The Bell Ringers

Clara leaves me for Bruce, an art history professor who invites her abroad for a semester of extra-curricular activities. Bruce suffers a stroke in Mexico City while showing Clara How Doth the Little Crocodile, a public bronze by Leonora Carrington. Back home, Clara devotes herself to Bruce’s care and does the most nurse-like thing imaginable. She marries him.

I take my own sabbatical-of-sorts and begin playing bass in a band of other disaffected office peons consoled by death metal. I mention to Clara that our band has a song called “Stroke.” She comes to our one and only show, Bruce maneuvering beside her in a pimped-out mobility scooter that looks like a geriatric Vespa. Our song is about a different kind of stroke, but watching Bruce headbang with abandon—his graying curls flying, a pentagram glow stick bouncing off his chest—I concede that his stroke is far more metal than ours.

Clara and I remain on friendly terms. I’m invited to dinner parties where she dresses Bruce in a way she hopes makes him look dignified, but which only foregrounds his disability. Former students and colleagues visit often, then only occasionally. Soon it’s just me showing up. The bowties and cravats are put away.

Bruce and I begin a correspondence. He’s erudite but not showy, highbrow balanced with low. He confides in me that Clara has begun wedging soy chorizo between her toes, drizzling her splayed digits with hot sauce, then getting herself off while watching Bruce nibble and gnaw. This is Bruce’s first marriage after a lifetime of inveterate bachelorhood. He wants to know what he’s in for.

You okay with this? I write back. He answers: LIFE POST-MEXICO IS A CONTINUAL EMBRACE OF THE UNEXPECTED. BUT THAT GRIM REAPER HOT SAUCE IS A MOTHERFUCKER.

I join Bruce and Clara for Criterion movie nights at Bruce’s place. He has a TV facing out a back window and into an adjoining sauna he fashioned years ago from a garden shed. We watch the films from inside the cramped, steaming quarters, Clara and I taking turns running a squeegee across the window and bringing the subtitles back into focus.

They invite me to vacation with them. I do the day’s driving to the coast as Clara navigates us to a rented cottage. Out of the van and helped onto his scooter, Bruce goes off in search of the childhood cabin where he used to vacation with his mother. Clara takes a shower. I unpack and note the single bed situation. Bruce encourages what Clara and I have only done out of his sight, upstairs at his house in the stuffy hush of the walk-in closet. There, amid the bric-a-brac of banker’s boxes, unused lamps, pillows, and throw rugs, the two of us have rutted away under a bare bulb, Bruce’s sea of old suits parted down the middle, Clara’s hands gripping a closet rod.

Out of the shower, Clara casts her towel on the bed and begins to dress. Her black bra looks like a bridge, two towers touching her shoulders, suspension cables arcing across her back. A tag sticks out like a protest banner. Her lack of inhibition makes it feel like she never left me.

“Will you check on Bruce?” she says, breaking the spell.

I tuck in the bra’s tag and head out, the road winding between scrawny pines that look dead under their dark green crowns. It’s hardly the idyll Bruce described to us on the drive here in his slow, stroke-inflicted drawl. I receive a message from Bruce. STUCK. RESCUE ME FROM OUR LADY OF GOOD INTENTIONS. His one-handed keyboard, affixed to his scooter and phone, only allows capital letters. The drizzle turns to patter.

I find Bruce down a trail he has no business attempting, his scooter mired in mud. A woman in rubber boots is crouched beside him, a record of her attempt to free him written in the trodden muck. She emerges from under the shared protection of the clear domed umbrella attached to the scooter. One of those British baking shows is playing on Bruce’s phone.

“Sorry to be of no help,” the woman says. “But I’ve been having a lovely time with Bo.”

Bo is the post-stroke nickname Bruce gives to strangers: just one of the many accommodations he’s made for people unable to comprehend his speech, his needs, his abilities. The woman may have been having a lovely time, but she heads off at a pace not meant for rubber boots once I’ve freed Bruce’s scooter. Back on the gravel road, Bruce is too impatient to let me pry the thick cakes of mud from the scooter’s tires.

“Another idea,” he says, or I think he says, as the scooter whines and thumps forward.

He shouts something else—a word, a command, a growl. Clara usually interprets Bruce’s unintelligible statements for me. I follow the sprinkle of mud turds and catch up with him, his umbrella shuddering off its collected raindrops as he makes a sharp correction at a pair of open black gates, whose gold-painted ornaments catch the reemerged sun. I follow Bruce into a courtyard at the end of which sits a two-story farmhouse that looks hundreds of years old, its ruddy cladding rising to a slate roof atop which a weathervane points to the sea. Behind a low stone wall, three horses stand in a lumpy green field, steam rising off their twitching flanks.

A man emerges from the farmhouse carrying a large easel. He is long-haired and wears a leather vest over a white T-shirt. I suspect a fellow metalhead. He stops and squints at us. “Students?”

“Boast here atta boy,” Bruce says.

“What’s that?” the man says. “This is private property.”

Bruce looks at me but I shrug.

Bruce gives an impatient groan and tries again. “I. Posed. Here. As. A. Boy.”

The man gives us a skeptical look, then props open the easel. “Wait here,” he says, and returns to the farmhouse.

Bruce drives over to the low stone wall and holds his arm out to a pale mare. Bruce’s fist could fit within its investigating nostril. I turn to the farmhouse windows and see the man in the vest pointing us out to an old man dressed in a gray gown. The old man looks like a pope gone to seed. He gestures for us to approach.

“What’s this all about, Bruce?” I say, but Bruce only grunts.

The long-haired man waits for us at the farmhouse door. I prepare to do the usual and bear Bruce on my back, but Bruce pushes me away as he climbs unsteadily from the scooter. He puts his good hand on the man’s shoulder and limps into the dim interior.

“Only him,” the man says to me, and shuts the door.

I clean the mud from the scooter’s tires and drive the scooter in the courtyard to check the alignment. I let half of my body go slack and drive in circles, pretending I’m the one who had the stroke. What would Clara do if Bruce’s misfortune also became mine—bring in a third witness, a third helper, a third lover? I knock at the farmhouse door and am told that Bruce is posing and can’t be disturbed.

I deliver the news to Clara back at our rental cottage. On our phones, we discover that the farmhouse belongs to a famous artist. Nearly all of his work is in a dark and brooding classical style, Goya-like, with no shortage of twisted limbs, irredeemable souls, and sinister backdrops. I can’t imagine that Bruce’s mother let him pose for something like this when he was a boy.

“You should have stayed with him,” Clara says, and I don’t disagree.

We wait for a phone call or the hum of Bruce’s scooter coming up the road. Does he have his meds with him? Are they feeding him dinner? When Clara can’t wait any longer, I lead her to the farmhouse grounds where we find two young men sketching a woman riding a child’s wooden horse. She points us to a sculpture garden where I see Bruce sharing an enormous rattan chair with a young woman, her bare legs bridging his lap. Bruce’s face catches the last of the light. The woman pivots a wine bottle down from Bruce’s puckered lips. He laughs when he sees us, sending dribbles of wine down his stubbled chin that the woman cups in her hand and feeds back to him.

“Again. Tomorrow. Early,” Bruce says to us between slurps.

He refuses our help getting up from the chair and instead relies on the women and men on the grounds to convey him to his scooter. The scooter’s battery gives out just as we pass through the gate, leaving me to push Bruce and his scooter up the gravel road.

Clara corrects the steering as she attempts to pry information. “Who’s this painter? How do you know him? What is he painting? Were you flirting with that woman?” She asks the last question lightheartedly, with a new, patronizing tone.

Bruce, drunk, only chuckles.

That night, listening to Bruce’s contented snores, I realize that this is the first time I’ve occupied the same bed as Clara and Bruce. Clara’s scent is familiar to me from a thousand nights spent together, but Bruce’s fug intrudes. I feel angered by his presence until my head sets things straight. What happened to me is in some ways being undone. What’s happened to Bruce continues to happen.

I wake before Clara and find Bruce sitting by the front door, tightening his Velcro shoes. I wonder what happened at the farmhouse to inspire his independent mood. Sometimes I imagine Bruce could reverse the stroke’s damage by conjuring just the right thoughts in the right order with the right intensity. Through pure force of will, he could reestablish his brain’s fluency over the language of his body. But if he really could, where would I be? It feels wrong to be grateful for the continued misfortune of another. I crouch beside him and pull off his shoes, put socks over his feet, then put his shoes back on. I make coffee, keeping an eye on Bruce as he drags himself outside. He comes back in and complains that I forgot to charge the scooter.

I drive him to the farmhouse in the van. A bearded, broad-shouldered man in a cassock answers the farmhouse door and helps Bruce inside, politely turning me away when I try to follow. This routine goes on for another three days. Clara, who has cared for Bruce nearly every moment since his stroke, has a hard time letting go. I prefer this explanation of her restless mood to the other one: that her impatience exists because it’s just the two of us again.

Clara and I visit a museum in town dedicated to the famous artist’s work. We search the galleries for young Bruce. Was he the model for the boy cradling a dead bird in one hand, his other hand missing? Is he the boy at the edge of a group of ghoulish men tussling in a cave? Is he the feminine-looking figure standing in the groping night? Or is he the infant in the nest, head turned away, a brand on its neck? None of these, we hope. The artist’s style upsets Clara, especially. Not the nudity or explicitness, but the unrelenting despair. I joke that the museum’s café probably only serves absinthe and blood pudding. Clara says the museum needs a trigger warning at the entrance and a suicide prevention counselor at the exit.

We return to the rental house but are too depressed by our museum visit to stay indoors. We follow the trail that leads to the summer cabin where Bruce used to stay decades ago. We can’t find any sign of the building. It was likely torn down years ago and replaced by one of the large vacation homes we pass as we follow the trail to the sea. The woods open and we watch kids leap into the waters of a calm, narrow inlet, their laughter breaking through the cries of gulls. Dark-green sea grass lies against the silvery, sun-drenched rock like strands of pasted crêpe paper. The air is spiked by the scent of charcoal and ordered to the beat of a summer pop song from someone’s phone. We take in this echo of the paradise that Bruce wanted to revisit: the shore, the skerries, the noise of the sea and its promise of constancy. But it’s not my paradise, not my idyll. Being here only makes me feel that I had a childhood of deprivation.

Clara takes my hand and asks if I’ve given any more thought to moving in with her and Bruce. My barriers are the baggage of our history, the appearance of questionable opportunism, desperation. Would we, together, be engaged in some warped hero-play? And if I decline the offer, am I abandoning Clara to a life of solitary caregiving, or simply flattering myself?

“Triangles are the strongest shape,” Clara says, but all I can think about are the corners.

We continue along the coastal trail and find ourselves at the artist’s cove. We cross a marshy bit of land on a Morse code of planks and rocks, then skirt the grazing horses in their paddock. The farmhouse door is held open by a doorstop made from half of a carved stone head.

The dim interior greets us with the writhing, slightly sweet scent of ancient wood. Exposed hand-hewn beams span paneled walls painted a deep blue behind faded depictions of flower bouquets. The ceiling creaks. We head up time-scalloped stairs toward the light, following the gentle strumming of a guitar on a stereo. Faded tapestries come into view on the walls of an atelier that rises to the rafters. And there, in the center, holding himself upright by grasping a length of thick rope hanging from a beam, stands an altered Bruce. He pivots on the rope and smiles at us.

“Your hair!” Clara cries.

Light from one windowed wall falls against Bruce’s newly bare scalp, against the rough, unraveling linen shirt that ends above his deep navel, against his thick prick and pale thigh, his mismatched legs, his bare flat feet. He looks like he belongs in the 17th century, as do the half-dozen people in the atelier: young men and women sketching Bruce, some dozing, all of them looking like they need direct sunlight and a vitamin infusion.

Bruce turns his body back to the position it holds on the large canvas the famous artist is scraping at with a palette knife. The artist wears a full-length caftan covered in swipes of paint where it bulges at his belly. There is an air of butchery about him. The artist says nothing and doesn’t even look at us as we step closer. The figure on the canvas is gripping a rope that extends into darkness above, like he’s been ringing heaven’s, or hell’s, bells. The artist has managed to capture Bruce’s dichotomy, a body that’s half strength, half weakness. But the most prominent feature in the painting is Bruce’s tremendous erection. The artist pauses his scraping and crosses his wrists over his belly, looking at us over his half-glasses.

The bearded man who has been helping Bruce every morning rises from the floor, clears his throat, and wordlessly escorts us back downstairs. As we do, I see that the music from a stereo is coming instead from a bearded man in the far corner playing a lute. We are left outside, the door closed behind us, the decapitated door stopper staring up from the gravel with a look not unlike the one on Clara’s face.

“What the hell was that?” she says, shaking off a full-body shiver. “And why’d they shave his head? He looks like a prisoner.”

“He was smiling, at least,” I offer, my relief at being outside momentarily greater than my concern for Bruce’s wellbeing.

“He’s probably been drugged,” Clara says. “We should call the police.”

We turn the corner of the farmhouse and come upon two young women playing badminton. The women wear concert T-shirts and ripped jean shorts. I hear Clara exhale at the sight of some normalcy. The women tell us they’re waiting for their boyfriends, both painters, who are attending a course here.

“We could be in the tropics,” says one of them. “Paint me a tequila sunrise, I told him.”

We accept the women’s invitation to play doubles, but we only get in a set before the man in the cassock comes carrying Bruce on his back.

“He’s done posing,” the man says, gently lowering Bruce onto a lawn chair.

“What’s with the erection?” Clara says.

“One of the old man’s themes,” the man says.

The two women are kind enough to give us a ride back to the cottage. They share their erection theories: that it’s the artist’s fear of failing artistic potency, that it’s his attempts to destroy the concept of the obscene. Bruce shakes his head at their theories, but calms as Clara cradles his roughly trimmed scalp.

Back at the cottage, Clara shaves Bruce’s head properly. “Poor baby,” she teases, staunching a cut. She’s back where she wants to be, nursing Bruce, she his all.

Can I inhabit a life of split affections? Is some better than none? Is it selfish to want my old life back without Bruce in it, that time we had before Clara felt herself stagnating? Or should I be grateful to Bruce for being my personal memento mori?

Clara shakes me awake in the night. It’s too dark to see her. I wonder if I’ve imagined her presence until she shakes me again.

“Get dressed,” she whispers. “Quietly. Meet outside.”

She’s talking like Bruce. I find her out past the van.

“He doesn’t get to keep our Bruce,” she says, and begins walking.

“What’s that mean?”

“I haven’t decided.”

We pass through the open gates to the artist’s compound, the pale horse a ghost in the starlit paddock. The top rim of the badminton net gives off the faintest stroke of light and points to a glowing, downstairs bedroom. I expect to see the famous artist cavorting with a few art students. Instead, he’s lying in a humble bed, his only company a splayed book of Sudoku rising and falling on his belly. A candle on a sideboard sputters to darkness as we watch him sleep.

Inside the farmhouse, we creep up to the atelier, then freeze at the sight of the lute player watching us. He doesn’t move or say a thing, and then I see it’s a painting and am spooked by the perfect entrapment of a soul in oils. We move on to “Bruce’s Boner,” as we’ve come to call the artist’s latest work. Clara picks up a brush and puts it down. A knife, and puts it down. She lifts the painting off the easel and we carry it downstairs and outside, the canvas tacky to the touch and silvery at oblique angles.

Later that night we curl into one another in the cottage’s bed, our hands familiar and newly criminal, our fingers cold and raw from scrubbing them free of paint. We accidentally wake Bruce, despite our tenderness. When I feel the warm weight of his hand on my back, it feels, unexpectedly, like a benediction.

There’s nothing on the news the next day about our theft. No police visit. We spend the day at a pebbled beach accessible to Bruce’s scooter. We try to reenact his boyhood experience with soda and hot dogs, potato chips and marble cake. But Bruce only wants to be in the water. We take turns accompanying him in the cold sea, hoisting his bum leg to the surface so he can float on his back. When he talks, it sounds like he is simply cold. Afterwards, Clara drives Bruce into town for an appointment with a masseuse to see about the knots that have formed in his arms and shoulder from days of posing.

I’m on the back deck having my one smoke of the day when I see the famous artist enter our cottage. I suppose our trespass at the farmhouse allows his here. He’s dressed in chinos and a loose white shirt, a cane in one hand, boots on his feet. There’s a wounded look about him, a bloated unhealthiness. I finish my cigarette and step inside.

He holds out a wrapped parcel. “I offer an exchange. Where’s the hostage?”

There’s no point feigning ignorance. What would we do with “Bruce’s Boner” anyway? Hang it in over Bruce’s fireplace mantel? I put the offering on the kitchen table and lead the artist outside and in the opposite direction from his farmhouse. He moves quickly for an old man, carrying the cane.

“Why’d you shave Bruce’s head?” I ask.

Something hurts him, a twinge in his step. The cane comes down and clicks against the gravel. “I was searching for the marks of the past. I was a phrenologist in a past life.”

“What did you find?”

“An enviable lack of tragedy, apart from the obvious.”

I lead him down to another cove, the road lined with pygmy pines and small vacation cottages, children’s voices straying out rod-propped windows. When Clara and I were here in the night, carrying the painting, I had the impression we were in a deep wood.

“I know he has ideas, but Bruce isn’t my son,” the artist says. “His mother and I had a brief…” he trills two fingers in the air “…the summer I painted him. I have enough children and grandchildren. You and your sister can convince him.”

“Clara isn’t my sister. The three of us live together,” I say, testing out the phrase.

The artist stops and looks me over. I imagine he’s picturing a new canvas: me and Clara and Bruce, all of us half-nude, heads shaved, pulling on ropes. “The Bell Ringers.” But our lives wouldn’t be like that. It would be more like standing in the sea, holding up Bruce’s bum leg so he can feel free. Being of use. Wanted. Although eventually it would be just the two of us again, and that wouldn’t last.

I hoist a ladder from behind a stack of lobster traps and prop the gnawed, home-made rungs against a dry-docked sloop. I climb up and lift the tarp, find the canvas, and lower it down to the artist’s hands, his cane draped over an elbow, his boots making the floor of crushed shells squeal as he steps back with the painting in hand. He leans it against the ladder after I’m down.

I look at the level of attention given to Bruce’s face, his heavy pugilist’s brows, the wide-set eyes, the meaty cheeks. The famous artist has the same features. “Bullshit,” I say.

The artist takes a flask from his jacket pocket and unscrews it. “It would complicate things for the others,” he says, dribbling the contents over the painting. He lights a match, but the sea breeze blows it out before it hits any vapors. He tries once more with no luck. He sighs and hands me the matchbook. “I’m unsatisfied with the painting, but tell Bruce he did good.” He looks at his work, then heads back up the road, alone.

In the bright sunshine, it’s possible to read the rope the figure holds as beginning to go slack up in the darkness. Maybe the figure isn’t a bell ringer. Maybe it’s the portrait of a man a moment before he falls, or the moment he’s about to stand on his own. The reason the artist wants the painting destroyed is written on Bruce’s face. Despite capturing Bruce’s wracked body and that obscene erection, the artist couldn’t bring himself to apply his trademark despair to Bruce’s face. Instead, the figure looks like a man thrilled by his first experience with Viagra.

Ovals of alcohol are withdrawing from the paint, slightly dulling the canvas. I tear out the last match. I turn my back to the wind and strike the match. It goes out. I pull out my lighter.

The van is parked at the cottage when I return, Bruce and Clara back from what ended up being a couple’s massage. They sit at the kitchen table looking at what the artist left with me earlier, a portrait of Bruce as a young tow-headed boy. He’s wearing red swimming trunks and swinging on a rope. He’s slender and tan, his visible ribs like a mark of the man within him pressing to get out. There’s a sailboat in the distance below gorgeous clouds. The light is overwhelmingly optimistic, a painting markedly different from all that Clara and I have seen of the artist’s current and past work. A painting he kept for himself. A sentimental memento vivere.

There at the kitchen table, Clara holds Bruce’s hand. The angle of their heads, the degrees of a reconciliation of Bruce’s past with his present state—it’s sentimental as well and it stirs rebellion in me. I am not made of quiet satisfaction and quieter moments. I am not academia, foreign films, saunas, and sculpture gardens. Bruce and Clara are both mistaken as to who I am, as to who they are inviting into their lives. I’m a who, not a whom.

Standing behind Clara, I plunge my hand rudely down the front of her top and grope one of her breasts, right in front of Bruce. See the man I am? Look at us: an immature metalhead, a free spirit, a stricken academic. How could this ever work?

Clara grabs my hand at the wrist. Bruce guffaws. “To. The. Bedroom. At. Once,” he intones.

Clara looks up at me and flashes her eyes.

We depart the next morning with two paintings in the back of the van, “Boy Swinging from Rope” and also, to Bruce’s delight, “Bruce’s Boner,” intact except for the charred corner and the imprint of my shoe against the brushstrokes where I smothered the flames.

When we hit the highway, Clara climbs up to the front seat and puts her feet up on the dash. She tells me again that she loves me. That she loves Bruce and me, both. She is happy. Bruce is happy. Are you happy? she asks.

I tell her I’m one of those people who’ll only be able to answer correctly with the benefit of hindsight. The statement hangs there heavily until, from behind us, Bruce plays that old Bobby McFerrin tune on his phone and tries to sing along.

A month later, a package arrives for Bruce. Inside a wooden box is packed a clean brush and a bubble-wrapped jar holding a slosh of homemade varnish. Also included are instructions. They’re written in an old man’s hand on a piece of stationary embossed with the silhouette of a familiar farmhouse. Bruce reads the note word by word, Clara translating as necessary. I hold the brush in my hand, bristles wet, canvas waiting, and follow the instructions. The painting’s colors take on added depth as I make light, even strokes from corner to corner, across the man, the rope, the wasteland, and back again, until everything gleams.