The News of the World (7 page)

“Oh, this garlic!” she yelled. “This garlic has got to go!”

“Tomorrow,” I answered. “Just one more day.”

“You know what Ruth thinks?”

“That she could get me off with insanity?”

“That you're having an affair.”

I poked my head outside the shower curtain and stared at Story. She was naked, brushing her teeth, and the way she bent to the sink burned across my heart. “What?”

Story tapped her brush and looked up. Such a smile. “You're not having an affair. You've got your secrets, but you're not having an affair.”

Before Story left for the office, I grabbed her lapels and said, “Listen, try this: get the township business out of your head, okay? If you have to, delegate some authority, make a new committee, but get it out of your head. And Story.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Come home alone. No Ruthless Ruth. No complicated preoccupations. Just you. Seven o'clock.”

“Is there something I should know, Dan?”

I showed her my palms and waved one up at the garlic doorway fringe. “You know it all already. I'll see you at seven.”

She gave me a funny, get-well-soon look, and I thought what it must be like for the mayor to be married to a wizard-master of the dark and light arts, but I also thought:
it's worth it.
She'll go and worry about me for thirty-five minutes, until township troubles hit the fan, and it's worth it.

After Story had left, I ran up to the campus for my ten o'clock life class, arriving just in time to let Tim, our model, in early. An irrepressible townie, he sits for the group bareassed in a buckskin jockstrap on a wooden stool, one knee drawn up to his chest, his heel on the stool seat. As he passed by me to go change clothes, he said: “One more time! Tomorrow I'm in Virginia Beach, and,” he pointed at me and smirked, “art class is history.”

I had forgotten: it was the last day of school. I was surprised and for the first time in weeks, time became real. My students filed in around me, and I had to smile; this was certainly a waking dream, but a good dream.

Mary Ann Buxton was waiting for me as I drifted among the easels. Seated directly behind Tim, she had drawn an incredibly precise version of the stool and had skipped up and drawn his shoulder axis and neck.

“Where were you yesterday?” she said. “The studio class, all nine of us, waited forty-five minutes. Is this what we pay tuition for?”

I wanted to say: Truce; it's the last day of school. Cease further hostilities. But I did say: “I'm sorry, Mary Ann; I was away.” Before she could start again, I interrupted her with this whisper: “Mary Ann. What's he going to sit on?” I pointed to the blank space on her paper where his ass should have been. “Don't be shy,” I said. “This is art.” I couldn't stop myself; I winked. “Go ahead, really.”

I was in a daze the whole hour. The volleyball at home. I couldn't see a thing but the ball and the three paintings emerging in my mind. I wandered the studio muttering, “Good, good,” to everybody, even Mary Ann Buxton and her feathered fluffy version of Tim's posterior. It was a tangible relief when Tim himself stood up, stretched, and said, “Okay. That's my twenty bucks. Anybody looking now pays overtime.”

Oh, Bigville! You sweet township! What I did the rest of the day was seen through eyes blurred by heat and vision. I shook hands with my fine young painters and headed out, running across campus, gathering a hundred stares in my wake. If any dean had been looking out the window, I would have received a letter.

At home, I retrieved the ten-pound bag of rice and the fifty pounds of birdseed from the basement and spread them in a blinding flurry of thrown handfuls across the backyard, and incidentally my hair, the roof, and the raingutters.

I went to see Mr. Cummings at the Food Center and he had my two chickens, that is, their innards, and he handed me the plastic pail without a look, my eccentricity gone ordinary in his eyes. At home, crackling across the birdseed and rice, I tossed gloopy handfuls of the intestines, etcetera, around the yard. I stripped off my shirt and made circles on my belly with the blood. I bent and tried to read the throws. I'm not sure what they said, but they looked authentic. I went into the basement and drew on the furnace room walls with charcoal briquets: sperm entering the egg, wiggling tails, hash marks of excitement, seven stars, the blistered moon. When I came back upstairs, blinking into the light, I saw Buster and Sadie, Mudd Miller's two dogs, rolling on their backs in the chicken guts. It dismayed me at first until I remembered that Sadie had already thrown three healthy litters of five puppies each, and I debated whether to go out and writhe around with them for a while.

The doorbell rang, and it turned out to be Mary Ann Buxton, in her traveling clothes, her little Volvo packed to the windows, still running on the driveway. She looked at me in a three-part glance: my charcoaled face, my bloody belly, and then, stepping back slowly, the aboriginal whole. There was nothing I could do.

“Hello,” I said.

“Mr. Baldwin,” she said finally. “Thank you for the help and encouragement in art this year. I've learned a lot. It was one of my favorite classes, and in appreciation, I brought you this little present.”

It was a prepared speech or she wouldn't have gotten through it, and she managed a “Thank you and good-bye,” handing me something and backing down the stairs with a look of frenzied relief on her face. She was glad to have left the car running.

I looked in my hand. It was her painting of the four birches near the Dean's garden. My eyes burned inexplicably, and I went back into the house and sat on the floor in the hallway for a moment. Mary Ann Buxton had squatted outdoors for three days frowning at this canvas, chewing her lip, and it was a good painting, two steps beyond representational. I looked at it for five minutes, as if I was counting the strokes. Those damn trees. I love those trees.

In my studio, my three paintings rose to me like live things. I buried my heart into the third and final canvas. I didn't look up again until I heard Mudd Miller on his porch calling the names of his children, the ones he could remember. Oh, it was a bellow full of love! I looked at myself, covered with blood and paint and charcoal, my face a savage smear in the mirror. “Oh, Bigville,” I moaned aloud. “It's all going to work.”

I showered and began to cool down. I called the office and Ruth Wellner said the meeting would go another hour. I stood in the dining room looking out through a window ringed by garlic at my yard littered with chicken waste, rice, and birdseed, and I had the momentary thought: “You fool, you've ruined your own home.” But it was a fleeting doubt and to quash it, I did an errand. I drove the Sportcraft volleyball over to Luther Allen's and left it with the groundskeeper.

Story did not arrive home until after ten. I had roamed the house for a while, cruising my new paintings with a hot, fond confusion. I liked them even if I didn't know what they were. Finally I settled in the living room with Mary Ann Buxton's four birches propped against the mantel where I could see them, and
Life Before Science
on my lap. In the new darkness, the volume put my legs to sleep and I followed soon thereafter. It was a heavy book.

I was dreaming of Dr. Binderwitz scolding me, pointing his unwashed finger in my face, when Story woke me, bumping me softly with her leg. “Hey,” she said. “Did you eat?”

I checked my watch: ten-thirty. “What happened?”

“Want some chicken?” she said. “I brought you some chicken.”

So we ate cold chicken and drank Piels Light on the rocks at the kitchen table like two characters in a good short novel while I woke up and Story gave me the details of the meeting.

As Story told me the tale, she laughed and ate chicken and we drank cold beer, and the moment in the kitchen light reminded me in a primal way of why and how much I loved her.

“I'm painting again,” I said.

“I knew you would.” She reached and took my forearm.

“Wait here,” I told her, and I rose and fetched my two jade friends from the bureau. I put one around her neck and one around my own. Chin down, Story examined her necklace.

“You need to wear it tonight, while we …”

“Interact sexually?”

I nodded.

“Well, you are dear, aren't you,” she said. “Confused, but dear.”

“Can you get the township out of your head long enough to conceive a baby?”

“Come here,” she said. “Come get me.”