Models

A Short Story by Danny Fitzpatrick

Reiner and Edmund had been in Oxford two weeks, and neither the heat of their walk over Magdalen Bridge to the Bodleian nor the cool unbuttoned fashion of the colleges had dulled their verve for tweeds and caps. These they wore to Queens Coffee and down New College Lane, where they parted at the Bridge of Sighs, Edmund for Worcester College and Reiner for Merton. They wore them in the Camera and in their afternoon walks around the Meadow, with the little red deer and the cows watching them as though they were two strange creatures returned from the dead. They wore them to Mass at the Oratory and to dinner twice a week in the Lamb and Flag, which they frequented with a sense of their own fine powers of discrimination. They had tried the pub across the street, of course, but the bitter the barmaid recommended was hard work, and the bathroom beneath its dim skylight smelled richly of piss, whereas the Lamb and Flag Gold was an easy sip, and the back room was seldom crowded. This was where they liked to write.

They would be there soon. Mass had ended, and Reiner sat in the twelfth pew on the right hand side of the aisle while Edmund made his confession. An old priest was making his way across the front of the high altar, putting out the candles with a long-handled snuffer and stepping back to see that each was extinguished. It was a slow progress and Reiner struggled to attend to it or at least to the slant of light through the row of tall pale stained glass windows above the altar rather than to the image of the woman he’d seen from the window of the Camera. He’d been poring over London mercantile records of the first decades of the 16th century and wondering how he had offended his tutor and, failing to make sense of the text or its causes, had gotten up to look for the lonely statue of the Virgin in her niche across the street. She’d survived King Henry and worse and now as Reiner looked at her his gaze fell away to the rippling of a curtain of deer-colored hair and the apparition of a pair of eyes that even across the cobblestones reminded him of the backs of the mallard hens who paddled on the Isis. Her face appeared again and again to Reiner, who forced himself to watch the old priest at his labor and the ghastly smoke of his success. By the time he’d transited the altar, the green light had come on above the confessional, and Edmund stepped out beneath a window featuring a many-tined stag against a crimson field and a lofty, broad-boughed tree. Reiner rose and genuflected, and the two met at the rear of the church. Holy water lingered on their fingertips as they stepped into the still early hours of the Oxonian dusk. Traffic was smooth on St. Giles, and they crossed easily at the War Memorial into the rich sunshine filtering through the sycamores and chestnuts.

By custom the two said little before they’d seated themselves and taken the first swift sips of ale. Each was taciturn by nature and besotted with reading by assignment and it took the whole of the hour between their passing out of the shadow of the Sheldonian and sitting beside the window that gave onto the oak-shaded silence of Lamb and Flag Lane for either to be fit for any spoken accord. But his ruminations on the woman below the Virgin had quickened Reiner’s tongue, and he was on the point of asking Edmund what he’d thought of the Ashcan Painters they’d seen the evening before when Edmund halted at the door of the pub, with the sun slanting into his thin, neat, dust-colored hair and turning it the color of a wheat field.

Closed? Reiner said, reading over Edmund’s shoulder.

Oh, Lord, said Edmund, stepping back and peering down the lane to be sure they hadn’t simply opened up out back. They looked at each other before turning to gaze somewhat mournfully across the street to the awning with its eagle snatching up the golden child.

Do we want to? said Reiner.

Oh, we may as well.

But the ale…

Pink gins tonight, then.

They started for the corner and crossed into the shade of the buildings across the street. Everywhere around them undergraduates went in regalia, and the two friends looked at them and were sad, and Reiner gazed helplessly after a certain pair of eyes. Forgetting the Ashcan School again, he asked as they turned up the opposite block toward the pub,

How’s the Enemy?

Ha! Edmund actually laughed as authors set it down. Ha! with the mouth open and shut in an instant. He makes Waugh look like Greene, and he makes Greene look like St. Francis.

Right up your alley then.

I feel like he is my alley.

Ah, to know one’s alleys.

They were passing an iron gate grown over with clematis. Behind it was a yard, not very deep but still irregular in that part of town, luxuriant with blossoms pitched to a greater keenness of color by the pale blue paint of the house beyond. Reiner had on no occasion seen anyone in the yard or the doorway or a window but his mind, struck with the romantic concatenation of its details, peopled it with numberless phantasms, luminous beyond the scope of ordinary men and women, the sort of people who behind a screen of indistinction lived in effortless awareness of life’s dramatic unfolding. Now he thought of her living there, of her stepping out through the low door into the garden each morning as fresh and clean as the dew.

He cocked his head to the left and shook it slightly as they turned in at the door of the pub. Edmund, looking back as he opened it, said, You ever figure out your wheat?

The booth on their left as they entered was full of Americans singing a gentle round. Edmund glanced back several times at Reiner, who kept his counsel as they edged into the relative quiet at the bar. The same barmaid, with her fried egg colored skin and ripening mulberry hair, dropped a rag and said, What’ll it be, beauties?

Pink gin, said Edmund.

Her eyes ran down his tweed jacket and back up to the peak of his cap before sliding over to Reiner.

Ginger beer, please.

Which?

Crabby’s. In a glass with an orange slice.

That’s it, she said.

Reiner felt Edmund’s eyes on the side of his face and persisted in watching the black back of the woman’s shirt as she worked. It was curiously impassive, conveying no more of the breadth of her bending, reaching, grasping, and shaking than water conveys of a floating body. At her first turning she set a highball glass before Edmund and Reiner smelled the bitters and juniper and the strawberries she’d tucked in tidily below the rim. He looked at Edmund to see how he’d react, and his friend’s hand rose and an infantile stammering played about his lips as the woman turned away again. Presently she returned with a tall glass of pale liquid fizzing around a sixth of an orange, which she set on the bar beside a voluptuous dark glass bottle with an elephant trooping steadfastly west across the label.

Uhh…excuse me, said Edmund.

What’s that, lovely?

Well, it’s just…I didn’t ask for strawberries.

She had resumed wiping out her glasses and fixed an amused, not to say threatening smile on him, as if to say she’d be delighted to see what he’d do about it.

I’ll take that one as well, said Reiner. Another pink g and t for my friend here, darling, and the strawberries on the side for me.

Ah, that’s it, beauty, you may not be as pretty as he is but you can have the strawberries any way you like.

Cheers, Reiner said, lifting the two glasses and the bottle and leaving Edmund leaning on the bar, one leg cocked anxiously across the other. He saw through the dim first room beyond the bar an empty table beneath a skylight grown over with ivy, and there he sat, leaning back into the deadened sunshine as he sipped the pink gin and chewed the first crisp strawberry and imagined the vines above possessed of some malignant long-sighted intent. He lowered his gaze and took a second sip, much longer this time, of the gin and felt the cold descending to his belly and the first tentative forays of the alcohol into his blood or his imagination. He closed his eyes and there she was, crossing the cobbles with a long, pliant step. He opened them as Edmund seated himself and slid a saucer across the table. Strawberries cut to the shape of hearts were erected in a little tower rising up to meet Reiner.

Oh, look at that, and after all they say about an island people.

Right. Edmund’s smile blurred as his glass rose and to head off the faint swirl of anger lingering beneath his friend’s lip, Reiner at last answered, Yes, I know about the wheat now.

You know about the wheat? Anthony told you then.

Yes, he had to tell me and I had to sit there like an idiot with the lightbulb coming on over my head.

Ah, that’s why he’s there. You probably made his year.

How distinguished of me.

Edmund took a drink and using his forefinger and thumb extracted first a notebook and then a small silver pencil from his pocket. Reiner watched him as he raised the ginger beer and felt the fragrant ebullience on his lips. It was as if the anger he’d seen in Edmund’s face had trickled over the air between them and rooted itself in Reiner’s mind. There he sat, pencil poised, with an ear cocked museward. All friendly concourse was concluded, said his manner, and now for the matter of Parnassus and let the troubles of the wheat fields and the sheep enclosed on the lowest slopes await a more propitious time. But he would not propitiate.

The other day at tea on the roof, he said, waiting for the blink of frustration and the dignified lifting of the head.

What about it?

I think I saw her.

Edmund laid the pencil in a groove of the table and said, Surely not her.

It must have been.

What was her hair like?

Oh, Lord. It was like a national flag. Like a torch in the sunlight.

Like the night wind under the moon.

See? See!

Still, they’re all like that. Edmund tried to pick up his pencil.

What do you mean, they’re all like that? Reiner drank fiercely, and a line of ginger beer licked over the right corner of his mouth and down to his jaw.

There’s no consequence in any of it. Not one of them looks at you and meanwhile you spend all day falling in love all over again.

Edmund picked up his pencil and turned a quarter from the table to cross his right leg over his left knee. He set the notebook on his thigh and wrote hurriedly, with the pencil slipping off the edge of the narrow page. Reiner took a book from the inside pocket of his blazer and a pen from his slacks, opened to a fresh page, scratched a cross into the header, and sat back, sipping his drink as he looked up to the skylight and waited.

A line came, and he wrote in the notebook open in his palm,

This silken music freaks the moon and larks

You know what would make me really happy, Edmund said, looking with misty eyes at Reiner as he sipped his gin.

Reiner watched and waited in silence.

For a really beautiful woman to die in a car wreck because she saw me walking down the road.

Jesus, man.

Edmund’s face split into laughter, his right hand with the drink and his left with the notebook coming down upon the table as he leaned forward, tongue shining with gin between teeth the color of raw egg white. As Reiner watched him, smiling and shaking his head slightly, Edmund’s laughter ceased and the color in his cheeks deepened and his mouth refused to close as he looked over Reiner’s shoulder at something that now raised in the dim room a chime of mirth like the first voice which was its own echo putting an end to nothingness. He knew exactly what he would have seen had he turned at Edmund’s awe-stricken testimony, It’s her. It’s her. But he refrained. By a supreme effort of will he put the pen to the paper and continued

Amid the meager valor of its gloom.

His eyes flicked up to Edmund, who had studiously bowed his head and wrote now as though under divine dictum.

Oh my gosh, said the voice, beside them now, descended from its hilarious empyrean into the realm of simplest, sweetest words. You guys are amazing.

Edmund and Reiner lifted their heads like corpses called from the grave. She was not alone. Both the boys dimly discerned that she was flanked on either side by a girl who was no doubt a great beauty but who next to the glorious flaxen presence burned simply as the cherubim beside a seraph.

This is what we’ve been looking for all day, she said. Her hair, Reiner saw, was tied back now, neat and demure as an ear of grain wreathed in the leaf. Her cheekbones soared like Dover and her eyes were like swallows in the nest. She wore a trim herringbone jacket and a black scarf and black pants that seemed to vanish into the nether gloom of the pub.

Still the boys said nothing. Can we take your picture, she said.

They looked at each other.

Sure, Reiner said. And then, a little deeper, Sure.

Of course, said Edmund.

Do you want us to keep writing?

Oh, yes, that would be great, please.

Reiner looked at the notebook again. No more lines arrived. He held the tip of the pen to the paper and waited, trying not to smile.

So cool, she said. Thank you! And was gone.

Reiner and Edmund looked at each other and sipped their drinks. Both tried for a few minutes to write. Nothing appeared on Reiner’s page, and he sensed that while Edmund’s pencil continued to move his friend’s usual rapid purpose had lost itself in the swirling currents of Psyche. Reiner slipped the book back into his pocket and finished the ginger beer. At the sound of the bottle on the table Edmund looked up. What do you think, he said.

Let’s go.

They rose, patting their pockets, and shuffled through the front room and past the bar.

Good night, sweets, said the barmaid.

Good night, they said. Good night.

The night hung far off in its slow summer approach. But as the boys stepped out beneath the sycamores they felt the pallor of the paving stones and the buildings across the road and the faint chill flowing beneath the sheet of cloud the evening had pulled over the city. As they walked, Reiner looked up into the grey inscrutable air and imagined the sunlight spreading boisterously above the clouds, still blocking out the stars.

Danny Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings and editor of Joie de Vivre.