I had to break the tension, the mixed desire and shame, I had to say anything at all. “I’d like to read the phrases inside your envelopes. Let me see what other people wrote.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because then when these words are all closed up inside this box they won’t be in a dark place anymore. Light will leak in and they’ll slowly get eaten up. A dim light. A deteriorating light. The light that comes from your mind.”
“What do you mean? My mind in particular, or anybody who happens to read them?”
“Anybody’s mind. If anybody finds out what they say, their perfection will slowly deteriorate.”
“But you know, don’t you? You’ve read them.”
“Yes. But if anybody else ever does, then what they’re doing inside me will be destroyed.”
She looked at me now with a very vivid, communicative expression on her lovely face. It said she was quite willing to view all this as absurd and humorous, but her eyes emanated a deep curiosity to see if I might somehow understand. I think I did understand. But I don’t think she believed I did.
And I did kiss her. Touched her sleeve with my fingers. She didn’t draw away. I plucked at her sleeve and she came close and I put my lips to hers.
“Okay,” she said. “Come back inside, please.”
She took me by the hand, carrying her box in the crook of her arm. On the way in she toed the rubber-tipped stopper with her pointed boot, and the heavy door swung to behind us. She set the box of phrases beside her pallet in the classroom and we descended onto the folds of nylon — it was a sleeping bag, not much of a cushion against the concrete floor. For a few minutes we kissed wildly, but I felt like a man in the wrong neighborhood, expecting at any moment to turn onto the right street, wondering where the hell it is and growing more and more panicked and disoriented. She was sweet, nothing about her felt held back, no slight deflection, no place reserved for herself, no irony or mischief, no studious objectivity, none of the stratagems that might have kept part of her out of this dalliance with an old man.
“Tell me your dream. The one you wouldn’t tell me.”
“I saw you in a room full of strangers. On a stage. They were studying you. It was just a dream.”
Kissing me, she unbuckled my belt and I helped with the rest. In my white boxer shorts I gave back her kisses and we both worked at the top buttons of her smock.
“This isn’t it,” I said. I felt no desire for her now. With a distinct and physical sensation I was slipping back into that hole where I felt no desire at all. I gripped her hands tight but it didn’t help. “I’m leaving.” I clutched at my clothing, snatched up whatever looked like mine from the floor and covered myself.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
My shirt open, barefoot, I got out to my car and tossed my shoes and socks into the back seat and hung on desperately to the steering wheel. She stood on the steps, just a shape. A shape containing…
This — now — was the point I’d wanted to reach with her. All the expected moments had been stepped through. One step more would take us into moments that could never have been foretold. I opened the door and put my feet out and pulled on my shoes. I buttoned my shirt, I watched her shape. I turned off the motor and went back.
She wasn’t there. The shape of her may not have been there in the first place. I went up the front steps and down the steps inside.
She stood still at the end of the hallway, having hesitated, I guessed, at the sound of my footfalls coming. She’d opened the back door again. From outside a warm green breath filled the hallway and began moving through it softly and audibly.
She came toward me carrying her message from a vanished god. “Would you like to hear the story of my name?”
I had a sense of her studio, just to my right, filled with ghostly items and skeletal things.
Again: “Would you like me to tell you the story of my name?”
I followed her back into her studio and sat on the spangled chair.
“First I think I have to tell you another story before I can tell you the story of my name.”
I didn’t say a word.
“An illustrated tale. Not just a story — a picture, too.”
Looking for something or other, she wandered among her objects, these multifarious seashells, sprays of baby’s breath, sprays of peacock feathers like abstract eyes on white necks, many-colored balls of yarn, tinfoil collected into shiny knots, miniature bottles you could fill to overflowing from a thimble, somber and translucent, purple, blue, green. She’d made her world a space for these things, for the train cars and props of model railroads, particularly the engines, small and black and heavy engines; birds’ nests cradling eggshells of turquoise and mottled amber: things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them. Objects not stored in boxes and labeled for eventual use, but left out in plain sight to be found and contemplated. Left open to encounters with strangers.
“Before I can tell you the story of my name,” Flower said, “I believe I have to tell you the story of your face.”
I felt better when she said that. “A sad, ugly tale.”
“I don’t want to! But it’s necessary.”
She’d found a sketch pad, a sheaf of newsprint in large sheets. She sat on a stool behind the nearest easel, set up the pad, took a thick pencil from the easel’s tray, and began, I guessed, to draw. She was left-handed.
“Your lips are thin. You have a big space between your nose and upper lip, like a monkey, but you miss having a monkey face because your chin is too small and there’s not enough face beneath your mouth to make a monkey face. Your nose is small and pushed up too far. Too much of your nostrils show. That makes your eyes look sort of dull-minded and also sort of fearful.”
She stopped momentarily and honed her pencil on a piece of emery paper.
“Your eyes are a very beautiful blue. You have nice round cheeks, and bushy well-defined eyebrows. Very definite eyebrows. Your hair is nice, very tightly curled, kinked, really, and with lots of colors in it, brown and blond and some blue and mostly gray. And you’re small.”
Flower stood up and held the sketch pad out before her at arm’s length a full minute, looking back and forth between her rendering and her model. She turned the pad to me. It was quick, but recognizable.
“Your hands are small. I’ve told you you have an inner and outer smallness that’s very attractive, at least to me.”
“Thank you. I think.”
“The story of your face is over.”
“Thank you even more.”
“Now the other story. Once I was taken away by a guy to a gingerbread house.”
“Excuse me?”
“This is the story of my name.”
“Okay. All right.”
“When I was a little girl, one day a man led me away from my home and took me to a gingerbread house.
“He was small like you, Michael, and his nose was turned up too far, like yours, and his chin was too small like yours. But his face was narrow, and his whole head, too, and his ears were big and funny. Not like yours. You have nice ears.
“I was four years old. One morning he came to our back yard and took me away. They didn’t find me till after dark.
“He sang a song,” she said.
“Were you terrified?”
“I wasn’t. And I’m not terrified when I remember. But everyone I’ve ever told it to has been.”
(She looked at me quizzically, searching, I suppose, for my fear. I’m sure it was there and I’m sure she discovered it.
(Yet now these words came from me — I didn’t intend them and I didn’t even know what they meant — I just remember them now — I hear them — I said, “I still can’t feel anything.” No response from Flower. Maybe she didn’t hear.)