Now I Ranulf, king of the Britons, draw my weapon, sheathe it (lo, it droopeth) (a little help, please) (Ah! Excalibur!), and sheathe it again, as is my right.
Shut up and do this if you’re going to.
Verily, Lady.
It was clear that her love for him was above the waist, and always would be, no matter how feminine his bone structure or how exotic the scents he wore in his long black hair. His deeper scent was masculine, his angles too hard, his tongue too big in her mouth.
He knew there were spells he might use to make her burn for him, but burn she would; the further the subject was from true desire, the more damage the incantation would do. Suicide, insanity, and illness were the long-term fruits of love’s abuse, by magic or otherwise, as so many had written and so few believed.
Andrew believed.
He had seen what happened to those who loved him over the two decades since the witch’s raven had left its peck in him.
Sarah.
Anneke would be safe from the raven’s beak.
The curse that murdered those he loved who loved him back.
She would not love him, and if he loved her, that was his blood to bleed.
I guess Papillon was the wrong movie to try to seduce you with.
Maybe not. You fuck like you’ve got money up your ass.
Wait a minute, I thought I was Papillon, not Dustin Hoffman.
You were Dustin Hoffman.
4
She had sculpted him twice.
The first time wearing his Japanese robe and sitting with his elbows on his thighs, head slightly bent and cocked to one side like a bohemian The Thinker, and she had kept that one.
It sat on the table by her smoking chair, the chair facing the lake, lording over the camel-bone ashtray her sailor father had gotten in Egypt. Sometimes she stuck incense sticks in the space between the statue’s arm and thigh and burned them so they veiled his head in smoke, but mostly she just puffed her Camel Lights and watched sunsets or storms or waves lapping at the weird ice figures framing the beach in winter. He liked it that a smaller version of himself kept her company.
The second statue had been larger, life-sized, a nude, and it was so lifelike she sold it for four thousand dollars at an art show in Ithaca. She had barely had it a month but needed the money, and she would not sell it to Andrew because his offer felt like charity. She wanted to see what she could get from a stranger.
And so a man from Toronto took home her best statue, a statue of one of America’s most powerful wizards buck naked in white clay, and put it in his basement near a red felt pool table.
It was titled Nonchalance, and the Canadian never lost another game of pool under Andrew’s bored stone gaze, even against much better players, nor did he ever guess why.
5
Anneke is not made for interiors; there is something smaller, something caged and wrong about her in the bar, as there is whenever she finds herself beneath a roof.
She is too big for the space.
Andrew’s mind’s eye favors snapshots of Anneke outside, building something out of wood or sculpting it out of clay and slurry; her shag of dirty blond hair, just beginning to gray, has been woven to drink sunlight; if she carries a hammer, tan suede gloves cul-de-sac her strong, brown forearms; if she sculpts at her outside table, her jeans are crusted at the thighs where she wipes her hands on them, and she does not sit, but circles her creation counterclockwise as she coaxes its true shape and name from it.
Just walking across the lawn she has the air of a lioness whose mate had best not be sleeping in her favorite spot.
Andrew knew he loved her when he first saw sunlight on her.
That had been two years before.
He let himself love her because he knew she would not love him back.
6
Anneke Zautke has been out of prison for six years now, mostly sober for eight. She bought her odd, sloped little A-frame house by the lake so she could be close enough to visit her chronically ill father in the little town of Mexico,
Leukemia? Will you die?
Eventually.
It’s not fair, Dad. You just… retired.
I sailed nuclear subs. Nobody made me do that. Nobody made me work at the plant. Shit happens.
but far enough away from Oswego and Syracuse not to see anyone she knew before.
She makes a decent living selling statues and earthenware mugs at art shows and Renaissance festivals, and her house, like Andrew’s, is hard to find.
Anyone who makes a hobby of harassing sex offenders will have a long, winding drive to Anneke’s property and back. Nobody has yet tried, but she has another twelve years to go before her name disappears from the registry.
Shelly Bertolucci had been sixteen.
Shelly had been so relieved to find someone else in Oswego who loved like she did that she didn’t care about consequence.
Consequence can be lopsided, though.
Consequence was one thing for Shelly, and quite another for the pretty young art teacher fresh from Cornell who introduced her to cabernet, Rodin, Edith Piaf, and her first thirty orgasms.
Anneke Zautke got the maximum four-year sentence for statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. This despite her lawyer’s exhaustive coaching.
She was in braces when it started, right?
Yep.
Every time you think about sitting upright and tough, doing that Marlene Dietrich thing, remember they’re going to show the jury pictures of a little girl in braces.
So, what, slouch?
Sit like someone who knows she had sex with a little girl in braces.
Show me what that looks like.
Will you be funny like that in maximum with girls who shot people?
Anneke had been unable to properly display remorse, because the truth was she felt none.
She wished she had had someone to light her way through the purgatory of a homosexual adolescence in west-central New York, and saw her willingness to do the same for Shelly as an act of personal valor.
Anneke had also been drinking a bottle and a half of wine a night and self-medicating, both with cocaine and with antidepressants she got online from India, so her ability to discern between empowerment and exploitation was…
Suspect.
When they’re showing the braces pictures, are they going to show any of the sculptures Shelly made in class?
Why?
Because they’re not bad. She really started… growing. Artistically.
What, because she was having sex with you?
…
Actually, yes.
7
Andrew takes her home.
The grass is growing high now that summer has settled in for keeps, and the stars are an opera out here.