The late night host faked an engaged, cultivated look.
“Why is it only the desert? What drew you to paint the desert? No pun intended.” He cut a look at the camera bringing the conditioned audience laughter. The artist felt her disdain expand like darkness at dusk.
“I began to become fascinated by the desert in college—”
“While majoring in Finance, correct?”
“Yes. I was going to be an international banker.”
“How do you go from Finance to being a world renown artist?”
“Good fortune.” Some audience members chuckled uncomfortably.
“Very good fortune, right? Your most recent painting sold…” he looked at his desktop cue card. “It sold for over ten million dollars.”
“Yes. I was in college—to finally answer your question—when I felt—”
“You’re called a recluse, right? I mean, you’re here so, I don’t know if that’s true or not. But what do you think when people say that? Recluse. Or that you are hard to work with.”
She straightened her shoulders and took on a demeanor that would live online as either inspired confidence or entitled coldness, depending on where one found it. She spoke deliberately,
“There’s merit in what others say about me. Maybe it is intentional. Maybe it’s a response to the sad, vapid situations I find myself in from time to time. You will have to decide.” With that, she removed her mic and left the stage abruptly.
Emilio James poured wine into a shot glass.
“Just chug it from the bottle, Emi.” Francesca said.
“It is funnier this way. We can drink all night and never find us drunk!”
“I want to get drunk.”
“But you say when you are drunk you want a man, and it is only us and the snow outside. There are no men—you will want.”
“Don’t Emi. Please don’t start tonight. Finals are almost over. And I told you I have to take some fucking art elective next semester.”
“You will like it. I promise. The class, I mean.”
Francesca grabbed the bottle and gulped three times. Emilio watched her throat—her pale throat—rise and fall. He’d written poems about her neck. Songs.
“Maybe,” she said, lowering the booze. “But I don’t always get horny when drunk so don’t start.”
“Things that will not end do not always have a beginning. Maybe—it is the biggest word.”
“How did my favorite human end up being some hippy-assed Mexican poet?”
“Good fortune.” He smiled the wide innocent smile that did, on occasion, give her pause. Emilio didn’t know the strength she used to avoid breaking his heart. It felt like a weight to her, a burden that her submerged sensitivity loathed and endured. He smiled when she laughed; cried when she was hurt. It was unsettling to her how this man could give to her so openly.
“I love you, Francesca.” he once said.
“I know. I don’t feel that way, Emilio. I am so sorry.”
His smile. “It only matters that you know. I am me and you are you but we were born to be us. And we will remain.”
Simp, she sometimes thought when thinking of him.
Dumbass, she sometimes thought when thinking about herself .
Emilio took a shot of wine.
“Write anything lately?” Francesca asked. She loved his writing. She told him often.
“Yes. It is about the desert.”
“Desert? We live in Minnesota!”
“Eternity has no home Francesca. This you should know by now.”
“Drink your baby boy shots, Emi.”
And then she paused.
A decade had passed since Francesca James last appeared in public. Her paintings appeared in compilations of 21st Century art. She perused Wikipedia about herself. There were references to college, the years of ‘reshaping’ modern art before her big break. She saw comments about Hughes, Salinger, and O'Keeffe.
“You pitied Salinger so much. You said, ‘He was polished by death and everyone thought it was gold. He knew better.’”
She shut down her laptop and stared at the fire, sipping her wine.
“Emilio!” she said sharply.
“What?”
“I can feel you getting hard. Back up some.”
“I am a man Francesca.”
“I know that horn-dog. Just back up—thank you.”
“Of course.”
“We are not going to have sex. You agreed.”
“I will hold you until you fall asleep.”
She snuggled her back into his chest. He was small but when he put his arm over her, spread his hand gently on her stomach, he felt like the strongest man in the world.
“Hey,” she said after a minute. “If this is too much, we don’t have to.”
“I don’t have to be a Man who lays you down, to be the Man who can hold you up.”
She pulled away, turned, and faced him in the pale light.
“Don’t talk like that. Don’t say things like that.”
“I don’t understand—”
“When you do—it makes me. Just don’t. Okay?” She could barely make out his endless brown eyes, the tender full lips.
“Of course Francesca.”
“Hey” Francesca said.
“Hey sunshine!” her agent, Michelle, responded.
“Have you ever read Indigo Rising by a woman named Loris Newton?”
“I’ve heard of it. Good?”
“I want her to interview me.”
Michelle stopped to clear her mind. Francesca James did not do interviews anymore. It wasn’t entirely because she didn’t want to; no one asked anymore. Michelle never told her friend of twenty years that her career-Francesca’s career-was no longer intriguing. People didn’t like art, much less artist. Most people didn’t even read much more than 140 characters at a time, and they didn’t always understand them.
“Does she do interviews? Loris Newton, I mean.”
“Find out. Push it Michelle. She’ll understand it and actually listen.”
“Fran, I get it. It’s been, what? Let’s be honest. When did you last pick up a brush?”
“You know what I’m working on.”
Michelle heard the tone that every woman possesses. Don’t cross the tone.
“I’ll get on it. Loris Newton. Got an agency or publisher?”
“No agency. Some group called Splendid Rush publishing.”
“Is it smut? Just kidding. I mean, the name.”
Francesca laughed. “Why read a cookbook when you won’t buy ingredients? Try to find her. She’ll say yes.”
“It is really good Francesca.” Emilio said, hunkered over the Smith-Corona she bought him for Christmas. He stopped and looked up. “Let me see closer.” He walked across the floor as she turned to go into the kitchen.
“Be gentle, Emi. The prof said it was good. But they have to say that.’
“I see a vase but it seems brittle, weak around the edges. As if it knows it will be broken.” he pulled back from the canvas. “Yes. The vase knows it will be destroyed. It’s shaking in its own base, yes? A thing waiting for its own destruction.”
“It’s supposed to be the Empire State Building up close.” she said from the kitchen. “I suck.”
“Come see. Look at it like I look at it, Francesca. It is a thing waiting for its own death.”
She walked from the kitchen, pulling the spoonful of peanut butter from her mouth. Francesca stood next to Emilio and looked at the painting.
“I’m looking at it like you look at it, Emi. It’s horrible.”
“Yes, it is horrible. It is sad and horrible. Don’t look at what it is intended to be; look at what it could be. This is the difference between knowing a thing and seeing a thing. See the thing, Francesca.”
She looked at the painting. She squinted her eyes. When she glanced at him, he nodded toward it with intention. “Look.”
Francesca turned from Emilio and there it was—a vase waiting for its own death. A tower about to fall. The split-second stillness before a building collapses. Francesca felt a rushing sensation that was also calm and patient.
“I painted that,” she whispered.
“You created it.”
“I created it.” Francesca began to cry when Emilio wrapped his powerful arms around her.
“Emilio.”
“We feel a funny hurt when we see who we really are. You see you now as I’ve always seen you.”
He kissed her on the forehead.
“Francesca, I want to read something to you.”
“Okay. Then we need to work on the next chapter. There’s a deadline Loris.”
“I’m aware.” Loris inhaled deeply. “I was doing my research, like we talked about, into your college years.”
“I wasn’t a very good student.”
“You weren’t Francesca James.”
Francesca looked up from the papers on her desk. She was sixty-two and, to Loris, a striking inspiration for independence.
“No,” she said gently. “I guess I wasn’t always Francesca James.”
“At first, I couldn’t find your transcripts. So, I went to the library and found an old yearbook. You said you didn’t have any.”
“No.” Francesca said, remembering the fire a few days after it all happened.
Loris had practiced this part but felt unprepared to hear the words from her own mouth.
“I want to read you something I found.”
“Okay?”
“It’s by an incredibly prolific writer from your college. When I began looking I found hundreds of stories, poems, and songs. Some of them I found on the Internet. Some in old literary magazines. This dude was everywhere for about two years.”
Francesca looked at Loris.
“You do not need to read anything to me by an ‘incredibly prolific writer’ from my college years.” Francesca shook.
“Fran, who was he? Emilio James. Why do you have his last name? You were Francesca Jacobs.”
Francesca got up and went to the kitchen. She returned to the living room pulling a spoonful of peanut butter from her mouth.
“Read it.”
“The desert mesa stands immovable against the ravages of time. It changes shape with the wind and the roughing sand. The torrential rains pull whole chunks of it free and crash them to the floor. But still the mesa stands; isolated, wounded—eternal. So it is my love for you.”
Francesca began to weep.
“He wrote that for me. It was from a short story called “The Mesas”. Emi said words could predict the future and that in the future,” she caught her breath and laughed gently. “And in the future I would need to be reminded.” Loris hugged Francesca.
“Who was he?” she asked gently in Francesca’s ear. “That was your first big painting. Isolated, Wounded—Eternal. Who was Emilio James?”
Jimmy Reynolds had a square cut jaw that belied the edginess of his personality. He was tall, bronze, and smelled of old money with a new promise. Francesca Jacobs fell hard when she met him in Financial Analysis.
“There is something I don’ like, Francesca.” Emilio said.
“Emi, don’t worry. And don’t be jealous.”
“I have always honored the men who satisfy you. I want you to be happy.”
“I know sweetie. What is it?”
“He looks like a tiger tired of the cage.”
“You’re so dramatic.”
“Please be careful. I can not always protect you.”
“Emi. Emilio. You do not have to protect me.”
She kissed him on the forehead. “You know he gets my art. That’s got to count, right?”
Emilio James was open with Francesca Jacobs but in that moment, did not respond.
Emilio left he and Francesca’s apartment to get dinner for the three of them. Jimmy was coming over for their two-month anniversary. Emilio passed Jimmy in the hallway. They did not speak.
When Emilio James came back to the apartment, Jimmy was raping Francesca. Emilio’s love and heart were stronger than his arms. He pounced on top of Jimmy to pull him off. Jimmy turned and punched Emilio. Francesca was on the floor, half dressed and stunned into shock. Emilio swung and missed. Jimmy pushed him across the room.
A window gave way and Emilio James fell four stories to the street below. Francesca recovered the ability to understand with a female police officer covering her up.
“Emi?” Francesca said. “I saw Emi fighting him.”
“I’m sorry ma’am.”
Francesca finished telling the story while looking in the fire.
“A few days later, I changed my name to James.”
“To honor him?”
“To give myself to him. Isolated, wounded.”
Profound & simple & beautiful 💜