From Audrey: A Book of Love

SPRING

        She came with a painted dragon and cinnamon hearts for Valentine’s.  Her name was Audrey.  Later I was hard pressed to remember what anyone else brought to the party. 

At least thirty friends crowded the red wall-to-wall carpet of our apartment.  The festive anticipation of starting a new decade, the 1980s, still hung in the air.  Kay, my roommate, and I moved in artist circles.  Despite the crush, even those of us who wore long skirts managed to maneuver without knocking over the candles that burned in cereal bowls on the floor.  The magic of candle flames, long skirts, seven guitars complete with accomplished players, laughter, murmurs, and cheap wine, made even me give up a good portion of my customary February gloom. 

        I was being courted by several men all at once.  Even Toby, nobly invited after I had recently conceded him the glory of rejecting me, seemed confused about all the attention I got.  Was there something to me that he had missed?  He came to sit with me at length instead of treating me with his special brand of benevolent disdain.  I read a few of my poems out loud, sang with the singers, and brought my eyes back again and again to Audrey’s painting of a mystical green dragon. 

        Did Audrey watch me stare at her dragon, which hung on top of a collection of rejection slips Kay and I used as world-defying wall decoration?  I couldn’t tell.  In case she did, I did my best to look intrigued, intelligent. 

A misty blue planet floated on the canvas background of swirled black paint.  From this planet the dragon burst out into the universe, crossed the entire canvas and tried to transcend the canvas’s borders into our space.  Its left paw, or claw, or whatever it is that dragons have, reached out in a tentative gesture--groping, I thought, to move farther, to fly on out with those enormous wings, despite being mythical, despite being trapped on canvas.  Later Audrey told me the dragon’s name, Serena. 

Midnight came and Audrey began leaving.  This took a long time and began everything else as well.  We lifted Serena from the wall.  I got to touch the dragon’s nose briefly when the painting stood upright against Kay’s desk, ready to be transported home again. 

Where was home?  And who was Audrey, come to stand behind me, telling me that I had lovely energy?

I never took compliments lightly.  This was no exception.  To hide both thrill and embarrassment, I went into a long speech about the dragon, its gentle, timid, fawn-like nose, the forceful amber eyes, which, Audrey explained, were modeled on the eyes of a nun she once knew. 

“I’m so glad you like Serena,” she said.  “Some people are afraid of her.” 

Afraid?  I tested the feeling.  No.  I told Audrey the painting gave me a sense of woman spirit emerging.  Audrey smiled. 

For the first time I looked deeply into her own fascinating eyes which had the color of nothing definite, and a depth of everything all at once, gray, blue, brown, green, blended with a lot of joy and sorrow.  The flicker of candles, some of them spluttering toward extinction, didn’t do anything to help with definitions.

“Good thing I never killed a dragon,” I said.

“Were you tempted?” she asked.

“Well, sure.  I used to have to play by myself a lot, so I took turns being princess, prince and dragon.  Mostly I ended up being the prince and waiting for the dragon.  Good thing I couldn’t be both at once because then, out of sheer ignorance, I might have actually killed the dragon.  After all, that was the traditional thing to do.”

        On her belt Audrey wore a dragon buckle.  A blue porcelain dragon hung on a satin ribbon from her neck.  There was a dragon riding on the silver ring of her left hand.

I boldly asked if she would loan me the painting of Serena for a while.  Regretfully she said that she had to varnish it in the next day or two, so it couldn’t be done.

        The least I could do then was to carry Serena out to Audrey’s green Volkswagen beetle.  Sparks flew between us that could only be born at all by looking up and discussing the moon.  Howling a little.  Moaning the joy of something ineffable into the sky and into sleepless neighbors’ ears.

        Audrey felt so safe and comfortable to me, because she was a woman with whom I need not, could not, fall in love, since, after all, I was a woman too.  Also, she had to be at least ten years older than I.  In time I learned our age difference was twenty-three years.  Most of all she felt safe because I recognized a very familiar sadness filter through the joy gloss of her impossible eyes.

        I took a deep breath and returned to the tap dance of friendly indifference in the apartment.  I perked up when Kay and Leslie talked of Audrey at one point, and I earmarked for future recall the mosaic pieces of a solitary writer working in a cottage, one day burning her whole manuscript with total satisfaction.  Come to her new art, painting, only recently. 

            I butted in with my opinions.  She must have been very alone to have destroyed her work.  Had she been encouraged, supported by friends, she wouldn’t have burned a thing.  Her writing would have lived.  As finally her painting did. 

“And that’s why we must keep supporting one another and take care of each other,” I concluded, throwing my arms around Kay’s breathless agreement.

“By the way, I’m having dinner with Audrey next week,” I bragged.  My enthusiasm was undaunted by the less than reverent reception of the—to me—overwhelming news.