Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“Irony,” I replied, without missing a beat. “Besides, I thought putting the turtle in the book would cheapen it. The novel, I mean. Not the sea turtle. Matter of fact, hell, I’ve never told anyone but you that story.”

“See where audacity gets you?” she asked. “Anyway, the novel you wrote before that one, it was much better.”

“A Long Way To Morning?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. I remember now, because it sounds like an Ernest Hemingway title.” And then she asked if I wanted anything else from the bar, because she’d just finished her Jack and Coke and was sucking on an ice cube.

“I can go,” I offered. “I’m not so drunk I can’t walk.”

“No, I’ll go,” and she glanced at the bottle on the table. “Michelob?”

“Michelob Amber Bock, ” I said, and she nodded, standing up, vanishing into the crowd, all those hipster idiots in cowboy boots and rhinestone-studded shirts. I thought sure that was that, all she wrote, and I’d never see her again. But, still, I did congratulate myself on the improvised sea-turtle yarn, thinking it might make a halfway decent short story one day. But she did come back, maybe ten minutes later. I was sitting there peeling the label off my empty bottle, trying to decide if I’d endured enough of the party that it wouldn’t look too bad if I left. There were tattered scraps of foil all over the floor at my feet, on my shoes, a few on the table. I set the empty down and accepted the fresh bottle when she held it out to me.

“Thanks,” I said, and Amanda Tyrell just smiled and shrugged and sat down again, but this time she sat down quite a bit closer to me than before. And then I broached The Question, because, even sober, I’d made The Embarrassing Mistake too many times in the past. Never assume. Never, ever fucking assume.

“You are a lesbian,” I said, and that earned more laughter.

“Is that an inquiry or a command?”

“That’s a question,” I said, sipping my beer, “because I think I’m getting signals here, and I don’t want to make a goddamn fool out of myself if you’re straight.”

She stared at me a moment, just long enough, I think, that she knew I’d be getting nervous. And then she nodded.

“Guilty as charged,” she told me. “A lesbian is what I am. Last time I screwed a guy — first and last time, by the way — I was fourteen.”

“Well, then, that’s a relief,” and I laughed, probably for the first time since we’d begun talking.

“But, I have a confession to make,” Amanda continued, so I’m thinking, yeah, here comes the other shoe. She’s in a relationship. Or she’s celibate, or I’m just not her fucking type. Something of the sort surely, but then she says, “I haven’t actually read The Ark of Poseidon . Or anything else you’ve ever written.”

I probably laughed very loud then. Maybe beer even squirted out my nostrils. Maybe my sinuses burned all night.

“I got those questions about your book from Tracy,” and she pointed into the constantly shifting crush of bodies. Tracy, by the way, was the girl in the band, whom I’d been dating back when I was writing The Ark of Poseidon, and she’d even helped out proofreading the galley pages. I felt set up and relieved at the same time.

“Cute,” I told her, though I didn’t think it the least bit cute. Mostly, I was wondering what the hell Tracy was playing at, if she thought I was so pathetic I needed her sending fish my way (which, at that point, I probably was), or if she was just messing with my head.

“You think so?”

“No, but it’s more pleasant than if I tell you what I’m really feeling right now.”

Her eyes dimmed and her smile faded a bit then, and I started to feel like maybe I was, by dint of her confession, regaining the upper hand. This assumes I ever had the upper hand, that I’d enchanted her with my fib of a dead sea turtle on a Grecian shore. I stared at the crowd, at that place where Tracy might be, observing her handiwork, and took a couple of swallows of the cold beer.

“Well, I hope I haven’t pissed you off,” Amanda said, after a minute or so.

“Nah, you haven’t pissed me off,” I assured her. “When you’re a writer, you learn to live by dirty tricks, or you don’t last very long.”

“You think that was a dirty trick?”

“Near enough,” I replied, and then, changing the subject, because I was still a lot hornier than I was angry, I said, “So, it depends on what I consider art. Whether or not you’re an artist.”

There was a brief pause, long enough that I had time for another swallow of beer, before she nodded her head. “Photography,” she said. “Well, it’s sort of photo-montage, lots of compositing, Photoshopping, image manipulation. You know, that sort of thing.”

“And that’s not art?” I asked, having more than half expected her to tell me she was into body modification (despite any visible evidence to that effect) or flash mobs or action poetry, something more along those lines.

“I think it’s probably my subject matter that gets me into trouble,” she said. “Too dark, I think. Too dark for most people, anyway. I used to do a little freelance magazine illustration, but now I mostly just do commissions.”

I nodded, trying to think of what I would say next, as I knew almost nothing about photography or photo-montage. And, finally, trying to sound interested, I asked, “Is it lucrative, the commissions?”

Amanda seemed to perk up a little then, so I guess I’d said the right thing, or at least avoided saying the wrong thing. Six of one, half dozen of the other. She set her glass down on a cocktail napkin.

“It pays the bills, most of the time. Mainly, I have clients, private collectors who are into what I do, and I take requests. They ask for some specific image, and I create it. Images you can’t get with just a camera, but that they carry around in their heads. And there’s some pretty dark stuff in people’s heads. They bring me their sick shit, and I make it visible.”

“Perverts?” I asked.

“Yeah. Some of them, sure. But not all. Some of them are just. ” And she paused, frowning and stirring her drink with a swizzle stick. “Some of them just need to see with their eyes these images that they’ve already seen in their mind’s eye. Sometimes, it seems like I’m a sort of therapist, or a midwife. They might want a photorealistic unicorn, or a woman might want a photo of herself, naked, riding a unicorn, or—”

“A photo of herself fucking that unicorn,” I said.

“Pretty much,” she nodded. “It can get sexually explicit, and intense, and most times it’s a lot grimmer than unicorns and fairies and mermaids and what have you. But that’s the way I happen to lean, anyway. A true disciple of Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Goya, Sidney Sime, of the Mütter Museum, Eighteenth-Century anatomical and obstetric wax models, and so forth. I’ve actually been to the Josephinum in Vienna, and, dude, that was like I’d died and gone to fucking heaven.”

The way she said Josephinum, coupled with that line about dying and going to heaven, I could tell that I should be impressed — or at least that she hoped I’d be impressed — so I made some appreciative sound, then, and apparently did a decent enough job of feigning whatever she needed to see. Truth is, though, she’d lost me after Goya.

“If I had my laptop with me, I could show you some of my work,” she told me, still using the swizzle stick to rearrange the ice cubes in her glass.

“A shame,” I said, more than half meaning it, because she’d managed to pique my interest, even through the obscuring haze of alcohol and horniness.“It’s not all that far from here, my apartment, which is also my studio. Just down in Grant Park, on Ormewood, not too far from the zoo. I mean, if you’d really like to see. If you’re not just saying that.”