The Cage by Audrey Shulman

an artist and a man with a vision. When they’d met she’d felt the firmness of his handshake, the width of his hand. Crow’s-feet appeared around his eyes when he smiled; she assumed they came from peering into a camera and thinking hard. His teeth gleamed so white and smooth she’d known immediately that he didn’t smoke or even drink coffee. He said he’d been to two of her shows. She noticed the way he concentrated directly on her face whenever she talked as though she were saying something quite complex and it was critical that he follow. When she turned away to get more wine, she’d also caught the way he glanced down her body. She felt honored and nervous, finished her glass of wine too quickly. She tried to smile the way she thought he thought she should: a small confident world-weary smile. They went out to dinner.
    During the relationship she found herself copying his speech, his mannerisms. He tended to couch his own thoughts in what she considered the impersonal style of textbooks: “It can be assumed …” and “It need not be said …”This style made what he said sound proven and factual. While talking philosophically he habitually brushed back his hair, massaging his scalp as though he were thinking so hard his head hurt. He twisted out his lips in grimaces while searching for the exact word. Her imitations of his speech never sounded as imposing. Her grimaces looked more like twitches than deep thought.
    Gradually he took on the role of older teacher, gave her treatises by Krishnamurti,
The Moosewood Cookbook
and
Diet for a Small Planet
. He maintained that eating macrobiotic took less from the world. For her birthday he gave her a carton of recycled dioxin-free toilet paper and some perfume made without animal testing. She had been quite excited by the size of the wrapped package, then confused when she saw the first roll. He had explained the dangers of dioxins; once she saw he was serious she tried to thank him for the present as though delighted by the originality of his thought.
    One day when he said she should do her laundry using only baking soda and vinegar, she’d listed all the chemicals he used in his photography. She meant only to tease him, but his face went quite stiff, the nostrils of his thin well-formed nose whitened.
    â€œThat,” he said, “is Art. One cannot curtail the needs of one’s expression, nor divert the means it chooses.”
    She had worked immediately at mollifying him. In the end he had relaxed only when she maintained that it was really the fault of scientists for not coming up with more ecologically sound chemicals. He was a passive victim from lack ofchoice. He had nodded his head at her wisdom and together they had decried the scientists’ greed for profit.
    And from the third breakfast they shared together, he had continually told her she should give up coffee.
    â€œIt is widely understood that there are three substances dangerous to clear vision,” he said the first time he enumerated the evils of coffee. He held out his hand and counted off the items on his large, neatly manicured fingers. Those fingers last night had moved so cleverly across her body she’d almost been scared of them. Afterward she’d traced the outline and texture of his nails and wrists for a long time while he slept. The blond transparent hair on the backs of his knuckles had seemed so vulnerable, so delicate.
    â€œNicotine,” he listed, “alcohol and coffee. Mystics around the world, from early Christians to modern-day Buddhists, agree that these three dull the spirit’s sight.” She watched his hands, looked at his red lips forming the words. “It’s fairly obvious the connection between spiritual sight and art. We must have clear truthful vision.”
    She was fascinated by the idea that to photograph well, one’s soul had to have clarity, as though it were another lens to be fitted