Bluebeard’s Castle

When I asked her what her favorite opera was, she said she didn’t like opera. I laughed, because that was what we were working on: an opera. I was a soprano, and Jess was the set designer. I could see her sitting in a folding chair during rehearsal, scrutinizing us and drawing in her sketchbook, her pencil fluttering like a moth as she revised sets. She was serious, hawk-eyed, closed-off in her dark jeans and leather jacket, and I was hopelessly drawn to her.

When I asked her out on a date, she joked that she was terrible at romance, but I insisted. Over coffee, I asked her where she was from. She said she traveled all over, staying in various cities while she worked on projects. Her home base—her art studio—was in some small town I hadn’t heard of, somewhere near the mountains.

“Show me your work,” I said.

Jess shrugged. “You’ve seen it.”

She meant the set design, her models with miniature backdrops.

“But your personal work. Your paintings,” I pressed.

She sighed and explained she was having a long dry spell when it came to her own art. That was why she had been doing so much set design for the past few years.

“Well, maybe you’ll be inspired here,” I said.

She gave a slight smile. “Maybe.”

We walked to the beach. I took off my sandals and she took off her boots. She rolled up her jeans and I held up my flowing skirt. As the cool seawater lapped over our feet, she took my hand. Then, she bent down and captured something from the tide’s ebb and flow. She had found a perfect sand dollar, which she placed in my palm.

Our relationship continued over the opera’s development. We were discreet around our colleagues, meeting at my apartment or her rental. Her place came pre-furnished. I brought her a pot of miniature pink roses, to give it life. She started sketching me in a special notebook, not the one she used for sets. She would pose me just so, then draw and draw, her pencil once again like a fluttering moth. Sometimes she would take photographs of me in different poses, different outfits. But she would never let me see the results.

“I don’t like people to see my art before it’s done,” she said.

“Open up,” I teased. “Be vulnerable.”

She at least showed me her work sketchbook. In those pages were the worlds she created for plays, ballets, other operas. I laid on her bed and flipped through it. There was a Swan Lake of silver and mirrors, an eerie gray mist. An Orfeo ed Euridice of sheer ombre curtains against expressionist crags. Backdrops for a production of Romeo and Juliet that were tapestries of Renaissance symbolism with a modern sensibility.

I imagined us in the future, traveling the world: her creating, me singing. She, the tortured artist, I, the bright songbird she let into her heart.

One time, I peeked in her private sketchbook. She had stepped away to the kitchen, and the sketchbook lay on her nightstand. I leaned over and opened it to a random page. There were colored pencil drawings of a white cat with orange splotches. The next page had sketches of cacti. I could hear the fridge close in the kitchen, but I risked skipping to her more recent work, landing on a page of sand dollars. They called to mind the sand dollar she gave me on our first date, and I smiled. A floorboard squeaked in the hallway. I slammed the cover shut and resumed my place on the other side of the bed.

Jess entered, holding a bottle of chilled pink lemonade and two glasses. She looked at me strangely. “What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said, reaching out to take the glasses from her.

Nothing had ever felt like opening night. As wonderful as it was to have onstage rehearsals with her set, on opening night, I felt like I was in a castle made of her soul.

“You’ve never sang like that,” our director said afterwards, his face awed.

In my arms, I cradled the bouquet of white lilies Jess had gotten me.

Then she left for her next project. I had known this was coming—she had already been researching it, sketching ideas. It was inevitable. Still, I imagined a future where we would fly back and forth to each other. She returned the pot of miniature roses to me, and we said we’d keep in touch.

For a bit, we did. But then her replies grew sparse, short. The little roses, no matter how I tended them, kept withering. And then Jess’s replies stopped coming at all. I was bereft. I felt hollowed out, drowning.

It wasn’t my first heartbreak, but nothing had felt like this. I lay in bed like a corpse, my room dark.

One night, I got up for a glass of water. When I returned to my bedroom, I noticed the sand dollar. Ever since the day of our first date, I had kept it on my windowsill. It glowed bright in the moonlight. I picked it up, remembering how she had placed it in my palm. It had been wet with cold seawater then, but as I held it that night, I felt a warm drip on my hand. Startled, I flipped it over, then gasped. Blood was pouring from the sand dollar’s aperture. I cried out and the shell fell to the floor, shattering in a gory mess. With my heart pounding and stomach lurching, I cleaned it up with paper towels, tied the trash bag tight, and carried it down to the dumpster. After I flung the disturbing bundle into that dark pit of rot, I let the bin’s lid close with a thud that echoed in the night.

Later, I told myself the liquid had just been old seawater that had somehow remained, along with parts of the decaying sea creature. But I knew I was lying to myself, that there was no explanation for what I had seen.

Years later, I was in a different city, watching a friend perform. While downtown, I walked past an art gallery and saw Jess’s name in the window: she had a solo show. I went inside.

On the white walls were large-scale paintings of women. The first showed a brunette in a yellow dress, surrounded by various items: a baseball stadium, a silver necklace, a plate of French fries. Next was a ballerina in the center of an assemblage of a white cat with orange splotches, a cactus, a classic car, a rollercoaster. The paintings continued like this. They had no titles, just numbers, and all had beside them the little red dots that indicated they’d been sold.

Then I got to the last painting, and my body froze. There I was, on canvas. There I was in her favorite dress of mine, and there were the miniature roses, the lilies, the pink lemonade, and in my hand—the sand dollar.