Pia Quintano

The sound of her stomach growling punched a hole in the quiet of the cabin like the single cry of an owl in the forest. She rolled over, wondering if it was loud enough to wake Martin.

He seemed to like everything about her anyway, including her breath on a hollow stomach. She raised herself on her elbows; he was next to her, under the thin comforter they shared, his face slack against the pillow. His face always had a certain softness, but his body was taut, even in sleep she could make out the hard edges and solid curves.

She flattened herself back on her stomach. She had been alone for the past two weeks, had the place all to herself since the friend it belonged to was spending the winter in Florida. She turned her head to the wood stove that stood directly in front of them. She’d left the door slightly ajar, and the heat felt like it was melting the contacts she’d forgotten to take out. She closed her eyes and started to drift. She thought of the white flakes falling from the trees like dandelion feathers, the dying embers like burning coals in the snow, sinking deeper and deeper to the bottom.

***

She woke up again when it was nearly morning, a grayish light throwing a blue shadow into the room and felt his hands on her back. He rolled her toward him and held her close, his hands against her hips and started pushing against her. She folded her legs around him like a hand. His breath was sour, and she half-tucked her head into his shoulder, looking out at the dim room, the clothes thrown on the rocking chair, the chalk dust collecting in the corners, the papers and drawings crowding the surface of the desk. She could see the legs of her easel on which sat a pad of paper and the tenth sketch of the white horse, this time done in charcoal.

Martin was like a winter messenger pushing the season into her, his penis as hard as an icicle and she felt tremors of goose flesh. He hadn’t said a word to her yet. She wanted to stop him, tell him to put on a condom but he was too far along.

He was a long time in coming. Maybe it had to do with his elfish shape and the fact that his toenails were so long, but she imagined him holding onto his penis with curled feet and pushing in, his body suspended above her like a great hairy bird. He pushed at her as if it hurt him, she could feel him wincing against her shoulder, she thought if she could just get a view of the frosted panes of glass above the desk, she would be able to reconnect with herself.

He came suddenly, pulling out of her in a fierce spasm and splattering a milky ribbon into her closed thighs. He breathed heavily into her neck, and she imagined a black hole opening under it.

“I love you.”

“I love you too” she mumbled, running a hand over his back.

“I’ve missed you. Did you know that I think about making love to you all the time?”

She looked at him and his eyes in the dim light seemed to have grown larger.

***

The night before she’d felt a kind of narcotic sleepiness overtaking her. He was talking about something he’d read, and she felt the familiar tension rising, which she hadn’t felt while she’d been away, the fear that she would suddenly drift off while he was speaking, when she knew he was only speaking as a prelude to touching her and he’d take the sleep as a form of rejection. She’d barely kept herself awake; she dozed between caresses. She entered a realm she had never known before, a sleep so shallow that it could be disturbed by a feather thrown on its surface, a sudden twitch from him that let her know another caress was expected. When it was finally safe to fall asleep, she found that she couldn’t. She wrapped her mind around the snow horse, as he placed her head against his chest and finally drifted off.

***

“We should go to breakfast soon” she said, already feeling again the tiredness rising from her like steam. She knew that it wouldn’t have been enough that they’d been together last night and this morning, if he were to reach for her again and find her somewhere else, his confidence in her wanting him, which she was trying to protect like a glass-blown flower, would shatter against her. She never felt any urgency to be with him, the way he said he felt about her.

She thought about the things she hoped to do with the day, the sketches she wanted to finish of the horse who had lived in a pasture near her parents’ cottage in Vermont.

It was typical of her family to do things in opposites, taking a winter vacation instead of a summer one and finding one of the few flat plains in Vermont where no one skied, where the frozen ponds were covered with bramble and where the only entertainment was the stretching out of the clouds toward twilight.

She had forgotten those moments in the endless, season-less winters that had passed since in the city and it wasn’t until that winter, when she’d had an especially resistant group of adults in her morning art class that she had asked a friend to let her spend a month in the cabin she kept in New Hampshire. She had tried to impress upon her students the beauty and simplicity of the tonal range, the contrast between light and dark as the departure point in their compositions. But the pencils slipped out of her hands as she made corrections on their sheets, the lines blurring, the texture lost in their mangled perspective.

She could only begin by painting winters; her brain had blacked out the years before adolescence as if they were at the bottom of an unreachable well. The morning after she arrived, as she drifted into wakefulness and saw surrounding her through the diamond windows the same snow of her childhood, the deep clotted fields, the trees that rested in their white cylinders, she was reminded of the horse she’d visited as a child in those Vermont winters with her parents. He was kept in a pasture down the road and came to her as soon as he caught sight of her, resting his head over the low wooden fence. He was the most exotic animal she had ever seen. The apes, birds and tigers she’d seen as a child in the zoo, the zebras, lions and seals, all blended into an absurd patchwork that she could not distinguish, that failed to move her. But she had never seen something as pure as the horse, with his white eyelashes and the angel hair on his hooves, and the deep wounded eyes of a starving child.

***

Maybe it also came from being able to touch him. She’d been shy at first, for the only horses she’d seen were the ones that pulled carriages of tourists through the park. But he’d nuzzled her on the first day she had approached the fence, leaving a green paste across the front of her coat and she’d gently laid her hand between his ears, standing on the low rung of the fence, reaching out to him, a tall horse, from her nine-year-old body.

The character of these winters was determined by her father’s health and mood, the timbre of it against the fragile eaves of the Vermont house. He seemed to suffer from everything at once, chest pains, spasms in his legs, bleeding ulcers. The cabinet above the refrigerator was filled with prescription bottles instead of cereal and crackers. And through his thin T-shirts she could see the cysts and craters that had formed on his back as a reaction to the various pills and potions he had taken for years. His brows seemed permanently wedded together in a harsh line above his nose and he couldn’t keep his hands still, they seemed to suffer from the same tremors which were in his voice. But the horse remained the same and, in her memory, it was always a very white winter around him, windless and still, he moved through the silence to her, roughly licking her hand and butting up against her shoulder.

Eventually, her family stopped coming to the cottage. Her father died and so the winter became slushy and loud, the hush of the horse in his white field and his curly feathers lost in the severe angles of the city, the cars coated in dirty snow. The horse became a symbol to her of all she could no longer remember.

Sometimes  she wondered if she could start her life again with just a good idea, a day well-spent, so as soon as the roads of snow grew out around her that first morning in the cabin, she’d started a sketch of the horse, laying it out in red chalk on her drawing pad, amazed she remembered so well the gentle slope of his belly, the pony face, the fragile nostrils and mouth, the muscles in his neck, the plush fur on his chest, the scoffed knees. Even now that she was an adult he had not shrunk in stature as most things did after childhood.

The first drawing spawned a series of sketches, gradually with the addition of soft pastels, the blue clouds reflecting off his coat, the amber barn behind him with its peeling shingles. The pictures grew in composition and texture: she would give him a setting and a context, and she hoped it would reach out like a constellation to the other things she had forgotten, muffled below the layers of snow.

***

It was already 4:00 by the time they had lunch in the lopsided wagon diner in town. Afterwards, they went for a long walk and found a small skating rink inside a playground. She leaned against its wall as he laced her skates, pulling them very tight at the inside of her ankle.

“How do they feel?”

She moved away from him and set them down on the ice. She hadn’t skated often, but she knew how to keep her balance: keep her back straight, lean on the outside edge of the skates.

“Wonderful.”

He sat on the ledge and took the runners off his speed skates. The boots were so worn that he had placed swatches of electrical tape over the holes, the rest of the leather was peeling and so dulled down you could hardly recognize they had once been red. The blades were longer than any she’d seen; he had sharpened them, so they looked strangely fine and out of place under the boot. He stepped onto the ice and reached for her elbow.

***

It was already nearing twilight at five o’clock, the gentle blue muted by a layer of gray and the ice a silver mirror: a cold day on which no one was walking. She felt like they were tucked inside a paperweight, caught in a world they had created. In the city a month earlier, the winter returned after a week of premature spring, and she realized she had lost energy for it. That was when she decided to leave town, reasoning that if she were going to be overcome by winter, she wanted it to be the real thing, with steel-edged ice covering the roads and forests deeply sunk in powder.

They skated around the rink a couple of times and then he let her go, to fly off on his own. They had been skating a few times in the city, but she could never get over the shock of his perfect form and symmetry on ice, the way he catapulted his slim body, like a bird in a rimless sky. But here in the tiny rink, it was an odd thing to see, the flash of his skates and power in his limbs, his head darting behind him as he moved backwards and rolled himself from the hips, only to be brought up short as he met the walls. She could feel the frustration in him, as he kept reaching too close to the shallow ice on its edges. Unlike her, he was an expert, beautiful on the ice, his grace like something in a painting she had seen as a child and loved. The moon was already in the sky, he stopped with the sudden clench of blades in front of her and took her hand. He spun her, doing it one round too many, making her dizzy. She felt in him the desire for her skill and regretted that she could not give it to him.

“You must look in the direction that you’re turning. Like a dancer. Watch me – see. Like this. Just keep turning your head.” She watched him, a man on a pond too small for his skill and she thought of the life they led in New York, the space she needed to create between them. He had become brittle in her company, anything she said was taken the wrong way. Yet whenever she saw him, it was as if it were the first time. In the spaces of time they were separated, she could not calculate how she felt about him because she knew that when she saw him again, there would be something new about him, not easy to dismiss. He spun her around again and she pointed her head in the wrong direction and felt sick.

***

 “Could we stop this now? I’m never going to be as good as you.” She wanted to be alone, to take her baby glides around the rink and think about her next composition. She had started drawing the white horse in the changing lights of various times of day. She was now in the afternoons, the pale blue, the light showing through the tops of the branches. She was beginning to understand that the horse was really a matter of the light that was shed on him.

He let her go and she skated away from him as he sat on the ledge. She wondered sometimes what he was thinking when he mutely watched her like that. She’d thrown cold water at him so often it could have made its own pond between them and yet he still wanted her. But by the third or fourth turn around the rink she had forgotten him, she was back behind the fence thinking only of the horse in the afternoon light.

But the road didn’t seem to extend back inside the actual house of her childhood – there was only in her memory a kind of stale unpleasantness, the way coffee smelled when it was left on the counter too long.

She performed a couple of half-hearted turns, the ice a bit crumbly, under her blades, trying not to snag herself. The ice felt papery under her, ridden with pocks.

***

 That evening, Martin went for a walk in the woods and left her to compose at the canvas. Finally, alone with a blank sheet, she realized she had perhaps overestimated the call of the images. For the first twenty minutes nothing came. It was twilight, the woods were made of silver legs that were reflected through the window, black twiggy trees outlining the white birches behind them like barbed wire. Yet she was trying to render an afternoon light, the horse trailing a gentle gust of butterflies behind him. She began with the sky, laying down an orange pastel and then immediately regretting it: the sky had never looked orange, it would have caused everything to melt around her and the horse’s reservoir of white would have turned to mud. She rubbed it off and restarted with blue, the clear white blue of linens, then she sketched out the trees, the red pines, in which the sun illumined patchy brown barks and finally the horse, half-hidden behind their solid trunks, looking out at her timidly, as if held prisoner behind a camouflage of memory. She could not capture his beauty, though she had tried through a careful fidelity to his parts, which never seemed to collect into perfection, the white and elegant ballet of his legs and gestures. It was more important to her than anything else that winter, to get his beauty right, to capture the feeling he had given to her, as if it was a debt owed to his memory. She worked quickly, adding limbs and branches to the trees, and then suddenly realized that the picture had darkened: no longer the height of the afternoon but instead the waning of it and the horse’s face looked thin and slack in the teaming shadows that crowded in. She stopped work and stood back from the easel, distressed that so little remained of the original light and sun.

She stared hard at the drawing, willing it to lighten; she hadn’t known that trees could look as fierce as thorns and the air could be so dense.

Martin came back, scraping his feet on the mat, his skin ruddy, the healthiest she’d seen him. He stood in front of the easel wordlessly and put his arms around her waist. She leaned into his chest, thinking back to how he looked on the ice, the perfect form, the confidence in motion. After the moon came out, the hills in the distance were wrapped in mist, the trees slowly becoming ghost trees farther and farther up the mountain. They’d skated arm in arm and she thought how much it felt like she actually loved him.

She felt the surface of his rough jacket around her bare arms, his breath, heavy and warm, like an animal on her neck. She turned and kissed his cheek, and he held her tighter. If she could only keep her eyes on the picture, she could figure something out. But he turned her around to kiss her and she knew there wouldn’t be time.

***

In the gray light of the following morning, she woke up before him and lay still, composing in her head, like a geometry problem, the picture she would sketch that day. It would be evening. She tried to remember the lay of the land, and her memory opened a hand in front of her. What came to her was something unexpected, her father’s knotty hands on his coffee cup as he sat in the cottage on the tall kitchen stool. He didn’t look up at her when she walked into the room. She had a pinecone in her pocket, the air a kind of stinging fresh, filled with the needles of the north and the smell of the fire in the living room, singeing the inside of her nostrils and the back of her throat. She walked past him and out the door to the road. She seemed to reach the horse without even having to walk, he stood in all his whiteness like a unicorn at the gate. She marveled that she could touch something so beautiful and pure, before she was transported back to the house, her father calling her because he was having cramps in his legs. And suddenly she was back inside, kneeling at his feet, massaging his calves as he stilled the rocking chair in front of the fire. As her fingers pressed into the slackened muscles under the thick mat of hair, she thought of the horse she left in the field.

But her father is never happy. She can’t seem to press right in the right place. He positions her hands further down the stem of leg and she feels like she is lost in a knotty wood. Her wrists are tired and stiff, she can feel the anger pulsing under her hands, his stiffening under her. The more she plies him the more he stiffens – she can’t seem to work the magic she usually does. She looks up and thinks she sees the horse through the window, the perfect crescent of his neck and the gentle slope of his forehead. She keeps looking at the window, willing the space, which is dotted by thick flakes of falling snow, to congeal into him.

She sat up startled and felt Martin’s hand on her leg and wondered if she had made a sound. Now there was light in the room, the gentle silver of last night dissipated into a white blinding heat. He brushed the back of his hand up and down her leg, which had suddenly become bare.

“You were beautiful last night. I felt incredible. No one has ever made me feel that way.”

She pulled a little away from him, aware of the bad taste in her mouth.

“What’s the matter?”

“I have to use the bathroom.”

“Are you sick?”

“A little” and her stomach suddenly cramped. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

When she came out, he was dressed and sitting in the rocking chair. He motioned for her, and she sat on his lap.

“I’m sorry” she said. “My stomach.”

“That’s all right. I’m not leaving till tonight, and I could even stay through to tomorrow morning if you want the company.”

Her body went rigid before she could catch the reflex.

“Oh – you don’t want me to, do you?”

She didn’t say anything. She had planned a great deal of work that night, a new sheet of paper, evening, the white horse glowing in a coal dark field. He turned her face toward him.

“You don’t want me to stay.”

She looked at him, the slight crease the pillow had left in his right cheek. His eyes were watery, and she could see anger forming behind them.

“Say it!”

She stood up – feeling in his body the impulse to throw her off.

He stood up too, the rocking chair moving violently behind him.

“Tell me the truth. You want me to go.”

She knew what edged his anger. She knew that she could undo it very quickly, with only a few words or the right gesture, but she said nothing, standing before him as mutely as a child. He took her wrist and shook it as if he were trying to get her to drop something.

“I just want to work on the pictures. I need to.”

He picked up a drawing pencil that was on the desk and forced it into her hand. “Then work on your picture.” He started moving around the room like a caged bull, throwing the few things he’d brought with him into his knapsack. She watched silently, tears rolling down her cheeks, blurring him – he was like a thick mass of colored movement in front of her, a runny watercolor, the windows with the sun outside them looked like fractured pieces of crystal.

When he was packed, he stopped in front of the door. Some of his anger seemed to have already left him.

“How will you get to the station?”, she asked.

“I’ll walk.”

She nodded and he waited. She thought about what it would be like if he stayed and knew he would want to make love with her, as he always did after a fight.

“Well, good-bye” he said after a minute, and she watched as he slowly let himself out and closed the door softly behind him. She wondered if he expected her to run after him, if he was expecting to hear the crunch of her feet down the old snow on the road.

But it was a relief to find herself alone when she hadn’t expected it and she pulled the stool in front of the easel and began the last portrait of the horse, the one that was going to be the best. She worked hard, forgetting that she hadn’t eaten, using the dark coals for the sky, the gray and gold tones for the snow and leaving for the very last the luminous figure of the horse. She worked through the afternoon. The sun throbbed into the room and then suddenly it stopped and turned into a brittle twilight, with the clouds restless in the sky and the sound of a steady drizzle outside the cabin. But the more she thought back to the winters, to reconstruct the environment of the horse, the more they seemed to thin and dim from her, the snow receding from the fields like a shoreline and patches of earth opening like wounds. Under what had been frozen ponds there were now still pools of black water, with sunken leaves and rocks at the bottom. As the snow retreated from the wells around the trees, she saw auburn sticks of pine covering the roots like bristly fur. She looked out over the range of her memory, a field of abandoned furry stumps. Dark patches of brush showed up on the canvas and the winter melted under her hands. Suddenly the sun bore down and seemed to clear a path in her mind, the smell of a country summer and in it the buzzing of mosquitoes. She is back in the cottage, and it is no longer winter, her father sitting before her in the rocking chair, his legs bare and cramped and she is kneeling in front of him, tears running down her cheeks. Yet she doesn’t bring her hands to his legs. She cannot bear to touch him. She runs out of the house, following in the dimming light the branches of the trees like a black cage above her, the anger in their limbs, the wind blowing through the tunnel. But this time they lead her to nothing; the horse is gone. The road which had been covered with ice is now a sandy shore. In his pasture, there is only a parched forest and the rocks that reach up out of the dandelions as if they were beached seals.

She looked at the canvas in front of her expecting the image of the horse to have vanished there as well, but something was left, his pony head supported by the white twigs of his body. She got up and ran out of the cabin and down the road, her sneakers sinking into the muddy sand and then she stopped. It was nearly dark, and she knew she wouldn’t find him, for he had left hours ago. She turned around and looking at the trees which reached above her, stretching their black arms out, she realized the souls in them, their quiet presence a great benevolence. She followed the road back, feeling around her the wet and peeling snow.

She came to the cabin and stepped inside, noticing for the first time that Martin had forgotten his ice skates. They were leaning against the brick face of the mantel, their laces stitched together and their fine blades reflecting the light back at her like silver tongues.