Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

On the third day she cleared her throat and said, “You wouldn’t even have art supplies or a studio if it weren’t for me.”

He didn’t look up, not even to mutely show her what he was working on. He hadn’t torn pages out to prop against the vintage goose-neck lamp or pin to the walls, so Cassidy couldn’t see what he’d done. But he was a good way through the book, almost half, and wore the same beatific smile as yesterday. It was as if, drawing, he’d uncovered the secrets of the universe. Her pencils had grown short; her paint tubes were twisted and rolled at the bottoms.

Back in her kitchen, Cassidy picked up the same red fine point marker she’d used to draw on the paper towel and wondered about its provenance. She used these markers to write on the little plastic tabs she pushed into her flats to identify seedlings or seedlings to be. Somehow the marker had migrated from the potting shed to the house. It was the kind of thing that might happen to Henry, but not to her. She was the organized one. Not that it mattered much. She opened her decorating magazine and uncapped the marker once more.

She drew a screaming person seated on a full-page photograph of a white couch. Was it an advertisement for the couch, or for the flooring beneath the couch, Cassidy briefly wondered, but she didn’t take the time to scan the text and find out. Instead, she plunged into her drawing as if it were a pond, and she diving underwater. When Cassidy re-emerged she realized the screaming person she’d drawn had wings. And the wings were tangled in the lamp stand behind the couch, so that he couldn’t escape.

No wonder she’d hidden her art supplies beneath the bench. This was neither a bowl of fruit nor a vase of flowers but a depiction of cruelty. She was sadistic, this excursion into her own creativity made clear. Cassidy felt dirty. Still, the drawing was good, even scribbled as it was with a gardening marker in a decorating magazine. It was quite a likeness. In spite of her deep confusion, Cassidy felt a little proud of what she’d done. In school they’d always said she had talent. She’d set it aside; she wasn’t sure where or why. It wasn’t as if she could blame the children she’d never had for taking up all her time.

But Henry touched her shoulder. He had crept up at some point, come and stood behind her. “You better let him go,” he said.

“But I did let him go,” Cassidy said. “The very first day.”

“He won’t leave till you ask for your things back,” Henry said.

How long exactly, had Henry known her secret? But then, that had been the point of Henry, right from the beginning, hadn’t it? Someone who could know her all the way through and not judge. She sat, still staring at her drawing. She didn’t say anything more to her husband, but she definitely didn’t want him taking his gently kneading hands from her shoulders.

“You don’t think I’m a bad person because I drew him like this?” she finally asked.

“I’ll bet you anything he drew you too. I’ll bet you he drew you drawing.” Henry caressed her hair and for some reason Cassidy was swept back to their beginning. She’d known Henry for a long time but one day had been different. There’d been a storm, and she’d turned the sign so it read “Closed” and locked the door in the dusty comfortable bookstore where she worked. Afterward they’d held each other in a different way, each needing reassurance they were still real, still separate, still had names.

Drawing made her feel a bit like that.

“I’ll make a stew,” Cassidy said, getting up. She’d wash the floor; she’d spend what remained of the weekend at flea markets looking for a new table for the guest room. The one there now was ugly, even after she’d painted it in a complicated faux finish, precisely following the instructions in her magazine. She’d already forgotten what the carefully rendered surface had supposedly been an imitation of.

“No,” Henry said. “Why do you think I built you a studio?”

“It’s just for plants,” Cassidy said.

“It is not,” he said, prodding her gently in the ribs.

She knew he was right. Cassidy got up and marched out the kitchen door and down to the shed. This time, she didn’t stand timorously peering through the screen, mumbling accusations and hoping the stranger would notice her. Instead, she opened the door and spoke loudly.

“Give me back my stuff,” she said. “It’s not yours.”

“I know,” he said.

“What did you draw?” Cassidy demanded.

“See for yourself,” he said, and turned the book around to face her.

Trembling, she opened the door and stepped inside.

It was just as Henry had said. The stranger had drawn her drawing. And unlike in her drawing of him, he’d pictured her happy, if a little transported.

He handed her the sable brush. “It’s your turn,” he said. “You already know you can do it.”

“I do?” Cassidy asked.

“Remember how you drew me?”

She lowered her head, ashamed. “I didn’t mean…”

“You were ashamed of me,” the stranger said. “That’s why you made a hurtful drawing. You were afraid and wanted me to suffer because of it.”

“Why should I be ashamed of you?” Cassidy asked.

“Because I’m not grape vine stencils. Or faux marble stipple effect. I’m not any of those things.”

She looked at his hands. There was the same fine veining in them as in his yellow wings; more like the veins in a leaf, she thought now, than anything else. “What should I paint?” she asked.

“What did you plan?”

“Flowers,” she said, after thinking for a moment.

“Then paint those.”

Cassidy took the brush from him and dipped it in a pool of aquamarine on the ceramic palette. With the wet brush she conjured outlines of flowers on the nubby white expanse of Arches paper. The brush swooped this way and then that, and before long Cassidy felt it again, that pull, a loss of self as intense as sex, but of a different kind.

When she surfaced she saw pistils, stamens, petals; florid, penile, fluted, scalloped, rippling, tumescent. She observed these qualities scattered throughout her painting, again disturbed by her own work. It was true flowers were the sexual organs of plants, hell bent on attracting pollinators. So why had she never seen it before? Except, of course, she had, or she wouldn’t have just painted them that way. Maybe she’d always pretended not to notice, afraid to be unladylike, and it was only in her art that her vision re-emerged, bypassing her filters.

But like her drawing of the visitor tangled in the lamp, the intensity scared her. If she had a show, all the neighbours would see what she was really like.

Not like them. Not one bit.

“It’s so good,” the stranger whispered. “Like Georgia O’Keefe.”

“Who?”

“Look her up. She’s your soul sister.”

“It’s not the sort of thing I can submit to the annual Water Colour Society exhibition,” Cassidy said.

His puce eyes met and held hers. They were fathomless and deep. “I’m not like a grape stencil on the bathroom wall,” he said again.

Cassidy felt a little swoony.

“What happens if I don’t?” she asked. She tried to give him back the sable brush but he didn’t take it.

“Then I die,” he said.

“Really?” It seemed so extreme. Again, she tried to give the brush back.

He fluttered his hands, no no no. Pleading. “Please,” the stranger said.

She began to cry, shaking her head. Her flowers resembled open mouths, open vulvas. It was too much! She knew now why she’d stopped drawing. She couldn’t look at what emerged. She could even less consider putting her visions out into the world for others to see.