The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,49

contemplatively into the dark, “we are each a chair and a ladder for the other.” And somehow that made sense.

It was Isaac who cut her hair. She was sitting in the courtyard with her head covered in pink curlers. He came out, wiping stone dust off the legs of his jeans, and saw her. His laugh bounced off the branches of the tree.

“What?” she said. “I’m not using a hair dryer. You don’t have one.”

He went back into the house and came back with a pair of scissors and a straight-backed chair. “Come here,” he said, patting the seat.

She sat in front of him and felt the curlers leave her head, one pin at a time, the damp, shoulder-length curls cooling in the breeze. When all the curlers lay in a pile around her, he took her hair and lifted it, cutting quickly and decisively, the weight dropping to the floor with the hair. When he was done, he ruffled her curls back in with his fingers.

“Now,” he said, “just sit there in the sun and let them dry.”

Her face, when she looked in the mirror later, was tan and younger than she remembered, the cheekbones stronger framed by the softness of the curls. She couldn’t imagine the woman with that face having a cocktail party, wearing a blue wool dress cinched in at the waist. Handing her husband’s secretary a glass of sherry, wondering what those slim fingers had touched.

Isabelle walked into the studio. “Thank you,” she said simply.

He looked up. “Now,” he said, “I think it’s time for you to pose for me.”

IT MADE SENSE to stand naked in the studio room, her back to the open wall where the sun came in and ran down the length of her spine, the soft, rounded flesh below, the backs of her knees. She, who had never even stood naked alone in her own bathroom, welcomed the warmth, felt it center between her legs, at the base of her neck. She watched Isaac’s strong brown eyes as they moved slowly and with a deepening understanding over her body, the softened angles of her collarbones, the slope of her waist rounding into her hips, the after-baby softness of her stomach, watched his hands as they moved across the stone, over the hours carving a curve that spiraled endlessly out into the world. The sex, when it happened late in the afternoon, was something both wanted but neither needed, as long and slow as the sun moving outside the shutters of the cool, dark room.

When she left, a week later, he stood at the door, watching her put her things in the car. She looked up and saw him and they smiled, long and slow, at each other.

He walked up to her. “For you,” he said, and handed her a smooth oval of white marble that slipped into the hollow of her hand.

SALMON, THICK, DENSE against her teeth, a beach of smooth white beans underneath. Isabelle at six years old, throwing thin, flat rocks sideways, watching them sink and disappear while her father’s floated across the surface, dipping then spinning up, like birds looking for food. The air cold and full of moisture on her face, even on a July morning, early, early, her mother and brothers still asleep, with just her and her father on the beach where she had found him, looking down the bay as if he could see what she couldn’t at the other end. She had wanted to hold his hand, but her father wasn’t like that, so she had picked up a rock and tried to throw it the way she had seen him do with her brothers.

“You’ll kill the fish that way,” he had said, as her rock plunged into the water like a lead ball, but his laugh wasn’t rough.

“Show me?” she had asked, in a burst of bravery. And they had stayed on the beach while he showed her how to position the rock in her hand and snap her wrist and she threw rock after rock, until one of hers finally skipped, dancing on the water like a child.

“Time for breakfast?” her father had said then, and they had turned and walked back up to the cabin that waited where the rock beach met the big green trees behind.

It was only later, after her father was dead and she had children herself, that Isabelle realized that parents most often know when their children are stalling to hold off the end of something