Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (15 page)

“You could, if you wanted to.”

“I could what?” But he was being coy, dragging out her flirting to flog himself with.

“Draw me naked. How does that work, exactly? Would I pose for you, and you’d be right there in the room, and you’d tell me how to sit or lie down? Or would you arrange me how you’d like and take a picture?” He decided her voice must be so husky from sleep. His cock was less interested in such denials.

He tried to answer and had to clear his throat. “However you would be most comfortable.”

“With you in the room. Telling me what to do.”

He closed his eyes and put down his pencil. Cupped his hand around his erection, let himself feel his pulse thudding in the base. “I don’t really tell you what to do. I tell you to make yourself comfortable because you would have to remain in the same position for so long.”

“Do you have to get close?”

“Sometimes.” He squeezed himself, just a little, and the pleasure drifted completely through him.

“Do you touch me?”

“I’d ask you to reposition yourself, first. If it wasn’t quite right, I might ask you if I could adjust you.”

“Have you done this before?”

“I drew from life at university.”

“But you never asked any of your …”

“No,” he interrupted. “I didn’t date anyone serious when I was figure drawing a lot, and Jessica was the most serious. But then, I was mostly drafting, mostly with computers, rounding out my portfolio and trying to get work.”

“I think I’d like it. I think I’d like you looking at me while I watched you draw. I like how you lift your hand up to keep it from smudging your drawing.”

He laughed. “I’m left-handed.”

“I know. I noticed at the library. When you drew or carved.”

He didn’t know what to say. They had noticed each other for weeks, clearly, and
part of him wished they were still only noticing. Not imagining. Not touching. Not
looking
. So he could leave with just the great, stomach-leaping thoughts of her until walks in the surf polished her away. “I think I’d have you rest against the headboard, your legs folded to the side. Gazing ahead.”

“Waiting, it sounds like.”

Yes
. “Or maybe with your shirt under your chin, your pants barely hanging on to your hips.”

“You’ll have to draw that one from memory.” She laughed.

“Believe me, I could.”

“You did look very … Engrossed.”

“If by engrossed you mean memorizing exactly what your breasts look like, then yes. That.”

He heard something rustle. Sheets? Clothes? “I don’t do any kind of art. I guess you could kind of count design, but that I only do a little of, and what I do is very functional. But I have a little project, lately.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Do you know Andy Goldsworthy?”

“The natural-materials artist?”

“Yes! Wow. No one knows who he is.”

“I’m a wood engineer, remember?”

“Right. Actually, you’re a sunflower engineer. But we’re quibbling. Anyway, I watched his documentary in college,
Rivers and Tides
, then, for months, I was always trying to make little bits of art when I was at the park—a stack of pebbles, a leaf chain, whatever.”

“Of course. I did something similar when I saw it.”

“You know the big, like, hives he makes? The domes? Sometimes from rocks, sometimes from twigs?”

“The giant egglike structures?”

“Yes! That’s what I’m doing.”

“You’re making a giant egg?”

“Actually, a giant dome. Out of sticks. My landlady, Betty, she used to live in my house with her husband, years ago, and he planted a tulip tree for her when they were young. It’s huge now. But I think it’s sick, or dying, and probably should be taken down,
but Betty is sentimental about it. So it stays, but it’s dropping all of these twigs all the time. There are lots of twigs, and sometimes I just need to do something sort of repetitive and soothing to take my mind off things. So I started building one.”

“Ambitious.”

“Yes, I think so.” She was quiet. And he heard the rustling again. She must still be wrapped in her sheets. Talking to her like this, he realized, was only pleasurable because of the hope of seeing her at some point after. If this call disconnected, and he couldn’t so much as nod to her in the atrium, walk her to her amazing limousine, and try to kiss her, he’d be gutted.

Good-bye would have to be well and truly good-bye.

“What do you want to build, Hefin?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you told me about Beijing, and the sunflowers. I know you couldn’t find that kind of work here, but you’re going back. At least, after you visit home. I just wondered …”

He closed the drawing pad. There were still small nails along the cabinet border in the kitchen where Jessica had hung his dad’s spoons. Hefin had insisted that she take them with her if she wanted, but she had only taken one—an older one that his dad had explained to her was an unusual design. The rest were in a box in the pantry.

Jessica had sponsored his immigration, so for a while, he wasn’t allowed to work. He did find a free internship, instead, at a contractor’s firm that specialized in retrofitting commercial buildings with green technologies. It wasn’t challenging, but it was rewarding, but once he was eligible for work, the firm couldn’t find the money.

For a few years, Lakefield State University was a good source of short-term consulting jobs for the capital build projects, and was more interesting. It led to a more rounded-out portfolio for him, but no permanent job. Again and again, he was told to relocate to Chicago, the East Coast, but Jessica was working for a partnership in her firm and living apart even part-time didn’t look well for his permanent residency status.

Jessica sometimes hinted that she didn’t mind supporting them both. That it was nice to lean on him in that way, and he liked taking care of that part of their life, but he couldn’t shake off a kind of despair that he’d lost sight of his ship, that he was pacing along the shore, forgotten.

He’d get emails from his old colleagues in Beijing and get sick, even while
reading them over and over. But he didn’t talk to Jessica about it, either.

He got the sense she was holding her breath, needing to believe he was fine. Fine in the States, fine in Ohio, fine with unpredictable and sharp bursts of creative and productive effort followed by long days of anxious horizon-gazing.

He let her believe he was fine until the belief came apart into rough stones that circled around him in a jagged heap. And yes, he resented her.

He saw that she was wrapped up in the middle of her own Wudaoying Hutong zone, stars and possibility everywhere she looked. He felt like he was standing in the shadow just at the border of the lights she sat in.

Except, he was never more than one step away, even with his circle of stones, her circle of light. He refused to see where they might intersect.

What did he want to build?

How did he want to live?

The sunflowers he found so poetic, that were prototypes and the first gasps of his group’s imagination in Beijing, were being marketed. Installed on buildings in Asia, northern Europe, many other unimaginable places. He never saw the endpoint, the closure of that project, and so it lived in him, still, as excited conversation and cocktail-napkin drafts in those long strings of humid nights years ago, now.

But even now, he could turn on his browser and look at their slick marketing page, cold and beautiful. It was beyond a formless, fertile idea that had burned inside of him and now it was just product.

Something else to buy. Even though it was a good thing, a brilliant thing, it could be simply
had
.

Here, he had built nothing of his own.

He opened the cover of the drawing pad again, looked at a set of early sketches he had made for the library.

“Destiny?”

“Yeah.”

“After I’m gone, when I’ve gone back, will you look at my carvings, in the library?”

She was quiet, he could barely hear her inhalations. He didn’t even know why he asked her, but suddenly, he thought of the oak he had carved, set into the marble cladding.

He thought of it darkening year after year, of children waiting until the guard’s eyes were turned to finger the links of one of the captured chains, or to rub the wing of a bird. He thought of the rotted panels he removed and had been unable to restore. How one of them still held a penciled signature on the back,
Gus Shirek, 1901
.

A hundred years from now, maybe more, someone would pry out his panels, rub away the rot from the edges, and wonder if it could be saved. Both he and Destiny would be long gone, would have lived lives away from the other, filled with unimaginable things.

And it was cruel, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help thinking that the one point of connection they would have is her gaze on his work.

“I didn’t think of that.” Her voice was whispery.

“I just did. I’m sorry.” He wasn’t precisely sure what he was apologizing for.

“So I’ll have to say good-bye over and over, and you’ll just have to say it once.”

“It won’t be long, I don’t exactly think, that you won’t need to say good-bye. We’ll have barely met, after all. I think I just got a little overdone there. Askin’ you if you’d look at them.”

“I’ve never had a summer romance. Even if this isn’t a summer romance. A spring romance, I guess.”

“We don’t have to, at all. It’s probably not fair to either one of us.”

“I don’t care. Maybe I will care, but right now, I don’t. I want you to myself, even if it’s a bad idea. I don’t even know how much of you I can get. Sam’s too busy with his clinic and work to help with Sarah, and yesterday was a spectacular reminder that she needs more care than she’s getting. Plus the library gig is awesome, but it’s part-time. I need to be finding something else, and soon. Carrie has some ideas, actually, and I have to go to talk to one of the other branches tomorrow.”

All he heard was that he might not see her on Monday. “What are you doing today? Seeing Sarah, I’m sure.”

“Yes, I want to talk to her about the roommate thing. And just see her.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“What are you getting at, Welsh?” The smile was back in her voice.

“We could get pancakes. Or I could take them to you.”

She was quiet again. Then he caught it—the erotic possibility of his suggestion combined with their mutual denial that they were embarking on the very best way to hurt
themselves in the worst way possible. “If you add coffee and bacon to that order, I’ll give you my address.”

“Right. Okay.” He wrote it down and she was quiet again. “Destiny?”

“I’m here.”

“This is okay?”

“Yes. I was just thinking that it’s nice to hear your voice first thing in the morning. But then, I kind of didn’t want to be thinking that.”

“No. I can see that. But it’s nice to hear yours first thing in the morning, too.”

“Hefin?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the thing you miss most about Wales?”

Myself
. “My mum and dad. The part of the shore I can see from her garden. There’s a jetty that curls into it and at night, even if the sea is calm, you can hear the water splash against it.” He hadn’t thought of that until just this moment.

“I’ve never seen the ocean in real life, actually. That sounds nice.”

“It is.”

“Could you do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Once you find my address, could you go around the block and turn into the alley? Park by the back fence. I am surrounded by gossips.”

He laughed. Promised he would. And after they disconnected, he held the phone against his ear for a long time.

* * *

He knocked and looked at the eight-foot-by-eight-foot circle of sticks, about two inches high in Destiny’s back garden, which really wasn’t much larger. She didn’t answer right away, so he stepped off the back stoop. Walked around her work.

She had the right idea, arranging long, straight sticks into a kind of wattle, but he could see where once it was built up a few more inches, it wouldn’t hold.

He put the breakfast bags on the stoop and started reworking the base. He was about three feet around when he heard the screen door creak open.

“You’re messing with my sticks.”

He looked up at her. She was in jeans and a tee as usual, God help him, but her hair was wet, her feet bare. It was one of those spring mornings in Ohio that threatened to be cold and the bit of sky you could see behind her, over the overlapping rooftops of the neighborhood, was moody. Gray with darker lowlights through, like her eyes.

“Yeah, just a wee bit of engineering for you. So the rest goes smoothly.”

“Wood engineering.”

“Exactly right.”

She moved off the stoop and stepped into the circle with him; he watched the damp grass cling around her naked feet. “Show me.”

They knelt together and she watched him arrange the twigs into the over-under wattle he thought would be easiest and support the best what she wanted to do. Then she went to the other side and started fixing from the point he started. In her back garden, on a Sunday morning, there wasn’t even the noise of traffic. Just the chatter of city birds and the occasional whine of a table saw from a neighbor’s weekend project.

He relaxed into the sharp smell of her soap in the breeze, a quiet awareness of her working behind him.

They met at the last point, and he made the join, pulling out the extra twigs. She leaned back in the grass, balanced on her elbows.

“We should eat our breakfast in here.”

Her hair had dried in places and was still wet in others—bright red streaks against dark auburn ones. Her tee was as loose as her jeans today and had slipped to the side on her shoulder, revealing the hollows of her throat and collarbones.

He pivoted and crawled over to her, the damp seeping into the knees of his jeans. He just wanted to lie down beside her, look up at her square of sky. He rolled himself so his head could rest near her, and she lay back, too, and scooted so his head was pillowed in the nook of her shoulder.

They wove their legs together like a wattle of twigs.