A Glimpse of Myers Ridge
© 1994, Reprinted 2004, Steven L. Campbell
It was almost four o’clock on that Thursday summer afternoon inside David Evans’s large back-room art studio. Heat filled the room despite the air conditioner blowing a cool breeze from the far window. A lascivious young woman reclined in a classic fine arts repose upon a lounge chair covered in multicolored satin linens and silk scarves. Her face was the color of the finest gold, ruby and sapphire. Her eyes sparkled emerald green. Her long auburn hair flowed down a seemingly endless body of extraordinary purity that glowed like a summer sunset in a garden of carnations and lilies.
The artist stopped staring at his newly found model and looked away. She owned a beauty he had never seen before. He desired to capture its uniqueness on canvas, of course, yet he seemed incompetent whenever he tried. Her beauty distracted him, mesmerized him and filled his heart with want. A want to have her as his own, to see her without end, a magnificence to behold forever with his touch as well as with his sight and imagination.
His model raised a delicate eyebrow and curled up a smile at the corner of her mouth.
“I made dinner reservations for tonight,” she said. “I hope you like chicken à la caléndonienne.”
Her voice was the light tinkling of wind chimes in a gentle breeze. Anxiety passed over David’s despondent face. He leaned his thin frame forward in his blue wheelchair and hid behind the cover of his easel. Surely he could have dinner with her, he thought. Why should he care what his neighbors would think. Nancy’s body had never been found during the search for her inside Myers Ridge. He’d lived without her for three years now. It was time to move on. Time to end his loneliness.
Still, the hope that Nancy would one day walk back into his life flickered within him. But he knew there was a slim chance she was alive. He sucked in a deep breath to help settle his anxiety.
“Chicken à la caléndonienne,” he said with a voice like a steel breeze from winter’s coldest hour. “What’s that?”
“Chicken baked in butter, parsley and lemon juice. It’s good.”
It sounded delicious but he dared not to admit it. He said, “Hmmm,” instead and adjusted his paint-splattered smock. Then he took a long flat paintbrush and spread white oil paint across his palette. The milky hue merged into a puddle of yellow, crimson and blue paint until he was certain he had the right color. He approached the large easel with its canvas positioned low, dashed a shaky stroke of color across the fabric and studied the face of the young woman he was painting.
A fist of desire grabbed his soul, so he hid again behind the canvas and partook of her beauty with deep and hidden admiration. He poised his brush at the canvas and applied another shaky stroke of color. When he peered over at her again, it was there in her face: she wanted him as much as he yearned for her. He put down the brush, tossed his palette and other brushes onto a taboret and told Julia the session was over.
“Patience,” she reminded him as she rose from the love seat and grabbed a blue robe hanging from the back of his easel. “It’ll come back to you.”
“Of course it will,” he huffed, and then backed down as soon as he saw her amorous face peer down at him over the top of the easel. He felt the walls close in on him. The run of bookcases seemed to creep closer. From afar a voice asked if he was okay, but he was busy listening to the voice in his head telling him it was okay to love again.
But Nancy’s body was never found.
“What did you say?” Concern wrinkled Julia’s brow as she crouched next to his wheelchair and peered up at him.
“Nancy’s body was never found,” he repeated.
“Tell me,” she pleaded. “I want to know what happened.”
“It was in the news.” David wheeled from her, but not to run away. He wheeled to the window that looked out at Myers Ridge. The hill that took his wife was miles away in the blue distance. He brushed his thick gray mustache with long fingers and was surprised by how vivid his memories of that day were. The memories seemed to never lessen in intensity.
“The curse of being an artist,” he said.
Julia sat in a chair next to him and waited. She looked like a piece of plastic realism from modern art’s Pop Art era—another fixture to his studio table cluttered with art magazines. And then she moved and his voice came like faraway thunder.
“It was the last time she was going to climb Myers Ridge,” he said. “She was five weeks pregnant, you know, but she was determined to find that crystal cave before the baby was born. I went along for the view, to take in the countryside. That’s when I discovered I was afraid of heights.”
“What happened?”
“She made me climb the peak. I was afraid to look down the side of the rocky slope we were on, but I looked anyway. My fear of heights gripped my stomach with a colossal fist that felt like it was ripping it up through my throat. I panicked and froze, afraid to move. My legs and feet had lost all feeling, but Nancy talked me into believing I could make it, so I inched my way to the top. Once I caught my breath and looked down, I wasn’t quite as afraid anymore.”
He stopped and sighed. “That is until we got our tent set up. That’s when a buzzing sound started all around us. And then our skin began to crawl and itch and sting, but not from bees or insects. It was electricity. The place we were at was becoming charged for a lightning strike. I didn’t know it until Nancy yelled for me to take off everything metal. Then she ran.”
He paused again. This time he looked at his watch.
“Please don’t stop,” she said and scooted closer to him. “I want to know what happened.”
The rumble in his voice became louder. “I ran after her. It felt like large bugs were crawling down my back. Fat and cold balls of rain splattered us from the silvery, foggy sky, stinging our faces like hail stones.
“An electric current snaked its way across my back just as we reached a cave. We pushed our way inside through heaps of rubble until we were deep enough that we could no longer feel the effects of the storm.” He covered his face with his hands.
“Go on,” she begged.
“Not here.”
“Then where?”
“I don’t know.”
The rumble diminished.
He turned to her and said, “I’m keeping you. You must be hungry.”
She stood and stepped into the sunlight. “Come have dinner with me.” The evening sun dazzled her body in golden hues.
“Stay there,” he cried. “Don’t move.” He wheeled to his easel and grabbed some brushes and his palette. "Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move," he said as he pulled a prepared canvas from a shelf and hurried back while balancing the gear in his lap. He sketched her with lines of umber and sienna. He whisked in golden hues next to gentle blues and pink. He formed the glow of her flesh with buttery mounds of paint until the light had changed and she was left in shadow. Then he stopped and closed his eyes.
She undid the cotton robe and let it fall away. Then she went to him, leaned over his face and kissed him.
David pushed her away, but the kiss had stirred his soul. It had been too long.
“No,” he said fighting the passion that burned in his heart and made it difficult to breathe. “I can’t.”
“I want you,” she said.
He partook of Julia’s love and beauty, which he consumed voraciously. His heart came alive and broke away the bonds of its incarceration. From its confinement it ran to her, eager to show her the way to his soul. He cried as he felt Nancy’s memory still hanging on.
When he backed away, Julia turned from him and dressed at the cot in the corner. He carried the canvas to his easel, leaned the sketch against its base, and covered the larger painting with a white linen sheet. Then he turned and watched her slip into her shoes.
She stood, made her way across the studio to the door to the living room, and then stopped and looked back.
“Talk to me,” she said.
David returned to the window. “I cannot love another until her body is found.” He stared at the feathered wisps of clouds in the yellowing sky. “I need to know.”
There was silence. Since Nancy’s disappearance, the house had become like a vacuum, always absent of a clock ticking, a radio playing, or the phone ringing. Even the open windows had stopped letting in the usual noises from outdoors.
David shivered. The feeling here was one of loneliness, and he longed to escape it. He closed his eyes and waited for Julia to leave.
“I’ll see you, David,” she said, and he listened to her leave. Then, lost in troubled thoughts and memories, he watched the evening sun sink behind Myers Ridge looming in the distance. The hillside of old pine, maple and beech, and its characteristic craggy hilltop darkened into an inky cutout shape against a red backdrop of sky. When it was dark, he went to the kitchen in search of something quick to eat. Later, he slept in his wheelchair parked in front of his TV, his sleep restless with troubled dreams.
Inside the house, the woman moved silently and unseen. She always came when he was asleep.
In his sleep, he dreamt of her. In his sleep, he smiled and loved again.
