Eddie puts the final touches on the serpent’s eye in Cleopatra’s headdress. Goes into the bathroom. Scrubs vociferous under his nails.
Sella knows he is a painter. But Eddie does not wish to complicate their first evening together with a discussion of his recent works. Firstly, he does not wish to frighten her, and secondly he does not wish to lie. Meticulous scrubbing now done, Eddie’s nails are raw. It is 7:30.
In the third left drawer – the top drawer – hidden under two socks and a newspaper clipping, the bronze stag slumbers. Eddie has touched it each time since the first time he took a woman out on the town.
Sella still lives at home. Her father had passed on; her mother is oblivious in sickly, sea foam curlers. The old lady does not give Eddie much hassle.
Eddie and Sella eat hot dogs, next ice cream. He notes her love of Pistachio, a flavor that gives him hives. Then off to a film. Eddie does not pay attention. Sella is quite involved. He loved this theatre as a child. The seats are still velvet and red. The fullness of the colors sends Eddie. As he stares at Sella in the seat beside him, her ripe peached knees pressed together and her ankles splayed out, his eyes sketch across her lovely legs, such beautiful ankles. Mostly he notices that she blends into the surroundings. Sweet Sella does not exude any of the hues he finds so distracting in the other women he brings to see pictures here.
Out back of theatre he places his bare hand upon Sella’s breasts, later, his head. The streets are pulled at four corners across the city in a grid, black and infinite. Eddie and Sella are the one point in this quadrant that is solid, non-elastic, beyond sculptural, perched on the tongue of this alley’s mawish shadow.
Eddie can sense their impending marriage. And it comes.
He never does suspect that furnishings will be the first stroke upon the broad canvas of their doom. Eddie being a painter (and highly trained at that) is sensitive to the aesthetic of their home. Sella cares solely about the accumulation of elaborate, Rococo: wallpaper, end-pillows, flowers. She pointedly places fresh lilacs and lilies in his workroom and on the creaky oaken tables beside their bed. It distresses Eddie when Sella displays no inclination towards a sparse homescape, no notion of quality over ornamentation.
Sella simply cannot abide the peeling wallpaper in the upper left corner of their kitchen. She is subsumed as they eat hard or soft-boiled eggs. Eddie likes them hard, Sella soft. This requires two pots, the steam of which only makes the wallpaper worsen. She tells him teary-eyed that their home is surely coming unwrapped. Eddie in turn tells her, “A home is a home, not a gift.”
Eddie owns three suits, selected by Sella, all the same. The difference hinges upon the hue of the neckwear, which Eddie is permitted to choose for himself.
At holidays Sella demands decoration. The whole of their home staggers decadent under the stench of pine and the weight of the perpetually plumping cherubim. The roundness of their faces delights her (in the first year Eddie consented, so he could see the sliding up of her smile). In the second year their plastered and painted faces beam too bright. The cherubim – after a year of hard storage – are now afflicted by a leprous flaking about their precious eyes. Winged, beaten, eyeless, sentinels, they plop down upon corner shelves, between books, and above doors. Round and pink, their tender parts swathed in a free-floating all too sheer fabric.
Eddie ends conversations abruptly each time he catches a glimpse of one. Sella picks up on these halts in their dialogue, “Dinner. Florenti—” And she smiles that smile, one like the cherubim army must have wielded back in their service days. “I know, I know, aren’t they breathtaking?”
When things get stale Eddie has the idea to take her dancing. Their wedding had been small with no dancing involved. He hopes it will loosen her up. Her mind is trapped in form; she needs mass. Sella on the dance floor moves to the rhythm strictly, never the underpinnings. She is a solid dancer, but lacks boldness. Her movements become muddled, repetitive. Far more trying for Eddie, is that sweet Sella always manages to keep her skirt just below her knees, even when spinning. This frustrates Eddie due to the quality of her legs, as well as the money she invests in underthings. Often they stay in. Sometimes they go to the pictures.
At the window he places her face in his hand, shaken by the sheerness of the skin slithering over the mechanics of her cheekbones.
In the scene where they part they have just left a film about a man, a bike with a straw basket, and some flowers. On the walk home Sella keeps referring to the flowers as ‘Ladyfeet.’ Eddie enters the bedroom without ushering in the light. Sella lost in filmic flowers, her wrist consumed by a silver bracelet, stands over the dark sink.
A lethal game of touch tag explodes. The next thing Eddie knows his books are strewn around him on the floor. They all lay open to words. Sella is just words. Sella is just a word. When she finally makes him leave these are the books he will have to pack.
He rents a room three blocks away, one left and two rights. Moving is easy. The books again in place, Eddie resumes. His only muse now, the stag -- stylized, bronze, and small.
For a full year after Sella he attends classes, learns that color in love (and life) does not require truth. He learns it, but he does not buy it. He spends every day of this year in studies of the stag. He starts with the primary colors, lets the outline out across the page, then fills it solid. Next, he begins hue, vibrancy, shadow, and tone, toys with contrast. When he has trudged stolid through every permutation of the horse’s hues he must broaden.
The stag will be wading across the end of sunset. The stag is blackened by backlight and heading toward his window. The shadows are reaching, just as old heady poplars in the strangling summer dark sway, straining to give cover to young bodies spilled out and entwined just beyond their feet. The darkness here is so extreme you can create the bark from a memory.
Eddie’s hand is poised at the level of the setting sun. He is dissecting the horizon. A woman stands below his window on the street. She is trying to string together a series of incidents she learned about in grade school: ‘High society events remain largely segregated. 1469, yes…1469 Ferdinand of
The light slowly fades. Eddie’s eyes crash into a narrow gorge between so many buildings and land on Marguerite. Marguerite is in the shadow; Eddie looks to color that in.
She passes his window every day at sunset for two weeks and two days before Eddie is out waiting. He does not go down until the stag and the sunset are complete. This way when he brings her home he’ll have something to show her.
On their first date they go dancing. Eddie is not going to make the same mistake twice. Dancing is an easy way to learn about women.
*
Marguerite lives in two rooms on Hyacinth. Where the smell coils in thick ropes made for choking, like the hair of the women that Marguerite overhears gossiping when her windows are open in summer. She burns oils to keep out the smoke.
It is the sheer depth of his irises that lets her say: “Yes. Seven. 8C. 473 Hyacinth.” A cat’s back at midnight in those irises.
A sketch caught on the silhouette of the nose, a strip of cream and light. The scent of Lotus oil, a book by the bed open to a certain page and she cannot make out the words, save: ‘for glue in making boxes,’ maroon its binding. A scarf, vermilion on the doorknob, bronze. The lamp left lit. A woman opening a heavy door onto the prairie at night. A green ribbon at the nape of her neck. Her hand upon a stray hair. The stars at night. Lips of youngish girl, a blond, calling back a tune from the player piano. Baubles of hammered brass hung from her ears.
Marguerite awakens in the morning before her usual time. Tonight she will be dancing.
Lewis and Ackerson staring at the scarf on the floor. Ackerson wants to touch it, but has to wait.
“Hey Lewis, that’s some color.”
“It smells like your wife.”
“That kid’s gonna have one hell of an electric bill.”
