I’m hardly an expert about much of anything. As I look back over my life, what occurs to me is how little I truly understand. My area of study in college –– female anatomy –– eludes me still. The models that I have used didn’t ever inspire me, after all.
There was, however, a single exception to the rule. Angelica was the subject of an earlier story of mine, “The Choker Alone”. She wasn’t a studio prop professionally but a student who volunteered for the job. I failed to realize what doing so would ultimately cost her.
The details were vague. Why am I afraid of specificity? Hazier shapes shouldn’t offend a reader any less. So, why maintain the mystery? I’ll blur the lines a little less.
I graduated from the University of California at Davis in 1993. In 2007, shortly after moving to Oregon, I returned to my alma mater. Outside of a coffee shop, I lamented my long-dead academic career. That’s where I encountered her (of course, our ages hadn’t exactly doubled yet, as I had described). Angelica showed me her business card. A realtor, she had mistaken me for a potential client. Accordingly, when I got home, I looked up the name of her agency and had somewhere to send the drawing. A sketch of her from class would substantiate my interest, I had thought. I didn’t expect to hear anything back.
By 2010, I had established a mind-numbingly dull routine. For seventeen years, since leaving school, I had been a bindery worker. Now, two divorces later, I was living as a hermit in a ground floor, two-bedroom unit. The Charles Point apartment complex sprawled beside the printing plant at which I was employed. In the early Medford morning, I would march across Lowry Lane, unfasten the padlock next to the sign that said CDS Publications and open the back gate to start my day.
Weekends were often especially boring. By late Saturday afternoon, I was wrapping up a few hours’ worth of focus on a literary project, had turned on the TV and popped a frozen pizza into the oven. That’s when a knock on the front door startled me. I eased the entry ajar.
There was Angelica.
She flew by the barrier to accost me with the mailing tube in her wildly flailing fist. Repeated strikes over my head and eventually upraised arm were accompanied by her continuous stream of vulgar profanity. The force of her blows began to break the container apart. Only the already-forgotten-about timer going off brought any relief, as if we both understood that it meant that a meal was ready. “Remember where we were,” I jokingly quipped as I disappeared.
While I shakily donned a pair of mitts in the kitchen, the shredding started. From around a wall, the first tear got my attention. She had completed a second before I had raced back into the foyer. I pleaded with the incensed woman, “Please, don’t!”
“Why?” she demanded, “It’s only paper!” The tattered cardboard discarded at her feet, the lid no longer fit into the badly beaten top, “You’re trying to ruin my whole life.”
“Wait,” I reasoned with her while reaching a padded glove out to still her grip on the figure study, the marks across which I recognized as mine, “There’s been a mistake.”
My sincerity stopped her.
The pause afforded me a moment to survey the changes that three years and a casual wardrobe had wrought. Unlike our last meeting at which she had sported professional garb, Angelica wore a low-cut top and tight jeans. Shoulder length, chestnut hair had replaced her gelled-into-place helmet of a pageboy style. Had it not been for the choker at her throat (again), I might not have recognized her.
Perplexity turned her anger into reappraisal, “What about the photos?”
“The what?” I emphatically wondered.
“The emailed attachments! You sweet-talked me into snapping them. It was an act of faith,” her words stuck in her throat, the urge to cry poised to overwhelm her, “You called me your muse!” after which, she broke down in tears. Clutching her by an elbow, the purse suspended across her opposite shoulder dropped to the carpet. I pulled her into a hug, coaxed her inside and shut the door. My neighbors were nosy. Her enemy or not, I could still provide her with a little comfort once sealed into solitude.
The sketch in quarters, she set the four pieces aside while I sat her on the couch. A scent assaulted us. My dinner was burning. I ran to remove it from the oven. The blackened crust of the personal pepperoni overruled its consumption. I enquired, “Are you hungry? I can have something delivered.” I took her silence to be compliance and dialed the number (Round Table Pizza, a favorite of mine after working there in college, has closed their Medford location since). Forty-five minutes, the kid on the other end said. I reached into the fridge. Retrieving two Inversions (the now-defunct IPA from Deschutes Brewing in Bend, a new case of which I had just purchased), I returned to my guest with the open bottles and handed her a peace offering.
“So, you never got my …,” hesitating before she finished, “nudes?” I solemnly shook my head, wishing that I had. “You’re not Artguy1969?” her question elicited my shrug. “I’ve been,” her quandy continued, “corresponding with someone else entirely?” My upturned palms signified my confusion before she deduced, “And whoever that person is, they’re using the images that I included with the messages to blackmail me now?” She took a long drink of her beverage before she concluded, “God, sometimes, I don’t know. Who would ever believe? I can be so stupid.”
The plot thickened. Our food delivery marked a momentary hiccup. It happened almost an hour later and shocked us both.
The culprit quickly became her estranged husband, Todd. A deft imposter, he must have found impersonating me to be fairly simple. My name was affixed to the mailing tube in tatters on the floor. It would, she admitted, have been readily accessible in her office. He frequented the place before their breakup. I got her a second slice of King Arthur’s Supreme as she continued to piece what happened together. Some phony contact information would have completed his scam. Todd pretended to be an old classmate, talked her into sharing the ultra-personal records of herself and was now using them to blackmail her: what a twisted web.
Three beers into the evening, Angelica was already somewhat inebriated. Maybe that’s what clouded her seemingly shrewder mentality. Had I provoked some deeply rooted exhibitionist urges? She found my idea too intriguing. Why, my question went, couldn’t she get out in front of the scandal, proudly publish the pictures herself and circumvent the controversy? She didn’t have any examples saved, she sadly conceded, “Do you have a camera, by any chance?”
A surprisingly short while later, before I had understood how she had disrobed so quicky (during her visit to the bathroom) yet after I had fished my photography equipment out of a closet, a bare body confronted me. Her emergence amid a flurry as I hurried to set up a shoot kept my eyes occupied elsewhere. I stationed a tripod, aware of the way that my excitably trembling hands would ruin a long exposure. My second bedroom was staged as a studio with a paint-splattered drop cloth hung on a wall lending a suitable background to our session. As I mounted the digital device, her idea got even riskier, “Can you record a video with that contraption?” I turned to finally admire her with the answer, “Yes, I believe that is possible.”
She stepped to the dripped-on canvas encompassing her form as I could no longer ignore it. Her curves were ample, her rounded hips wider than a twenty-something student’s yet supply fitting with her somewhat seasoned age. The slopes of her chest tapered into the nipples above where they cast a sensuous shadow. A shift of her weight brought the navel below them into the overhead light. The skin around her throat showed the wear of her years the most; her subtle wrinkles were cinched together underneath the singular band remaining as her adornment. She introduced herself and described her dilemma to the lens while I pointed to her piece of apparel and pantomimed removing it. A reach upward to check what I meant reminded her of how, because of a strip of fabric, her nudity was still incomplete. She pulled it loose, the elastic collar expanded beyond the size of her skull with the comment, “Another point is what I’m wearing. This stupid choker here has always separated my head from the rest of me. Okay, not anymore!” Snapping it at me, the stark embellishment flew out of the frame as I tried but failed to catch it. A full rotation later, the sum of her seductive physique had been revealed. She added, “Goodbye for now,” as I concluded our clip with the press of a button.
Yet another whirlwind of activity followed. From me locating the necessary cable to her uploading the few minutes of footage onto her so far strictly real estate related website, she accomplished it all without any clothes on. We revolutionized the world of anyone seeking revenge with a similar stunt. By making her privacy public, Angelica beat any would-be extortionist to the punch.
Once our work was out of our control and into the cyberspace ether, she retreated to the sofa. I got her a pillow after watching her awkwardly rest her cheek on a cushion. Her broad expanse of flesh, although alluring, didn’t look very warm. A finally furnished blanket took care of her chill. The time was approaching eleven o’clock. I bid her good night, watched her snuggle under the cover and relaxed into the nearby recliner. Before turning out the light, I heard her whisper, “Checkmate, Todd.”
“Tina! Tina! Tina!” awoke me the following morning. Her makeshift bed was empty. The clacking of a keyboard struck my ear from down the hall. I went to investigate. Angelica, who was already dressed to facilitate her getaway, frantically fought to undo the damage that she had inflicted a few hours earlier. She couldn’t access her account. Her young assistant, Tina, the second user with her credentials, must have locked her out. How could she not have realized? Todd and Tina were having an affair. “Wait,” Angelica told me, “it gets even worse!” After navigating to a central menu and clicking on the ‘about’ tab, I understood why. There she stood in all of her drunken splendor, slurring her words, struggling for balance and almost falling over to slingshot her last accessory to the guy lurking out of view. The plan, itself, was sound; the execution, however, not so much.
“I need to go back!” her announcement accompanied her flight to the living room, the quick retrieval of her purse and my unceremonious abandonment. With the slam of the door, I had the sense of being returned to my uneventful life. As a matter of fact, tracking the internet for that trace of her that we had recorded took up hours of my time. By early afternoon, not only that moving image but the entire window onto her business had disappeared altogether. Instead, in a white screen hovered the number ‘404’ with the caption ‘Page Not Found’. Angelica must have gotten to her office, contacted the web hosting company and sorted the whole unsavory episode out.
Compared to her companionship, however brief, my days were too unbearably mundane to face in the vacuum of her absence. The ripped apart figure study didn’t help. Nor did the accessory that she had forsaken assuage my despair. Only the file that I retained of her wild antic provided me with any relief. For the sake of her peace, I knew that I should hit ‘delete’ … but didn’t … and wouldn’t … for years.
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