Becoming His Muse, Part Three

BECOMING HIS MUSE

The train home barrels through frosted fields and drab industrial zones.

This time apart from Logan is going to be like medicine — necessary but unpalatable. After our last intense conversation, when I brought up that four letter L word that so often makes or breaks relationships, it was clear to me that we are not on the same page. I’m not even sure we are speaking the same language. Except when we’re naked and not using any words at all…

I shift in my window seat. I don’t want to think about that now. I clear my mind by watching the small towns and wintry brown fields roll by. Going home for Thanksgiving will give me some time to gain some perspective on our strange situation.

I’ve been enjoying being his muse, but what if I want something more? A part of me does. Another part cannot sort out how to turn our secret life into a real one. This is what I need to think about, because as much as I feel my heart, mind and body inextricably bound to Logan’s heart, mind, and body, I do not know if we match up outside of bed sheets, in the real hustle and bustle of the world.

The train makes its long slow cruise through the unattractive outskirts of the city. Soon we’re in the tunnels, burrowing underground to the mid-city station. I feel my ears pop as the pressure changes.

After disembarking, I wait outside the train station until my mom pulls up in her silver Lexus SUV. She’s waving and smiling through the windshield before she’s fully pulled over. I hope she has the sense not to clip the taxi idling by the curb just ahead of me. My mother is flighty and distracted at the best of times, except around my father. With him she is the Attentive Wife or the Efficient Executive Assistant. He’s the Boss and she never questions him. Until I went to college, I rarely did either, except for a short rebellious bout between fifteen and sixteen. For the most part, I was a Good Little Daddy’s Girl.

“Honey, honey, honey!” calls my mom jumping out of the car but leaving it running. “It’s
so
good to see you!” She gives me the once over, noticing that I still haven’t lost the Freshman Fifteen (I can tell by the fleeting tick of her upper lip) and then she pulls me into her thin-armed embrace. She actually feels stronger, as if she’d started working out. And when I really look at her, instead of just glancing and seeing what I expect to see, I notice that she does look more trim and fit than she had last summer.

I toss my suitcase in the back seat and climb into the passenger seat. Once my mom has buckled her belt, she says,

“I know you’re disappointed Tess won’t be here, but guess who else is home for the holiday?” Uh oh. I have a funny feeling where this is going.

“Don’t tell me. Warren.”

She beams. “So you
have
been thinking about him.”

“No, actually, I haven’t. But you’ve been trying to set us up since we were in diapers. For the hundredth time, I’m not interested.”

Warren Simmonds has been our neighbor since we moved into that house when I was one and a half. He’s goofy and fun and proved to be a good friend between the ages of eight and ten, but then he got pretty nerdy through middle school and high school (and I mean, the Dungeons and Dragons kind of nerdy), and so we survived awkward neighborly BBQ’s for years since then. He’s a good guy. Just not my type. If Tess had been here, she and I probably would have taken pity on him and invited him out for a drink one night since at some point we’d all want an escape from our parents.

As we pull up into the crescent driveway, the wide front door opens and out pours my father, John Rudyard Evans Nichols, Esq. (JR to his friends.) He stands at the top of the steps with his hands on his hips and a grin on his moustached face. He looks like the king of his castle.

“How’s my princess?” he booms as I slide off the leather seat and onto the pea gravel driveway.

“Great, Daddy. Good to be home.”

I climb the steps and he grabs me, lifting me off my feet, to give me a lung-crushing hug. He played football in high school and his hugs always feel like tackles. Apparently, he earned a football scholarship to one of the local colleges but his father insisted he turn it down, enroll at Harvard, and get his law degree. He always says it was the best decision his father ever made for him, but I have my doubts. Not about his choice to be a lawyer—he’s good at it and he seems to like it—but what must it have felt like to have your father step on a dream come true for most high school football players. “You’ll like it for a few years and then later you’ll wish you’d done something more serious. I’m saving you time, son.” Those were Grandfather’s words, apparently, and my father used them on me when I’d decided to major in Visual Arts, only he replaced the word ‘son’ with ‘princess’.

But I was adamant about studying painting no matter how he tried to dissuade me.

“So you’re going to waste my money on art and then go get a serious degree? Can’t you at least aim to be an art dealer? I hear there’s money in that, but you’d be better off majoring in Business. You can do art on weekends.”

“Either I study what I want or I don’t finish my degree.”

He’d relented, probably figuring he’d have more chances over the years to change my mind.

Telling people what to do has gotten him far in his career, and my mom lets him get away with it at home, but there’s no way I’m going to let him rule my life now that I’m so close to having the chance to live it on my own, but first I have to graduate.

“I’ve got a bunch of catalogues for you,” says my father as we head through the foyer.

“Oh? Art catalogues?” I’m ribbing him, because he’d never send away for something like that.

“Law schools, Princess. Dean Ascott says your grades are looking good. And if you win that award, that will look good on an application.”

“Dad, we have to talk about that.”

I hear the sound of sports announcer coming from the den.

“We have lots of time to enjoy this weekend. Why don’t you settle in first,” he says, pausing at the foot of the stairs. I can tell he wants to get back to the den, and I’m not exactly thrilled to broach the subject of my plans to move to the East Village.

“Sure.”

My mom is halfway up the steps with my small tote bag. I follow her up to my room.

My mom keeps my room exactly as it was when I’d graduated high school, except it’s cleaner and my make up and nail polish bottles no longer litter my mirrored dressing table. Everything is still white, just on the tasteful side of frilly, with splashes of rose pink in the throw pillows and blankets. The white duvet has tiny pink roses embroidered into it. My middle name is Rose and so my mother found myriad ways to work that into her design schemes for my life.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” she says placing the lighter of my bags onto my bed. She turns to me and her eyes are glistening though she is smiling. I’m not up for a tearful reunion. I sigh and drop the suitcase I’m carrying beside my closet door, and say, “Me too.”

I told myself on the train ride up that I’d make this a good family holiday, with no fights and drama. I’d show my parents I’d matured and was ready to take on my independent life. Independent from them. My relationship with Logan has given me a new sense of confidence, and freedom. With it, I feel a growing sense of responsibility toward my parents, not to do what they wanted, but to try to respect their choices in life so that I might expect them to one day respect mine. Maybe not at first, but eventually.

My mom hugs me again. I feel her fragility this time, her age. Not that she’s old, but it strikes me that she’ll only get older, and with time. I hug her back.

“I love you, mom,” I whisper. I feel as if I might be saying goodbye for a very long time even though I’ve just arrived. But this feeling isn’t about coming or going, it’s a feeling of another layer of childhood sloughing off me, like the outgrown skin of a snake.

She looks up at me—I’m about 2 inches taller than she is— her eyes crinkle with a smile. “It’s so good to have you home.”

“You just said that, Mom.”

She squeezes my arm and heads toward the door. “It’s never not going to be the case, Sweetie, so it bears repeating. Indulge me, why don’t you.”

I look around at my perfect room, my perfect mother, at the vestiges of what appears on the surface to be a perfect childhood.

My mom’s at the door now and she turns, her smile gone, a look of sadness in her eyes as she surveys my room.

“When your child is little, you never really think of them growing up. Not really. You can’t imagine it. Every inch they grow is a new surprise…” She seems to be talking to herself, not to me, but after a pause, she looks at me again.

“You never imagine they’ll one day be taller than you are, that they’ll surpass you in so many ways.”

“Mom…”

She shakes her head. “It’s as it should be, Ava, but it’s hard for me sometimes. When you’re gone, I forget how grown up you are. In the months I don’t see you my mind seems to go back to the past. I remember you as a little girl. Forget that you’re a grown woman.”

She looks shy and embarrassed now. “Sounds foolish, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I say. It doesn’t seem foolish to me, but maybe a little odd. I have an urge to tell her all about Logan, but I know she won’t understand. Not only would it blow her little girl memories out of the water, it would cause a whole new drama to unfold. She would tell my father, he would have a fit…

I won’t risk it. While on the train, I decided to keep that relationship to myself this weekend, and to pretend, for a while, it didn’t even exist. Because I just can’t imagine the secret becoming a reality. My parents would never approve of an older man, a teacher no less, an Irish immigrant who’s made his way by writing provocative literature, by seducing young muses…

I draw my arms around myself, feeling far away from Logan and the parts of myself that felt sure about us just a couple of days ago. Us. Is there an ‘us’? What are we? It’s not even a relationship. It’s an affair, a secret affair, with no hope of a future. That realization hits me hard as I stand in my room wishing I could talk to my mom about it and knowing I can’t. Knowing that I could never bring Logan home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Knowing that even if I could imagine a future with him it would never look anything like
this
. Like home.

As I wrestle with thoughts of the future, my mom still seems to be gazing into the past.

“Is everything all right with you and dad?” I ask.

Her eyes drop their haze of melancholy nostalgia and instantly brighten with a kind of trained enthusiasm as she says, “Yes, of course! Everything’s perfect.”

She beams with a confident wifely smile and we’re back to the perfect life, the perfect family, the window onto some silent truth now closed.

“Hey, you gals coming down for a snack?” My father booms from the bottom of the stairs. I can’t remember the last time he set foot in my room. Not since before I turned sixteen. He prefers to call from a distance. And on this occasion, I guess he doesn’t want to stray too far from the football entertainment.

“Coming,” calls my mother in a sing song voice. To me, she says, “Come on now, you must be famished after your journey. I’ve got a ton of low carb snack options for the weekend.”

So the veiled comments on my weight have begun. “Just give me a minute to freshen up,” I say.

“Oh, that reminds me. The Simmonds’ are coming by tonight for drinks. You don’t mind, do you?” Without waiting for an answer, she strides off down the hall, calling out to my father as she goes, “John honey, did you put the wine in the fridge?”

I can’t tell if he answers her or is cheering whatever football team is on the tube.

I sit on the edge of my bed and pick at one of the embroidered roses. I don’t know if it feels
good
to be home, but it is home, and there’s some comfort in that. But if I’m honest with myself, I really do miss Logan. I feel caught between two places, two selves — the self I used to be safe at home and this new self finishing college, growing up, and getting ready to move out into the world. This new self breaking rules and taking risks.

I hear the buzz of my phone vibrating in my purse. I reach down to pull it out. My heart beats a little faster when I see who it is.

I miss my muse.

I smile, letting my thumbs respond.
She misses you too.

I’m sorry for the dickhead things I said before. Come back
.

I will. In 4 days. You need to write.

I want to write with my tongue all over your body.

His words, his desire, erase all the complicated feelings from before.

I’d like that too but it’ll have to wait.

I hate waiting. I love touching you.