The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey

abilities were truly remarkable. But he was always modest about his work, aware that for all its proficiency it lacked even a flicker of greatness, and that prettiness was his stumbling block. The paintings, worked on sporadically but, when the mood hit him, obsessively, were the oil and canvas equivalents of his California girls, just as clean and tidy and empty.
    There was one Susannah liked, though. He had attempted for a while to break out of his mold by adding a touch of fantasy, and one such experiment was a painting of a hut that seemed to be emerging from a chaos of sunset clouds, an elusive little structure seemingly constructed of vapors in the process of solidifying. The twilight, rose-gray colors were lovely, and the indistinctness of the scene intrigued Susannah, but what she liked best about it was the hint of someone, something, watching out the windows—a rarity for Ivan, who, except for his ancestor portraits, never painted people. They hung the painting in their bedroom, and it was a constant source of inspiration to Susannah—not the actual scene, but the potentiality of it, the sense of infinite possibilities beyond those clouds, behind those windows. Ivan liked the painting, too, but it seemed to puzzle him; he grinned at it when it was first hung and said, “Did I do that?” He was very happy to think it inspired Susannah, and that she saw it as the auspicious start of a new, more mature style. And yet it never led anywhere; he went back to banal prettiness, and the painting itself, which he called “Cloud House,” was really, taken alone and not seen in relation to his other things, no more than a superior sort of decorative art—hopeful and important and inspiring, Susannah supposed, only to herself.
    She used to sit on the bed for hours and hours, with the shades drawn, and Ivan’s painting glowing faintly, mistily on the wall, and imagine things: people, usually, and bits of conversation and ways to describe faces, voices, gestures. Tags of poetry ran through her head, fitfully remembered from her college courses: “Fled is that music, fled is that music.…” The line rang and rang through the long afternoons, and so did “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” and certain words she liked—intercontinental ballistic missile, duenna, martello tower, Sri Lanka—and colors from Ivan’s paintings—vermilion, rose madder, heliotrope.… The words had powers to create landscapes around themselves, strange places she had never seen, except maybe as marijuana dreams in her spacier days: underwater vistas with pale plants whose fronds reached wispy fingers out at slippery fish and faceless swimmers; or rocky, dry, hot stellar landscapes, sometimes with a figure—who? what?—lurking, waiting; or desert places where sand blows, and banks itself against the base of a mountain, and then on the horizon after millions of years of nothing but sand, something moves.
    These visions, colors, skeins of words got themselves transformed, eventually, into science-fiction stories, a term Susannah rejected as not descriptive of her work but the one editors used whether she liked it or not. She wrote very slowly, and only after weeks of sitting, like a hen on eggs, in her darkened room, watching the quality of the light subtly change around the sides of the window shades, thinking of nothing but that light. Not even thinking of it, just taking it in, her brain purposely emptied out, but differently from the emptiness of that dutiful domestic month—empty so it could fill. She sat caught fast in her stories where the drudgy details of daily life never intruded, where no one ever washed dishes or ironed a shirt or pulled weeds. She forgot to eat, forgot Ivan would be coming home and she would have to slap dinner together, idly petting Keats or Byron or Shelley, whichever of the three cats had achieved the place of honor on her lap during that