It’s four o’clock in the morning and I have just woken up next to a strange woman. That is probably not the best way to start a story, so let’s go back a little bit and start over.
I first met Nell a few days ago. I have just moved house, to a large and rambling apartment building near the railroad tracks in that part of town, they call it the Fifth Ward, where the Bohemian artists and the down and out of society mix freely. It’s a part of town whose real pulse is best taken at night, late at night, but seemingly quiet at, say, 10:30 in the morning. I had just lost my job at the paper, and picked up a few classes to teach at university. The apartment was cheap, and I would be able to get by on that salary and this rent.
The building was a four story walk-up, my unit was one of four on the second floor. Most of the buildings in this neighborhood are industrial, but this one was actually built as apartments. “The Hawthorne” was the name over the main entrance, but I, as most of the tenants, used the side door, off the litter strewn parking lot.
David had called shortly before my move. He was going to be in town for Father’s Day and asked if he could stay with me. You can stay in my apartment, I told him, my new apartment, but it will be empty - I’m in the process of moving right now. That worked for him, and he even helped me move a few of my things over. There wasn’t much, really. I had been shedding possessions of late, part of an abortive plan to move overseas. I still might move, but that was the impetuous to get rid of much accumulated material cruft with which one surrounds oneself over time. I still kept many books, an old typewriter of my mother’s, and my laptop. An old leather easy chair, in which I liked to write, and a wonky footstool were what we were moving the night I first met Nell.
The first thing that struck me about this diminutive figure was her large head. Not large in and of itself, but large for her small, slender body. She had close-cropped black hair, almost spiky, with little elfin locks curling down before her ears. Her close-set dark eyes would often peer out from under her brow, her face tilted down towards her feet, as though heavy. That brow carried thin, but not plucked, eyebrows, with a few hairs on the bridge of her upturned nose, revealing the eastern European heritage which most surely lay in her past. She had a slight frame, and her shoulders hunch forward when she thinks no one is looking, but she has a proud carriage otherwise. About 50 years old, maybe a bit less, but I couldn’t really be sure. Her face had a way of lighting up when she thought she had impressed you, but could turn dark and cloudy with her mood. A black sweatshirt, with arms so long that they shrouded her hands like a monk’s cowl, overlapped the waist of her maroon jeans, themselves belted with an old tie.
She shuffled towards us in her slippers, looking through some mail, and almost absentmindedly held the door open for us. She looked up, though, as we carried the chair and footstool through the door. Her eyes had an almost mischievous cast to them as she introduced herself in a voice weighted with years of smoking but still lyrical, “I’m Nell - 4A. What a gloriously disheveled chair you have there. I’m sure he has an interesting story in him.” A few, I assured her. “I’d shake you hand and properly introduce myself, but this glorious chair would tumble. I’m Ralph, just moving into 2C.” She smiled and I got the first whiff of her subtly beguiling nature as she tilted her head down in that way and peered up at me from under her brow. She held the door, and we, David and I, finished getting the chair through. As the door closed behind me David said he thought she was hitting on me. I don’t know if that was so, but there was something, that was for sure.
Moving boxes with David the next day we ran into Nell again. She offered to serve us tea in her rooms. “I’ve got the fourth floor to myself, I do my work here as well,” she said, as we climbed the creaky back stairs behind her. She had an odd way of climbing stairs: she would take a step with one foot then bring the other up to meet it, then take the next step with that other foot. In this way, right foot up, left foot follows, then left foot up, right foot following. This made for an odd rhythm as the three of us ascended those old stairs.
Unlike the other floors, the fourth floor had no hallway or lobby, the stairs just emptied out at her back door. She fumbled with a key chain which had a large number of keys on it, and a pink feather for a fob and one of those stretchy plastic bands which some women use to hang keys from their arm when they don’t have a purse with them. She could never hang this key chain from her arm though, it would take all of the stretch out of that band.
The door opened into an almost empty room. There was an old green love seat, almost looked as though from an airport with its strongly geometrical style. A matching side chair and a low coffee table completed the grouping. That was it, three small pieces in a room which many would consider a large living room. It echoed it was so spare. I commented and the sparseness and the echoes. “An empty room inspires an active mind to rest, I find.” she replied. “Sometimes I need that, with what I do.”
“What do you do?” David asked.
“I’m an artist,” said Nell, and offered him a business card pulled from her pocket, that key chain rattling and jingling the whole time. He looked it over and slipped it into his own pocket.
“How many units are on this floor?” I asked. “Just mine.” she replied. “I don’t know why, but the building was built this way, with one large apartment on the top. I love it though, for my studio space.” This last was said as we made our way through another room and into a long hallway. There were many doors along that hallway, some with several locks on them. We were approaching the front of the building and the hallway lead us to her studio space, a long room which must have spanned the entire width of the building and had several tall windows along the western wall which looked out over the tops of the mostly lower manufacturing concerns and parking lots around us. The sodium-vapor lights from the lots down below cast an eerie dull-orange glow which came up through those tall windows and illuminated the ceiling more brightly than the rest of the room.
“Let me show you my latest work,” she said, and she must have flicked a switch somewhere, for the room suddenly had more lights on. It was still dark, but there were pools of light in the otherwise shadowy room. I could make out a couple of figures in the shadows. They were almost in silhouette when, with another switch, more lights. I could now clearly see a pair of statues, one of a man seated on a tall stool, another a man placing a box upon a tall shelf which wasn’t there, almost like mime. They were wonderfully lifelike, as I viewed them from the distance. As I approached one, however, I sensed some movement. Then it struck me, these are living! Surely, they were men, they held poses, and had been carefully dressed and made up, as for a photo shoot or to sit for an artist, but they were now living sculpture.
I cannot say for sure how it developed, I am a little foggy on the details, but Nell took on a different demeanor once we crossed the threshold into her apartment. She became stronger willed, almost imperious. She didn’t ask, she told. She almost ordered us around, and no longer peered out from under her brow, but rather held her head up and looked down her nose. She was strong, and we complied. Shortly after we entered the studio a young woman entered the room. “Bring tea, Hilda. Three cups.” ordered Nell. “Bring the pot, and some honey. That new Earl Grey, that’s what we’ll have, for Mr. Ralph and Mr. David.” “Get a move on it, girl.” she snapped. Looking quite frightened, Hilda even courtesied as she left the room.
“I was wondering if you would be so kind,” she started, addressing me. “I’ve needed to rearrange this furniture a bit for the longest time.” We were standing near one end of the long narrow studio space with our tea. David was perusing the bookshelf and trying not to look at the stoic, seated figure near him - that sculpture on the stool. Hilda hovered, nervously, near the periphery. There was a long, low couch with a gray woven throw over it, and many neutral colored pillows. Next to it were a couple of tables and a large white upholstered ottoman. The corner and fully one third of the ottoman was under one of these tables. “I’d like that ottoman over in front of the couch here,” said Nell. “We moved it when I was working on a piece recently and I just can’t seem to move it myself.”
I felt something, as she said those words, which told me that she would never have even tried to move it herself. She wasn’t given to acts of toil, there were other people to do work. She just directed. I took that direction, however, without even a thought of will. I put down my tea cup and moved towards the ottoman. It was one of those large square pieces, about four feet across. It was not too large for me to heft it alone, but it was awkward. As I picked it up I had to slide it out from under one of the tables. I heard a mew, and noticed a kitten, as white as the ottoman itself, was sitting on the corner which had been under the table. Where a cat would have jumped off a now moving ottoman, the kitten just hunched down and cried in fear. Hilda swept in and grabbed it. As she just as swiftly moved away I saw that she had dropped a note before my eyes.
“Help, we’re prisoners.” was all it said.
I wasn’t thinking as I read it, aloud, but once I realized the meaning of those words I looked up and saw a hard look in Nell’s face. “What is this?” exclaimed David. I, still with that ottoman in my hands moved towards Nell. The hard look in her eyes changed to fear, that fear of a cornered criminal, and she dropped her tea upon the sofa and darted out of the room. “You foolish girl,” she hissed as she ran.
I heard a door slam as I dropped the ottoman and headed after her, David and Hilda hot on my heels. “You won’t catch her,” cried Hilda behind me, “they never do.” Nell was nowhere to be found. Most of the doors were locked, and quite sound. “Well, I don’t know that we care about her,” I said to David. “You’re welcome to come with us if you’re scarred,” I told Hilda. “I’m sure she can’t hurt you.” I strolled towards the door to the back stairs. I hadn’t noticed, as we came in, just how sturdy it was, nor how many locks were on it.
“Nell, unlock this door!” I must have hollered that a hundred times that night as David and I tried to bust our way out of apartment 4A. Hilda didn’t even struggle, she just watched us, a mix of pity and fear, and defeat, upon her face.
As I said, it is four in the morning and I have just woken up next to a strange woman. I do not know when it was that I gave up. I don’t remember laying down with Hilda, but I awoke with her alongside me, her head firmly pressed into my left shoulder. “Where’s Nell?” I asked as I wiped the sleep from my eye with my right hand. I then looked down at Hilda but she wasn’t there. It was a nightmare, I realized, just a nightmare.
I pushed back the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed, both hands reaching back to rub my sore lower back.
You’d be surprised just how stiff you can get from holding a pose all day long.




This from The Independent on Sunday in re Barack Obama planning a foreign trip:


