MINNOW AS THE UNIVERSE

by

Terri Brown-Davidson

There's a tree in New Mexico I adore. It's not exactly skeletal but blasted out of shape, the limbs twisted, sinewy, like arms made of pure bleached bone thrusting up into sky. And when that sky's ebony velvet, as it is now, or black as an oil slick floating flecks of white stars, that's magic.

Or suffocation.

Which describes my relationship with so many people in my life.

Except, perhaps, for Minnow.

Minnow, who's still sleeping in my bed, though she looks incongruous there--all that brown toughened skin against the housekeeper's snowy sheets.

I let her sleep because I like to watch her.

There's little more to it than that.

I love to walk barefoot out here in the rough, reddened sand, savor that grit working up between my toes; I circle around the tree then decide, glancing around, that I'd like to crucify myself.

Grinning, I step into the enclosure offered by the tree's half-destroyed trunk, a hole gaping in the bark above my head.

I move backward, brush my black-gowned spine against bark gnarled as an old Shaman's skin, sidle up until I'm certain the tree's embracing me, then hoist my palms, imagine them with the nail holes neat and blood-blackened in the centers, smiling as if I were snapping photos for some art magazine though, except for Minnow curled unconscious in my bed, I'm really quite alone.

There's too much violence in America though I remain fascinated, I confess, with the story of Bonnie and Clyde, have enjoyed everything I've read about Bonnie's "toughness" even while questioning how much Clyde controlled her, whether Clyde was, in fact, like Alfred in his proclivities, bossing Miss Parker around with his big, fancy machine guns and his suits that needed to be tailored just so.

And somehow that fascination hasn't dwindled though Bonnie and Clyde are long dead, their Ford blasted full of bullet holes, blood splattered across the windshield, Bonnie and Clyde made up beautifully, though there were more than a hundred holes in each body, the corpses laid out decorously in a combination funeral-home-furniture store.

When I woke up last night, my nightie drenched in sweat, I'd been gazing down at Bonnie Parker's face in its coffin. They'd said she was pretty, a perky little blonde who stood only about 4-11, a little girl made to appear tougher when the Barrow Gang photographed her in a joke with Clyde's cigar dangling from her lips, but--after she died--I heard otherwise.

And that's what I saw in my dream, the nose eaten away by syphilis, the black holes of the nostrils, the pinched and pasty lips, her blue eyes, azure as a summer sky, peering up shocked until I leaned forward to close them--and that's when I was jolted awake.

Now I pad barefoot into the bedroom, dust clotting up between my toes, bringing Minnow a cup of coffee though it's only five a.m. I want to wake her up, need to tell her so many things, the story about the tree I just tried to crucify myself on, the dream last night about Bonnie's half-rotted nose, all the little anecdotes of my life that I believe she should be interested in though she never seems to be, this muse I never sought, new Georgie to my Alfred.

I switch the lamp on though we don't need light in this room, the windowframes constructed of pure pink adobe, the glass unblinded--even if we made love, who'd be tiptoeing around to see?

And the moon, a glorious, New Mexico moon, gleams in all its big-fisted, orange glory, casting its unmuted glow across Minnow's face, her nostrils intact, her bottom lip pneumatic, her bare brown shoulders, beneath the simple muslin sheet, stirring so I can glimpse all the bones rippling beneath her skin, draw my breath in so violently I startle myself; I sit down on the mattress, stare until her eyelids flutter open.

"Georgie?" she asks, and then spots the coffee cup. "Christ," she says. "Not again."

"I need you to wake up."

"Why, for God's sake? What time is it--" she rolls over onto my side of the bed, the moon pumping itself hard and fast as a bullet against my vision. "Fuck," she says, and I wince. "Fuck," she repeats, "it must be fucking midnight out there."

"Actually, you're mistaken. It's five o'clock--after five--and all decent people are stirring."

"I don't want to be decent," Minnow whines, her cry plaintive as a toddler's though she's thirty-five years old. "I don't want to be normal," she continues, and slants her summer-blue eyes in that malicious squint I adore though she props herself against the headboard, dutifully sips my coffee.

There's a woman Lawrence hates: a painter named Dora Carrington though I use the word "painter" loosely, you understand. In some respects, she reminds me of Minnow or Bonnie Parker, that shining cap of hair, that little girl's lisp.

Minnow's like Dora Carrington, except she can really paint. And has a male sensibility, I suppose, as well as a nasty habit of snorting when I bring up the subject of sex. Once she gave me a mirror, tried to force me to look at what I was "missing" though I politely refused.

"All those flowers," she said, and laughed.

"They're just flowers," I replied, and walked away when she kept giggling.

It doesn't matter, I think. Lawrence will die soon of TB--the man's a walking skeleton; anybody can see it--and Minnow will walk right out of my life.

"What's the agenda, Alfie," she asks, when I've forced her to down my coffee, tugged her naked out of bed, placed my hand against her back, hurried her into the bathroom, where, while she sits, I avert my eyes as Minnow urinates with a merry loud clatter.

"Sorry," she says then, blotting. "All that coffee."

"I need you to be awake."

"Why? All decent people are sleeping."

I know she's making fun of me, and I blush.

"I have an idea for a painting."

"That's ridiculous," she replies. "How will you get enough light?"

"There's a full moon, Sleepyhead. In the event you didn't notice."

Laughing, Minnow throws back her head then, emits a lusty howl.

The truth is, though, that there's no painting I have in mind. I've been blocked for weeks--a month. I can disguise it, of course, tell myself that Minnow need never know, that everything's always "in progress," though I remain terrified that her keen painter's eye will detect the deception.

What I love most of all is to arrange Minnow in poses.

I know what you're thinking. The painter turned pervert: well, you couldn't be more wrong. My arranging of Minnow's limbs furnishes me with the purest heights of aesthetic rapture I've experienced in this lifetime.

And what is that worth?

Oh, everything.

Everything.

"Jesus," Minnow says, cowering in the silk kimono I've sashed around her, the skin on her forearms goosepimpled. "It must be thirty degrees out here. Don't think I can stand it."

"Want me to bring you a parka?"

"Yeah," she jokes, "and one of the chows, to warm my hands in, just till I've adjusted."

Obediently I go back to the house, fetch both dogs, the black, the gold, my battered ancient parka, and a silver thermosful of coffee for good measure. When I come back, Minnow's hugging herself in a ridiculously self-loving embrace, hopping up and down. The chows glance at her once, flop down panting on the sand, ghost-clouds floating up from their tongues, their steaming mouths.

"Sit," I say, and help her unbend her limbs, ease her into a sitting position atop a rock. She's so cold that she has difficulty complying, so I have to force her down. I drape the robe closed over her legs, ease the parka around her, force each arm in, zip the parka up to her neck. "You look like an eskimo," I say then, and smile.

But Minnow doesn't smile.

I unscrew the cap on the thermos, slosh hours-old coffee into the lid.

"Here," I say, "this will help," and shove the cup into her hands.

She drinks avidly, like a child, burying her nose in the coffee that's so overboiled it emits a stink. "Minnow," I protest, "take it easy. That stuff'll burn holes in your stomach," but she keeps swilling till she's drained the dregs.

"Jesus. Glad you came up for air."

"I can't possibly pose out here," Minnow gasps, the breath-clouds obscuring her face.

"You have to."

"You're saying I have no choice?"

I think for a second. "Yes," I say finally, proud of the fact my voice doesn't waver.

"You can't make me."

"I can. Listen," I say, a note of good-natured pleading creeping in. "You know how important my painting is. To me. To us both. How can you deprive me of that?"

"A few reasons. First, you're like some otherworldly creature I've never even met. Y'know--odd. Don't tell me that you feel the cold, that you can empathize with my suffering, because you can't. Second, I know you're cheating over there. Am positive that you haven't done anything but exercises for weeks. So why should I waste my health...and time?"

"Because I need the poses. I swear--I need them. Look--I'll make it up to you, Minnow. Promise."

I can see her iron will softening. She looks at me, away. "All right," she whispers finally, stroking the fat dark parka, which, with her dusky skin, renders her brown-bear-like. "I'm holding you to that, though; don't forget."

Of course I never even think about what her words might entail, so anxious am I to resume the work I was placed on this planet to pursue.

We begin with the crucifixion pose that I set up earlier, though it takes a great deal of effort to coax Minnow out of the parka, tuck herself up against the tree. And she refuses to go nude, though I'm adamant--how the hell am I supposed to paint her in a kimono?

My treks back to the house are beginning to seem endless, the chows trotting along tongue-lolling at my heels, but eventually I locate, in a near-forgotten closet, a few candles I can use to shed a little heat and light. Minnow's right: I'm odd; the cold doesn't affect me at all though I crave the New Mexico sun, love to bask in it lizardlike until it fills up my pores.

With the candles set out flickering on rocks, Minnow poses against the tree, her long legs splayed, her arms tossed over her head; I curve the fingers out, arrange them just so, urge her to imagine nail holes, bones, blood, piling detail upon detail until she grimaces; then, I order her to hold the pose though it's physically arduous--nearly impossible.

But this is the work, I remind myself as she sweats, for which Minnow's been trained, though she's never declared herself an artist's model: some women are born mistresses or wives; Minnow's a born muse, and I the one charged with conjuring her to life.

She's growing weary. The sensuality of her lids, sliding thick-skinned over her eyeballs, entrances me. "Wait a second," I cry. "That look--can you hold it?"

"What?" Minnow asks.

She's numbed with fatigue. Even her mouth looks swollen.

"Georgie," she whimpers, rubbing it. "I have to go back to bed."

"Not yet."

I'm not compelled by the poses anymore. Now I see, truly see, that Minnow isn't a human being so much as an aesthetic object, and if I arrange her like part of a landscape, maybe it'll be easier to capture her.

This is a new challenge for me: I never paint human figures. Have never had much interest in rendering them.

But Minnow's different.

Inspires me as deeply as a rose-bedecked cow skull, a red-rimmed sky, a black iris's velvet-petalled duskiness.

"Let me leave," Minnow whispers: I shake my head no.

I'm certain of what I'm after. Am determined to convert Minnow into a landscape of death. I ask her to lie down on the sand, shove at her wrists, her elbows, when she doesn't comply. But she does, eventually, topples onto her back, her dazed expression enchanting me, and I peel her lids down with my thumbs, allow them to reopen enough to suggest a slitted hint of gleam, and there she is, Bonnie Parker, gazing up bullet-blasted from her coffin.

It's true. I'm obsessed. Though my obsessions have always excluded what we consider the normal territory of the human. And when I help Minnow back to bed, she can barely walk. I swing her legs up, tuck them beneath the sheets, tug the blankets up over her, mold them around her breasts, shoulders, step back to assess my work. "Sleep, little Bonnie," I whisper, and know Minnow won't wake for hours, a thought which affords me satisfaction since I'm craving private time. I gaze at her for minutes, assessing her sleep-blanked face. Then, I climb into bed beside her, clamp my arms against my sides, self-consciously close my eyes.

When I wake, the haze of my dream surrounds me; river stones, cow skulls, crucifixes, sand. Human figures never enter my dreams though the chows frequent them: I'm very attached to my dogs.

I open my eyes thinking Turquoise, quartz and discover Minnow's head lying across my breasts...I'm unrobed.

I sit up immediately, and her head slides down my belly; Minnow rolls forward into the blankets, never stirs even when I push the covers back, when I stand staring, appalled, then check my body for scratches (which I find), my thighs for moisture (which I find).

I'm trembling so hard now I'm light-headed.

Sex with me--Christ.

That woman had sex with me. Even Alfred--

I cup my hand over my mouth, terrified she'll wake; I go running for the outdoor shower, turn the rusting tap on Hot, then, scalded, stumble outside, punish myself with a juniper branch, rake my skin bloody atop the scratches Minnow's already left.

I'm muted at breakfast...but not insensitive. Believe that I understand Minnow's intentions. She didn't violate me, not exactly, and has never indicated, by thought or deed, any necrophiliac leanings, thank God.

No: Minnow simply doesn't understand the boundaries that comprise our relationship, and only because those boundaries have never been clearly drawn.

I drink my kiwi juice moodily, nibble on bacon, Minnow gazing slump-shouldered at a sunrise that streaks, with the most ephemeral pink, gold, green, the flat-topped mesa I adore.

She appears calm this morning. And I empathize. It strikes me, then, watching her fine brown face in profile, that I have two choices: I can explore the boundaries or ignore them.

I select--gratefully--the latter option.

Everyday I wake with new scratches. There's something degrading, I believe, about a middle-aged woman waking up perpetually mauled. Yet, every morning, Minnow sleeps curled in a catlike ball, her long limbs strewn everywhere, her brown skin glowing.

And the truth is that I can't bear to confront her.

Why?

Because I'm terrified of appearing ridiculous.

There's a part of me that loves her; I'd be an idiot not to admit it, but there's also that part of me that despises the scantest suggestion of flesh brushing flesh.

Plus, my painting's going beautifully. After that one night of posing, when I succeeded, finally, in imagining Minnow as aesthetic object, her image kept sweeping itself recreated across canvases in a vibrancy of forms: Minnow as blue bowl on my coffee table, Minnow as the hood of my pure-black Model A, Minnow as a spider, a desiccated golden leaf, a clump of water-glued sand.

Minnow as the universe.

We begin painting together. It's inevitable; hell, we're living together, having sex and not having it, our every word revolving around paintings we've seen or produced.

Part of me wants to share everything with her.

Part of me wants to seal myself closed like a sarcophagus.

So one day, tacitly, we set up our easels side by side at the base of a wild red mountain. Flamboyant yellow weeds thrusting up out of earth, coyote tracks, the rim of mud left by a urinating animal, a crimson wall of rock.

Minnow's earthy today, yet resplendent. Her deeply tanned face, slash of vermilion lipstick, the lines a little smeary. The contrast here--nut-brown skin, cardinal-colored lipstick--mesmerizes me. For this occasion, she's donned blue jeans that cling to her hips, a wide silver belt, a flimsy white tanktop that reveals her sinewy arms.

And me?

I'm Georgie as usual. Old-lady garb. Stark black gown falling from shoulders to knees, my hair tucked into a bun, the Calder pin at my throat.

"God," Minnow says, mixing her palette, crow's feet crinkling her eyes, "a beautiful day, Georgie. A Godsend. It's so gorgeous I don't even think I can paint."

But today I'm feeling brittle. Cantankerous. Woke up with four new scratches on my right inner thigh.

"Georgie?" Minnow asks.

I nod, more peremptory than I intend. Can sense Minnow watching me. Which is fine, I think, fine. I don't want to push things. Not now, with the promise of an excellent painting day ahead. "O.k., then," Minnow says, mouth tightening. "Let's dig in, baby. Paint."

I'm painting Minnow...and Minnow's painting the mountain. The odd thing, though, is that Minnow hasn't figured out that all my paintings contain her now, but as an object.

And who could guess that?

Only Picasso, maybe.

Picasso and that revolting Dora Maar. But just thinking about him nauseates me, makes me want to spit.

Today I'm rendering Minnow as a weed. But not just any weed--a weed with a most unique and subtle intermingling of yellow, orange, green; a weed so tenderly evoked, strand by strand, that something beneath my ribs cracks open and I imagine a miniature Georgie ascending from the wound, clambering up the mountain.

"Georgie," Minnow says, and glances at what I'm doing then abandons her own canvas, steps in front of my own, blocking my view.

And I seethe.

Yet, I'm also pleased.

Bitch, I think, I love you, and step back, crossing my arms.

"Georgie, it's so beautiful. Stark, though. Weird. O.k.--I know the flowers aren't vulvas, right--but do the weeds contain eyes?"

"What're you taking about?" I ask suddenly, startled.

"Eyes. There are hundreds of eyes peering out from this little piece of weed. Didn't you know it, sweetie? Or maybe you're feeling watched?"

I study the painting, stunned, her white-toothed smile haunting the periphery of my vision.

We've broken for lunch when the conversation starts. Retired to an overhang of rock rich with shade, one that'll protect us from sun. Minnow's brought sandwiches--turkey on rye, some chipped-beef-on-toast concoction, and fresh, raw vegetables, which I'm more interested in.

We spread our red-checked tablecloth before us in the dirt, munch moodily at braintough wedges of cauliflower while gazing up at a curtain of flame shimmering red, orange, purple. I glance over toward our easels, toward Minnow's mountain. She always begins her paintings very literally--red mountain, blue sky--and then, just when I least expect it, some fantasy elements intrude: any moment I'll see a bathtub, a rumpled bed, protrude from the side of that mountain.

"I've been thinking," Minnows says, licking a piece of cauliflower, "that I might hop over there someday, catch a glimpse of David Herbert."

Inside me, a silence. I rub my eyes with the back of my hand.

"Why?" I ask.

"Oh...I don't know. Just to talk."

"About what?"

"Lots of subjects."

"With D.H.? Or with Dora?"

"Is Dora over there?" Minnows asks: feigned surprise. Ha, I think, ha, and thrust the remainder of my cauliflower inside a wadded-up napkin.

"I thought he hated her," Minnow continues.

"He does."

"Still," Minnow muses, "there's something interesting about her, don't you think? She's so tiny. Doll-like. Plus...that little-girl's lisp."

"Yeah," I say. "She's a real pedophile's dream."

Of course Minnow has the good grace to blush. Finally, though, she says, "I heard she hated sex, too. When she started."

"What do you mean?" I say, my voice sharpening.

But do I really have to ask?

It's true. My weeds do have eyes. And Minnow's painting, when she finishes it, has D.H. emerging from a door in one side of the mountain, Dora Carrington from a door in the other. They're on separate sides of the mountain, though; it seems clear they can never meet.

Plus, I'd like to tell Minnow that Dora's in love with a homosexual, Lytton Strachey, that her reputedly voracious appetite's based on a system of baiting men to lure them for Lytton to enjoy-- That she isn't interested in women-- But what's the point?

We pack up our paintings, go back to the compound, remain in separate rooms, Minnow in the living room with its panoramic views of the mesa, I in our bedroom where every object's a talisman, where I walk around in my long black gown touching Minnow's ashtray, Minnow's bra (like a training bra, designed for an A-cup girl: my little, little Minnow), Minnow's half-concealed bags of chocolate in the closet, Minnow's tea.

I lift the box of loose tea, open it up, am sniffing it tenderly when I glance up and discover her slouching in the doorway.

"It isn't really normal, you know," she murmurs, "to be an adult woman and not to enjoy sex." I stare at her quietly.

Have no idea what to say.

"D.H. talks about sex all the time."

"Yes," I say, "well--"

"I wonder if you're a freak," Minnow continues. "I wonder if I've invested too much time in you already."

Even when she leaves, I'm still trying to figure out what to say.

When I wake, I count twelve scratches in various places on my body, decide to ignore them, my repressive mechanism working overtime. And Minnow's already gone, to D.H. Lawrence's ranch, I presume, though all of the information I can ferret out of my housekeeper suggests only that she fed Minnow eggs and butterless toast before she left.

The thing is that I really don't mind that she's vanished. Last night I eased into painter's mode, the electricity firing up, slowly as a furnace that smokes and coughs when it's cold, shoots up an orange-black flume as it hums, clacks, awakens, then--settling into its own intensity--roils with heat, the synapses and neurons of my creativity shooting, refiring, my body drawing itself up tighter and more alive until my very spine's electric with every hot emotion--though I try to stop myself, eat some chopped carrots for breakfast, I discover my hands are trembling so badly I have to go paint.

I step into my studio, lined with a half-dozen paintings, gaze up at the skylight, a thin, huge pane of glass, the blue sky whitening with cumulus, and smile because I've found my subject.

I stand there for hours, rinsing my brush after every dark color in a wide-mouthed jar I've placed on a box, enjoying the way the clouds shift above me, the sky shimmering blue and then gray.

Squinting, I step forward, add a touch of ash, green, step back on one foot, scrutinizing.

I'm painting very deliberately, but I scarcely see the painting anymore, only images that wash toward me then recede as I glimpse them.

Painting stains my smock, shoes, dropcloth, but I've trained myself not to care, oils nearly as messy as sex in their own way, I decide, the reason I savor the first, revile the latter, a mystery.

After a long day of painting, before Minnow came, I loved to take a light supper by myself in the living room, sit on a chair before the panoramic picture windows, gaze at shadows creeping across the mesa, the moon a gigantic orange globe that pushed up into the sky and hung there, suspended, so I never grew tired of it, not even when Minnow came and made me feel like an adolescent again.

I loved to sit on that chair and contemplate my day's work, and that's what I do now, forking up the leaves of my chilled spinach salad, not sure if she'll come back tonight, if she'll ever reappear, convinced I'll miss even the scratches on my body.

I'm in bed when I feel her beside me. Her breaths deeper, more rhythmic. And something relaxes. Opens up inside me and a miniature Georgia floats up through my breastbone, hovers against the ceiling.

I listen to her breathe and then my thoughts go back to the work I initiated today, the Bonnie-Minnow project--just thinking about it makes my neurons refire.

Relax, I urge myself, and sink back into my pillow, willing myself asleep, the miniature Georgia circling the ceiling with an otterlike fluidity.

I wake with a start and--thank God--she's still here. She's over by my jewelry case, rummaging. I watch her quietly, hoist myself on my elbows. Her face, in the wall mirror, is tight as she tugs open a drawer, pulls out several gold bracelets, slips them over her arm.

"Hey," I say softly. "Stieglitz gave me those."

"Well," she says, turning around. "You never exactly wore them, now, did you?"

I study her flushed face, too vibrant mouth. "They didn't exactly suit me. You know Alfie was flashier than me."

"Do they suit me?" Minnow asks, and hoists one arm, the bracelets sliding halfway down to her armpit.

"Yes," I say. "But that shouldn't matter."

Laughing, she tosses her head back, glides away on sandaled feet, slams the door.

I slide out of bed. My mouth hot and sticky. I glance toward the unblinded window, toward the stark yellow glare of another Indian-summer day. The glass is opaque; nobody can see me now. Sitting back down on the mattress, I roll the nightgown up past my knees, past my hips, count them.

Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.

My gaze flickers toward the window; I permit myself a single smile.

My new project's to portray Minnow as Bonnie Parker in a series of portraits that will emphasize the links between sensuality and violence. I'm excited by the challenge; I've always been what people might describe as a "cool" painter, attracted to aesthetically beautiful shapes, striking colors, a painter who renders the fluid forms of imagination with more grace and loveliness than passion.

But--in this second half of my life--I've become suddenly determined to change, don't want to be the grand dame of painting anymore, the rigid old Georgie whom everyone knows has denied her flowers are about sex, rendering stick figures instead of people because I'm so unconnected to the human form; I want to be the new wild woman of painting, elegant shapes be damned,earthier passions unleashed.

My plan's to work on all of the paintings at once--and I've already started. Because I'm ambitious but not insane, the paintings in the series will number, roughly, six, though now I've chosen to address only three, each painting featuring a stop-actioned moment in a B and C scenario--for example, there's the scene on the hillside where Bonnie reads Clyde her fumbling love ballad about life on the lam--everyone knows at least one stanza:

Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang.
I'm sure you all have read
How they lie and steal
And those who squeal
Are usually found dying or dead.

Story continued on Page Two