Cheese Before You Go

The artist was named Mowgli Kyd, and he was a painter. He had a nice house that overlooked the bay—really, it was more than a nice house, with white stucco and red-brown shingles and never a care when there were tsunami warnings—and he always treated his guests royally. The elaborate style of his house apparently applied to the catering as well, although no one ever saw him cook. He had no servants, so he must cook. But no one ever saw it. The food appeared as though it had always meant to be there.

(In truth, Mowgli’s mother had always told him that the key to happy guests was through food, so he always made gracious snack platters of grapes from his vineyard and cheese from his goats and home-baked bread and sometimes small finger sandwiches.)

Ms. Leville was his primary muse. She came up the dusty dirt road in her jeep that was black except for the silver plastic hubcaps, and she did this every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and sometimes on Sunday. Today was Sunday, and Mowgli had been watching her jeep as it crawled up the hill beneath the empty sky. He watched her as she sat for a moment before emerging from her vehicle. And he especially watched her as she swung her legs out the door and slipped to the ground, swaying in her slick gray dress pants and her button-up shirt as she strode up the walkway to the front door.

The doorbell rang, and Mowgli Kyd rushed down the stairwell to greet his muse.

“Well hello, hello! Come in, please!” he exclaimed, the first thing either of them had got a chance to say after he flung the door open. “Wipe your feet, if you don’t mind. I have food in the kitchen; please help yourself.”

Ms. Leville stepped inside. Her posture was more closed today. Mowgli thought that he would have to fix that before he planted her on the balcony to watch how her hair flowed in the wind. She wiped her feet and clack-clack-clacked her way beneath the arch toward the kitchen. The potted plant she passed—its name was Gerald—reached for her ass as she walked by.

“You didn’t have to make all this!” she exclaimed when she saw the platter. “It’s lovely, Mr. Kyd, but the two of us can’t possibly….”

He’d finished prepping the cheese just before she’d arrived, and he was very proud of it. “Oh, please. You know how I like my cheese, ha! Besides, today will be one of our longer days, so I figured preparing a little extra food wouldn’t hurt.”

(Preparing food was second nature to him by this point, and he only recently had begun paying attention as he arranged platters. Sometimes, he wondered if he would do this at all if his mother hadn’t taught him to. Probably not.)

Daintily, she took a bit of cheese between her two blue painted nails and bit into it. Her expression was carefully reserved, which was strange. Mowgli would have to fix that too, to get that soft smile he’d been trying to capture for so long. Perhaps a bit of small talk would loosen her up.

“No church today?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. I don’t go to church nearly as often as I should anymore. Busy, I suppose.”

He nodded understandingly, gestured to a comfy red chair that sat partially in the sun coming in from the wide window that overlooked the bay. “Please, take a seat. I’d like to do some exercises with you before we start.”

Ms. Leville pursed her lips and didn’t pick another bit of cheese from the platter as she moved toward the chair, so Mowgli took the plate in his hands and brought it after her. The way she moved, with sweeping strides and shoulders relaxed but back—a bird on the wind. If her chin had grown wings, she would have glided.

She was, by far, the most beautiful woman Mowgli had ever seen. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and whatnot, but it wasn’t just her physicality that made her beautiful. Mowgli thought as he took a seat in a chair facing her, setting the platter down on the coffee table between them, that other men might find her physicality most attractive. But for him, an artist, her appeal came from the way she carried herself. It came from the depths of the ocean in her eyes, from her posture that was so relaxed one might forget she didn’t belong to this world at all.

“Mr. Kyd,” Ms. Leville began, setting her hands together in her lap and tucking her feet under the chair.

(Not at all ideal; she was far too nervous to begin yet. Best to let her speak for a bit.)

“Mr. Kyd,” she said again. “I… I am moving to Alaska.”

And just like that, the platter, the posture, the ocean—none of it mattered. The cheeses and the billowing orange curtains breathed around him. Mowgli blinked and frowned.

“Whatever for?”

“A job opportunity. Some—”

“But you have a job! This job! What more could you want? I will raise your pay—forty to eighty dollars an hour! I’ll pay for your insurance, your medical bills, anything! Ms. Leville, you are built for my canvas—”

“Yes, but Mr. Kyd—”

“What is it, then? My muse, my beautiful muse….”

“Mr. Kyd, I simply do not like this job.”

That, of all things, gave him pause. The beautiful house, the platters of food, the bay in the distance and the salt that came up from it on the breeze… What of those? The pay? The ease?

Ms. Leville continued slowly: “Mr. Kyd, I have received a job offer for an editing company in Alaska. I would like to begin some real work. I love editing… just how you love painting, see? We are creators, you and I, and I think that… Well, it’s just time for me to put my creativity elsewhere.”

He leaned farther back into the chair. “So… you say you’re simply tired?”

“I’m ready to move on, yes. I’m willing to finish this last painting, though, if you—”

He held up a hand, and she stopped. Perhaps her bottom lip trembled a little; she could tell he was upset. Probably from the tears gathering in the creases at the corners of his eyes.

Slowly, he shook his head. “No. Please just go. I’ll pay you for your regular time today.”

“But—”

He grasped the platter and stood. “Cheese before you go?”

She stood also. The clever tightness in her eyes that was usually there was gone now, and she seemed empty and blue and lost at sea.

“No, thank you.”

And so the muse left, and Gerald grasped for her ass again, and she didn’t wipe her feet before she left because what was there to wipe besides treachery? Mowgli didn’t watch her jeep as she drove back down the hill. He went outside past the billowing drapes to the balcony, and he stared out to sea until the sun set, and half of the cheese was gone when the distant truckle of light slipped into its watery grave. Then, the artist threw himself off and tumbled down the hill into the bay below.