking was free – no sin in it! That was what artists were supposed to do. It was an obligation of the trade, nothing more. He certainly had no intention of indulging some Mormon divorcee’s domestic designs. No, he sniggered to himself, she’d better not get any ideas. All he wanted was to sketch her. He had been searching for a model ever since his last one went off to Vegas. 

Ashlee turned to slide out of the pew, and met the old man’s gaze at the end of her tunnel, as if they were looking at each other through either end of a tin can. His irises were turbulent mud-brown today, like the Ohio roiling under a clear sky in the early hours after a storm. The crosshatched skin on his neck folded and slid under itself like tectonic plates. He liked that she was smiling subtlely, without showing her teeth. It was that expression of secret satisfaction that intrigued him. Her lips were smooth and dry and pale pink. A feeling like hot liquid seemed to surge somewhere in his chest, coupled with something painful like shame – but it was nothing. Sister Pettigrew, wearing the same checked dress she’d worn the week before, came up to them and placed her manicured hand with the fashionable false nails on Ashlee’s shoulder.

“Have you met Brother Friedman?” she asked.

“Not yet,” said Ashlee. Her voice was light and mellow in his ears, somewhat nasal. He took her hand momentarily and nodded, and the skin on his palm and fingertips was rough.

“Are you coming to Sunday School?” asked Sister Pettigrew.

Ashlee twisted her neck to view the appendage on her shoulder. Into her circle of vision came the lipstick-stained kleenex that was tucked into Sister Pettigrew’s checked sleeve. From the sleeve wafted the chemical, artificial-floral scents of fabric softener and antibacterial soap. Ashlee thought of the waiting room. She thought of the way the Ohio churned in the days before she had eye trouble, back when she could see the whole span of it at once.

“I’ll be there in a little while,” she said.

“I’ll save you a place,” said Sister Pettigrew, glancing over her shoulder at the two of them as she waddled out of the chapel, tugging at her slip.

She asked him about himself – good, she was a talker, that was a relief. He was a widower, no children, he told her. A landscaper and an artist on the side – artist all the way now that he’d retired. His voice rumbled in her ears as if his chest were an empty oil drum. She couldn’t read emotion in his eyes – that was what was so animal about them. She was lovely, he thought to himself, in the face and limbs, and the torso and hips from what he could see; but not nearly buxom enough for his taste. Still, an excellent model. The cheekbones were exquisite.

He did not really want to know about her life. People’s lives were nothing but sorrow. It always made his ribcage feel tight, as if he had to fight for air. He was grateful she didn’t get too personal. So, would she consider sitting for him? Well, she thought, he was certainly not the typical tottering high priest type – simpering and spineless. He was not the typical anything, this artist. Adventure was a faraway thing that happened to rich and beautiful people in books and travel brochures – not to plain and simple homemakers like her. She was surprised to hear herself say yes. So was he.

“Next Tuesday then, at my apartment?” she offered. He produced a pen and paper, and together they drew up a simple map.

“See you then,” he said with a businesslike nod, and took up his briefcase and left. She decided not to share their conversation with Sister Pettigrew, who she was certain would phone her that evening.

*     *     *

Amy Bernays - "Waiting"

He had done a series of sketches of her form over several weeks and was getting nowhere. He had put off the realization as long as he could. He was old. What had made him think he could become an accomplished artist now, at his age? All the years wasted earning his and Donna’s way. The days, the nights, the seasons – where had they gone? As a young man, his deepest desire had been to paint. His parents had decided it was impractical – and it was. He went into landscaping with his round-faced and only brother Ben, a full tithe payer, a barbershop regular. Stiff-lipped Ben. When Ben died – the scarlet roses on the casket, the curling, vivid yellow anthers at the centers of the roses on the casket, their muted reflections in the dead, dull eyes of the funeral-goers – he ran the business alone, for years and years, empty, knuckle-aching decades of dirt and bulldozers and midnight ledger books. A quotidian numbness had claimed him without a fight, bought him cheaply, roots, eyes and all like a ten-pound bag of potatoes, and now perhaps it was too late. He didn’t feel any different inside at sixty-eight than he had at thirty-eight. But he was losing his dexterity and his mental edge. He feared the loss of his intellect above everything. The heart disease and arteriosclerosis didn’t bother him. “We’d like to start you on oxygen, Abe, a tank you can carry around with you.  It would make it easier to…” the cardiologist had begun. “No, hell no.” He never paid attention to his breathing. What he could not bear to lose was his mind. Without it, he could never achieve his desire – to paint a masterpiece.

He went to pick her up this time, thinking the light might be better at his home in the country. Maybe he could pose her under the trees. He was going to get it right. He would get it right. He was going to prove himself – to Ben, to all those taut-suspendered black-and-white pioneers in the tintypes that hung on the walls of the farmhouse when they were belt-whipped kids, and to all their rigid descendants. He would prove them all wrong.

She was glad to get out of the city. Brilliant white clouds rolled and slid and caught on jags across the cool morning sky. Maybe he would be in a good mood today and talk to her.

“Do you just not like to talk, or is it because of your lungs?” she asked after they had ridden for several miles in silence.

She was awfully impudent for a middle-aged woman. There are names for women like that.

“There’s nothing wrong with my lungs.”

“What is it then?”

“Heart trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

It wasn’t worth answering.

“Oh! Look!” She pointed to the tops of a group of sycamores sprouting from a sinkhole in someone’s front lawn. The twisted white limbs, naked against the March sky and swaying ever so slightly with the wind, showed bands of vivid color – red, royal blue, yellow, flame orange. “Look what someone has done! They’ve painted the tree tops!” As the car moved and she swiveled her neck and shoulders to match its speed, the treetops seemed to be a banner waving. She laughed with delight. There was an embarrassing twinge near his breastbone.

“I painted them. This is my yard,” he said gruffly.

She knew he would not answer if she asked him why.

He pulled the car up into the gravel driveway. On second thought, it was probably too cold and windy to draw outside. They would set up in the sunroom; though he did not like to draw there because it was overgrown with Donna’s houseplants. He still watered them out of a sense of duty, but they were scraggly and tangled and he knew nothing about trimming them. He set up a folding chair for her with sidelight on her face, and fumbled in his briefcase trying to extract his sketch pad without ripping a page. Finally he tore the page with a tug and threw it in the trash can. His breathing was raspy. Probably the March air. Why was she always so abominably cheerful? Once, walking through the hallway of the meetinghouse on his way out, he’d caught sight of her sitting on the floor of the nursery, two children wrapped in her lap and others gathered around. They were laughing and singing, “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam…” 

She watched him through her tunnel. He was utterly alone.

“Have you ever done a portrait of Christ?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

He grated his jaws together. “Because I don’t believe in Christ.”

“You don’t believe in Christ?! Goodness, how could you not?”

“I only believe in what I can see.” His eyes followed the contours of her face, and his pencil obeyed in quick, firm strokes. She was pressing on a sore spot. How many dreary years had he spent trying to force himself to believe before he gave himself permission to doubt? He was free now, and wanted to stay that way.

“I see Christ everywhere I look.”

“Well, I don’t. God is in heaven, man is on earth. Never the twain shall meet,” he squeezed out between his teeth. Bitter spit stung the lining of his throat as he swallowed.

“Christ is where they meet. He’s everywhere. Even inside you.” She let out a little laugh.

“Stop smiling now, I can’t draw you with half your face serious and the other half smiling,” he grumbled.

In spite of herself, she’d grown to like his reverberant voice. And she found she had become accustomed to his incessant gasping. The certainty of its rhythm soothed her ears, gentle, steady, like a heartbeat in a womb. Sunlight sifted in through the window.

“I’ve decided it’s against my principles to stifle smiles, or to plaster them on when I don’t feel like it. Give me that much freedom anyway,” she chimed.

“All right, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll draw you serious today and smiling tomorrow.”

The sunlight flickered for a moment as a cloud swept past.

“What if there is no tomorrow?”

He ignored her. She talked too much. That’s the way it always was with beautiful women. She was like a giddy young girl. She knew nothing of human suffering. Even her impending blindness didn’t wake her up to reality. A real Pollyanna. When he had finished drawing, he stood up and tucked his pencils back into his briefcase. She stepped over to look at the picture.

“No,” she said loudly, shaking her head.

“What do you mean, ‘no’? I’m the artist. I see you as I see you.”

“No. This is too ideal. Where is the birthmark on the side of my nose, the mid-life wrinkling at the sides of my mouth and eyes? Do you think I’m twenty years old?”

He looked at her and then at the drawing. “I’ll draw you however the hell I want to draw you,” he growled, and his chest began to heave.

Hot tears began to trickle down her cheeks and down over her chin. “Please try again, please try again,” she murmured, covering her face with her hands.

NOT tears, no, no, no. Something creaked in the hollow of his chest.

“Why is it so important that I draw you as you are?” he boomed, loosening the phlegm in his throat. “This is my style. Why should I change it now, after forty years, for God’s sake?”

“Abraham, Abraham,” she sobbed, crossing her arms over her chest and twisting from side to side as if trying to shake off a straightjacket.

“What? What is it?” He was enraged, confused, he wanted her gone, never to see her form again.

“It’s because you’re going to die, Abraham, you’re going to die!” she sobbed, suddenly pressing her warm, wet face against his breast, her tears soaking through his cotton shirt. Her tiny form convulsed, frail, helpless. The wailing from her throat shook his body, vibrating through its density to the core. He held her close and slowly stroked her hair. A decision hardened in his belly.

“Next week, come with me to my studio.”

*     *     *

Amy Bernays - "Down To Business"

Tuesdays had become their sketching days. In the evenings she worked on her story about them. It is the story you are reading now.

Abraham and Ashlee pulled into the neatly edged parking lot of a tall red brick building on the outskirts of town. Carved limestone trimmed its windows and doorway. April had come at last and the bulbs he had planted in the fall were blooming bright along the sidewalks – purple hyacinths and yellow daffodils and red tulips. He wished she would see them and laugh, but she was quiet. As they walked, she held his sleeve tightly between a thumb and two fingers. She’d found walking a straight line to be one of the most difficult tasks to perform without peripheral vision. She always felt off-balance.

He winced at the familiar face of the stone gargoyle that shoved its tongue out at them as they entered through the archway. The door was heavy, dark oak, smooth and cool against his hand. He paused to feel its deep grain and to catch his breath. Long time since he had had a model here. He felt slightly anxious. The inside of the elevator was embellished with silver art-deco ornamentation, and he watched as she pressed her fingers into it. He’d chosen this studio space because of the hodge-podge of architectural details, incoherent, somewhat mad. It suited him.

They got off on the top floor, and he unlocked a small door that led to a narrow staircase. She hesitated on the first step while he gasped and climbed a few stairs and gasped some more. At the end of her tunnel she saw him turn and indicate with a toss of his chin for her to close the door behind them. His eyes were softer and gentler than usual. She followed him up. As they reached the top of the stairs, he pushed open a trap door, and sunlight poured down like golden silk on their faces, their shoulders, their feet. Grasping his gnarled hand and coming up into the light, she saw that the entire attic was one large room with windows and skylights everywhere, several of them open. The blue of the sky filled her thirsty eyes to overflowing. A breeze cooled their foreheads and upper lips. There was a canvas-covered table near the center of the room. About ten feet away was a tall wooden easel, and near it, a small stand. That was all.
He opened his wooden box on the stand and began to arrange his paints and brushes, his palette knife, his tiny tin cups for turpentine and linseed oil. He had done it a thousand times, going through the motions again and again, and the loneliness of his ritual never claimed him. But today, unaccountably, he felt very near tears. She stepped gingerly to the edge of the hardwood floor, tipping to look out the window, as if she could fall off, as if it were the edge of the world. He looked at her from behind, a graceful curve from waist to hip to thigh, a perfect ‘S.’ She turned slightly and it was gone.

“No one can see us here but God,” he said. “This is the highest spot for miles.”

It seemed that his voice quavered just a bit. She set her purse on the floor next to the table and began to get undressed, dropping her clothes in a pile on top of the purse. As he measured out oil into the cup, he heard her inhale slowly and deeply, and then exhale as if through pursed lips.

She climbed up onto the table. “How do you want me?” she asked.

He looked up and blinked. His eyes moistened and it seemed a gong sung in his ears, thrommn, thrommn. “On your side, legs together and up on one elbow.  Stretch out.  Just like that will do,” he said.

“My arm here?”

“Yes, drape it over your waist, that’s fine.”

She closed her eyes.

He began to sketch a quick outline on the canvas with a touch of vermillion on a thin, dry brush. Due to his damn cardiologist’s appointment, it was already afternoon, and he was afraid the light would not last. The sky seldom gave him his wishes.

“Have you painted many women this way?” she asked.

“Some.”

“Isn’t it difficult not to… love them? I mean, once you have seen them.”

“I don’t make love to every naked woman who presents herself,” he said.

Detecting a smile in his voice, she turned toward it and peeked for just a second. His teeth were the color of dogwood blossoms, worn square and with a small gap between the incisors. It was the first time she had seen him smile.

He drew a few breaths, stirring his brush into the linseed oil. “Most people do not inhabit their bodies,” he said. “Whether they are naked or clothed, they are only shells.” 

A few more moments passed, still and slow. A cool breeze licked along her torso, her thighs. He was a train of thought and feeling, cars one after another coursing forward, pushed by the power of an unseen engine. His hands fought to channel the power through the brush to the canvas. He felt clumsy, embarrassed, as if finally, suddenly, his long experience would no longer serve him. The weak paint streaked and ran. He thought of his dear wife, the thousand small familiarities – the smells of her cooking, the way she folded his socks, fond phrases, remembered days, the shared faces of friends now dead. The dozen permutations of their long life together, the painful blundering attempts at understanding, the dull pain of missing each other, somehow passing each other by like cars on a highway. A smile, a wave. They had done the best they could to support one another. She tolerated his art, but had refused to pose for him. She was glad to arrange models for him. She was very efficient. She was gone and he had never painted her.

“You and I – are we shells?” asked Ashlee, her voice innocent as a child’s. Her eyelids were closed, softly, like the green cups of Venus fly traps. Large pink-brown areolas outlined with mauve rings budded from her small, flat breasts and trembled delicately at the pounding of her heart. The nipples were a dark mauve-brown too, pebbly-textured skin rising to firm, flat-topped buds, slightly out of round along the diagonal, as if they had been pressed that way by suckling infants. Donna’s breasts had been full and plaster-white and her areolas a pale peach-tone, nickel-small with pointed nipples, in the way of Rubens’ nudes or Renoir’s, promising so much, giving so little. They had never welcomed his filthy, groping lips. They had never produced milk. He could no longer repress the conflicted memories of deep sensations, the bitter shame that gathered at the back of his rough tongue, the anger and yearning that burned in his entrails, the horrible quiescent stiffness of Donna’s inert body as she allowed him his due. Guilt and resentment had been his daily bread.

There was a c-section scar on his model’s lower abdomen, and the pale lilac iridescence of stretch marks. Marks of suffering and sacrifice. She was an enigma. His eyes descended to the pubic mound, lush and curled, and to the dark cleft below. He put down his brush.

“Ashlee…”

“Yes?”

A mania possessed him, he was speeding out of his mind and into his body, a place he had not been since his youth. She cooed softly, unintentionally, slowly filling with want and need and desire, becoming her want, her need, her desire. He would relieve her, she knew, relieve her of her image, cast it for her in the mold of his golden eyes, for time and all eternity. He would share with her the heavy burden of self. Men were not the only ones who needed a place to put themselves. She opened her eyes and within their tight ring of darkness the whole room seemed to glow green. His eyes shone like candles.

“Sit up and lean back on your arms. Pull your legs up in front of you with both feet on the table.”

She braced herself and drew up her legs. He did not know how to ask for what he wanted next.

“Let your knees fall apart.”

She relaxed and spread them wide with a gentle groan. A ripple of delight passed through her as she felt his eyes take her in. The hair parted revealing large purply-brown labia. The inner lips fell open freely like the limp, fluttery petals of a day-old cut rose. A firm clitoris showed its head from under a pink fold. The smooth, honey-glossed surface of the hole spiraled inward, burst outward, fuchsia, royal purple, burnt umber, indigo blue, black. The fountainhead of mystery. This was what he wanted to paint.

Nervous, in a controlled panic, he placed another canvas on the easel and took up his wide, flat camel hair brush. He plied thick paint directly onto the raw canvas with no preliminary sketch. He grunted, working with bold strokes, confident, as if in a dream. It would be a deep palette, unlike his accustomed pastels and muted fleshtones, violet and peacock green and cobalt, mad complements pressing in on one another, defining one another, terrible, terrible vision, here the bitter edge of the executioner’s axe, here the sweet fecundity of the cornucopia’s brim.

*     *     *

“I’m concerned about some rumors I’ve been hearing in the congregation lately,” said the bishop, sitting across from her at his desk. “And I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but – Is it true that you and Abe Friedman are having an affair?”

“No.”

“Sister Dustin, you may not know this, but he paints lewd pictures. It would be in your best interest to stay away from him.”

“I enjoy his company very much.”

“Has he ever laid hands on you?”

“Yes.”

Bishop Lawson’s head dropped to his chest, and he closed his eyes as if praying for inspiration to guide this poor widow.

“Once,” she said. “When he and Brother Pettigrew laid their hands on my head and blessed me to regain my sight.”

*     *     *

He had taken her home then, both of them silent.

He felt the gravel crunching under his tires as he pulled up in his driveway.  He got out of the car and strolled out to the sinkhole, hands in his pockets, and looked up at the painted sycamores. Why had he painted them, trudging up the ladder every day for a week, brushes stuffed in his back pockets, paint cans swinging between the branches, strung up by ropes. It was for her he had done it. Before he even knew her. It was for the hope of her. Evening was falling and the first stars winked from behind wisps of cloud, massive spheres spinning, burning, dying and being born.

He considered his miserly life. It wasn’t that he was bad. He’d tried his best to keep the Ten Commandments. He’d been baptized and attended church most Sundays since he was a boy. But none of that had changed the one determining fact of his life, and it was this – that man is a beast, no different from the animals. A man was obligated to fill his stomach, and that only by depriving another man of his supper. Get ahead or get behind, kill or be killed, that was the law of this world. It was a finite world, a world of scarcity, where he found himself free to choose only between stealing and being robbed – and he hated himself either way. He had avoided – loving – people – no, it was a word he could not even say. He had avoided caring about people, because he must inevitably hurt them, use them, shame and abuse them or be shamed and abused by them. He hated a God who would put him in a bind like that.

Tree frogs croaked in the budding treetops, answering the melody of those in the next grove. He had never been satisfied. When he was a child, it seemed there were never enough biscuits – his hunger, he learned, would make others suffer. If he cried from hunger, he was beaten, because he did not have faith enough that God would provide. To want was to hate others and to hate God. To want things of beauty – it was the most selfish thing a man could do.

Somewhere in his heart he had always felt that was not right. But his mind had continued to condemn him as if it were true. Maybe he was the one who had been blind, blind to his own power to do good and be good. Maybe the world was not finite after all. Maybe what he had always thought of as taking could somehow also be giving. And in giving, perhaps, he could finally be filled. Perhaps five loaves of bread and two fishes – somehow – could be enough to feed a multitude. 

She was a chaste-hearted woman, a mother and homemaker, a daughter of God. He thought of the way her voice sometimes broke with emotion as she sang the hymns of redemption, recalled the shy, luminous expression on her face the day she returned from a temple trip. She had prayed for him, she said, and he had scowled at her and hated himself for scowling. She knitted blankets by feel for the maternity home and made phone calls to a neighbor in the hospital. Yet she was a sensualist. She was a wanton whore, a temptress, swollen with a suffering need, nearly moaning with it. And from that place of need came good, came life itself. He had seen it with his own eyes. The spirit and the body were one. Jesus Christ!

It was too blasted naive, too simple – wasn’t it? Could it be true? His filthy lips, his selfish genitals – could they be “good?” Could he bless a woman with his pitiful neediness? Could he take her with all the fury of his hot, hardened balls and not only please her, but please God? Please the Father in searching out the limits of truth with the rearing head of his own penis, the pleasure of his own body, of her body? Two wills not competing, but one?

Yes! The pleasure of God, the pleasure of humankind – the same! God loved him! God was opening the final frontier to him, a whole green continent sprawling clear to the horizon, spilling over with color, texture, taste, smell, sound. A rich new earth was spread like a Thanksgiving table before him, without money, without price, a new and living world! Together they could plumb her deepest grief-filled seas and thrust into her dark, laughing forests, they could climb over her stark mountains and undulating hills, through the dumb, stumbling night and straight on into the sunrise. They could follow the spiral all the way home. It wasn’t too late.

He felt a buzzing in his head like the roar of a distant waterfall.  The edges of his lips began to tingle. Sensation began to return down the sides of his neck to his shoulders, his arms, down to his wrists and the palms of his hands. Suddenly the long forgotten rasp of his own breathing dawned upon his consciousness. With one tremendous screech, a rusty gate burst open deep in his chest and he fell to his knees with great heaving sobs, “Oh my Lord, oh my God…”

*     *     *

Ashlee stood barefoot in her garden, her toes cooling in the soil. It was already mid-morning, and all the weeding was done. She had the portable phone clipped to the waist of her pants, not wanting to miss his call. The early summer sun had climbed past the low-lying banks of clouds – it was a fine day. Surely he would finish the painting today. Her heart ached to see him. To look in those strange, ageless eyes. To hear him saying her name. She couldn’t wait to tell him that her vision was improving. The black walls of the tunnel had begun to soften to a fuzzy gray. The phone rang.

“Abe?”

“Sister Dustin?” It was Bishop Lawson’s businesslike voice. “I have some sad news to report. I thought you ought to know. Abe Friedman was found dead at his home last night.” Several moments pass. She stands staring at the ground. A circular picture rimmed in fog. Yellow-orange grains of pollen stand poised on the anther of a pumpkin flower against the deep green background of a leaf. “The funeral will be Thursday at eleven. Would you feel up to saying the closing prayer?”