Retreat to Love Read online

  She smiled at me. “Desperation brings out the best in me. You’ll do it?”

  “Yeah. You explain it to Caleb, though; he’s got the week’s menu planned from some sort of brunch food pyramid, and whatever we make Saturday had better not interfere with his master plan or we’ll never hear the end.”

  She agreed, and I headed back to ValeSong for a nap. I’d been up late finalizing the layout of Chains and piecing together the top layer, and now was blinking moisture back into my tired eyes every second they weren’t scrunched closed for a yawn. I didn’t even look at it hanging on the north wall of the studio as I zombied towards bed.

  In early twilight I woke up, stiff and disoriented and still in my jeans. My left leg tingled as I straightened it, so I staggered to a hot shower. A bit clearer, I plopped myself, towel-draped, on the studio floor.

  Outside was dim and the my lights were off, which was just how I needed to view Chains. The detail faded to dark and pale patches with a hint of hue, and the beads I’d stitched for hours glinted across the cloth. Viewed as a starscape, the predominate feature were the strands of silver I’d stitched into Gran’s hair, echoes of the same thread dancing in and out of the chains. The black beads in the Irish Sea were ominously broken by the spirits of Gran’s siblings rising from it. The patches from the farm, which were light enough to largely conceal the shining elements, surprised the viewer with the hints of a snail trail up the pear trees and a couple of beetles in the chicken yard.

  I used stickers to mark a few places to add beading, then went to get dressed. I hoped to finish the piece by the next day; I had two other projects lined up and had already spent a week and a half of my eight retreat weeks on the first one.

  I was late for dinner—not a great loss, since Brandon’s signature dish was turning out to be fried chicken with a side of mac ‘n cheese for the vegetarians. Margie made an unexpected appearance over coffee and a tin of cookies. After raising a suspicious eye at the preservatives in the butter wafers, she sat between Wren and I. The sandalwood musk was an unexpected touch; I wasn’t expecting her to be so formal.

  She gingerly set down the coffee mug Brandon had jumped to fill for her when she came in, and reached for the sugar bowl. “Thank you. I hope I’m not interrupting anything?” As she looked at each of us in turn, I noted the way Wren brushed her hair back, Caleb sat up straighter, and Angelica took her elbows off the table to link her fingers across her dessert plate. By the time Margie’s gaze turned to me, I had wiped the smile off my face and crossed my legs at the ankles.

  “Well, I just wanted to bring up a few things at this juncture, and give us all a chance to discuss them. First is a general note. There have been a number of occasions on which I have used the laundry facilities only to discover a large build-up of lint in the dryer trap. Now, as we know,” she paused to stir her coffee, “this not only wastes energy, but it adds considerable time to the drying cycle. I’ve posted a notice on the dryer lid, but I wanted to bring it up in person to reinforce the point. I should hope time, for each of you, can be more valuably spent pursuing your art.”

  “I’ve always found white noise like the dryer makes helps me think,” Theo said. “I mean, not that I won’t be careful about lint. Just so you know I’m not, I mean we’re all not, just sitting waiting for our stuff to dry and not working.”

  Angelica smiled at him. “That’s true. About Theo, anyway. I’ve seen him working in one of those sketch pads while he was doing laundry.”

  “Yes. Well. Despite what you and Theo have experienced in the laundry room,” I stifled the laugh until Lizzy caught my eye, “or elsewhere for that matter, thank you Lizzy and Ashlyn, may I continue?” We managed to stop, but not before Wren had let out a squeak. “Thank you. Despite Theo’s white noise theory, the founders did not intend this to be a place in which you spend more time on domestic chores than creativity. Therefore, please help to keep our operating costs down and our lint traps clean.”

  The seven of us nodded dutifully. I couldn’t even look at Lizzy, and was unbelievably glad Margie had Wren and I separated. If she was as canny as she was strict, she’d planned it.

  “Now, the other thing concerning me is the social interactions I have observed. There has never, in the short history of FireWind, been such factionalism and rejection of the group’s fellow artists. Personally, I don’t understand it. You were chosen from a large pool of applicants, based not only on the artistic merit of your projects, but also on the perceived ability for the eight of you to exchange insight into each other’s work and the very meaning of art.” Again, she looked sternly around the table and we fiddled with our napkins and chair placements. “What I see with you eight—no, let me correct myself—with the seven of you who are here, is an unprecedented level of separatism. The very fact one of you does not feel comfortable enough to sit with the rest of you at meals is an indication.”

  I was going to fall out of my chair if she used a contraction. My high school English teachers never spoke with such careful syntax.

  “It seems to me you have driven one of your member away, been prone to pairing off and forming other small, exclusive groups, and shown a remarkable lack of interest in each other’s visions. Other groups by this stage in their retreats have staged small shows of works-in-progress, held all night long sessions to discuss the history of art and how it applies to their ideas, and organized field trips to galleries in Austin and San Marcos. I have not seen the eight of you together since the night of orientation, once Ashlyn arrived.”

  Of course she looked archly at me. Of course my face burned.

  “Why is it bad if a few of us want to do things together and others don’t?” Caleb asked.

  “Right, I don’t understand this. Do you want us to stay in our studios and create art, or go gallivanting off on a bus together?” Lizzy added. “And Rafael hasn’t spoken three words to any of us, so it’s not as if we offended him. He’s welcome anytime.”

  Wren mumbled, “He was especially welcome last week when I was cooking and cleaning on my own.”

  “That’s another thing!” Lizzy leaned forward and flung an arm towards Wren. “No one heard you telling Rafael about the spirit of togetherness when poor Wren was left without a food partner. The rest of us get on fine, but we wouldn’t exactly go arranging slide shows together without inviting him and he’s never around to make us feel as if he cares one way or the opposite about our work, now is he?”

  Margie’s coffee whirlpooled for a moment as she set down her spoon. “I am not under the impression you are seven souls eagerly awaiting an eighth to make your union complete. I grant Rafael keeps odd hours, and I am aware of the bind in which he left Lauren, but my point about your unusually anti-social behavior still holds. The founders and I cannot force friendship upon you, but we can make you aware of the need for greater and more productive interaction and strive for it. I am going to speak to Rafael tonight, and want you all to know I am available to answer your individual or group concerns whenever you see fit to bring them to me.” Pushing back her chair in some magic way that didn’t make the leg scrape against the wooden floor, she stood. “Does anyone have any other questions for me at the moment?”

  We shook our collective heads.

  “Very well, then. Good-night.”

  It took a good two minutes of listening to her take the lake path towards Rafael’s before anyone spoke.

  “Well, I want to know who’s been leaving lint in the dryer,” Lizzy said. “My jeans took at least an hour to dry the other day.”

  “I vote we have an exhibition in the laundry room,” Angelica added to the laughter, “We can preview each other’s work and figure out who the culprit is at the same time.”

  “Oh, I know who it is,” I said.

  “Who?” Theo and Angelica asked together.

  “Who else? Our recluse. He spends his days wandering the abundant lint-forests of central Texas, and stays up all night eating our left-overs and fluffing things.” />
  Caleb reached across and took my hand, kissed the big knuckle. “She’s hilarious,” he told Wren next to him. “Aren’t we lucky?” He squeezed my fingers and let them go.

  “I wouldn’t mind an exhibition of sorts, actually,” Lizzy said, standing to clear the coffee mugs. “If that’s not falling too much for the party line. I’d be interested in what yous all have to say about what I’ve just finished.”

  “You finished it? You rock. I still have a couple day’s more work on Chains.”

  “Technically, it’s half done. But before I start on the other half I’d take some good critical reaction.”

  “I have some things I could show,” Caleb volunteered. “You do, too, don’t you, Wren?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m almost to that point myself,” Brandon said.

  “Theo’s done wonders.” Angelica put in.

  “Thanks.” He gave her an absorbed smile. “Your stuff, too. Don’t be modest.”

  “Right. So, we’re almost all ready. How about this? We do a door-to-door thing, each day, say after lunch? We visit one person’s studio and talk about their work. We can start with Angelica’s, then mine, Wren, and so on. Would that give you enough time?” Lizzy asked me. I nodded.

  “Brandon?”

  “I could swing it. That’s a week for me.”

  “Eight days,” she corrected him. “Saturday Ash and I will be unavailable.”

  “Do we invite our silent member?” I asked. Quite admirable, the way the woman who earlier implored me to spend a day saving her from direct contact with her parents had become the ringleader and swept the issue of their arrival aside as if it were no more inconvenient than an annual check-up.

  “Does no harm to ask him. He doesn’t have to come, doesn’t have to say anything, doesn’t have to let us into his studio.”

  “Okay, but please don’t ask Margie,” Wren said. “I couldn’t take what passes for critique from her.”

  “Absolutely. Are we agreed? Angelica, will you be ready on the morrow for an invasion of artists into your world?” Lizzy looked at her as if anything but agreement would be ridiculous.

  “After lunch,” she confirmed.

  “Great. Brandon, finish this washing up, will you? I’m bushed. Night, all.” And with that, she left.

  I don’t know if our first meeting about Angelica was stilted because of her work, or the way Theo wouldn’t let us say anything negative, or because despite our growing ease with each other, we hadn’t yet experienced many group discussions about our art, and didn’t know where each other’s biases lay.

  She started us off on a porcelain rose, glitteringly beautiful, with had three over-sized and rather fierce aphids crawling up its interior petals. We all (exception: Rafael, not there) stammered at her expectation we’d be carried away on its loveliness, until Theo said, “I think it’s all about the ephemeral nature of beauty and the fragility of life.”

  “It’s remarkably realistic,” I ventured, meeting Wren’s gaze and quickly averting my eyes.

  “And the shock effect is genuine,” Caleb added. “Not like a lot of stuff people do just for effect. It genuinely surprises.”

  “I like the combination of brass and porcelain. The fragile and the enduring,” Wren said, taking it back from Angelica. “They must have been hard to combine.”

  Angelica grinned. “It was. God, I’m glad you all like it. I was so nervous, being the first one under the microscope, so to speak.”

  “I kept telling her she didn’t need to worry,” Theo said, taking her hand. This was new, their holding hands in front of us all. For several painfully obvious days, they had pretended to be just pals when anyone else was around. “Everyone can see right off how talented you are. Show them the sketches of the heron.”

  We had seen the white block on the way in, cleaned and formed but not yet detailed. She gathered us around her easel and drew back the cover page.

  “Is it, um …” I asked.

  “Dead?” finished Wren.

  Angelica traced the neck lightly. The heron was apparently asleep, but in some of her detail sketches we could see the bare patches of feathers carried away, the lack of eyeballs, the fact one of its legs was actually in three separate pieces.

  “I want him to look as peaceful as possible,” she explained. “He’ll be large, of course, so I can get all the details right. It was taking up so much of my energy, I had to step back and regroup by finishing the little rose.”

  “I do that all the time,” said Brandon. “It’s like, certain projects are so intense we can’t focus on the big picture, as it were. So we have to let it drop for a bit and just take study pics of trees, which is what I do.”

  Of all of Brandon’s work I’d glimpsed in the computer lab—he left it on screen a lot when he stepped out to the toilet, it’s not as if I was snooping—every shot had been a tree. Mostly the tallish pine near the main entrance to FireWind.

  Happy to get off the subject of her work—did she not find it in the least macabre?—I talked about the way I’d been stuck at home, how this retreat was exactly what I needed to refresh my mind. Everyone had a similar story, except Theo, who was, according to him, merely a funnel of some kind. His inspiration came from outside himself and he was the hand holding the brush. Angelica stroked him from shoulder to elbow as he said this.

  Caleb, Lizzy, and I stopped at Wren’s cabin on the way out of Angelica’s.

  “Am I the only one who thinks she doesn’t know she’s twisted?” I asked. “I mean, she’s talented as hell, but there was, like, no awareness death and destruction can be disturbing. She could be sculpting bluebirds and rainbows for all she reacts to it.”

  “If eight year old boys could buy art, she’d have a big market,” Wren said, scooting over so Caleb could sit on the arm of the sofa next to her.

  “Maybe that’s what she’s going for.” He leaned back so his arm was along the back of the sofa, behind Wren and Lizzy and Wren’s bright face. “Of course, I’m not saying anything bad. I don’t want anyone retaliating against me next week.”

  Wren grinned up at him. “You have a lot of maggots and decomposition in your compositions?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Then I’m sure we’ll love it.”

  “Ah, you’re just saying that. Make me feel all confident so I’ll be crushed on Tuesday.”

  I stood up. “I’d best to get going if I’m going to have anything presentable myself. I haven’t had this tight a deadline in a long while.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Caleb offered, standing. “I forgot to order the groceries after lunch.”

  “Give you one simple job,” I muttered.

  “Hey, not fair. I’ll get them in time.”

  “Barely.”

  “Shuddup,” he said, nudging me with his elbow. “See you later, alligators,” he added to Wren and Lizzy.

  “Bye,” they chorused. I winked at Wren, who suppressed a giggle.

  Lizzy and Wren’s shows were a lot smoother. Rafael even wandered up to CypressWood when we were marveling at the half-completed In Sickness and In Health. Lizzy stopped talking about how she would combine the soapstone with the granite when he walked in, and we all turned to gape. He’d grown a goatee. He didn’t say anything more than ‘hi’ before kneeling in front of the sculpture to examine it, straightening to shake Lizzy’s hand with a formal little bow, and leaving.

  “That was praise, I think,” I ventured after he’d left.

  “I guess. He wasn’t exactly moved to tears.”

  “Maybe he was holding them back until he got outside.”

  She shook her head at me. “Well. As I was saying.” She looked around. “What was I saying?”

  Wren let rip with a belly laugh. “He just did it for effect, hon, snap out of it! You were telling the assembled crowd of admirers about fitting Sickness over and around her,” she reached out and played her fingers over Health’s muscular back.

  Health was a granite
woman half-kneeling, her face towards the ground and her hair pulled loosely behind her. Her calf muscles were flexed and her hands reached behind her to cup the empty air above her hips. Her smile was so strained it was hard to decide if she was actually grimacing or not.

  Sickness would be a soapstone woman resting on Health’s back. Lizzy wanted to wrap one of her arms around the granite waist; the other would be supporting her head as she leaned her elbow into Health’s back (which explained the twisting of her left shoulder blade.) Lizzy had started the sculpture months before, when she was still in Ireland, but once she had shaped the granite she’d found she couldn’t concentrate on it long enough to get anything substantial done. The break-up with Moira had further complicated things, since she couldn’t contemplate the work without also facing her emotions about the end of her relationship.

  So she’d applied to FireWind and a few other retreats, and shipped the stone ahead of her once she’d been accepted. Fortunately, the founders had provided all the pneumatic equipment she and Angelica could use, since her equipment was both bulky and wired for 220v. Their studio was outfitted for the heavy work of sculpture: built-in compressor cabinets, hoseable studio floors, hydraulic work tables that could elevate to five feet, two- and four-wheel dollies. She’s bought a good block of soapstone in Austin when she’d arrived, and concentrated since her arrival on drilling Health’s features.

  “I’ve been vacillating so much on the expression of Sickness, I suppose it’s my main problem at the moment,” she told us, moving to her easel. “Her form I know already, as you can see, so long as I can handle the logistics of fitting them together. But her face leaves me cold.”

  She flipped to a page with five sketches of a face. They ranged from nauseated to lugubrious. “What do yous think? I don’t want her too much, you know, in need of antacids. It’s more of a mindset thing.”

  “But aren’t you going for the problem between the two?” Caleb asked. “Health is carrying Sickness even when she shouldn’t?”

  “Even so, the way these things work, or at least how I’ve seen them, is the Sickness one will play up the problem with her weakness,” I said. “So she can’t look all happy or anything.”