The Muse

He sent his book to her doorstep, along with a bouquet of peonies.

She stared at its book cover for the longest time, smirking at the feminine silhouette lying against bed sheets. The Villainess. She wasn’t the least bit surprised of it.

She tossed the book into her Never-to-Reads, a pile of Christmas gifts from all the more significant men of her life that collected dust by her drawing board—she rationalized that it was to be picked up later when she had the opportunity, but in all actuality it was for motivation. Morale. Her father kept a picture of her as a child by his desk, everyday, waxing lyrical of her heavenly blonde hair, her creamy white skin, and her eyes the shade of a star as it dies in a cataclysmic universal event. You’re my muse, he told her, when she was ten. I don’t know where I’d be without you.

Downing pill bottles, she hoped.

She put the flowers in a vase, set it on top of the books. Her romantic partner’s miseries gave her life. Let them crash and burn; they deserve it, if they think they’re entitled to her. They all did, of course. Artists are egotistical bastards. She of all people should know.

“Are you aware that Jordan Harrison is writing of you, Ms. Warsaw?” 

Yes, she was aware.

“Hey, Calli, have you read what Jordie wrote about you? Did you really break up with him over the phone?” 

No and yes.

 “Dude, look. It’s the bitch from the Harrison book. Yeah, I know she’s just his muse, but even if she’s only a quarter of Scarlett Amoretto she’s still colder than a witch’s tit.” 

Yes, yes she was.

Calliope spent the rest of the week listening to other comments of equally unremarkable caliber, finishing a painting of hers and sending it to several prestigious art magazines. It got accepted to all of them, and she went out to various conventions to promote it. She picked up his book and stashed it in her bags while flying from San Francisco to Las Vegas to Chicago, leaving it wrapped in plastic. It made her happy.

She hoped he’d cried his eyes out while making it.

She knew it was cruel, but it didn’t matter to her. He was the one at fault. He was the one who tried to define her, to put her into his little box. She wouldn’t be his model forever. She wouldn’t be perfect. Would she?

Her father thought she would.

She remembered the rules he believed in, the philosophies he adhered to. She remembered his lectures at five am in the morning when she had woken up because he told her to, because she wanted to be the good daughter, the model her father sketched out in his vignettes. She remembered the way his eyes gleamed when he talked about his muse, and she remembered how confused she was the first time she heard it, the first time she could recall what he wanted and what he didn't. She didn't want everything he did, did she? Surely she disagreed at some points? But no, she didn't disagree. She let him mould her. She let him change her in his image. She'd become his muse, and in that case she had to follow his law.

Once convention was over and the painting was sold, she returned home to find another batch of peonies by her doorstep. It was tied together with a note, written in cursive: I loved you. She stored the peonies into another vase of water, tossing the note into the fireplace.

Eventually, interviews stopped treating the incident like an earth-shattering development, leaving it as more of an afterthought. People still treated her as just another bitch, but that didn’t surprise her. People could be erroneously single minded. It was better than being capricious, she supposed.

She got another batch of peonies with the same note the next week, and then the next, and then the next. She had to move her vases to the dinner table, using up two Chinese ones and a mason jar. It was only after eight weeks of flower petals and burnt notes did she finally get something worthwhile in the mail—a box of chocolates and an invitation to a party. Behind the invitation, scribbled in cursive, was written: I love you, still.

She checked her schedule. When she found out she had an interview to go to, she threw the invitation in the fireplace and ate the chocolates in silence.

After the interview, she found Jordan by her doorstep. He was sitting on the porch, donning a tux and a weathered look in his eyes. “Calli,” he greeted her, jumping to his feet to hide the desperation of the situation. “Hi. I, er--”

“I see you came home from the party.”

Jordan Harrison was not a towering man. She stood an inch or two taller than him without high heels, and there was little doubt in her mind that he was insecure of it. A majority of his main characters, excluding her caricature, were described as weak, affable, and short, and never once did they let the reader forget it. She thought it was a quirk, an admittance of humanity. It was more a setup for martyrdom, now that she thought of it. “You didn’t come,” he stated.

“I had work.”

“What kind of work?”

“Art.”

He stood, mouth gaping, and she pushed him aside to open her door. She usually had to worry about having ex-boyfriends attempt murder in her own home, so she had hired a body guard and a driver inside the home, but there was no need for that with Harrison. “We share a craft, then,” he joked, pathetically. “You and I.”

“Would you like a cup of coffee while you’re here?” she asked, letting him in. They walked into her living room, where a bodyguard must’ve moved her mason jar of peonies to the coffee table. “Or shall you continue finding pieces of my abstract figure on your own?”

“I prefer sharing my abstractions with you.”

“I’m sure you do.”

She stared at him as she propped herself on the couch, leaning back to bask in the warmth of the fireplace. He stood by the coffee table, glancing at the peonies. “You…kept them.”

She smiled. “They fill me with a fiery passion,” she answered, mildly, “A drive to succeed.”

He blinked at her, adjusting his glasses. The light-skinned man was evidently uncultured in the ways of talking to a muse, as he sat down on another couch away from her, picking out a peony. “I know I’ve given you,” he started, “A substantial amount of attention--”

“I don’t care for it much.”

He arched a brow. “Don’t you?” he asked. “They’ve written scandalous things of us.”

“I was never enamored of you, Harrison,” She answered, leaning back. “I was never particularly invested in our relationship, therefore it only makes sense that you write me so callously. You’re an artist, you feed off subjectivity, emotion. The opinion of anyone who doesn’t understand that your word isn’t to be taken as a fact shouldn’t matter to me, as it becomes evident that they’re uneducated of the truth.”

“You don’t give a shit, then.”

“I could slather excrement on the Newsweek articles, but I could put such energy to better use.”

His hands sprawled over his mouth, as if they were trying to remember how hers felt when they last made love. Calliope didn’t remember. She didn’t think she needed to. “Is it because of the book?” he asked. “Are you—hurt by it? Because if you are--”

“I haven’t read it.”

Jordan paused. “What? Why?”

She shrugged. “Your abstractions don’t intrigue me,” she answered. “They’re retinal in their nature, serving the senses more than the mind. Even if they give my character any dimension, the illusion remains intact and undeniable.”

“How would you know if you haven’t--”

“You think you’re my first artist, Jordan? And I your only model?” she chuckled. “Artists are infants imitating the nature around them, warping them in abstract but familiar ideals. But there is no life to their work. No color in their strokes, no poetry in their words. Bad art is plagiarism of good art, and good art is useless. Whatever category your book falls under, it remains two dimensional, a shadow of what actually is. And I’m uninterested in your two dimensional interpretation of my character.”

He glared at her in disbelief. His hand was on his forehead, now, pressing the stress lines like they were violin strings. “What happened to you, Calli?” he asked, jumping to sit beside her. She cringed as he grabbed at her fingers. “What broke your heart, what hardened your shell? Why won’t you let me in? Why won’t you let me understand?”

Because that was always the problem with him. Because that was always the problem with every one of them. “You are no longer welcomed here, Jordan,” she said. “Kindly leave before I call Bartholomew.”

He stopped, realizing the uncomfortable position he was in. He drew his hand away. “I’m sorry--”

“Leave.” She glared at him. “Now.”

Jordan watched her, tentatively. There was sadness in his eyes, the same reflections she saw in her father before he died. She broke him, eventually, too. She recalled her father’s last words as Jordan walked out the living room, looking for something in them: You could’ve been perfect. You could’ve been art.

That’s why I can’t love you.

It only took death for the old man to realize that.

She remained the vacant eyed bitch of Harrison’s mythology for some time, until a second book came by her doorstep with another batch of peonies. The Heroine, it read. There was a silhouette of a little girl on the cover, a contrast to the seductive woman of the last one. She didn’t even consider keeping it—immediately after reading the synopsis, she walked to the fireplace, tossing it along with the peonies into inferno.

“Are you aware that Jordan Harrison has written of you again, Ms. Warsaw?” 

Who cares?

“Hey, Calli, have you read what Jordie wrote about you? He seems really sorry about what happened.”

Shut up.

“Look, it’s the girl from the Harrison book. Yeah, I know he probably exaggerated it, but it’s still sad, you know? If she went through even a quarter of what Scarlett Amoretto did, she’d still be a broken teacup.” 

Go fuck yourself.

She didn’t waste any time making contact with Jordan. Her consciousness wouldn’t let her. She charged to her former partner’s home, a lush housing in an infamously rich block of the road, her anger fueled by the state of things. To think he was profiting off her image, off her shadows, off her reality. Who gave him the right to change her image? Who gave him the right to define who she was? Who gave him the fucking right to call her a heroine ?

“Harrison,” She screamed as she knocked on the door. “Harrison, open the door or I’ll peel its hinges off and use them to carve out your eyes and cut off your fingers.”

Soon after the eponymous writer appeared, obviously not expecting visitors at the time. “Calliope,” he said, his eyes bright with hope, “Have you read my book?”

“What did you think you were doing?” she shouted at him, ripping out a New York Times review paper from her jacket. “Look at this. Look at this, Harrison. What are they calling me here? What are they calling your sorry attempt at an apology?” She leaned in, shoving it into his face despite knowing he probably already read it. “What did you think would happen once it got out?”

Harrison plucked it quietly from her fingers, skimming over it. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, “I thought you’d like being understood--”

“Understood?” She drew away, looking outside the porch. Her head rolled over to the sky, as if asking for her father’s advice. This was just like talking to her father, she realized. Both of them just couldn’t resist exploiting life in all its glory, greedily sucking off reality to fuel their own bankrupted imaginations. “You’ve simplified me. I haven’t even read the fucking book, and I know you’ve simplified me. You’ve made me into the picture of brokenness, attempted to draw me in as human, while simultaneously painting me as a paragon.”

He narrowed his eyes, glancing from the review to her. “What in God’s name do you want from me, Calliope?” he pleaded, holding his hands out. “You remain unsatisfied with my first book and you hate the second book, without even reading the both of them. You never write, you never call, you never respond to my attempts at a resolution to our relationship, and yet you come here complaining I’ve drawn you as a hero instead of the villain from before?”

“I came here because you stole me,” she screamed at him, her composure slowly slipping. The weight of the world shook on her shoulders, and she felt the pressure of her father’s ideal once more—she felt the humanity, the clay that made her being freeze between her fingers, cementing her into a statuette of an era that never was. “I came here because you took my soul and squeezed ink from it. I came here because people like you, men like you don’t care for what happens to reality once it’s written down in subjectivity—you demonize, you romanticize, you tell everything but the truth. You might as well be schizophrenic; you don’t even know what truth is! And yet, I come back to Earth every time to find that life imitates art. I come back here to find I’m following expectations, that I’ve become the very thing you dictated I was. You know what I am now?” She shoved a finger into his chest. “I’m a shadow, following your every word. I’m soulless. I’m dry and hollow, and it’s all because of your worthless breed.”

Jordan shook his head, grasping her by the shoulders. “Calli, no, that’s not it at all,” he answered, “I love you--”

There it is. The polar opposite of her father’s epiphany. That word, that phrase. It deserves a question mark at the end, not a period; when has anyone said ‘I love you’ and meant it, really? It’s ambiguous. It’s strange. It’s false hope. “You love the idea of me,” she answered, “You love your image, your vision. You’re narcissistic and alone in your thoughts, and you’ll never have me as anything else but a chapter in your biography.”

He stared up at her, completely and utterly dumbfounded by her aphorisms. He had no idea what to do with her words, no idea what they meant. It was strange, not understanding words when the sole purpose of his existence was revolved around them.

Calliope turned away from him, shaking her head in disdain. She turned to her car, ripping open and slamming the door closed. By the next minute she was looking out the rearview window, staring at her lover as he stood by the driveway, waiting for the return that would never occur.

She had never thought she would come back.

She had never thought she'd be there again, in the same position she was in ten years ago. She thought she outgrew her father. She thought she'd left him in his grave along with her brother and mother. She thought she was an artist that understood the loneliness of the human race, that understood that she couldn't be God. She thought she was a muse that understood what it was like to have everything she knew, everything she was questioned at it's heart, to let her identity be dictated by another human being. Calliope Warsaw was both an artist and an art form. But the only thing she ever wanted to be was human.

It came to her doorstep four years later.

She'd grown tired of life, weary of the paint on her fingernails and the books collecting dust by her drawing board. Her peonies had all withered and died by then, but it didn't matter--he brought her new ones, along with a new book. The last of the trilogy, he claimed. The Human , it said.

Nobody asked if she knew she was being written by him.

She cared.

Nobody asked if she knew what he was saying about her.

She wanted to know.

Nobody stuck a label to her chest.

She wanted them to.

Because in the years she had lived, Calliope Warsaw forgot who she was, what she was. Calliope Warsaw forgot how to be human, even though she's desperately wanted to be that. Calliope Warsaw let her father's expectations slip under her skin and turn her into a statuette, and now she didn't know how to be anything else. But he was giving her a chance. He was giving her a genesis. It was a dimension of her, she realized, and a dimension of him. It was the closest they'd ever get to having a child. The Muse and the Artist are two entirely different things, two entirely different line of works, but both contribute in making art. Both were seminal in understanding each other.

That night, Calliope Warsaw didn't leave it on the Never to Reads pile.

That night, Calliope Warsaw left the peonies in the vase, and sat herself down by the couch. Sighing, she peeled the plastic of the cover open, and prepared to be reborn.