“Bullshit!” she screams suddenly, throwing her charcoal pencil down. “He did too call you darling! Bullshit if he didn’t. I know what I remember!”

“Catherine, you remember what you remember, I’ll remember what I heard.”

We sit watching each other, like wary foxes.

Then she giggles.

“Kiddo, I think this is going to be good.”

40

When Ernest returned to the apartment, Catherine pulled some shit.

“Get out!” she screamed as soon as he entered. “Leave me alone with my woman. Don’t disturb me and my woman.”

Neither Ernest nor I expected that one. I just stared at her and Ernest stared at me. Finally, I looked at him. He walked into the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee. I followed him in.

“Ernest, don’t believe what she called me,” I explained. “I’m not her woman. There’s no shit like that going on here.”

“Sure, I know Catherine,” he said.

“I don’t know what got into her this time. You know there’s nothing . . . You know how she likes to startle us by saying impossible things.”

“Sure, I know,” he said.

I poured myself a cup of black coffee, sat across from him. I felt like a leaf.

“That woman,” I said, trying to laugh her off.

“Sometimes, though, I wish you were mine,” he said softly, so softly I could have pretended I hadn’t heard.

“No, you don’t,” I said, my eyes as wide as a rabbit’s.

We watched each other for a moment, then I got up from the table.

Catherine was back in the studio wrapping her soul in flypaper. Her “soul” was what she called her favorite paintbrush. She had started to paint her sculptures deep, rich colors—turquoises, maroons, lavenders. The Egyptians, she said, painted their sculptures. It was one way to preserve the wood. “You didn’t know me when I could use real wood,” she added.

“Did you explain to him?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know why I said that dreadful thing,” she said. “Yes I do. I wanted to make him feel like he makes me feel.”

“How does he make you feel?”

She’d said “small” one time; maybe she’d give another story.

“What are you, a fucking shrink or something? Why don’t you go and put him on your fucking couch? That’s what you’re aching to do, anyway isn’t it? I heard.”

How could she have heard what I scarcely had?

“I heard him call you darling that time.”

“You misheard. He called me doll and it was playful and there wasn’t any . . . Anyway, you were chattering away so. You chatter so much you don’t listen. But Oz for us if we don’t attend to every dot and dash you say! What the fuck? I’m going out myself.”

She was the leaf now.

“You’re coming back?”

She stood with her neck stretched forward like she was a turtle peeping out of its shell and trembling at the world it saw.

“Sure I’ll be back, doll,” I said, and walked out.