Originally published in and Chelsea, Issue 77, 2005

Dave met Anabel, or rather she sat near her feet, in a figure-drawing class. Foregoing easels and tables, Anabel preferred to position herself on the floor, where she drew with furious abandon, even when models took breaks. At the end of each class, drawings pinned to the wall for review, hers were totally black, the model consumed within a dense web of charcoal slashes and the paper itself covered in rips. The instructor, a middle-aged European who looked as though he had experienced war, referred to the rips in Anabel’s drawings as wounds. Rips were good; for what was art, he explained, if not pain given form. At the end of one class, the instructor handed Anabel a ticket to a Picasso opening and told her he would be there. Because Dave stood next to her, and the instructor didn’t want it to be too obvious that he was flirting, he turned and gave Dave a ticket as well.

The first time Dave recalls seeing a man wear bell-bottoms was at the invitation-only opening of the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. All the curators wore them. He’d read in the paper that Picasso would be at the opening, and because he was rumored to be in ill health it was thought this might be the last time anyone outside his entourage would see him alive. When Dave walked into the museum, it was clear something had gone wrong. Bell-bottoms swishing and bow ties bobbing, the curators looked like sailors in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore roused into action and called upon by the director to respond to some offstage calamity.

Anabel had just purchased her first bonsai tree and checked it with her coat. The bonsai tree was placed on the top rack with the hats, and at an art opening it didn’t look out of place up there. Dave overheard a woman in a floor-length black velvet dress, say—possibly because she had been forewarned to expect something out of the ordinary and had mistaken the bonsai for it—that Anabel was Picasso’s girlfriend, but don’t, she told the crowd gathering around her, tell anyone she’s here. Like shrieking furies they dispersed to the corners of the gallery. Standing before small engraved images of Picasso posed in endless satyr-like guises, wherever Anabel walked, as though she were magnetic north, arms pointed her way. Because Picasso was a known prick, no one was surprised when, aided by a woman in a black cape, he passed right by Anabel as though she were not there.

Dave had never owned a bonsai nor wished to, but often found himself stopping to examine those tiny versions of big things, which he was told took continual care to keep stunted. America was growing in a different direction. Dave was bigger than his father, who had been bigger than his. Of the families available to him for close inspection, only his mother’s has resisted the trend. His mother, like her mother and her mother’s mother, did not reach five feet. If, with help, each had mounted the other’s shoulders, as a group they couldn’t have changed a burned-out light bulb. It was as though Dave’s maternal grandparents had fed their children only the food they’d brought with them on the boat. Or—and this has come to him recently as a second option— throughout the growing years they’d stacked heavy and growth-stunting books of family lore atop their children’s heads. In that second option, Dave imagined the piling-on-of-books occurring in a back room of his grandparents’ house, a dwelling he’d never completely explored because some rooms contained odors too strong for a child. Whatever they’d done, they’d succeeded in producing tiny and perfectly-matched offspring. When the time came, and if space were limited, Squat, Brainy, and Afraid of the Dark, could be chiseled, with truth, on the tombstones of his mother, her three sisters and two brothers.

Despite her interest in bonsai, Anabel was American and believed in the abstract notion of more. She ate often and fast, and between her eighteenth and twentieth birthdays, she grew two inches. Dave was invited to Anabel’s twentieth birthday because by then they were engaged.

Because of proximity, Anabel’s birthday celebration was always lumped in with Thanksgiving. At the Thanksgiving/birthday dinner, held at her mother’s apartment, Dave noted right off that Anabel was exactly a head taller than her mother and her grandmother exactly a head shorter than her daughter. He also noted that he was the only male present. When he pointed this out, he was told, as though by a chorus, that all the men had died. Later Anabel told him that wasn’t true. As the cranberry sauce made its way around, Anabel, leaning close, told him her father and grandfather and her three uncles, alive and at a mirror gathering at her father’s apartment, were probably just then sitting down to a catered meal. Anabel’s grandmother came in from the kitchen carrying the turkey, a bird large enough to feed all seated as well as the missing men. It obstructed from view much of the tiny woman.

In Anabel’s figure drawings, she drew the interior of what she saw. She attempted, it seemed to Dave, to put her fingers on the jugular of her model’s inner lament. In his drawings Dave drew outlines. First, he let his eye find a point on the model’s hide, then he placed his sharpened pencil to paper and let his hand, moving in thickening and thinning lines, circumscribe the world of the seen. Dave aimed for the concrete in his figure drawings, and, as an artistic progenitor, looked to the icy world of Ingres.

After each figure drawing class, Anabel spent a quarter hour in the women’s restroom washing charcoal from her face, hands and arms. Dave came out of class clean. While she washed, he mimed the sipping of water at the drinking fountain located between the men’s and woman’s rest rooms until she emerged streaked in gray, her attempts at cleaning only partially successful.

Dave wasn’t comfortable introducing himself to such a passionate girl with a simple hello. He thought it better to wait for the exact right moment. Stationed between the two restrooms never felt right. As icy water rushed in and out of his mouth, he watched Anabel recede down the hall.

At the Picasso opening at the Museum of Modern Art, standing just outside the cloak room as Anabel was handed her coat and bonsai, the moment felt right. Standing directly in front of Anabel and blocking her path to the revolving door, Dave’s mouth dropped open and he waited for the individual letters of H E L L O to tumble out. Before that could happen, the shadow of their European figure drawing instructor, and then the instructor himself, stepped between them. With his back to Dave, and bending at the waist in a formal and foreign way, he reached toward Anabel as though to grab hold of her hand and give it a kiss. Anabel jerked back, the bonsai falling. Dave lurched forward and caught it. Standing there, bonsai pressed to his chest, he realized why he had been born. Dave heard a swishing sound, then felt a sharp blow on his shoulder. When he turned, the woman in the black cape stood with her cane on the ready to hit him again. Still holding firm to the bonsai, for it was now his life’s work, Dave stepped aside as Picasso and his entourage passed through the revolving door.

With Anabel holding on tight to her bonsai tree, Dave asked, “Anabel Trebler, haven’t I seen you before?”

Then he rambled on about tribes, genes, jokes and the scattering power of hurricanes. Anabel understood, or said she did It was—looking back he still likes to think of it this way—like embracing a mirror.

Most mornings, Anabel’s cat, Tom-Tom, jumped up on the bed and sat on Dave’s head. This morning, Anabel ran naked into the bathroom, bolted the door and with a ball-point pen crossed yesterday’s message from the wall. Then, in a change of tempo and intent, she begin writing on today’s.

Anabel’s daily messages—giving voice to the unspoken—were bulletins under which the day, once ended, could be reexamined, given context. Or they were captions, the upcoming day materializing above them like a Polaroid. By ten o’clock on Sunday mornings, the new message hours old, newspaper spread before them, words not yet spoken, it wasn’t uncommon for Anabel to stand, point to the bathroom, and say, “See, I told you it would turn out this way.”

Anabel stopped writing and shouted through the bathroom’s closed door.

“Was it Depcon or Detcom, or what? In the Roddy McDowall movie—you know, the one he made when he wasn’t a kid, but before he made The Planet of The Apes. It was Metal Man or Man of Metal, or something. It was the one about an atomic-powered robot that couldn’t be stopped. The world was going to blow up if the robot made it to Depcon or Detcon 5?”

Dave didn’t know, and, yelling, he told her as much. Anabel went back to scratching. Dave glanced around their studio apartment as though taking an inventory for the insurance company: four partially packed suitcases; his tux and Anabel’s wedding dress hanging from hooks on the closet door as though full-sized replicas of a bride and groom from a wedding cake’s top; the dining room table, covered in a sticky skim of Diet Coke; a charred mound of burnt plane tickets mixed with fondue-skewer-sized tree branches and a scattering of tiny, browning leaves.

Just to the left of the charred and Coke-dampened mound, resembling the aftermath of a miniature tropical storm, were the twisted and broken trunks of Anabel’s bonsai trees. There had been a small forest of them. The trees, like an American neighborhood—a mix of Tudor, French Provincial and Cape Cod—were perfect examples of their kind. The apartment smelled of burnt plastic, a lingering remnant of the ritual Anabel had performed with cuticle scissors and Zippo lighter on her Mastercard. A melted Payday candy bar, looking like a Salvador Dali wristwatch, was draped over the top of a chair. Everywhere Dave looked he saw failure, so he closed his eyes.

Eyes pinched shut, it wasn’t hard for him to picture Anabel dressing, pulling clothes from one suitcase, then another, ripping her figure drawings from the wall and rolling them up. Then he heard her go to the closet to get the cat. When she slammed the front door behind her, he opened his eyes. A trail of kitty litter in a continuous bead, like gunpowder, went from the closet to the front door, where it puddled when she had to stop and fiddle with the three locks. Her wedding dress was gone.

The phone rang. It was Rachel Trebler, Anabel’s mother. Dave explained everything, or started to. She cut his off.

“If, God forbid, you see ever see her again or if she calls, just tell her it was The Metal Man, but it’s checked out from the video store.”

Then she hung up. Dave figured Anabel had called her mother while he was asleep. If he woke up in the middle of the night it wasn’t uncommon to find Anabel talking to her. Anabel’s parts of the conversation amounted to a series of whispered yeses and nos.

Anabel’s autographed Andy Gibb poster hanging near the table might be something she would come back for, even though it was badly singed. Once, just after Saturday Night Fever came out, he, too, had been a fan of the Bee Gee’s. Like Anabel, he wasn’t shocked by disco, although they both understood why established jazzmen hated drum machines and the disco beat. If she came back for the poster, Dave would tell her about her mother’s call.

He went into the toilet and tugged on the light. Anabel had crossed-out Genuine Mutual Creative Differences, yesterday’s message, and in its place, in large block letters had written today’s. Her new message, STUCK ON DEPCON (or DETCOM?) 4, held within it, in a tracery of criss-crossing lines, the old message, which cut through its center the way all new history holds within it the veiled past. Her old message, now useless as the buried dead, was available only to memory and conjecture. By mid-afternoon, if he tried to call it up, he might remember what she wrote as Creative Mutual, or Genuine Creative, or some other permutation of the truth.

With Anabel not gone more than an hour, there was a knock at the door. Dave peeked through the spy-hole. It was—and this is the way he thought of his soon-to-be mother-in-law at the time, as a kind of honorific—Rachel Trebler, Her Mother. She had her hands in front of her face as though studying lines of text written on her palms.

“I’ve come,” she said, shouting words through her fingers, “to gather her things.” Like a soldier responding to some internal command to stand at attention, she dropped her arms to her side to await his response. She would, Dave knew, wait there forever. He unbolted the door.

After stuffing what she could into the suitcases, Rachel Trebler pushed them into the hall; then, the way the marines return to the field of battle to retrieve their mangled dead, she marched over to the dining room table and scraped the remains into a black trash bag. In went the broken bits of Anabel’s bonsai trees, the soggy airplane tickets, the Mastercard fragments and, from the top of the dining room chair, although it was Dave’s, the part of the Payday candy bar that hadn’t permanently affixed itself to the fabric. On her way out, trash bag slung over her shoulder, she turned and handed him a charcoal-encrusted box closed with slashes of masking tape. The box was the size of a sampler of chocolates, yet it had the feel of a bomb. Affixed to the top, one slash of tape held down a lump, and when he explored it with his X-acto knife, he found Anabel’s engagement ring.

The box was wrapped in a drawing, which he flattened and pinned next to Anabel’s Andy Gibb poster. The drawing was a blackened silhouette that in truth could have been a record of anyone’s lament, but scrawled across the bottom Anabel had written, This Is You, Asshole. And maybe she was right. In the poster Andy Gibb’s shirt, opened to the waist, reveals tufts of wispy blond hair. Like the curators at the Museum of Modern Art, he wears plaid bell-bottoms. His hair, a sparkly clean and feathery page boy, just touches the top of his shoulders. But it’s Andy Gibb’s smile, muted by what may be a drug, that speaks to Dave. It says—and possibly this is the reason he’s wanted to kept the poster—“This is going to go on forever.”

In the film’s climactic ending scene, Roddy Mc Dowall struggles in a rickety freight elevator with a refrigerator-sized robot. The floor indicator, shown in close-up, tells us the elevator is on Depcon 3 and going down. As Roddy Mc Dowall is being strangled, and just before he dies, the wrench he’s been using to try to disconnect the robot from its atomic power source, which the robot wears like a backpack, falls from his hand and, slipping through a crack in the elevator’s floor, comes to rest wedged in the elevator’s gears. The film’s final image, over which the credits roll, is of the wrench jammed in the gears. Jerking and bucking, the elevator and robot are stuck on Depcon 4. Of course, it was an image that invited a sequel.