Retreat to Love (20 page)

Wednesday morning Caleb slipped out of our warm bed pre-dawn and hadn’t made it back in time for breakfast. He slammed into the dining room just as I was finishing my coffee and grinned widely at me.

“Oh, Ash, babe, I’m sorry I was so long. It was incredible—the trail up the stream was bursting with dragonflies and blue jays, and then I swung back by my cabin and Brandon had left some coffee cups on the porch and, oh my God, I couldn’t believe my luck, there were I kid you not, three crows hopping around on the rims and all over. I even got some shots of one of them bowing over the tray like a supercilious waiter while the other two were gazing at each other like star-crossed lovers. Just wait till you see it.” He finished this little rant with a loud smooch on my cheek as he reached for his coffee cup.

“Great.”

“Yeah, it was.” He poured and I passed him the cream and he finally stood still. “Hey, I’m sorry I woke you this morning.”

“It’s okay, I know you need to catch the light, and I’m glad you got some great work done.” I squeezed his upper arm (mmmm, all muscle) as he came back in to get the coffeepot. “Just don’t call me babe. I hate that. You didn’t give birth to me, and I’m not an infant.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not a big deal. Just try to not do it, okay?”

He nodded, still jazzed from his morning. “’Kay.”

But then Thursday and Friday mornings he did the same thing, and Friday night I suggested maybe he should sleep in his own cabin, since he was getting less and less subtle in his morning ablutions and we were staying up late enough for the lack of sleep to turn me crankier than I needed to be. He got all puppy-pouty on me again and promised to be super-quiet if I’d let him stay.

I gave in.

But, big surprise, he woke me when the door slammed behind him before six the next morning, and to make it worse he came back in to apologize and decided somehow it would help if he rubbed my shoulder to get me relaxed again. All it did was wake me up further. And he was getting impatient to get out in the dawn and jiggling his foot against the bed’s side rail so I had to practically shove him off the quilt to get him to go. And he said ‘sorry’ three more times on his way out. I buried my head under the pillows but never managed to get back to sleep.

Then it got bad. We went to his studio after lunch. He wanted to show me the new prints, and we made a lot of the usual jokes about skanky artists inviting women up to see their etchings, and then we got there and, well, I just didn’t like them.

I didn’t like his composition of the crow and coffee shots, and the deer at the salt lick looked derivative of some hunting lodge oil painting, and the hatching chrysalis, which he was going to put into a maternity-ward setting, were so soft-focus they were hard to decipher. It’s not like they were the finished product, I knew that. I knew my reaction to them raw might be vastly different to my reaction to them when composed, but I just couldn’t grasp the frayed ends of his enthusiasm and turn it into excitement on my part.

So, I wasn’t jumping up and down for him.

I wasn’t rude or anything. I’m not that big an idiot. I did what I could to praise the prints, to look for the good points and stoke his ego. Apparently, Caleb was getting damn perceptive when it came to reading my body language, or my mind, or my aura, or something.

“What’s so terrible about them, then?” he asked, all mopey.

“Wrong? Who said anything was wrong?”

“No one. No one said they were right, either, did they?”

I knitted my brow at him. “I said they were good. How is my reaction so important anyway?”

“Don’t play me for an idiot, Ash. You know damn well you’re my sounding board here. If you don’t like them you should just be honest with me.”

So I told him he was wrong, told him he was imagining it and being defensive and even paranoid. But he wasn’t so happy with me, and to tell the truth, I wasn’t so happy with myself. The longer we went into it and into it, the more I realized I hadn’t been nice about the prints. But I still thought my reactions were valid—I wasn’t crazy about the work itself. But I also wasn’t crazy about the way I’d expressed myself. Instead of treading carefully, I’d figured a slightly glib path was good enough to get me through.

Eventually I asked, “Do you want me to stay and talk about this some more, or go?”

“Go.”

He didn’t move a muscle, so I had to stretch pretty far across the space between us to brush his cheek with my lips. “Come by and get me for dinner?”

He exhaled. “I’ll be working here for a while. Why don’t I just see you there?”

I nodded, and couldn’t think of much else to say. I left.

Dinner would be a pasta salad—no cooking time to speak of, but I expected him to show up about ten minutes earlier than he did. I wasn’t waiting for him or anything—I was sitting in the common room sketching while I listened to the radio. Wimberley got several country stations and, after I played with the antenna a little, an alternative rock station out of Austin.

Because I wasn’t going to be the first one in the kitchen again. Been there, done that, written the cookbook. So I didn’t rise until after I’d heard him run the water and clank the pot on the stove and open the sticky door of the cabinet where the cutting boards lived.

He didn’t say anything, so I didn’t say anything. I just got my favorite knife and started dicing the tomatoes. He spooned the cornbread into the pan. I scooched aside so he could open the oven door. He closed it with a bit more of a bang than I considered strictly necessary.

The water was bubbling.

He was looking, presumably, for the penne, but since he hadn’t bothered to put the mixing bowl in the sink he couldn’t tell it was tucked behind it against the knife block. After his third trip to the pantry, I scraped the tomatoes into the serving bowl and slid the pasta bag out from its hiding place, handing it towards his chest.

“I know,” he snapped, then opened it and dumped the contents into the pot, sending scalding bubbles up to land on his hand.

“Fuck.”

He didn’t elaborate, and when he unwrapped the dishtowel from his wounds I took it to give me leverage in opening the jar of artichoke hearts.

“Operating with your usual thoughtful sympathy, I see,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“I can’t say I understood you, though. You apparently have some problem with my behavior, Mr. Paragon of Romance?”

He gave the pasta a quick stir. “Oh now I’m not romantic enough as well as being crap at my job?”

“I never said that. Either of that.”

“What are you saying, then, Ash? You’re doing your best to be as unclear as possible, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Gee, why would I mind?”

We locked eyes for a moment before I reached around him to get the mayo out of the fridge. My back was to him as I dumped it in with the olives and tomatoes and everything, then reached for some dry mustard and tarragon. “I never said you were crap at your job, not even remotely. I liked your stuff, I like talking to you about it, and I think what you have is going to turn out great. Just because I can’t see in it the same things you can doesn’t mean your vision is bad, it just means I see it differently.”

“Yeah, we seem to see a lot of things differently.”

I didn’t think that deserved a reply, and I suspect my look told him so. I tasted the penne. “That’s ready, drain it and mix it in cold water.”

He pulled out the colander. “Don’t tell me what to do, I know how to cook fucking pasta.”

My vegetable dressing tasted perfect. I added one more dash of pepper, then pushed the bowl towards him. “Fine then, you finish it. If I’m such an overbearing person you maybe want to talk to Margie about it, see if she’ll assign you to Angelica. I’m sure she’d love to get a crack at rounding off her tour of men. You get sex, I don’t have to cook with you; everyone’s happy.”

The timer for the oven went off as I left the room, so whatever Caleb may or may not have said was lost in the buzz and the slamming door.

Fine then. Being alone gave me a chance to throw myself into my art, which had been suffering some neglect. I worked with the quick assurance and precision I loved but only found in maybe thirty percent of my labors. I woke up in the middle of the night with a clear plan for the patch about Jason, how to put me in his temple as both individual and a generic Venus from his brain. Since I had just the right fabric scrap for the marble-look of my figure, I got up to dig through the box until I found it. As pitch dark as it was in the country at two a.m., the windows reflected back the colors and motion in my studio, fish-bowlish and yet safely encompassing in the silence. I sat at the machine, and stitched, and cut, and basted, and sang along to the old country tunes on the radio, and drank a lot of water, and worked.

I was becoming all too aware of the time during this reign of Margie’s food schedules—I should have gone to a normal retreat where they didn’t make you cook the communal meal. So I knew it was just past five when the dawn light intruded into my space. My spine screeched as I stood, and my eyes were gritty and dry. The radio was playing some post-
Gambler
Kenny Rogers, which I never much liked anyway, so I switched it off.

I’d done good. The patch for Jason was as close to my mind’s eye as I ever got, and technically it shined. It only took a couple of moments for me to iron it flat and hot and press it against my hanging felt.

The birds were intent on their business. Caleb would probably be up among them, unless he’d been up too late with the raccoons. Rolling my shoulders under the pulse of the shower sent me deeper and deeper towards comatose. I didn’t even put my clothes on, just climbed under the sheets with a towel on my head and one around my chest. It was Sunday. No one was looking for me. I slept for hours, dressed, munched some cereal in the kitchen, walked up the river an easy ways with my coffee, then went back to ValeSong and slept through lunch.

The thing is, with that second nap, I’d cried myself to sleep. It was unexpected. It made me mad. Since when does Ashlyn May cry herself to sleep over a man? Then I cried some more and told my pillow I was really crying because I was mad he’d made me feel like crying, and then told my pillow (it was skeptical about the first reason) really I was crying because of the pent up worry about Gran, and not knowing what to tell Zach, and what had happened in my life to make my own mother scared to talk to me. (The pillow let me get away with that, though it pointed out my worries were hardly pent up, what with my sharing them with everyone I could get my hands on. I told it to shut up and balled it up into my chest and buried my head in it, and it relented softly.)

It was one of those groggy awakenings, confusing because of the afternoon light and the sheets which had gotten crumpled under my neck and ribs as I slept. Someone was knocking at my door—a refreshing change from the usual walking right in. My pillow was still damp and my legs were cold, and I barely breathed until I heard the steps walking down my porch.

Presumably it had been Caleb. There was a tray outside with a bowl of fruit salad and a cheese sandwich, but no note. It seemed to me he was making an awful lot of assumptions in bringing me a late lunch, but I was, after all, hungry, so I brought it inside. He was probably hiding behind the scrub oak taking pictures for his
Food in the Wood
series. I stuck my tongue out towards the trees, just in case.

At dinner I sat between Lizzy and Wren, and when Caleb passed me the salt before I’d tasted my tomatoes, I said, “No thank you,” even though, when I bit into the salad, it needed the extra flavor-boost.

On Monday we sat next to each other at breakfast and dinner but when he bumped into me with his shoulders I scooted my chair away, politely ensuring he had all the personal space he could ever need.

On Tuesday after lunch he caught up with me as I went back to finish up the Wig patch.

“Ash, babe, aren’t you ever going to talk to me?”

“Haven’t I asked you not to call me that?”

He blushed. His skin was such a lovely deep color that blushing was a cranberry affair for him, gentler than my own cherry-red flames. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

Silence. Then, “Can we go talk?”

“About what?”

Slightly more hostile silence. “About the fact you’re avoiding me for no good reason, maybe?”

“That’s not what I’m seeing. I just happen to be busy with my work at the moment.”

Definitely not silence as Caleb ripped a dry branch off of the mesquite and hurled it towards the creek. “Damn, Ash! Whatever the hell I did, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know what was so bad, is freezing me out like this really the way you’re going to deal with it? How the fuck is that fair to me?”

He was staring pretty nastily at me, but it was my turn to generate hostile silence. “Last I checked, screaming obscenities and throwing things wasn’t in the ‘How to achieve effective communication’ relationship guide, Caleb. Please excuse me now, I have some work to do.” And I turned slowly and paced myself until I was, presumably, out of his line of vision, then stomped back to my room to tell the pillow all about the latest agony in my life.