Escape Artist

The elongated vertebral hump of the Hudson Highlands is my canvas as the night and the light fight a duel to the finish of the day. First, the sun ducks down behind the mountains with a teasing goodbye glow, leaving the river to shine like a billion diamond facets in the remaining sweep of dusk. Then, it reappears in winking flashes, not yet out of the picture, out of time, out of miracles.

Trees, trains, stations, signals, piers, pilings, jet skis, tugboats, kayaks, telephone poles and wires, transformers, rusted cars, abandoned baby carriages, rotting wood, shredded billboards, discarded pipes, scummy ponds and watchful commuters flash by in a giddy blur of flourish and decay alongside the wild, wet ribbon of river, where salt and fresh water collide.

 “So what do you think I should do?” Kiki asks me, and I’m torn between continuing to stare out the train window and dutifully returning to our mating dance.

“Shhh, not while the movie is on” is what I want to say, caught as I am in the act of silent visual contentment. Instead, I ask: “Do about the…?” I’ve forgotten. I need a review of the subject for this conversation. I want a road map of where we are in the relationship and what she needs from me now.

Across the water, steam exiting a smokestack is suspended over it like squeezed toothpaste from a tube, and the stubby teeth of the rocks of the Palisades make a clotted maroon and russet silhouette against a darkening sky.

“About the job offer?” Kiki asks. “You know, the biggest thing on my mind for days?  Were you actually listening of any of this, David?”

“Definitely,” I say. “Of course not,” is what I mean.

I catch a glimpse of a final fiery red glow of the day before it slips into an envelope of night, of my reflection in the train window as it reveals my blatant inattentiveness, and of Kiki focusing on me focusing elsewhere.

“David, I need your input,” she says.

“I know.”

“This is a big decision for us both.”

“I know.”

“There would be lots of travel – I could be away a lot.”

I’m about to say I know again, like a robot, before I catch myself. “I…I’m aware of that.”

“I need your perspective and your feelings.”

“I’m here, Kik.’”

“Are you? Lately, I wonder – I really do.”

“Sorry…things have been crazy at school.”

I’m a high school art teacher, otherwise known as an unsuccessful artist. She’s an attorney on her way up. We’ve been together for two years, having exited an office party -- my college buddy who works with her invited me to it to meet someone other than one of my “hopelessly arty,” as he put it, old girlfriends – clutching a bottle of Champagne and each other, giddy with new person sensations.

Afterward, the talk was fun, the sex even more fun, the politics mostly mutual. And our differences, especially her financial circumstances (ample) versus mine (paltry), seemed only to intrigue us.

The pilot light of love was ignited.

Within a year, our CDs and books were being dovetailed, our underwear was going into the same washer and dryer, and we were making long-term plans. With a short-term one now just four months away: our wedding. Unfortunately, it’s clear that she’s 27 going on 42 while I’m 29 going on 15, I think. So do my friends.

“David, do you want to hammer this out now before we get to my parents and their agendas?”

“Absolutely,” I say. ”God, no,” is what I mean.

“Go over the whole thing again -- the position, the salary, the perks, the travel,” I say, desperate for clues. And she begins once again to outline the offer to join a large, prestigious law firm -- as I drift off dreamily, like an unmoored sailboat in a calm sea.

Last week, on this same ride north, a latticework of small storm clouds hugged the water, floating over it ever so slowly and sensuously, like ghosts paying a visit. It was eerie and irresistible, a note from nature that said: pay attention, I’m only going to do this once.

There was a time I would have run to get my easel and brushes and returned to try to capture or interpret it. But these days my art seems less urgent, subordinated to “our plans.”

I blink the scene away and it's replaced by one of Kiki staring at me. “Well?” 

I improvise. “I think that you...that we have nothing to lose by your taking it. Change can be our friend, Kik. You’ll have a title; the extra money will help us get a bigger place -- and you’ll become as desirable in law as you are in bed." (I smile.)

As I say this, I imagine Kiki away on extended trips and fewer conversations like this with her and more of them with myself, and I feel guilty about it.  My friends are so right about my child-like thinking – only they’re wrong. I’m 12, not 15. And girls still turn me on from afar but make me uncomfortable up close.

Still, I say what I think I should: “It would establish you with a top firm and prove just how good you really are.’”

 “I need to establish myself with you David. We need to establish us.”

“You have and we will, each day,” I say, wondering who I’m trying to convince, as I shift my eyes from the landscape to a full focus on the luminous green of her pupils.

“And the travel -- my being away a lot -- doesn’t bother you?”

“Sure it bothers me. But it’ll make you more worldly and, hopefully, rub off on me, as well. Plus it could give you lots of new contacts in places we might want to live.”

She puts her hands with their long fingers up to my face and I see the wide scar on her palm: the result of a bicycle on glass fall when she was eight. She nestles

into me with another hour to go before we get to her parent’s rambling Westchester house that reeks of success and restrained good taste. Very restrained – stilted, in fact, to me.

Her father, recently retired from the law firm where he was a senior partner and hopeful that Kiki will eventually join it and be similarly anointed, will no doubt with his usual gruff affability pull me away from my conversation with his more interesting spouse, a psychotherapist.

He’ll usher me toward a plush den where he’ll offer me a Bloody Mary, a drink he loves and knows I don’t, before sharing his rage that his beloved corporately-clean Yankees were toppled by a hairy, rowdy Red Sox team that looked more a street gang, in a memorable series I barely watched.

Kiki and her mother will, as they always do, rescue me from him before dinner, pulling us apart like two carved chicken parts. Her mother will kiss me on the cheek, take my arm a little too intimately and begin to discuss our wedding plans, which have become hers to plan since Kiki tends to be overwhelmed by them and I am both clueless and essentially parentless. (My father died when I was a teenager and my mother’s memory is abandoning her.) The event will be large. The dresses: chic. The ring: big. The invitations, flowers, place settings, food: elegantly understated. Me: barbered and tuxedoed, almost ready to become a New York Yankee.

As the train tabuma tabuma tabumas north, my mind drifts again…

Last week’s scudding clouds over the Hudson reminded me of that day of hiking outside of Santa Fe, near Abiquiu, with my ex-girlfriend Paulette, her friend Nadia and Nadia’s boyfriend, Rosario. We followed an arroyo trail under a mass of agitated clouds with our voices echoing in the air thick with portent, and all of us high on something and life, too.

Our cameras and sketchpads were in our backpacks and we were buzzing with potential, eager to add to our experience here, surrounded by the carved cliffs that Georgia O’Keefe made love to with her brushes and became famous.

We flinched at the startlingly loud thunder and blinked at the horizontal flashes of  lightning, as the moisture, the sage and the dust made the air smell like expensive leather.

Alone, exposed, at once vulnerable and giddy – we were capable of either fleeing or stripping our clothes off and madly making love to each other like pagans while nature celebrated noisily all around us. Our knowing looks said that we might do both, though we merely observed that day and did the other the next.  A downpour would have flooded the arroyo in minutes, washing us away like pebbles, shooting us past these crumbling works of art for a last gasp look at the genius of nature. Though our car was less than 20 minutes away, we were willing captives of the time and place -- in love with it and each other.

Now, here I was headed for captivity of another kind – the kind someone (was it Lawrence Ferlinghetti?) called “the fur prison.”

Kiki stirs and sits up. Her eyes are brimming with tears. “You don’t care about

this job, do you, David? I think you have big doubts about us. Be honest. Before we carry this too far and we’re really sorry later on.”

“That’s a really cruel conclusion,” I say into the teeth of the truth of it, and for the first time since we’ve known each other we’re suspended in an awkward moment of silence.

“Take it! Take it!” I find myself shouting, startling a napping rider across the aisle. “Take the job and run with it, Kiki! You’ll do brilliantly. And so will we,” I say.

Suddenly, I’m on a roll, winging it, hoping for grandiloquence after merely being thankful for any words at all. “ Let’s make use of our abilities, work out our differences, and have no regrets.” I say, wrapping my arms around her and kissing the deliciously sweet spot on her temple.

She wants to believe in my affirmation, and I can feel in her body that she does, even as I look past her and out the opposite window of the speeding train into a night filled with vivid possibilities that I discover I’m not ready to leave behind.

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