17 Baz
17
Baz
Dorian couldn’t have picked a better day for this trip. I shove uncomfortable thoughts of yesterday’s freaky events to the back of my mind and enjoy the rush of the salty wind blowing past the Tesla’s open windows, tossing my hair into a wild mess.
I slept well last night, thanks to a sleeping pill Dorian gave me and also thanks to the luxurious bedding in Lloyd-Henry’s penthouse. Dorian and I stopped by my house this morning before we set off to feed Screwtape and check for disturbances. Everything was exactly as I’d left it—except there was a half-chewed rabbit lying on the porch, with several dead moths scattered around it. Black, velvety moths, just like the swarm we saw at the Chandler. Dorian picked up the rabbit and tossed it in the trash.
“A stray dog must have dragged it there,” he said, but although I nodded, we both knew better. Which is why, despite the glorious beauty of this sunny day, he and I aren’t talking much.
After half an hour of silence, wind, and occasional sips of coffee, I decide to say something.
“I looked up Hunting Island while I was getting ready this morning,” I say. “It’s a beach. Well, a beach and a swamp. Not to burst your bubble, but that’s nothing I haven’t seen.”
Dorian’s eyes are unreadable behind Cartier sunglasses, but he grins, dimpling. “Keep telling yourself that.”
“There’s other stuff in the area—hiking, fishing… God, please tell me we’re not going fishing.”
“No.”
“Then what’s so special and inspiring about this place?”
“You must not have done much searching. Just a cursory glance at the website, yeah?”
I reach into my bag and take out my phone, but Dorian snatches it and tucks it into the pocket of the driver’s side door.
“Hey!” I try to reach across him. When I can’t, I unbuckle so I can stretch farther across his lap.
“Baz, sit your cute little ass back down and put your seat belt on. And no messing with the driver. One massive car wreck might cause enough damage to make my portrait disintegrate entirely.”
“At least that would get me off the hook with you.”
“You’d probably die with me. How romantic.”
“Give me my phone.”
He sighs. “You impossible woman—just let me surprise you. Relax and put on some music. You don’t need the phone right now.”
“Fine.” I slump into the seat, faking a pout, but secretly I’m even more curious about our destination—and pretty damn flattered that he’s going to so much trouble for my sake. Today’s trip doesn’t seem to have much to do with his eventual goal—convincing me that a life of wealth and indulgence is worth yielding my principles and breaking my vow. Taking me out here is about inspiring me creatively. Which I guess might circuitously feed into his goals, but I prefer to think it’s more personal than that.
For the next hour or so, we take turns finding music we like. His taste tends toward the classics and oldies—Etta Jones, Julie London, and Nat King Cole, but he’s got some newer choices in there, too—Kooma and Main-de-Gloire. He plays Sinatra’s “Call Me Irresponsible” and then Blondie’s “One Way or Another.” I introduce him to Ghost, Marianas Trench, a little Paramore. And the song choices lead into a discussion of music in movies and TV shows, like the brilliant infusion of Neil Diamond’s music into Midnight Mass .
Suddenly Dorian is pulling off the road into a sloped, narrow parking lot by a reedy marsh. There’s a weathered building ahead.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
He looks at me quizzically. “Lunch? You barely ate anything this morning. It’s twelve thirty. I thought we should eat before we get to Hunting Island.”
“The Foolish Frog?” I get out of the car, eyeing the cartoonish sign. “Doesn’t seem like your kind of place.”
“You don’t know me that well yet, Basil Allard.” He winks at me. “Come on.”
The restaurant turns out to be a quaint place paneled in honey-colored oak, with a breezy seating area on the back porch. The crab cakes and turkey basil wraps we order taste divine, and the cracked okra surpasses all the okra I’ve ever tried. Near the end of our meal, the brisk wind catches one of the big umbrellas on the porch, lifting it right out of its base. It starts to sail away over the swampy water, but Dorian leaps onto the bench and manages to catch it just in time. The other guests applaud, and our server thanks him breathlessly, tucking her hair behind her ear about seven times. He brushes off the gratitude with a laugh and a wink.
Then we’re on our way again, covering the rest of the distance quickly. Dorian drives into the state park, all the way down to the southernmost point of the island, where we park near a building with a couple of restrooms.
He takes a bag out of the back seat—one of those beach bags with an insulated compartment.
“I’ve always thought those were neat,” I say, half to myself. And then I pinch my lips together because I, the cool artist goth chick, just told Dorian Gray that insulated cooler bags are “neat.”
Fuck me.
But he only smiles a little. “They are neat. I take it you haven’t been to the beach often?”
“Before I moved here, not much.”
“You lived in Columbia, right? It’s not that far.”
“No.” I drag out the word as a sludge of memories fills my mind. “No, it’s not. Trust me, I used to ask to go to the beach all the time. But our financial situation made beach trips impossible. Every time I asked, Mom would say stuff like, ‘I can’t spare the gas money to drive two hundred and forty miles both ways just so you can splash in shallow water full of other kids’ pee and burn your skin to a crisp and probably get stung by a jellyfish.’ Or she’d say, ‘It’s not worth the hours of driving just for you to play for an hour and then start whining to go home.’”
We’re on a gravel trail now, trekking through subtropical forest, bright beams of sunlight lancing down from above. Without a breeze, it’s a little too hot for comfort—besides which, I can feel my body temperature rising like it always does when I dredge up uncomfortable memories. Sweat trickles down the back of my neck, a drop of it tracing along my spine.
“Your mother was being unreasonable,” Dorian says.
“Right? Totally unreasonable. I promised her I wouldn’t whine. I suggested we could stay overnight with Aunt Jessie, like we did a couple times before Dad passed. That way, we could spend more time here, make the most of the gas money without having to pay for a hotel. But Mom always said no. Said my aunt didn’t want anything to do with us. Once, when I was fourteen and feistier than usual, we got into a yelling match about it. I’d scraped together a little money doing caricatures, and I wanted us both to go on a vacation. So we’re screaming at each other, right, and finally Mom comes out with the real reason we can’t stay with Aunt Jessie—because Aunt Jessie thinks my mom killed my dad. Even though Mom had an alibi. She’d been at the store, and lots of people had seen her there. Aunt Jessie never believed it. You know, I think that’s why my aunt left me all her stuff. Because she felt guilty about abandoning me with Mom and never seeing me again. I was the last piece of her family, her brother’s daughter, and she never saw me after the funeral. We could really have used her help. Got pretty desperate sometimes.”
“I wish you hadn’t endured that,” Dorian says quietly. “I’ve never been poor. Thanks to my face, my body, and my invulnerability, I’ve always found a way to make money. The lowest I sank was around 1918 in Casablanca, when funds were low and I hired myself out as a prostitute. Fortunately I was in such high demand I got to choose my clients. But I quickly worked my way out of that.”
“How?”
“I stole a lockbox full of money from the madam at the brothel and ran away with a duchess.”
“Damn,” I breathe. “How long were you with the duchess?”
“Not long. I had to dump her once she got nosy about my portrait.” He hitches the bag higher onto his shoulder. Despite his strength, it seems heavy for him. Probably full of wine, if I know him at all.
“Yes, that was the closest I came to poverty,” he muses. “I was born into wealth, you see.”
“What were your parents like?”
“Well, my mother, Margaret Devereux, was the beautiful daughter of the pompous Lord Kelso. She defied Kelso’s wishes and ran off with a handsome, penniless soldier. While she was pregnant with me, Kelso paid someone to lure my father into a duel in which he was killed. My mother died soon after my birth. So it’s a very romantic and tragic story, but I never had any real emotional connection to either of them. My grandfather hated me with a passion while he was alive—beat me for the smallest infractions.”
“That’s so unfair.”
“Those were different times.”
“Sucky times.”
“Agreed. When the old bastard died and left me everything, I used to spend money on things I knew he would hate on purpose. I like to think his ghost has witnessed every glorious, wicked thing I’ve ever done and that he can’t rest because I’m such a gleeful sinner. My kind of revenge, I suppose.”
We’re crossing a weathered bridge now, a kind of stubby boardwalk over a strip of shimmering water. There’s a thin line of palmettos, with the ocean beyond that.
“So it’s just a beach then,” I say.
“Hush.” Dorian steps off the end of the boardwalk, removes his sandals, and tosses them under a bush, so I do the same.
“Dorian,” I complain, hopping after him. “This had better be worth—”
And then my words winnow away on the breeze coming off the sea, and I pace forward slowly, silently, my pulse quickening.
This beach is studded with bare, skeletal trees, bone-white and black. They lie like the graceful skeletons of broken gods, huge and still and silent on the glossy sand. Sheets of frothy water skate in, wetting the flat sand afresh, keeping it mirror-smooth. Farther down the beach, the sand is corrugated, and a lone dead tree stands in a glassy tide pool. Its limbs lift toward the sky like antlers, like the fingers of a supplicant.
On and on it goes, all down the stretch of beach—blue-gray waves marbled with white foam, with the twisted forms of dead trees rearing out of the surf. There’s a strange, salted pallor to many of them, a pathos to the lines and angles of each once-living thing.
“Welcome to the Boneyard,” says Dorian. “Hunting Island is a barrier island, and the combination of erosion and storms has resulted in this tree graveyard.”
I barely notice when he hands over my phone. I’m walking, then running, right into the center of it all. In front of me is a huge fan of interlaced roots from a tree that lies prone in the shallows.
The closer I look, the more I see. Tiny pale barnacles growing along cracks in black weathered wood, like minuscule crystals set into dark bone. Sun-seared ivory branches splayed like queenly fingers. Twisting limbs, worn smooth by the wind, contrasted with broken trunks so sharp they could draw blood. Churning surf and glassy sand, pale glistening bubbles on ebony wood. Tall erect trunks elongated by their reflection in the mirrored pools around their base.
The shadows of the tree carcasses are just as compelling—bold and thick and threatening or delicately interlaced or strangely distorted by the flow and ebb of the tide.
Over it all arches the limitless sprawl of the blue sky, faintly hazy, lightly strewn with cottony bits of cloud. The dead forest extends as far as I can see, some trees half-submerged in the sea, others jutting up from the sloping sand.
I could wander this strip of beach, this maze of morbid beauty, for hours—no, days—and still keep seeing new angles, new contrasts, new microcosms of the mortal cycle.
I place my hand on a sun-warm arch of wood, white as whalebone, smooth in places and seamed in others. Where it curves down toward the sand, cone-shaped white bumps erupt from the branch, and the cracked grain of the wood is frozen in swirls that mimic the thin veil of water washing my toes.
Speechless, I look up at Dorian. He’s walking behind a screen of crisscrossed roots taller than he is. His warm flesh and human beauty form a startling contrast to the thorny black-and-white fence of dead wood between us. His blond hair shines like spun gold, like the halo of an angel.
My throat is tight, my voice choked with emotion. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Dorian.”
“I thought you would like it.”
“‘Like’ isn’t strong enough to express how I feel about this place.”
He nods, gives a cool half-shrug—but he can’t hold back the grin. It breaks out, carving his dimples deep, illuminating his whole face. “I brought you some painting supplies, sketchbooks, pencils. I’ll find a dry place for all the stuff, and you can come get whatever you want.”
As he turns away, I grip the bone-white branch harder, struggling with an emotion bigger than anything I’ve ever felt for anyone.
It’s so intense I can’t bear it. Can’t find an outlet for it, so I hold it in with all my might, wrap it up inside me, and crush it down deep.
I start taking pictures and videos, trying to capture the scope, the endless enormity of this scene. Trying to collect each vignette—the exquisite beauty of the minuscule barnacles, the salted crystalline decay, the infinitesimal perfection of all the textures I’m seeing. Impossible to truly capture it all with a camera. Only through my fingers, my art, can I express how this place makes me feel. It’s wild beauty. It’s the tide of life, arrested midflow by catastrophic death. It’s stillness and motion, a forest of statuesque monuments to the lethal power of sea and storm.
“Sibyl told me to be sure you put on sunscreen,” Dorian calls from the blanketed area where he has set out the art supplies. Grudgingly, I walk over and let him spray the parts of my back and chest exposed by my racerback tank top. He sprays my arms and legs, too, and then he sprays some of the sunblock on his fingers and rubs it along my forehead, cheekbones, and temples, dabbing a little on my nose.
He thumbs my chin, curling his fingers around my jaw. And for a second, he doesn’t let go. His teeth catch his lower lip briefly.
I’m reflected in his sunglasses—the shaved swath of my head exposing my ear, decorated with sparkling studs and tiny hoops, my black hair, streaked with pink, tumbling over my other shoulder. My own sunglasses mirror him and my reflection, an endless sequence of us.
In this moment, we are infinite, Dorian and I.
And utterly alone, because this part of the beach is empty except for a man and a dog barely visible in the far distance.
Dorian leans in and presses a warm, tender kiss to my mouth.
Then he turns away, kneeling on the blanket to move the paints into a bit of striated shade cast by a dead tree nearby.
That kiss wasn’t an “I want to fuck you” kiss or a “we’re dating so we should suck face” kiss or a “you look hot today” kiss. I’ve had plenty of those.
That kiss was heartbreakingly sweet and frighteningly intimate.
Dorian shucks off his shirt, baring himself to the sun.
“Can you tan?” I ask him.
“Not much,” he says. “It’s technically skin damage, so the portrait takes most of it.”
“I’m usually pale, too, but I do tan, thanks to a little Italian sprinkled in with my Irish and French ancestry.”
“Ah, I’m jealous of you there. And the tattoos—I’ve always liked the idea of getting one, but they don’t take. I just end up tattooing my portrait.”
“I’ll draw a tattoo on you sometime.”
“Where?” He flashes me a smile.
“Wherever you want it.”
His tongue traces his lower lip, and I don’t miss the faint tension of his muscles or the twitch under the fabric of his shorts.
“Go get inspired, Baz,” he says. “But come back to me later.”
I look over the supplies he has laid out, impressed that there’s even a lightweight, foldable easel I can set up. I have to sink the legs pretty deep in the sand to stabilize it, but Dorian brought clips to attach the pad of paper to the frame and to secure the corners of the pages. Before long, I’ve mixed a palette of watercolors that give me intense joy, and I’m painting, freehand, unencumbered—simply letting the energy of my surroundings surge into me and flow out onto the paper.
For hours, I switch between sketching, painting, and photography, wandering up and down the beach. Dorian joins me sometimes, pointing out sculptural trees or chunks of driftwood that he thinks are especially unique or visually interesting. Eventually, he picks up pencil and paper and composes a small sketch himself. And it’s exquisite.
None of the showing off he has done over the past week impacts me like that tiny sketch of a barnacled stick jutting out of the sand. The realization of just how creative, talented, and intelligent he is strikes me like the slap of a cold, salty wave.
“You could do so much good in the world,” I tell him.
He sighs, taking off his sunglasses and hooking them around his neck. “I know. I suppose I don’t see the point in racing against the machine of inevitable human destruction. Better minds than mine are working on that problem. I’d rather enjoy myself until everything goes to shit.”
I’m painting the tree he’s leaning on, a dark cluster of branches emerging from pale smooth sand. His skin glows in the sun—marble white, with faint shadows along his pectorals and abs, more shadows etching his biceps and forearms. The urge to draw him hits me like a battering ram to the gut.
If I did it now, what would happen? Would the painting be harmless and normal? After all, the original portrait is far from here. I couldn’t pull his soul from some unknown location into a new picture, could I? Or is his tether to the portrait strong enough that I might inadvertently pull his soul into a new image, even from this distance? What if I did draw him and capture his soul, and then the painting became soaked, torn, lost, or damaged on our way back to the car? He would die, right before my eyes, and I couldn’t stop it. Or what if I mangled his soul, sucked a deformed fragment of it into a new drawing, and ruined the man that he is?
There are too many unknowns. Much as I want to draw him like this, I can’t take the risk.
Besides, there’s my vow to consider.
I work my phone out of my shorts pocket and take a photo of him—a pale immortal with wind-tossed golden hair and eyes that match the sea. He’s never looked more like Howl than he does right now. I half expect a chicken-legged steampunk house to come staggering down the beach toward us.
Dorian is looking at me, dark lashes hooding his eyes. “Time for a break, Baz. You need to hydrate and eat something.”
“Did Sibyl tell you to feed me and make me drink water, too?” I ask dryly.
“No.” He advances, his bare feet leaving neat prints in the sand. “I can take care of you on my own, without Sibyl’s coaching.”
I hold my breath, thinking he might kiss me again, but he walks past me with a faint smirk hovering over his lips as he heads for the blankets.
Swearing under my breath, I tidy up my paints and follow him.