He could see only the top of her chocolate head, the part slightly crooked, as she descended his ladder with her sandals hooked over one thumb. Well, he could also see the slim, creamy expanse of half of each thigh, punctuated by very cute knees, since she had to ruck up her skirt slightly to reach each rung. And if he leaned just a few degrees to the left, he could peer out beyond her head and that intriguing part line to the roundness of her sweet little ass.
It was that ass, and the crooked side part, that saved Marie from looking like a tall, thin, slightly awkward stick of celery. Even the timber of her voice indicated that she was made of rigid, stringy stuff. He wondered if she’d be crunchy spread with peanut butter, and cast the image aside before it got too exciting.
He’d just been accosted by strong moral fiber on his own roof. Strong moral fiber with disturbing news and unwelcome opinions.
She got to the bottom of the ladder and pulled her skirt down over her knees, which was a damned shame. Miss Celery had nice stems. She held on to the ladder with one hand while she slipped her sandals back on with the other, and picked her way through the grass to the Jeep.
Straighten that part and pull it right down the center of her head, add some length to her skirt and a white ruffle to her collar, and she could step into a cameo pin. One with a jade background. Her suit was fussy but the ever-so-slight zigzag on top of her head indicated that perhaps Miss D’Ancanto wasn’t as precise and rigid as she seemed.
Her sales skills were none existent, but she certainly seemed to care about his grandmother. At the thought of Amelia, he frowned. Slowly he collected the miscellaneous tools from the roof and made his own way down the ladder as Marie’s vehicle disappeared from view.
Logan tossed his tools into the small shed behind the cabin, wiped his face on the T-shirt he’d discarded, and went inside.
The little house was musty, as usual, and he left the door wide open to let the fresh air in. He knew he’d regret it later because of the mosquitoes and flies, but the moldy, stuffy air had to be chased away, like unpleasant memories.
He went to the little porcelain sink and filled a mason jar with water before flopping on the daybed he’d spread with a Navajo blanket. He drank half the water while staring at the ridiculous chair the previous occupant had left behind. It had once been a rocker, but one of the runners had been replaced by two Shaker legs, so that the chair neither rocked nor sat entirely steady. It was the most peculiar repair job Logan had ever seen, but it was barely functional , like the rest of the cabin.
The place had been built in defiance of any construction code. Neither a beam nor a rafter was level; not a single cabinet door hung straight; the rough-hewn mantel was six inches wider on the left side than the right. Everything was off-kilter, but the cabin possessed an odd charm.
Granted, the charm did little to replace the stove burner (one of two) that didn’t work, or the freezer (part of a dorm-sized refrigerator) than ran a steady temperature of thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but Logan didn’t much care. It kept four beers at a time reasonably chilled. He’d owned the place for two months now, and hadn’t gotten around to buying new equipment. All of his time and cash went into his latest venture.
Logan was in the business of encouraging people to defy their mortality. It didn’t sit well with him to contemplate terminal illness, just as it didn’t sit well with him to relive the past.
He spent his days teaching witless thrill-seekers to sky-dive. There was nothing like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane to remind you that your life was your own. You were free as a bird, reminded of your humanity only by the skin of your face flapping and the tiny kernel of uncertainty that this time you might not make it.
The earth spread out below you like a funky patchwork quilt, and it was yours. You might be flying by the seat of your pants, but you were King of the Wind. And you were free-falling, and the rush was enormous… and then you pulled the cord that sent your ‘chute billowing out behind. You knew in an instant of exultation that you were going to make it, and rode that high for a few moments longer. Then that bitch, gravity, pulled you back to earth.
The birds, damn it all, still had it better. A bird could escape the clutches of gravity simply by dipping and lifting its wings. A bird could float on the currents, drifting for hours, not simply minutes. And a bird could skim close to the ground, dropping ammunition on the hapless without guilt.
Human beings will always be bound by gravity and guilt, Logan thought. The two inescapable forces. Funny how guilt functioned as mental gravity.
Here he was, twelve years later, still bound by guilt. For he didn’t like to think of Grandmother Amelia frail and helpless in the grip of some terminal disease. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see her—hell, he knew he didn’t want to see her like that. How could you maintain hurt and anger in the face of helplessness? How useless, how small, emotion seemed beside the permanence of looming death.
She wants to see you. Marie’s voice echoed in his mind.
Does she? What does she expect to see? The face of the boy who ran? The bitterness of twelve years ago? Grief? Or impassivity. Or greed?
Perhaps she thinks I’ll visit her out of sheer greed. Logan’s mouth twisted.
He wasn’t sure why Marie had chosen to get involved in all of this. She claimed to have become friends with Amelia during the past eight months. But why would his grandmother have sent her out here? Surely a courier could have delivered the same message. What was her story?
He drained most of the water from the mason jar and gripped the cool glass in both hands, hanging it between his knees. He stared at his won fingers, brown from the sun and callused from both work and play. They were magnified through the glass of the jar, as his grandfather’s brushes had been. Yellow ocher, cadmium blue, vermillion red. The smell of turpentine.
Logan raised the jar to gulp down the rest of the water when his arm froze. Charles Xavier had kept his artist’s brushes in mason jars. “Ah, hell!”
He threw the jar and its contents into the fireplace.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“You look like a human scoop of pistachio ice cream,” Jubilee said, as she slid a calorie-laden iced café mocha in front of Marie.
“Thanks.”
Jubes wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans and leaned on the bar of her coffee shop. “Or an upside-down carrot.”
“Stop it with the compliments already,” Marie told her.
“It’s just so… Talbot’s. Yeesh.”
“I know you’re secretly conniving to borrow it.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Jubes had shortblack hair cut in a hip, sexy, uneven shag. She knew exactly how to wear a short, tight T-shirt so that it showed off her silver belly ring to perfection. Marie didn’t envy her the belly ring; just the blasé attitude it required to sport such a thing.
Jubilee took a gulp of her own iced coffee, and left a screaming red lip print on her tall paper cup. Lip print number seven thousand four hundred and thirty-nine.
Marie had once witnessed a man pay for one of Jubilee’s empty, lip-printed cups. He had actually forked over five dollars for it, since the print in question was so perfect and luscious. He was a complete fool, but Jubes had that effect on men.
“So,” her friend asked, “how did your trek up the mountain go?”
“I’m not sure. He’s… quite something.”
“What do you mean by that? Is the jerk going to visit his poor grandmother?”
“Yes, I think he will. And he’s not a jerk, exactly. But he’s not not one, either.”
Jubilee stared at her. “Either he is or he isn’t.”
“Okay, then. He’s not.”
“So he’s just a really, really nice guy who won’t return phone calls or answer letters or e-mail.”
“There’s some mysterious family rift,” Marie told her. “Something terrible happened twelve years ago that he hasn’t gotten over.”
“Ah. A really, really nice guy who holds a grudge and won’t return phone calls or answer letters or e-mail. And you’re defending him, so…”
“I’m not defending him—“
“…he must be incredibly hot.”
“Jubes! I—he—“
“Yes or no?”
“He’s not hard to look at.
“I knew it!”
“But that wouldn’t change my opinion of him.”
“Oh, of course not.”
Marie glared at Jubilee as she excused herself to take a customer’s order for a large no-fat vanilla cappuccino. The woman was a trip. And an amazingly quick study of people; a trick learned from having lived on her own since she was thirteen.
She’d met her while coming here to get her nightly caffeine fixes, necessary for preparing her lectures and grading painfully boring student papers and exams. They had nothing in common besides a certain cynicism and a love of coffee, which freed them up to talk about anything and everything. Neither could imagine living her life as the other did, but Jubilee was fascinated by what she thought of as the highfalutin’ intellectual life.
Marie, on the other hand, sometimes thought wistfully of what it would be like to live unencumbered by academia and its inherent infrastructure of criticism. No pressure, no publish-or-perish mania, no endless committees on this or that. What heaven!
“The people-watching is great,” Jubes had admitted. “But the financial pressure is hell. Gotta make your rent, gotta pay your employees, gotta meet the electric bill. There’ve been months where I live on Top Ramen and peanut butter and jelly. Didn’t seem totally fair, given that my customers were getting real cream and imported Sri Lankan cinnamon… but hey, you do what you have to.”
Marie sipped her iced mocha and thought about the comfort of a regular paycheck. The problem was that for an assistant professor without tenure, the regular paycheck wasn’t guaranteed to last. And tenure was depended upon publishing a book and passing the gauntlet of the promotions and tenure committee.
The good news was that Princeton University Press had shown interest in her Charles Xavier book. The bad news was---
“Why, Miss Marie, what a pleasant surprise.”
The bad news was suddenly standing in front of her: Erik Lehnsherr, chair of the Fine Arts Department. Marie dredged up a smile. “Mr. Lehnsherr. How are you?”
“Well. Preparing for the fall semester, as I’m sure you are.” He spoke imperiously to Jubilee—“A double latter”—as if she were no-account help.
Marie resisted the urge to add “please,” for him, and murmured that she was indeed busy.
“I noticed that your Rodin seminar is short two members. I don’t know if we’ll be able to offer it, my dear.”
Your pre-Raphaelite course only has six students signed up. But you wouldn’t dream of canceling that, you old windbag. “Oh, well, I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed that we get two more signed up in the next few days,” she chirped.
“Always a good attitude, dear.”
Why, you patronizing s.o.b. She half expected him to pat her head.
“So, Marie, have you had a chance to broach that little matter I spoke to you about?”
“Mrs. Xavier has been in the hospital for the past six weeks, Mr. Lehnsherr. It didn’t seem appropriate…”
“Yes, yes, very sad. Not to be unfeeling, but time may be of the essence in this case.”
She opened her mouth, then shut it again, before she said anything too pithy and honest.
“I realize your feelings are delicate in regard to this matter, so perhaps it would be best if I were to accompany you in a friendly visit to Mrs. Xavier, whereupon I could plant the seed of generosity in her mind.”
“I—I—“
“Is tomorrow convenient for you? Shall we say eleven?”
You unspeakable slime. You testament to beastliness. You grasping, grunting warthog. “Eleven,” Marie agreed faintly. He was the chair, and she was an assistant professor.
“Wonderful. I’ll pick you up outside the slide library.” Erik Lehnsherr accepted his latte from Jubilee with a supercilious nod and no tip, and departed the shop.
“Asshole,” Jubes muttered. “Gee, I wonder how that laxative tablet got in his coffee?”
“Jubilee, you didn’t!”
“I damn sure thought about it. So the scumbag wants your old lady to donate those paintings to the college?”
Marie nodded, miserable.
“And he’s going to use your relationship with her, then take the credit. I see why you climbed the mountain today.”
“Yes. And if the jerk doesn’t come down soon, I’ll climb it again.”
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Stay with me on this one, kids. This story is going to be a learning experience with me as I test out different writing styles and POV's.