In a time of upheaval, I hesitate to focus on a personal obsession. Nevertheless, I can’t escape her allure. My faculties are failing. If I don’t describe her gift to me now, I may not have another chance … whatever the myriad outrages elsewhere.
The Author
On Sunday, June the 14th, 1992, the woman who would become my first wife and I went to see Ozzy Osbourne perform on his “No More Tours” tour (I still have the ticket stub in a cigar box). The retirement that was supposed to follow didn’t. Lots of other albums, TV shows and a music festival bearing his name did. He survived –– and defied expectations –– until 2025. Ozzy passed away this summer, over three additional decades later and seventeen days after playing a final farewell concert.
To be sure, I was reminded of mortality; more so, however, determination. Married to Sharon, how big of a role did she have in his career? I suspect that it was sizable. Why do I mention it here? Oz and I had a condition in common. If you’re familiar with Parkinson’s, you know how debilitating the disease can be. What the Osbournes accomplished together is what Lisa has done for me.
We met in 2011. At the time, I was struggling with a manuscript. Having used my art degree to write a novel, my efforts were a mess. With her level-headed demeanor, she helped me to organize what I had and encouraged me to continue. Now, with three full-length works of fiction, a few short stories and a memoir to my credit, I wonder what got in the way of my ultimate success. Apathy bears the blame.
What I have is a dopamine deficit. Each of my other symptoms stems from that. A feel-good neurotransmitter, it’s also motivational. Nobody’s pulling the triggers on the reward centers in my brain. Even the electrodes installed there a while ago don’t really seem to help. They did, however, get rid of the tremor that turned my drawings somewhat shaky.
As a literary subject, the nude should have been revolutionary. Instead, my books were merely weird. Either way, I have consistently counted on Lisa’s support.
Despite her seniority, she is the livelier part of our imbalanced duo. Prolonging my life with regular hikes, we spend hours outdoors where the fresh air, the scenery and the wilderness solitude restore the sanity that’s sorely absent everywhere else. My walking poles guide me over the uneven terrain of a trail. It’s an aid to the placement of my feet when I’m back on level ground again. The degenerative aspect of my disorder would claim me far more quickly if not for her. That’s why I love her like nobody’s business.
Enter Angelica.
She and I first encountered each other in college. We had another meeting outside of a coffee shop after I had moved to Oregon. Our paths crossed again with my second divorce behind me and before I had gotten with Lisa. Those events accounted for two of the titles, “The Choker Alone” and “Her Forsaken Accessory”, on the bookshelf at my website, colinturnerswork.com.
I was sitting at home when it happened. Once staying with me long enough in my little apartment to get her degree, Lisa’s mom and stepdad helped us move into a house. For more than a decade now, we have made that two-story, corner property our headquarters. In that time, I have received my diagnosis, we’ve weathered a pandemic and the sweet English rose that Lisa called “Mumsie” has died. Her inherited IRA and my social security combine to keep us afloat. All the same, the burden of being a caregiver to me can take a toll. Lisa –– though not routinely –– will leave for her sister’s, an hour closer to the coast. During one of her times away, the doorbell rang.
There stood a stark reminder of a wholly separate life.
Age had treated her better than me. That I could tell right away. Angelica and I were both in our fifties. Unruly hair in a pinned-up pile, dishwater strands of it fell around a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Her legs swam in their baggy pants. A solitary button was still undone at the top of a blouse that was roomy, too. She lingered on our porch while I maintained my customary silence, mouth agape with a hallmark of my affliction. It prompted her comment, “Wow, this place sure has changed!”
“What?” I grunted.
“Oh, yeah,” she admitted, “I was here a bit ago. None of these townhomes were. They ruined your view of that gorgeous field.” After a brief explanation, I gathered that Angelica, in October of 2017 (while Lisa and I were vacationing at the “Blue Whale”, our family-owned time-share in San Diego County), had sought me out. Having gone to Charles Point, where I used to live, she was sent elsewhere. The manager had revealed, the day that I gave her my notice, that she would be our new neighbor where we were headed. She detailed, to my hapless visitor, a structure just to the north of a sprawling emptiness. Since then, the same company had built a complex right across the street. “What a shame,” she lamented, “I guess that nothing ever stays the same.”
Without a word, I motioned her to come inside. When she caught my halting gait, it dawned on her that I wasn’t healthy. Cleaning up my stuff, a sketching tablet sat open beside a recliner. Fumbling around, I hurried to close it as soon as I had clicked off the TV with the hastily wielded remote. “What I’m working on is secret. I hope you understand,” I said in my hard to hear voice, “I can’t capture the model’s likeness … with my problem … whatever the heck I try.”
“What’s wrong?” she wondered aloud while shutting the front door behind her.
As soon as I had uttered what ailed me, she drew backward a step or two as if it were contagious, adopting a serious air, “Listen, I’m here about the video that you shot of me before. I need to know if you still have a copy.”
“I might,” I confided, “upstairs.” The clip in question recorded Angelica’s moment of impropriety many years earlier. She had staged the nude declaration as a response to her spouse’s blackmail. Taking place in my tiny studio, it made its way onto the internet. She awoke on my sofa the following morning to frantically find that she had been frozen out of her account. “Take your shoes off and have a seat,” with a look at her low-heeled sandals, I told her, “Lisa, the lady of the manor …,” my humor confused her, “she doesn’t want people walking on her carpet in what they wore outside. Relax and I’ll rummage around in the office for a while.” In fact, I remembered approximately where the artifacts were: not only the memory card but the figure study of mine that she had dismembered upon her arrival and the choker that she had removed amid the footage. I had deposited each into an oversized envelope and slipped them into a portfolio prior to meeting Lisa. I labored to climb to the second floor, a feat to witness, I realized. Nevertheless, if I were to fall, there was someone around to help me.
I was elbow-deep in old illustration boards and paper, not to mention the occasional canvas, when I spotted the manilla dogear. With my charcoal- and chalk-smeared fingers, I fished the fifteen-years sealed time capsule out of it snugly sandwiched surroundings. Once certain that I had located the point of my search, I triumphantly called to the living room, “Here it is!”
Nobody answered.
I took it to mean that I had, yet again, failed to project my pronouncement. Therefore, I bounded to the ground floor (although, by anyone else’s standards, a slow descent), discovered the furniture empty along with the foyer and, when I got to the entryway, the curb beyond which a motorist would have parallel parked her car. Angelica had departed.
Panic seized me. I surveyed my space. Everything remained how I could recall it having been. That’s when I recognized a very slight difference. Shoe prints wandered across an overlay of freshly made vacuum marks. Tip-toeing around the TV, she had nabbed the flash drive from out of its port, absconding with a duplicate of my especially private property. I ripped the packet apart, dropped the digital storage device onto a rocker along with the other contents, held the camera-exclusive accessory up and shouted out the window, “This one is yours. That’s my USB stick!”
Whatever had driven her to wait seven years the first time and eight more the second, I wasn’t sure if she would return for a third appearance. Did a bout of modesty overpower the complacent acceptance of her fate? Would her shame have brought her to Oregon to collect a vestige of her indiscretion? How did she hope to gain the upper hand by robbing me of a treasured belonging? I repaired, while I bided the weeks and months, the piece at the center of our saga. Two big tears had divided the sheet to quarters. A little tape spliced the vandalized memory together. What resulted resembled how finding the ticket stub made me feel.
That Ozzy Osbourne concert recalled an opportunity. It dated from a time when I had recently turned twenty-two, the age at which I first ran across Angelica, thirty-three years ago now that I’m fifty-five. Not long after that, I graduated, got married and settled into a career as a bookbinder. Speaking from my heart that day in figure painting might have had a very different outcome. Who knows? We all make our choices.
Then, when I least expected an answer, this note showed up in our mailbox:
Dear Colin,
Let me start by saying I’m sorry. When you said that you were trying to get a likeness right, I mistook it to be myself. You already know that it wasn’t.
You remember Beau, my boyfriend in college? He thought that he was clever to call me Fanny after the only feature that he cared about. When I shared myself with the class, he threw me under the bus. I dropped out of college because of that douchebag. Had I been put on a pedestal, instead, how far could I have gone?
Todd, the man who I married, you know all about. I had to switch to commercial real estate after what he did. His sneaky trick cost his stupid old wife her reputation. It has surfaced again recently. That’s why I was at your door.
Then I stumbled onto the star of your series. Wow! This whole experience has taught me just how beautiful each of us is. I wish that every woman had a man who was so excited about her body.
Short of that, I’ll celebrate mine myself. There’s a Canadian lady whose blog I follow. She draws and paints pictures of herself without any clothes on. It’s a healing thing. I’ll start with that. Do whatever you want with the clip of me that we recorded. I’m not hiding who I am another day.
You’ll object that your files were password protected. Artguy1969? It was so easy. My ex’s screen name? I ordered and skimmed your memoir, “Shaky Places”. At the end, you mentioned the project that I must have interrupted. “Going Rogue: A Nude Woman Explores Southern Oregon” sounds intriguing. You shouldn’t commit to keeping it to yourself.
The truth is, I’ve never seen you look so happy as when the camera catches her in the foreground with your face in a mirror behind. I would’ve sworn that you couldn’t crack a smile anymore. In person, you reminded me of a zombie. I couldn’t understand very much of what you said. It’s nice to know that you can still come alive. My guess is that she alone can do that for you. Hang on to her, Mister.
A video library with almost a hundred entries? Hour after hour of viewing bliss? And you’re the only member?
Tell Lisa that she has a new admirer now,
Angelica
Colin Turner's Work 