Mars Violet Evenings

By Brian Jacobs

Felonies, infidelity, and fine art collide on the shadowy side of a quaint American town in this unconventional debut novel. Transplanted from London, England, Marc Clemens joins his colorful colleagues to navigate a slew of ridiculous episodes so
absurd it can only be real. As Marc struggles with his love life and creative vision, can he use an artist's observational skills to uncover the misdeeds of the administrator antagonists who bedevil him?Irreverent, enigmatic, and highly imaginative, Mars Violet Evenings examines resilience in creativity and love while exposing the hilarious though maddening dysfunctions of a local art scene.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913962982

Book preview

Mars Violet Evenings

Brian Jacobs

To Jaye

Mars Violet—A dark, reddish–purple iron oxide, used by painters since the early 20th century as a synthetic caput mortuum (violet earth) colour. Like other Mars pigments, it takes its name from the Roman god associated with the metal iron.

Evenings—Those periods of the day, between the end of the afternoon and the beginning of night, that include the setting of the sun.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

SPRING, 2005

PRELUDE

CHAPTER ONE

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER TWO

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER THREE

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER FOUR

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER FIVE

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER SIX

FINALE

COPYRIGHT

SPRING, 2005

PRELUDE

I learned from the radio this morning that we’ll be having a very high level of solar flare activity today. The reporters had it sounding like an exceptional occurrence and, since the way I was feeling was also something I’d never experienced, I decided that it must be these solar flares causing my tension. The feeling I was experiencing was somewhat like those times in the past when my muscles would get knotted up until I couldn’t focus on anything unless I got my back to crack. In those days, I could rely upon my wife to do the cracking.

The way I was feeling today was like that, but more overwhelming. I don’t get knots in my back so much these days, although living as I am without a woman presents another kind of distracting tension. Nonetheless, this is what I felt immediately upon rising this morning: something was constricting me, I could feel it in my muscles and joints, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate until that oppressive force was gone.

I opened the double doors in the back of my studio and looked out. These doors look out, but they don’t allow me out. I’m on the second floor of this vintage building and the years have destroyed the means by which one could formerly exit to the rear of the building below. But down to the street level and out to the river was where I wanted to go. So I closed the double doors, locked them with a piece of lumber, and headed out my proper entrance, down the stairs, and through to the pavement via a door labelled 1211B Hemlock Street.

From there, it’s only a short way down Hemlock Street, in the opposite direction of the art centre, to the falling water that is the main attraction of my little village called Sanguine Falls.

No one knows how the village came to be called Sanguine Falls. The popular theory is that it was named after Francisco Sanguillén, a Conquistador who discovered the falls, though this origin is a bit shaky given that there is no written history of a Conquistador named Francisco Sanguillén anywhere, let alone in an area of the world that would eventually become a suburb of Cleveland. Linda Baker, the chief archivist at the Sanguine Falls Historical Society, contends that the village’s name is derived from a Native American word meaning one. This theory, wrapped in Mrs. Baker’s starry–eyed idolatry of the noble savage, seems at least partially designed to irk her husband Larry who is the longest participating member of the Sanguine Falls Conquistador Society.

This is the group that organises the yearly re–enactment of a battle between the Iroquois and the Spanish Conquistadors, an event that, Mrs. Baker will assure anyone who cares to listen, is completely fictitious. Nothing could be more real however than the enthusiasm of the costumed husbands and fathers playing out this drama in the muddy fields of Upper Falls Park every June on the weekend following Homecoming. Every summer, at least one of the Conquistadors twists, sprains, or breaks an ankle in the ruts and bogs of the ravaged field, perennially destroyed by the previous week’s monstrous carnival rides and sod–plodding amusement seekers. But local legend has it that the men playing the Iroquois never injure themselves—a clear indication that the village has guilt it wishes to resolve through such provocative, but fatuous, lore.

At this annual spectacle, half of the battle participants enjoy dressing up as Iroquois Indians and they excel at spinning and dropping and writhing in melodramatic demise. Mr. Baker, however, is always a Conquistador, and he plots and schemes every year to play Sanguillén himself, though he never gets more than his fair turn at the leading role.

His genocidal enthusiasm for winning the mock battle, which the Conquistadors always win by design, provides the additional benefit of annoying Mrs. Baker, who finds the whole event reprehensible. But her endeavours to reform her husband are entirely futile, as evidenced by the Sanguine Falls Indians baseball cap that Larry wears everywhere. Embroidered on the front is Chief Tom Tom’s cartoon visage, forever greeting Mrs. Baker with a cheerful smile.

As I was thinking about this baseball cap, so inseparable from Larry’s head, perhaps it was the bright red of the high school’s team colours that turned my thoughts to the root meaning of the word sanguine. Likewise, it could have been my earlier thoughts of the carnage Mr. Baker’s lot would be staging in the park a couple months from now. In any case, at that moment I saw something novel in the way that the rising sun hit the Upper Falls with a crimson light, the falling water already ruddy with stirred up sediment from its bed of iron–rich clay.

And so I found myself pausing in the little wedge of park at the corner of North Main Street and Hemlock Street imagining a different origin for the name, Sanguine Falls. I found myself musing that I live in a little town that fancies itself a throwback to an imaginary nineteenth–century New England but which also has a waterfall off North Main Street that this morning looked quite like a million gallons of cascading blood. Suddenly, the town seemed ominous. Like there was something hidden—devious and criminal—behind the pleasant faces of the few early risers hurrying off with coffees in their clutches. I began to imagine what it might be like to create etchings portraying a seedy underbelly to this little town, complete with sketchy characters melting into the shadows in the alley between Cookies on Main and Riverside Books.

But perhaps I am simply in a dark mood these days. This morning was certainly no exception.

As I wandered across South Main Street toward the larger, Lower Falls, I imagined Native Americans of centuries past living beside the water. I wondered whether those native people had come to name the falls something that coincidently sounded like Sanguine, an ancient Anglo–Saxon word rooted in Latin. And I began imagining myself as yet another cultural invader from across the sea. Marc, the Conquistador.

When I moved to the United States from England almost fifteen years ago, I had a plan to settle in New York City where I would create and sell my paintings. I was enamoured with the mid–century art of the New York School. As it happened, by the time I got to New York, Modernism had been superseded by Post–Modernism. The art I admire the most had been relegated to nostalgia, sound investment (like old coins), and soulless knockoffs. And then I worked upstate for a few months where I discovered, whilst cleaning the art in Rockefeller’s collection, that many of America’s best–known modern artists—or their parents—had only just emigrated from Europe. I was simply another European following my predecessors to the latest Modern Art capital, albeit a couple generations removed.

Artists are bound to roam and, after finding their way to New York during and after the war, many artists of the past subsequently found themselves following the Erie Canal west to dock in Cleveland where fine art and commercial art flourished for years as strange bedfellows. Far later in the game, I came traipsing in their fading footsteps and settled here, juggling fine art and commercial art myself, whilst working with a crazy little enclave of artistic ladies—and some few gents—at 1313 Hemlock Street in Sanguine Falls. Sanguine Falls, where Cleveland artists used to come to paint in the summers, before the automobile arrived and banished the interurban rails making everything here strangely more secluded.

I turned to make sure no other pedestrians were on my heels. I wanted to stop and look around. As it happened, there were very few others on the street at this early hour. So I had the view to myself. I wanted, for a moment, to remember the first time that I had lived in the village.

The first time. In some ways, that doesn’t even ring true. I’m always surprised when I recall that this is not a new place, but an old one. You would think that the ghosts would be a giveaway. I met my former wife here, back then. Kaci. Just as her figure and face often develop unexpectedly in my paintings, she also frequently shows up in these streets. And here she is, already, in the story I didn’t think was about her—or us. But I can hardly walk down Main Street without feeling her hand in mine.

After all, I reminded myself, looking around at all of my surroundings, Sanguine Falls is where I married her. That was, what—twelve years ago? I was searching for cheap studio space and an active arts community that promised a little less superficiality and ego. Kaci was looking for a better career and better culture. I found myself teaching at Hemlock Art Center (which, back then, I derisively referred to as the HAC ). She was working at Riverside Books. We were bound to meet.

We still keep in touch. And she sometimes reminds me how, in the past, I would badmouth the local, traditional art in Sanguine Falls. Back then, I couldn’t wait to move to the West Coast. Always looking. Over the ocean, onward toward the plains, over the mountains. Somewhere I would find the art I was looking for.

I was thinking about all this as I walked past Expressions Gallery and arrived at the stairs that lead to the bottom of the falls. The gate was closed and locked. In PRogREss, read the sign in an arbitrary mix of upper and lower case letters. Where? I asked as I surveyed the rest of my surroundings, looking for evidence of construction.

I was attracted by some motion in the little tree by the bench. Two leaves were falling simultaneously and they twisted around each other all the way to the ground. I leaned down to look at them, lying side by side on the red bricks, and sensed that two more leaves above had begun performing the same display. But when I looked up, this time it was two butterflies. I thought about how Melissa would have appreciated the event.

As I walked past the Lollipop Stop on my way to the bridge above the Lower Falls, I twisted the bronze pinkie ring that Melissa gave me about a month ago. I have been greedily sating my soul in the warm feeling of security it has been providing me. I don’t care. I am allowed one delusion; the rest of this town is soaking in delusion. Soaking in it like the kids will be soaking in the dirty, falling water down at the bottom of the falls come summer.

I leaned over the railing and my ears popped. Suddenly the oppression I had been feeling all morning was lifted. I watched the roaring water pour down to the rocks in the Sanguine River, bathed myself in the comforting atmosphere, and realised I am not as young as the wading teens I was picturing below me. But I am only thirty–six. I am basically still their age, I decided as I calculated the difference in years between me and the youthful figures I had painted, like a Seurat, in my mind.

What were we when we moved to San Francisco? Twenty–something? Twenty–five, I think. In four short years, I had landed in the colonies, made my way to the edge of the Midwest, gotten married, and found my way to the opposite coast. But I can’t keep chasing art around the globe, can I? So, where is it? What am I looking for? What am I waiting for? What do I expect?

I turned and looked as far as I could see. This way and that, the furthest I could see was maybe 150 metres. The Sanguine Falls Bubble, I sighed. Leaving the railing above the falls, I moved along South Main Street and the oppression came back like a giant wet blanket falling over me. Positive ions, I speculated.

As I returned past the Lollipop Stop, I saw Poppy going inside. I was glad she didn’t see me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to go home and paint. I was done looking and I was done thinking. Glancing over the river, on my way back up Hemlock Street, I saw some men in Upper Falls Park. They seemed to be examining the grass.

Conquistadors, I said to myself.

CHAPTER ONE

Conquistadors. I was wondering why that sounded familiar. Then I remembered that the word had been in a crossword recently and, at the time, it made me think of the annual Battle of Sanguine Falls. What was the clue? I tried to remember. Something about sea life.

I decided that maybe, if I got my hands on a puzzle, it might be a good distraction. Though I wanted to paint, in truth, I knew that today was not going to be productive and any attempt would be ruinous to the canvas. So I cut across the red bricks of Hemlock Street at an angle, imagining my feet drawing the edge of a triangle on the road, and headed to the grocery shop in pursuit of a local paper that might have a crossword in it. Long ago, I had become accustomed to the American style of the puzzle, though I shuddered at what I might find in the back of a small–town paper.

Orcas not squid. That was the anagram in the clue, I think. I was trying to work it out when something in the corner of my eye caught my attention. It wasn’t a movement. That’s what drew my attention. It was something very still. And that something was Stacy May sitting on a bench where I hadn’t noticed anyone at all until just then. She was looking right at me.

Oh, hello, Stacy. I’m glad I remembered her name.

Hey, Marc. How are you?

Pretty good. Although something about the weather today feels particularly oppressive.

That’s the solar flares, Stacy said. Stacy would know. Stacy is our local astrologer and natural healer. She works at Magik on the River and when she was employed at Hemlock Art Center, I’m told, she’d offered workshops in one metaphysical pursuit or another.

That’s what I was thinking, I agreed.

Positive ions, Stacy elaborated. She smiled. Sort of. Stacy May is always smiling but never widely enough for me to check my theory that her bright white teeth line up with precision across her mouth.

I like the way Stacy looks and I’d love to paint her. Not nude, mind you; I’m the bloke who takes his life drawings home and dresses the figures. Clothing intrigues me and Stacy’s clothing would be interesting to paint.

Like Melissa, Stacy knows how to dress like herself. I was surprised to note that she was wearing a dress over slacks—something I suppose I encounter all the time and take no notice of. On her feet were dark tan boots with low heels and moccasin toes, not clunky but not uncomfortable. The dress was an earthy blue–green and she’d paired greyish purple pants with it, complementing the cool colours with a rusty, deep–orange belt.

Inside that costume Stacy was short, but not quite petite—too little to be big–boned, but not delicate. Her hair was also short and looked right on a perfectly symmetrical face that was sexually very neutral. She wore round glasses with cool, grey plastic frames.

I see Frank is hanging shows again, Stacy said. Stacy had recently been the gallery manager at Hemlock. Historically, they haven’t been able to keep the position filled so after Stacy left, Frank Wilson came back from retirement to help out.

He’s got the new show up at Saint Gwen’s Church, I said. Partnerships, you know. I haven’t gotten over there to see it.

"Fishing Scenes on the Sanguine River," she quoted the name of the exhibit.

Right, Frank and his fishing. I saw images of the work, I told her. It’s quite good, actually, some of it. In January, when Tiffany announced she was pregnant and didn’t return following winter break, I was conscripted to take over marketing. So I’d been promoting the exhibit for the last month.

I’ll have to get over there, Stacy said.

Check it out. Not my cup of tea, generally, but I do find a couple of the paintings interesting. If they were in our gallery I’d take my class to look at them. I started to feel like I was trying too hard. Are you going to submit something to the next show? I asked.

Sure, I might. What’s the theme?

You know what? We don’t really know. It’s a bit annoying. I get the feeling that some of what you planned isn’t being followed through on.

Oh, I never planned anything. All these shows were planned by the gallery manager before me, before I started there.

That figures. Was that Kimberly? It is impossible to keep track.

Yeah, maybe. I don’t even know.

Carol is trying to get Tricky to post the position, I said, but Tricky wants to put the word out with the other executive directors in the area instead. Maybe we’ll get someone soon. Otherwise we’ll be looking at fishing art for a bit!

We both laughed, chatted a bit longer, and then I excused myself to continue with my errand. We traded parting salutations and I headed into the grocers.

Upon arriving at the newsstand at the grocers, I was reminded that it was Thursday and a new edition of our weekly newspaper had been published that morning. I might have purchased a New York Times if it wasn’t so bloody expensive. Regardless, I’m trying to pick up local papers to aid me in my new marketing role.

So I bought a copy of the Sanguine Valley Gazette and opened it as I embarked on Hemlock Street toward my studio, stopping for a moment to fold the pages up under the puzzle. I didn’t have a pen, so I worked on the crossword in my head as I strolled up the block. Though it was my day off, I found myself absentmindedly passing by my building and walking up to Hemlock Art Center.

When confronting the building from the street, anyone paying attention would recognise that it was something else before it was an art centre. In fact for many years, beginning at the turn of the last century, this building had been the main entrance to a mental health asylum.

Sanguine Falls has a good deal of old architecture including plenty of Victorian houses with all the fancy stylings one would expect in an upscale retreat that harks back to an earlier age. Hemlock Art Center fits in with the lot. But the architectural decisions that decorate the facade lend a distinctive drama to the place.

Taller than it is wide, with high ceilings on every floor, our centre demands the word looming from anyone who describes it. This effect is heightened by the thin lancet windows on the upper floors that remind me of keyholes. These tall, fortress–like windows reside within rather elongated, semi–circular lintels that terminate in feet like the serifs on an upside–down capital U.

On the ground level an open, A–frame roof sits above a shallow porch and yet another unlucky horseshoe. This one surrounds a circular window of rose–coloured glass above a tall, narrow oak door stained a similar hue. The result is an insistent lower case i.

I for insane, I suppose.

On either side of the entrance are bay windows, for which no description is necessary; there’s nothing notable about them. As the eye travels down to the ground, you might, however, note that there is a wooden arched door built into the foundation to the right that leads, perhaps, to an unused cellar.

Originally, this structure was part of a large campus of five modest, three–storey buildings connected in a closed triangle by two–storey wings. You can see a photo of it at the Sanguine Falls Museum. Today, Hemlock Art Center is the only one of the five central structures to survive. One of the wings has also survived, and that is now the row of offices, shops, and workshops that include my studio. But it is separated from the art centre by the length of another building and wing that are long gone.

Standing before my place of employment, I knew that my study of the physical Hemlock Art Center this morning was equal parts an interest in design and an interest in procrastinating my entrance, at which point I should be obliged to talk to my fellow art administrators. But I could hardly turn around now and walk back to my studio. So I rolled up the newspaper in my hand, sucked in my last breath of fresh spring air, and proceeded up the steps to the front door.

As I entered the art centre, I heard ringing. Poking my head around the corner and into the offices, I saw Carol sitting at her desk, contemplating a lit up telephone. I looked over at Tricky and said, Good morning.

Well, hi, Marc! the executive director said with a showy eagerness to which I’ve become familiar.

The office line had already sounded at least a half dozen rings when Carol picked up her desk phone and said, in her sweet voice, Hemlock Art Center, I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, how can I help you?

I forced a smile for them both to stifle anything like a wince or a sigh that might develop in the circumstance of their tedium and moved along to classroom D hoping to find Joe.

Joe Taylor is an artist and a longtime student. He could easily be an instructor but, over the years, he’s managed to find ways to stay out of the drama at Hemlock Art Center. His day job had been at a successful printing company. Now that he’s a pensioner, I find him at the centre nearly every time I look for him there.

And, as I predicted, he was already present that morning. He was cleaning his brushes and I could tell from the way he was completing the chore that he was cleaning them only to prepare mentally for the next three hours of painting. It was unlikely that any residue from the day before remained on the large, long, hog–bristle flats that he loves to use.

I unrolled the newspaper, shook it, and said, Eighteen across. Female body part. Who writes a clue like that?

"Sanguine Valley Gazette?" Joe inquired.

I mean, truly. First letter V. Last letter A.

Joe thought for a second and then asked, Five letters or six?

I quit. I refolded the paper and the front page caught my eye. New Art Center Opens in Londen, I read from the headline. That would be Northeast Ohio’s Londen, not England’s London, obviously. City learns it owns a building that everyone forgot about, said the subheading. Hold on, I said.

I went back to the front of the building and held up the story for Tricky and Carol to see. Did you know about this? I asked them. They hadn’t. Another art centre. That makes three, now, within a ten minute drive of each other.

Tricky retrieved her own copy of the newspaper. She’d stuffed it in her bag that morning without looking at it. Now I could see the wheels spinning in her head as she ground the gears of her imagination. I knew where her thoughts were going. Two competing impulses were exciting her brain. The first, of course, was jealousy. She had to find out who would be running the new art centre. Then, the second impulse was to immediately begin contriving ways that she could partner our organisation with theirs. I was feeling agitated already.

My own impulse was to score a teaching gig there. We contract art teachers know that there’s a perfect number of classes per week that makes our labour profitable. Below that, we’re in trouble. So I was scanning my copy of the paper for clues to help land that teaching job.

The phone was ringing again as I skimmed through the article. Exactly six rings later, as Carol was answering the phone with Hemlock Art Center, I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, I had found what I was looking for.

Back in classroom D, the other students were starting to arrive and set up. Open house tonight, I said to Joe. Londen Center for the Arts.

Joe skimmed the article and said he knew the person identified by the newspaper as the founding executive director. Cheryl Thompson, Joe said. I met her when Cynthia Brown ran the Community Center.

The Community Center in the Village? I asked.

That’s right, about five years ago. Cheryl Thompson was running the Folk Music Museum downtown and she put it into Cynthia’s head to use the Community Center to sponsor some project I never understood. She got Cynthia to try to buy an old barn in Merryville with a plan to relocate it to the Village and tack it on to our building to make a bigger space for the project. But what’s the Folk Music Museum got to do with the Community Center, really? That’s what I always wondered.

Just across the Sanguine Falls border in neighbouring Merryville is an African American community that everyone refers to as the Village. The Village is tucked between two long roads that radiate out from the centre of Sanguine Falls. The way that the land lies, the Village is not visible from the road—only the few homes and a small church sitting upon a slight rise at the edge of the neighbourhood are noticeable while the other homes lie tucked behind where the land levels out. Laid out on old farmland a century ago, the Village is planned in blocks with some 150 homes that few outside the community itself know exist. Joe lives in one of those houses and, on one of those blocks, serving the residents, is the Community Center.

So, is that why Cynthia ended up in trouble with the Community Center? I asked. It was an event that had occurred before my return to Sanguine Falls.

Sure. Cynthia’s tried some things that didn’t work out so well over the years and that was the last straw. To this day we run the centre without an executive director because, after Cynthia, the board’s afraid to ever hire one again. But, you know, she never would have come up with anything like that on her own. Still, she made her bed.

I am familiar with Cynthia’s habits as an executive director. I’ve worked for her at the Little School for the Arts since January. How Cynthia secured a position there coming from a similar organisation that was eager to part with her is an interesting question. But now I was hearing about another arts leader, Cheryl Thompson, who sounded even crazier than Cynthia. Maybe even crazier than Tricky. I trust Joe. And now I wasn’t feeling as optimistic about working at this new venue.

Joe slapped the newspaper against his thigh as he looked up at me, shaking his head with an incredulous smile. She knows the Mayor’s wife. That’s how Cheryl got this job in Londen, he said. It says here that this new art centre is city owned. It’s got to be Mayor Crumb’s wife. I’ll bet Beatrice Crumb got Cheryl Thompson that job. They go to the same church.

I’d have to learn more about that later, though. Alright, is everybody ready to paint? Melissa Alexander’s voice rang out. I tossed her a friendly smile as I vacated her classroom and left her to her instruction. You’re not hanging out with us? she asked.

Gotta run, I said, poking my head back in through the door. I watched her adjusting her hair band and found myself fidgeting my pinkie ring with my thumb. It was an old behaviour that had recently been reintroduced to my repertoire of habits. I’ll catch you up after class, I told her. I wanted to ask Melissa to go to the new art centre with me that night, but I knew it was impossible to bring it up just when her class was starting, as she would have lots of questions.

I had some questions, too. The library is only a few blocks away, across a bridge by the old mill. After an hour on the computer there—I chose the one in the corner at the far end of the row—I had learned quite a bit about Cheryl Thompson. Joe was probably right about her and Beatrice Crumb. The two of them are named together numerous times in association with Saint Gwen’s.

But what’s more interesting is her tenure with the Folk Music Museum. Just like Cynthia she was sacked from her last position. According to one of the on–line articles, Cheryl frequently hired educational groups and entertainers to come to the museum to provide programming that her staff and instructors were already capable of providing. She also hired contractors and outside agencies to provide marketing, web design, and other services that she already had in–house people engaged in. It was like micromanagement by proxy, one reporter wrote. Cheryl ended up wasting a considerable portion of the fiscal budget.

One of the reasons she needed to hire from outside was her habit of placing her staff in time–outs for weeks and even months at a time. A former employee spoke to reporters about spending her work hours applying for positions at other organisations because Thompson had taken away all of the employee’s responsibilities as punishment for her refusal to swear complete fealty to the director.

That sounds like Tricky’s treatment of Carol, I thought. I guess these executive directors are all the same. And yet, that’s what sealed my decision. This executive director is obviously a nightmare, but I’m already dealing with nightmare bosses at Hemlock Art Center and Little School for the Arts, so I think I know what to expect. It’s time I stopped running from conflict. So I logged out of my session on the computer and settled it in my mind. I would go to the open house and secure a teaching position before the close of