Paradise Close by Lisa Russ Spaar

Author:Lisa Russ Spaar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Persea
Published: 2022-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Shenandoah Valley

The Print Shop, 2000

Trey “Tee” Handel had come to her in need. An assistant professor at a Virginia university, he had a new book of poems forthcoming, and it required cover art; a colleague had recommended Emma Miles, a 40-something professor in the Studio Art Department, and a series of prints she’d done, birds trapped in houses, churches, subway stations, currently on view at the University’s art museum. An exchange of office-to-studio phone calls and emails brought him, near the end of spring term, to the open door of the print shop, a long, tall-ceilinged addition at the back of a Gothic hall of painting studios.

Often he returned to this moment, wanting to remember it exactly. Not to embellish. To be faithful. The full-frontal, overwhelming acrid atmosphere of acids, solvents, resins. The dank musk of ink. Rackety ventilation fans. Someone playing De La Soul on a CD player. Light from tall windows falling like fables across tables, sinks, three hulking presses, a tall shelf of limestone slabs. Cases of type. Art books in teetering stacks. A hooded bath of acid.

Four or five students were working, one pinning dripping paper to a clothesline, another adjusting, then readjusting a plate, then covering it with a blanket of felt on the bed of a press. Several heads bent over rectangles of zinc and copper, beveling edges of plates with rasps, drawing with needle-tipped pencils Tee would learn to call styluses. Little baby-nail piles of metal filings on the tabletops. It was a hot May afternoon outside, and in here the fumes immediately had him feeling a little dizzy, off-point. A print shop’s like a medieval chemistry lab, she would later tell him, except without the safety features.

She was turned away from him, at a far sink, washing ink off a plate. What he saw first: her small shapely shoulder blades, bare beneath the apron’s necktie, the low collar of her blue tank top. Hair—brown?—though later he would know it to be coppery when not drenched with shadow and sweat—piled up in a nest of pins and plastic child’s barrettes. A few silver threads mixed in too. Two stray hooks of hair flat against her slender neck. Freckled shoulders. Above the sink, a red box with an exhaust switch, painted with a white skull and cross bones.

He would grow to love approaching her from behind, and it moved him that she liked this, too, unlike other women he’d been with who’d rejected such a gesture as shameful or submissive. Instead, after they became lovers, she would present her strong back to him, its tawny cream and oatmeal shower of freckles, with an authority that brought him to his knees. When he hadn’t shaved, she leaned back hard into the stiff brush of his jaw, mouth, as the old record player in his apartment scratched through Maria Callas or Joni Mitchell, or the boom box in his office emitted a soundtrack of Liszt, Ravel, Stevie Wonder. Coltrane.

When Emma Miles turned around that first

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