By Larry Smith

She was more intuitive and no doubt more intelligent than most of them. When I asked her to arch her torso six or so inches backwards, if she could, and keep her knees together and thrust a little forward, she said something to the effect of, "Never form for its own sake."

"No, never," I said, appreciatively.

"A really naked odalisque," she said.

"Exactly," I said.

"Like the one I saw in Paris," she said. "The landscape." I knew exactly which painting she meant. The one of the seven trees I called "Houri." One critic said it was discomfiting. You can't help but feel a certain adolescent delight when adjectives like that are used about your work. You feel powerful and special. People you've never met are being intimately affected. Because of you, they feel naked. Which is odd in my case, since in my personal life I'm not like that at all.

"Too much form for its own sake these days, don't you think?"

"I do," she said. "You haven't worked all that much with the human form, have you?"

"I'm still trying to figure out what the human form is," I said, and she smiled.

"Is there some facial expression you want?"

"No, that will develop on its own."

"But don't you think what I do with my hands is important?" The question impressed me, and I asked her to elevate them waist-level, as comfortably as she could, the palms facing neither outward nor downward. "Do you do work yourself?" I asked after a few moments of silence.

"I'm a singer."

"Really? Jazz?"

"Yes. Good guess."

"Where can I hear you?"

"I've been going to get auditions," she said. "I'm friendly with June Christy and she's trying to help me."

"I love June Christy," I said. "I saw her not long ago at the Club Troubador."

"You like to talk while you work. That's interesting."

"It keeps me from being too self-conscious in my work. Don't feel obliged to talk back."

"How long were you in Nicaragua?"

"A little less than a year."

"Really? Is that all? You were very productive there from what I've read."

"I had to get out."

"Really?"

Marcel was a small bearded man, very intense in his manner but scrupulously polite and rather sweet at times. Whether he was basically sweet-natured or not, Peter could not say for sure. His wife Simone was considerably taller but there was nothing incongruous in the picture of them standing side by side. In her early 50s like her husband, she was extremely reserved, almost cold – she was a chiselled blond, stately, who seemed to move only when she had to, and then with the smallest attenuated motions and gestures – but most gracious in seeing to every amenity when she and Marcel had guests. One would never think to say a dirty word in front of her or to behave in any haphazard sort of way. Peter felt much comfort in that. Such reserve carved out a safe harbor for him to rest in and actually made for a freer flow of conversation.

Converse they did. Despite his celebrity in artistic circles, their home in the suburbs of Managua was the closest Peter had ever come to experiencing a salon in the traditional sense, even when, as was often the case, he was the only guest. Marcel and Simone both spoke fluent English but sometimes addressed each other in French, which was not at all rude as they knew Peter could understood them well. Again, though, the punctilio: French was never spoken when another guest was visiting who might not know the language.  

Peter on occasion thought of them as Nicaraguan, so well adapted they seemed to their expatriation. Yet their catholicity, of which a mutual passion for English poetry, and American poetry too, was just one example, always astonished him. Their love of both was keener and better informed than what most professors in the Midwestern colleges he knew could boast of.

"Forgotten masterpieces of any sort naturally intrigue; that they've been forgotten is lamentable, of course," Marcel said one evening. "But poetry, except for the major classics, is so evanescent. Under the best of circumstances, how susceptible so much magnificent music…"

"Hulme," said Simone.

"Yes, Hulme," said Marcel, and he recited:

Strange to me sounds the wind that blows
By the masthead in the lonely night,
Maybe 'tis the sea whistling – feigning joy
To hide its fright.

"So beautiful," said Peter.

"Evanescent! Evanescent! And stasis was what the poet cherished," said Marcel.  

"Oppen," said Simone.

"Yes, Oppen too," said Marcel, and he recited:

…The jigsaw of cracks
Crazes the landscape but there is no gap.

"He was an objectivist, wasn't he?" asked Peter.

"Yes, courtiers in nature's court."

The rainy season was nigh although Peter was advised the real torrents wouldn't be until September. He and two other guests, a Nicaraguan man and a British woman, had been dining at their home when the first flashes and cracks occurred, and it was pouring by the time the car arrived. The driver sat waiting on a chair in the entryway for the evening to end. It was a steady rain but warm, not unpleasant. He was the last to be left off and, when he was, he was startled to see Marcel waiting in front of the bungalow he had rented.

"May I beg a bit more of your company?" asked Marcel, quickly, before Peter could voice his surprise or – at the expression on Marcel's face – alarm. The rain was running in tiny rivulets down his cheeks and disappearing into his beard.        

"Of course," said Peter, and they sat on the sofa as Marcel groped quickly for the words. "My friend Isaac died last year. He was my only confidante. I could trust Isaac, you see, because Isaac was homosexual."

Marcel waited the briefest instant in case Peter wanted to say anything, but there were too many possibilities as to how Isaac's death and his homosexuality might pertain to whatever Marcel had come here to talk about. Peter was afraid to chance any of them.

"My wife is very beautiful, isn't she? You probably have formed certain conclusions as to the kind of woman she is, haven't you?" Marcel no longer waited for, or wanted, Peter to interject replies to his rhetorical questions. "And you are not wrong. She is that kind of woman, I assure you. She holds herself back so magnificently. She is constantly reminding me of the virgin I married so many years ago. And she is so faithful, she remains so faithful to that sense of herself that she has, and that I love."

Peter was staring hard at the man, but Marcel was now looking downward, and murmuring as if in prayer, just loudly enough to be heard. "But tonight it rains, as it has rained on the many, many nights here and in the other places where we have been. And in this place it's going to rain more and more in the days and nights ahead, torrentially at times, lightly at others, it doesn't matter, it will rain and there is nothing to be done about it."

"Done about what?" asked Peter, otherwise nonplussed.

"Whenever it rains at night, I am cuckolded. The rain does it. I don't know if the rain compels him too or if he is compelled because he knows Simone is compelled. But when it rains, she rushes out the door to meet him. Sometimes she manages to wait for me to retire but other times she can't wait, and she rushes out despite me. She disappears into the dark, I don't know where, somewhere they find each other. He is a worker. Other workers I see despise me. On some nights I run after them, I run blindly into the night as if to find them somewhere in the rain. The rain does it. I see her running, almost flying, the white body naked flashes through the rain and night. I hear painful longing and then silence, silence in the night."

"Is there not some cure for this?"

He ignored Peter's question. "She is so beautiful when she returns with the dawn. There is no such beauty. Sometimes she leaves when the rain starts as I lie beside her, and she returns at last to silently lie down again beside me. When I touch her, she has again turned to porcelain. Sometimes she begs forgiveness. Sometimes she says nothing. She loves me so much. Once she was asleep when it began to rain and he came into our room and took her by the hand and they fled together. It is raining now."

"She is with him now?" asked Peter, a sudden twisted knot in his gut.

"She will break if we escape to a dry country. She will crack like a vase that has a flaw, a fateful lineament. Ah, the rain has stopped. Somewhere in the night he withdraws from her body, he smiles and caresses her and speaks endearingly. Isaac was homosexual, you see, I knew I could trust him, but we must go on. We must go on. You are such a fine fellow and I am so unutterably alone. It is such an astounding aloneness." Peter felt eager to be trusted even as visions of the pale beauty streaking through the rain infested his awareness. Her breasts bounced joyously as she ran and suddenly the horns on his friend's head seemed becoming. How thrilling, to be in love with a woman who is raped by the rain, and constantly, through the rainy season. Soon the elements would wear her down completely and she'd be also running off when it rained in the days as well. Here, he understood in his desperation was something so primal no artist he knew was able to compass it.

"Peter, dear man, we weren't expecting you this evening," said Simone.

"Simone, I must beg your indulgence," said Peter, still at their door with a small valise. "I have been quite unsettled of late and I'm wondering if I might stay in your guest room until I feel a little better. I realise this is out of the ordinary, and if it is simply not possible…"

"But what is troubling you? How can we help?"

"A vague emotional crisis, I'm afraid," he said, not bothering to quell the nervous tremor that began in his voice the moment he saw her. "Nothing disastrous. But a place to sleep in this wonderful house would be helpful." She'd blame the tremor on his "vague emotional crisis."

"Say no more," said Simone.

The room hadn't been used in months and was already prepared. "Are you sure this is wise?" asked Marcel following him there. "Why are you here?"

"I'm here to protect you against the rain."

"Fool! Go away!"

They sat facing each other on opposite sides of the guestroom. "I thought I could trust you," said Marcel.

"I guess I love you more than you love yourself." Then came the lightning streaks and thunder cracks.

"So, what do you propose?" asked Marcel.

Peter made no move as the rain thudded on the roof, maintaining instead a tense silence as he listened for movement in the house. Suddenly he bolted out the room and out the house. He ran well ahead of Marcel in exasperated pursuit. He was much younger than Marcel, younger than Simone. He ran in one direction until, deciding she must have gone in another, he cut now to the left, now to the right, in resolute if haphazard pursuit. "God!" he heard Marcel call out, and there she was, alone in the moonlight, rained on, white and naked.   

"You see!" cried Marcel. "You see!"

"Do you want to see?" I asked her.              

She strode toward me, smiling. The nipples on her breast were dark red, even darker in the gathering gloom as the light from behind the model's stand was fading slowly and steadily. I turned the canvas toward her before she reached me. I was reliving the same old sadness because I always knew she wouldn't like what I had done. She continued to smile but she raised up her hands a little to hide her sex organs. "Wow," she said and got dressed in something of a hurry.    

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