Roses and Rot (2 page)

“This place—it’s too amazing to be real, Marin.” I had called her after she sent me the link to Melete’s website. An artists’ colony. Full funding for nine months, including housing and meals. A personal mentor to work with—an artist who was working at the top of her or his field who would also live at Melete in order to guide your work for that time.

“I’m applying. You should, too, Imogen. It would be so great if we were there together.”

“It would take a miracle to get in. I bet they get thousands of applications.”

“Probably. But it might as well be us,” she’d said.

“You have a point.”

So I had put together a portfolio, written my artist’s statement—an activity that always made me feel like I was writing some strange manifesto that had nothing to do with why I actually wrote—and sent in my application. I’d been astounded when I’d gotten the email telling me I’d made it through the first round.

“I knew you would!” Marin had said. She had, too. “I’ve got such a good feeling about this.”

Her good feeling turned out to be right. We were both among the forty fellows awarded residencies at Melete.

Before she lent her name to an artists’ colony, Melete had been one of the three original Greek Muses—the sisters Aoide (song),
Mneme (memory), and Melete (practice). The colony’s founders wanted it to be a place for up-and-coming artists to be able to practice their art without interference from the outside world.

It had been around for just over seventy-five years, long enough to generate a distinguished list of alumni, a terrific reputation as a cauldron in which artists could refine their talent, and even a few scandals, one so dramatic as to almost close Melete’s doors. That last bit wasn’t listed in the application materials.

Everything had been too good. I didn’t trust the polished website, the shiny testimonials. No place could be so perfect. So I had looked, and looked hard for the tarnish on the shine.

There was curiously little written about the scandal anywhere, but even with the dearth of mentions, the tiny blip stuck out because it was the only discordant note in the near-identical chorus of glowing praise.

Something—and the details were obscured, spoken on the slant—happened about fifty years ago. A fellow involved with one of the mentors, an extramarital pregnancy, a disappearance that might have been a suicide. Allegedly. Everything was qualified by that word, “allegedly,” and—very carefully—everything was phrased to suggest that it could have happened anywhere, that nothing that Melete did or didn’t do could have changed things. At least officially. But there were changes in the program after that, mentors no longer in the same housing with fellows, and allowed to bring their families to live on the grounds, so at least some of the rumors must have been true.

But everything that had been said publicly since then was near-Stepfordian in its similarity. Everyone who had attended had the experience of their lives, and even the most successful alums continued to mention Melete in acceptance speeches for ever-flashier
awards. The excess of glory made me nervous. Nervous enough that I had left the application—completed but unsigned—sitting on my desk.

“The deadline is tomorrow, Imogen.”

“I know, Marin, I know. I just . . . there’s something weird about it.”

“You are seriously the only person I know who decides not to trust someplace because it’s too perfect.”

“I want to sleep on it.”

“Fine. Maybe you’ll get some sort of sign in a dream. Will that be good enough for you?”

I laughed and hung up.

I didn’t dream of Melete, or of winning a literary prize, or anything else that might be taken as an omen about going. I did, however, sit bolt upright at around three in the morning, realizing that I was about to lose the chance to possibly study with my favorite living writer because of a bad feeling. I picked up my pen, rolled it through my fingers, stretching the stiffness from my scars, signed it in the red-black ink I used for luck, dated the application, and sent it off.

Even though she applied before I did, the fellowships were all announced on the same day. Celebrating our acceptances with Marin on the phone was one of the happiest moments in my life—I was so proud of us.

Melete’s campus was tucked away in New Hampshire, about an hour out of Boston. Close enough to New York that artists could come up and give guest seminars and performances, or that the fellows could go down to the city and see shows, but still isolated enough that we could be alone with our art. Our practice. It was possible to feel utterly apart from the world while you were there, if that was what you wanted.

As we drove through slanted sunlight and green-leafed trees that scraped the sky, the outside world fell farther and farther away. Here were graveyards old enough to have footstones as well as headstones marking their bounds, inside of stone walls that had stood for hundreds of winters. I cracked open the window and let the late August breeze tug and tangle my hair.

“Here you are,” the driver said. “Enjoy your time at Melete.”

I gathered my bags, then looked at the house where I would be living for the next nine months, and burst out laughing. In front of me was a beautiful and slightly mad-looking Queen Anne, painted in autumnal shades of red and cream and gold. It had gabled windows and spindle work, and a porch that wrapped around the front and left side. Best of all, it had a tower. Had I been asked to design my ideal writer’s house, this was what I would have come up with.

I barely registered the house’s other details as I rushed up the steps to the front door, and then continued up the spiraling staircase to the tower. The room at the top was indeed a bedroom, and unoccupied, the key still in the door. I turned the key in the lock and walked into the center of the room. Stood, eyes closed, breathing in.

For that breath of time, my doubts and worries fell away, and I was utterly happy. It seemed just possible that all of the praise for Melete was nothing more than true, that I was in an extraordinary place that was exactly as perfect as it seemed. Best of all, it was my writing that had brought me here. For a moment, everything felt golden.

I slid the zipper of my suitcase open and started unpacking. Then stopped. Unpacking could wait. I went to the window and looked out.

Ivy twined around the window frame, a dull green that I hoped would turn scarlet in the fall. Through the glass, I could see some
of the other buildings, houses and studios, of the place that would be home for the next nine months.

Home.

A strange word to think about. The house I grew up in was never home, and I had left it as soon as I could. After that, I had moved through a series of temporary places. Dorm rooms, cheap apartments, two months on a friend’s couch when things were tight. Most of them had been no more than addresses. None of those places felt like mine. Maybe, at least for a little while, Melete could.

“Didn’t it occur to you that maybe it would be better to wait until we were all here before you claimed a room?”

The woman in the doorway was whippet-thin and had a messily chopped shock of fuchsia hair. She looked angry at everything, and specifically at me.

“Considering we could move in any time from two days ago until tomorrow, not really,” I said.

She stood in the doorway, as if perhaps the weight of her presence might make me change my mind. I started putting my lingerie away, hoping that unpacking something that personal would send the signal that I had no intention of trading. “I’m Imogen, by the way. I’m a writer.” I smiled.

“Helena. I’m a poet. I have two collections out already. Both with independent presses. This is supposed to be my room.”

Okay then.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see how that’s possible. There was nothing in here when I arrived, and the key was in the lock.” The welcome packet I had received had specified that while residences were assigned, individual rooms were not. They were available on a first-come, first-served basis during the move-in period, and keys would be left in the doors until the rooms were claimed.

“Whatever,” she said. “It was supposed to be mine.”

“If someone promised you that, they were lying. Or at the very least, mistaken. Check your welcome packet.”

Silence. She was gone. I shook my head and continued unpacking.

The tower was the highest part of the house, its own small third floor. Mostly unpacked, I walked back through the rest. The second floor was made up of the other three bedrooms, all generously sized. Each bedroom had its own full-size bathroom. Whoever had designed the house had clearly been thinking of harmony between the people living there as much as aesthetics—there would be no need to fight for showers in the morning. One door, at the far end of the hall, away from the stairs, was closed. I assumed it was Helena’s, and didn’t knock, glad, at that moment, for closed doors and distance.

The front door opened.

“Hello? Anyone here?” a voice called—a voice I knew.

My heart flung itself into the back of my throat as I clattered down the stairs to see my sister. Marin smiled, arms open, and I stepped into them.

As we hugged our hellos, I marveled, as I always did, at the strength of her. Dancer’s muscles, and skin and bones made fearless by a life dedicated to throwing itself against the constraints of gravity.

She squeezed me one more time. “I’m so happy you’re here, Imogen. So happy. Keep me company while I unpack?”

“Sure.” I grabbed one of her bags and followed my sister up the stairs.

“This one,” Marin said, after walking back and forth between the two unoccupied rooms, gazing from the windows. “I like the view of the river.”

I stood next to her, looking out as the sun sparked mirror flashes off the water. “I can’t believe how different it looks from here— I look out at the opposite side of the house, and you can’t even see the river. It’s like living in two different places.”

“Well,” she said, opening up her suitcase, “for the first time in far too long we’re not, and I’m glad.”

“Me, too.”

Watching Marin unpack was like watching a very precise whirlwind. She seemed like chaos, but everything wound up folded and hung, neat and exactly where she wanted it.

“Have you looked around the campus yet?” she asked.

“My plane was delayed getting in, so I didn’t get here that much before you did. Long enough to mostly unpack, and to steal an unoccupied room from one of our housemates.”

Marin rolled her eyes over the story. “Maybe she didn’t understand the whole ‘open move-in period.’ Or she has unbelievably bad people skills.” She zipped her suitcase closed and tucked it in the back of her closet. Just like that, her room looked as if she had always lived here.

“Maybe. Maybe it was just a bad day. I hope she gets over it. I don’t relish the idea of living for nine months with someone who hates me from the start. Speaking of bad people skills, have you heard anything from our mother?”

Marin’s mouth twisted. “The usual passive-aggressive bullshit. The idea of Melete seemed very nice, but was I sure I was doing the right thing by attending, and yes, I would have a great teacher, but if no one else saw me dance for a year, would they remember me, blah blah blah. I told her we weren’t allowed to communicate in any way with the outside world while we were here.”

I gaped. “You didn’t.”

“I did.” A dimple winked in and out as she grinned. “Doesn’t mean she won’t fill our inboxes with nasty email, but it does get us out of dealing with her.”

“You are a genius. An evil genius, and I love you.” What she had said wasn’t quite true. No one who wasn’t a resident was allowed on the campus, but we were certainly allowed to communicate—to email or FaceTime or call. Not that I wanted to, when it came to our mother, so I was delighted that Marin had put up that extra barrier.

“It was the best way I could think of to keep our sanity. Mom’s always going to be Mom, which means she’s never going to be happy, and will do her best to make sure we aren’t, either. Literally the only thing she asked when I told her about being awarded the residency was when I’d be performing, so she could come ‘visit.’ Which I knew was code for ‘stage some sort of scene.’ Remember opening night of
Swan Lake
?”

“How could I forget? That was maybe her worst.” Our mother had always made a point of attending Marin’s performances, and an even greater point of making sure everyone knew she was there. That night, she had fainted—from excitement, she said later—in the middle of Marin dancing the Black Swan variation. She had done so noisily enough to bring the entire production to a halt, and she got more words in the next day’s review than Marin did.

“Right? Or at least her most dramatic. So yes, it was an utter delight telling her that no one who wasn’t a mentor or resident was allowed on the grounds.” Marin stretched, rolling her shoulders and shaking the last vestiges of travel away. “Want to take a walk, get to know the place?”

“That’d be good.”

We wandered through the other residences, marveling at the ridiculous and amazing all around us. It was the opposite of cinder
block and sameness—nothing on campus looked like a normal house.