Threshold

By Mara Buck

“Aliiicia, where are yooou? I looove you.” A low cry, plaintive as the wind through a broken window, or perhaps it’s the wind itself, merely validating its loneliness. This house of someone’s past and no one’s future, this relic alongside a gravel road perpetually darkened by overhanging evergreens, moss slippery down their trunks, this is the place I’ve chosen to exorcise my own demons, to paint a Wyeth-esque portrait of a colorless November day. I’m an intruder, a refugee from the world of neon and shopping carts and holiday preparations, placing my holidays behind me, craving another realm where reminders from my past can’t find me while I explore the artifacts of strangers.

The pine clapboards are patinated silver-gray and speckled with white flecks of paint, reverse freckles from a former sun-kissed life. Mismatched roof shingles hang as disjointed as the unruly hairstyle of an elderly lady whose scalp peeks through despite her best efforts. The front door remains solid yet ajar, its simple pediment strangled by a wild cucumber vine, skeletonized seed pods clicking like high heels on a dance-floor, resonating a definite rhythm to a big band tune I’m struggling to remember. A staccato beat, an escaping echo, repeating like a cracked record played at seventy-eight speed. Begin the Beguine? When they begin... The brass door hinges are corroded but remain cordially silent when I push the latch and enter. I’m trespassing, a voyeur with one foot over the threshold in a feeble attempt to alter my own world.

The house breathes a perfume, a signature fragrance fascinating as anything in a cut crystal bottle, shrugging off layers of dissolving plaster and mildew, cloaking me in the chill scents of luxuriant animal fur, whispering of dust and thoughts and memories and things forbidden and best left undisturbed, but most emphatically embracing the essence of gardenia (heavy and exotic and surprisingly fresh) and of those things feminine which we women understand yet seldom discuss, secrets for which words have little relevance. The aroma of gardenia in a derelict farmhouse is as foreign as a shipwrecked sailor. I’m intrigued and strangely energized, an attentive acolyte at the door while my eyes adjust to the low light. I unbuckle my knapsack, glance at missing floorboards yawning to an oblivion below, and proceed with caution.

The house retains its furnishings, untouched by thieves, victimized only by neglect and the curse of time. Elegant things, surprisingly prosperous for a humble farm. A certain reverence, as in a church or museum, informs me I’m welcomed, but my presence must not disrupt the norm, and to this I nod silent agreement. I’m a casual person, but this isn’t a casual place and my brain adjusts accordingly. My thoughts, while not stilted, become more formal, more mindful of my silent diction. This is no place for the slang of the twenty-first century.

At my feet (its luxury a trap for the unwary, half hiding a broken beam) sprawls a Tekke Bokhara, crafted by talented fingers a century ago in a far-off land— hand-spun wool dyed natural indigo and cochineal, woven into optical patterns to stabilize and hypnotize simultaneously. A carpet of generations, of life lived and lost, of travels and feasts and heartache, of tired feet and busy feet and stumbling aging feet and now this, abandoned to the groaning wind, to the netherworld of rodents and spiders. I circumnavigate the carpet —mindful of the precarious state of the floor— and focus on the art covering the walls, hanging gallery-style from a continuous picture-frame molding that circles the room.

These works are transfigurative —ethereal watercolor studies of the sky, myriad colors pulsing as if applied directly from imagination itself with no brush interfering, the artist’s passion evident on each glorious inch of paper. No suggestion of landscape is visible within the frames, only the cloud formations and the light— bold, free light radiated at the whim of the moment. Certainly, a debt is owed to Turner, to Constable, but this artist ventures beyond known territories and revels in the conquest. Works of stunning individuality beyond expressionism or impressionism, shockingly personal as a diary or love letter. Within moments, I find myself wishing I’d known the artist, could share the secrets that created these masterworks. The dimness has preserved the delicate colors (watercolor being the most ephemeral of media) and the windows have remained intact, sparing the art from the elements. Thankfully, no moisture has leaked from the rooms above. It’s a treasure trove fit for any museum, far more inspired than my clumsy efforts have ever produced, and I’m immediately jealous of the talent of an artist unknown and probably long dead. With care, I rub my finger along the bottom of the dusty glass of each frame, but all the signatures are illegible.

I again smell the gardenias. There’s that whisper of the wind, the music of the seed pods, and I move onward, although the sumptuous chairs in this parlor reach out to tempt me to rest awhile. When they begin, begin, begin…

The dining room is darker still, mahogany furniture absorbing any tentative winks of light. Fingers of cedar caress the windows, then try to claw their way inside, then again caress. A glimmer of porcelain on the buffet, then not, a glance of silver on the table, then darkness. As if for a reception, opulent compotes and candelabra stride down the center of the table, then disappear. Long wax tapers, their wicks fresh, never lit. One massive silver urn anchors piles of brittle rose petals and the drafts gently lift the petals up and down, up and down, like breathing. It is astonishing, this formality within such a simple shell. The gloom flickers, reminiscent of a thirties talkie, and the room is toned in sepia, dust softening and integrating. Again, I hear snatches on the wind, that sighing refrain, those retreating staccato heels. When they begin, the Beguine...

The house is unexpectedly warm. I pull a carved chair from the table, sit down, peel off my knit cap and gloves, lay them on the linen cloth. Bright woolen stripes contrast with pale ivory, mingle, are effortlessly consumed by the shadows. Briefly, I close my eyes and there appears an infinitesimal shift, a hiccup within the air surrounding me, and I can now hear with total clarity, “Aliiicia, where are yooou? I looove you.”

A man’s voice, not the wind, a voice with a slight lilt, pleasing, teasing, as in a game of hide and seek. Of course, it must be the wind, but I’m lonely enough to yearn for something more than the wind, lonely enough to have trespassed into a deserted house without a weapon or a flashlight, without thought, the heaviness of my life obliterating everything. I remain at the table, straining to catch the direction of the voice. Once again, the clicking of heels, now definitely moving away as the voice advances. My eyes become accustomed to the low light, the porcelain takes on a finer shimmer, the dust dissipates, the details of the silver shine. My cap and gloves are still hidden. Now almost feverish with the warmth, I leave my jacket in the chair and continue through the house. When they begin...

The kitchen and the rear parlor reek of obligation. Domestic and common, these rooms are unfit to dwell under the same roof with the charm of the others, and although most of these windows are broken, there’s no wind puffing through the fragmented glass, no voice, no clicking, no perfume— only dead cold air. I shudder, retreat, and in succession, close the doors behind me. The kitchen door is warped and snarls in defiance.

I’m back to the point of beginning, where the front parlor beckons me with a gesture of familiarity. This time, I sink into a brocade armchair, pull off my boots, and allow my feet to luxuriate at the edge of the carpet. Again, I’m overwhelmed by the paintings. They soar, they breathe, they take flight from the walls of their confinement. These aren’t the skies outside these walls, but visions of a romantic isle so perfect it could exist only within the imagination. They are marvels, these skies, and I’m humbled by the skill of the artist who created them from simple paper and pigment.

My canvas knapsack stuffed with paints and brushes is no longer visible at the door where I dropped it, but it hardly matters, since as of this moment I’m certain I’ll never paint again, can never attempt to equal these abandoned treasures created by an unknown hand. The dust motes swirling through this forsaken relic write a pitiful epiphany for me, and my life abruptly loses focus. The futility of my years of sacrifice descends, smothering me as surely as the dust. I grit my teeth against my new brutal reality until my jaw aches, and I hear, “Aliiicia, where are yooou? I looove you.” The dance rhythm. That refrain. A night of tropical splendor...

Maybe I’m crazy. Lately, I’ve often thought so. They say the mad themselves never know, never suspect, so maybe I’m only on the cusp, balancing, tentative. The voice comes from the rooms above me now. I search for my boots and, failing to find them, pad toward the stairs in my socks. When they begin...

It’s a single staircase with a grand newel post more befitting a townhouse than a farm, and the treads are carpeted with an Oriental runner, a Heriz I think, bold provocative geometrics leading the eye upwards. The carpet feels warm beneath my feet as if heated with a radiance from within, and I make no sound as I climb the stairs.

All the doors along the second floor hall are neatly closed, and framed photographs decorate the floral-papered walls. Hoping to cast enough light to examine the photos, I open a door and blink at the sudden brilliance. It’s a bathroom, white porcelain pristine and gleaming, mirrors shining, towels on crystal rods hung as carefully as in the pages of a fine magazine. Like perfect wedding gifts, the linens appear unused, elaborate monograms of interlaced cursive impossible to decipher. No dust has entered here, and daylight from a single window echoes the reflective surfaces and spills willingly into the hall. I turn my attention to the photographs.

Clustered along the wall in no apparent order, in fine condition behind glass, they’re all portraits of a particular man and woman, yet the two are never pictured together, and the photos seem their only means of communication. The man wears a naval officer’s uniform and stands amid tropical greenery, smiling broadly, squinting into the sun. Subtle touches of the uniform and the general toning of the paper suggest a date between the two world wars. Sandy-haired and tanned, he appears tall by his proportions and well under thirty, gazing carefree into the camera, thankful of avoiding what had come before and oblivious to the future. There are several more, each showcasing a different port-of-call, but the backgrounds are out of focus and only the officer is clear and sharp in the foreground, smiling and charming. He looks so immediate, at ease in his uniform and his surroundings, so eager for a life of happiness ahead that I wish I’d known him, and I’m still not too old to be disarmed by a handsome face.

The pictures of the woman are vastly different. In her early twenties and slender to the point of gaunt, she’s professionally posed before an amorphous backdrop, her personality as enigmatic as the most complex example of the perfumer’s art. Her inky eyes are focused far beyond the photographer, projecting her thoughts into other realms, her body present against her will. Is it the naval officer she misses, for whom she’s wasting in body and spirit like a heroine in a gothic tale? It would form a pretty love story, but hers is the look of a trapped animal, not a lovelorn sweetheart. In the succession of professional shots, each pose is different while her expression remains the same— vacant, cornered, trapped, hopeless.

There’s one further photo of the woman. Enlarged from a snapshot, it lacks definition, and the softening of edges lends it an intimate quality, as if fogged by the warmth of breath inside the frame. She is smiling —laughing, really— and her eyes are remarkable, lit from within. She stands at a portable easel in a meadow, the sky bright around her head, and one hand pushes back her windblown hair while the other grasps her brushes. I’m face-to-face with the artist of the paintings downstairs. Her expression reflects her passion for her work and invites me to love it as well. As I do, even while I envy it.

Although the bathroom window is secure and all the doors are shut in this upstairs corridor, a sudden warm breeze carries that fresh scent of gardenia, and I hear those staccato heels retreating behind a door to my right. I’m committed to a bizarre quest impossible to identify and I turn the knob, peer inside. A night, of tropical splendor...

The room is alive in a cacophony of color. Paintings overlap on the walls, tacked with carefree abandon. At one time delicate watercolors on paper, now their ruined pigments hemorrhage into one another from the moisture beading on the plaster behind them. Like fingers reaching down from secret places, splinters of ancient laths poke through the ceiling, and rusty dampstains form monstrous sanguine patterns around these wounds, oozing into puddles of viscous drool beneath. The floor is littered with paint tubes, brushes, parts of smashed easels, the reckless miscellanea of a frantic departure. A fury of terrifying proportions. Along one wall under the paintings, an entire collection of tropical shells lies shattered and scattered; former subject matter for still life has become a memento mori. Whereas the other rooms are tidy and undisturbed, this studio is chaos, a dark primeval void, a black hole of the subliminal origins of art itself. Even the broken glass of the window forms a tormented Rorschach of splattered paint. Nothing is whole. It’s an artist’s nightmare, this incredible vandalization. I can’t bring myself to look at the ruined paintings. I choke back a sob and kneel to examine the fragile fragments of a Nautilus shell, warm as skin in my hands, and the shell echoes my sob back to me.

I glimpse the shadow of something half-hidden behind the door, tug on a rope handle, and drag a sea chest out into the light. A simple patinated pine box (really like a small coffin) with seaman’s becket handles and a stenciled address flaked into illegibility in the damp. The hinges are so corroded that the lid comes off in my hands. I lay it alongside.

Paintings. The box is stuffed with still more watercolors, and my hands tremble as I cautiously lift each one out and place each with great reverence on the cleanliness of the overturned lid. These are perfection. Exotic birds with radiant plumage pulsing with life, details flawless to put Audubon to shame. Astonishing flowers blooming in hues previously unknown in the gentle world of watercolor, rivaling Redouté and the Flemish botanicals. I’m no longer envious of her talent, but genuinely in awe and grateful that these delicate works have been preserved from the horror of the wreckage. The box is neatly packed with hundreds of pages. The triumph of a lifetime for any artist.

I remove a goodly number of the paintings, but deciding they’re far safer within the sea chest, I carefully replace them. When the box is finally full once again and the lid is in my hands, a tremendous gust surges up from the chest itself and the paintings erupt, spewing out in a frenzy. The air is alive with paintings. The wind rages through the studio, whipping the paintings into a tornado. I scramble madly to rescue them, but they sail just out of reach, crumpling into one another, slashing at each other in mass suicide. The brilliant pigments of the birds’ feathers drip like tears onto the pristine flower petals.

The turbulence subsides only when the trunk is entirely empty. I’m panting, stunned, leaning against the damp wall, hanging onto the remnants of an easel for support. The paintings are drifting on the air currents like the birds they are, like the petals they are. I’m overcome with grief and the heavy cloying scent of gardenia strangles me. Watercolor rag paper is soft by design, being so absorbent, but red criss-crosses my hands and I feel the sting of cuts on my cheeks as well. The floor is littered with broken glass and the razor-shards of shells. In my haste to rescue the paintings, my blood now mingles with the other colors of the room.

I’m exhausted. I have no idea how to save the paintings. Spreading them across the floor in this room or on the walls with the broken window would only invite further damage, but if I return them to the trunk, they’ll stick together and mildew. Instinctively, I doubt the trunk will accept them back. Each precious one is now crumpled and damp. I’m the Pandora who opened the chest and the responsibility now rests upon my shoulders. A debt is owed.

The bathroom is dry, but far too small to spread them all out, and I open the next door down the hall. Like the other living spaces before it, this room is pristine and tastefully furnished, hinting that its refined residents are elsewhere in the house and may return at any time. A spacious bedroom, it easily accommodates an antique bed freshly made up with luxurious linens, with a dent in the pillow at one side of the bed only, as though a drowsy head had recently arisen from a brief nap. Accompanying bureaus and mirrors in matching carved walnut balance the room, and a gentleman’s tweed jacket hugs a mahogany valet-stand in one corner. A dressing gown is tossed on the chair beside the bed. One closet neatly holds what appears to be a man’s entire wardrobe, smelling of leather, tobacco, and warmth, while the second whispers its emptiness, and a limp silk nightgown hangs from an inside hook.

This unspoiled dry room offers plenty of space to arrange the damp watercolors and I’m instantly relieved. The paintings will be rescued. I’ll restore them if it takes forever. I vow to put my own ego aside and make the world recognize the genius of the artist— but first, the comfortable expanse of the bed entices me. I’m bone-weary, and the house is so warm that I slip off my jeans and sweatshirt and lie down. The pillow hints of aftershave, a most pleasant brand, something simple, perhaps Bay Rum. I close my eyes and remember many things I’ve tried for years to forget. Years as ruined as the watercolors in the studio. Regretful years. Years passed without passion and years ahead with the art within these walls their only purpose. When they begin the Beguine...

I hear clearly his voice in the hall, the same teasing refrain. The same running steps, gardenia wafting through the door and out again. The steps recede, always at the same rate, traveling down the hall, away from the voice, the music following the scent, following the heels. A night of tropical splendor... I discover my clothes have been swallowed by the precise pattern of the bedroom carpet, and I grab the dressing gown and stumble out into the hall, my bare feet following the voice, following the steps, following the scent. When they begin...

The door at the far end of the hall drifts ajar. The breeze blows it still farther open, and I enter the attic over the kitchen wing of the house, an ell common to architecture of the period. Gabled rafters frame gaping sections of open sky, and I’m somehow not surprised to see it’s now an autumn moon, and not the sun that shines a dispassionate light. The scene is a dream of a dream of itself. Not déjà vu, not a past-life regression, but something far deeper, more primitive, a pre-destination for which I’ve been searching and where I’ve finally arrived, a weary traveler here in an attic room where wild things scamper undisturbed and the wind hovers as a voyeur.

A wedding gown sleeps crumpled in a corner of the attic. Ivory charmeuse glows in the filtered light and fog, tender as the moon in autumn, whispering for a lover, a bride exhausted from the ceremony, and the moonlight traces its shimmering form as if the bride were still inside. A high-heeled satin pump bought to match the dress has kicked out its cardboard box, an attempt to reach its mate. Silk gloves staunchly wed together are fisted to a ball, each clutching the other in desperate prayer. Littering the unfinished floorboards are letters and cards, ephemera of a life long gone, some animal-chewed, many moldy, bits of colored paper bleeding into one another, messages and notes telling secrets.

There is a stillness to this room, a finality, a timelessness. The windows here are broken and tree limbs are creeping inwards, vines inquisitive, tendrils sliding closer. The moon itself sneaks inside, an agreeable participant. It is a stage set without boundaries, a Greek amphitheater of the northern woods, the scene in muted tones of nighttime rather than the bright marble of daylight, but a tragedy nonetheless.

The rafters are stained the rich color of antique pine, and their scent is of summer and loneliness. A noose of tattered rope hangs alone from one, clothes hangers parade across another. Various hooks and nails imply a lifetime of drying herbs, of storing winter woolens when the house was young and purposeful. Remnants of a life, scattered morsels, dreams spun and vanished as mist in an attic room where raccoons breed and sunlight seldom enters.

A mounted photograph remains wedged in a corner where a rafter meets the roof, a safe and dry spot away from fading light and rodent teeth. It is a professional photograph of a bride, the woman of the photos in the hall, the artist, dressed in the charmeuse gown, the elegant gloves hiding her brilliant fingers. A lavish bouquet of waxy exotic flowers overpowers her slender form. From behind a tiara-mounted veil, now puddled here on the floor beside the dress, her eyes stare out huge and unbearably sad, raccoon eyes of smudged mascara as was then the fashion, eyes of a feral creature trapped in silk charmeuse. More than anything in life I want to free her, this ensnared genius, this anguished trap-caught creature.

And I, I a spinster without a lover, an artist without promise, whose future looms fruitless for endless twilight years, I struggle out of the dressing gown and slide the glimmering satin over my head. Charmeuse hugs my body like a caress and the pumps fit as if custom-made for my cut feet. My paint-stained and bloody fingers grow feminine and delicate within the long gloves and as I adjust the tiara upon my head and drop the veil over my face, I am young and beautiful and so much in love with the idea of love. There is no mirror in this slant-lit room, but I have no need, for here is the wondrous photograph as a testament to my transformation. I lack a bouquet, so I reach through the broken window and grab the vines, long snaky barren stems that glow silver in the early moonlight and once bundled in my hands give off the unmistakable aroma of gardenias.

Again the call comes, whispering through the house, and now I answer, “I’m heeere, darliiing. Heeere I am. I looove you.”