by Betsy Burke
And then I heard the other voice.
“They’re funny…not bad…but perishable…has he thought about longevity? I mean, hell, Leonardo’s stuff didn’t last and now we’re all sorry. I’d worry about mice. Or people with a bad case of the munchies.”
Sam’s voice.
He was here.
Here with Francesca St. Claire de la Roche.
I had to see what he looked like.
I fought my way through the people who were now crowding and blocking the corridor. It was frustrating. I could make out Sam’s voice somewhere in the maze, but not the words, and whenever I tried to get closer to where I thought he was, the voice disappeared. There was too much confusion.
Then it occurred to me. I was rushing past all Paul’s work without taking anything in. I hadn’t seen myself immortalized. I hadn’t looked at the show.
I peered into one of the cubicles. At the center was a life-sized white sculpture of a nude woman. It was stylized, angular and definitely not me. Square shoulders, impossibly long legs. Above the sculpture, a TV screen projected a naked woman, moving, posing, moving again, all slightly out of focus.
The video disturbed me. It was done so that if you really wanted to, you could recognize the model.
I moved on to the next sculpture. It was dark brown, a tall woman, but this time with spidery limbs. The video above it seemed to be another out-of-focus woman posing, moving, posing. She was so thin her ribs stuck out.
The next sculpture was light brown, a tall, slender, flat-chested woman. The video above, again blurred images, corresponded.
And that sweet smell. I moved closer to the sculpture. It was…what was it anyway? I touched it. It was smooth. I held my finger against it. The surface beneath melted slightly and left a small dent.
I licked my finger.
Chocolate.
His sculptures were made of chocolate. Some portrayed female nudes in a prone position, stretched out on their backs, others resting on their sides. Some looked as though they were about to fly, others just languishing. Some of the sculptures were white chocolate with a slight tint. One was deep brownish purple. And above each was an image of a blurry naked woman moving on a screen.
My impatience was growing. And then, about three quarters of the way through the spiral, I stumbled onto myself.
14
I stared for a long time. At first, it was in disbelief and then with the thudding heaviness of certainty. There was no mistake. It was like one of those dreams where you’re in front of the class at school, or on a stage with millions of people in the audience, or walking down a crowded street. You look down and realize you’re naked and weigh three million tons.
Not that I think being naked is a bad thing. On the contrary, naked is wonderful. But it’s best when you know it’s happening or you planned it to happen and you know what its consequences are going to be.
Paul Bleeker had taken all my most noticeable problem zones and exaggerated them wildly. The blobby sculpted Lucy Madison was reclining on her side, enormous thighs tapering down to dainty little feet. Huge globes for breasts with a pink tinge at the nipple. Pink tinged the knees, elbows, and cheeks. I looked like a cross between the Easter Bunny and Elmer Fudd.
As for the video, although he’d kept the images out of focus, there was no doubt it was me. I was just a little fuzzy at the edges. Like the ace pornographer he was turning out to be, he must have had the camera very cunningly hidden.
My eyes were blurry with tears as I hurried back to the champagne. Quite a large group had gathered. They ate and drank and warbled praise for the show. I watched the people milling and chattering. Then I saw the sheaf of white-blond hair gleaming above the other heads. It was Anna, my roommate. Of all people. I hadn’t mentioned the show to her. I didn’t think she was interested in art. I felt an affinity to her just then. I needed to see a friendly face and roommates can be good in those bad moments. I mean, we’d shared so many things, things you could almost call intimate, like boxes of Tampax, dish soap, Glug and bathtub rings. I would like to have talked to her in that moment, but she turned away before I could catch her eye.
Francesca was there, too, standing alone, off to one side, tasting the caviar. No prospective Sam-types stood nearby, though.
It was another surprise to see Nelly the Grape, the girl from La Tazza, sipping champagne and schmoozing. She was even more purple than usual.
I’d had enough. I grabbed a full bottle and headed for the bathrooms. There was only one remedy. I locked myself into a cubicle and began to drown my sorrows in a whole delicious bottle of Brut. I was down to the bottom part of the label and on the verge of hiccups when I heard voices approach, the door open, and two sets of footsteps stop in front of my cubicle. I yanked my feet up onto the toilet seat.
A voice whispered, “Oh, Sam, you should. I could make us dinner, then we could take a swim in the pool. There’s a Jacuzzi, too. You need to relax. I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately with the Jennifer business.”
Sam!
And who the Bojangles was Jennifer?
I was dying to peek through the crack and see what Sam looked like but couldn’t risk discovery. I held my breath and squeezed back the hiccups.
There was the flick of a lighter and a blue curl of smoke rose into the air.
“Francesca. You think you should? I don’t know that they’d appreciate you smoking,” said Sam.
“That’s why we’re in here. It’s just like school, isn’t it?” She laughed her fluttery laugh. I could picture Francesca as a girl, at some elite private school, taking bites out of each and every forbidden fruit.
“Francesca. What are you doing?” Sam’s voice was soft and teasing.
There was more fluttery laughter, then the dry shoosh of hands on fabric and the wet slurpy sound of lips on lips.
“How was that?” asked Francesca.
“Um, you’ve caught me…the champagne must have…uh…I mean, I’m a little surprised…um…uh…what about Gordon?”
“Gordon and I have an understanding.”
“Look. Let’s get out of this place. I’m freezing and I need to get some air.”
“Whatever you say.”
They were gone, and with them my stupid slim hope that Sam might be available. I could be fairly sure that he wasn’t a hunchback with bad acne scars and two long hairs vainly covering some bald spot. He was kissable in Francesca’s books, and women like Francesca could have anyone they wanted. I didn’t know who Gordon was but it sounded as though she wasn’t letting monogamy get in her way. I couldn’t compete with her. I chug-a-lugged the rest of the champagne and sat there in a maudlin haze, wishing Jeremy were alive, wishing for a Sam…I mean…a man…of my own.
I staggered out of the bathroom and back to the tables. Paul had arrived. His voice filtered through the curtains. He was holding court. All the disciples and adoring fans surrounding him had stopped chattering.
He spoke. “The corridor represents the female void, the darkness is the sense of terror and emptiness on entering it, or penetrating it, as it were. The video images are intended as brief moments of light, that which tempts us in flesh and the female form. Females as constellations, beautiful and alluring at a distance, but close up, one discovers that this is no star but a planet, surrounded by noxious unbreathable gasses and temperatures unfit for human habitation. The female is portrayed here as a paradox, nature’s lure, a biological trick designed to have us believe that she is an entity of light, when really she is a creature of a darkness so total that you should fear for your life. All a trap to ensure the race’s procreation.”
“What about the chocolate?” asked a voice.
“Heh heh heh,” snicker-snacked Paul. “It seemed the perfect medium. Women and chocolate. They’re inseparable.”
On that point, there was no faulting him. Following the other line of reasoning, all that babble about light and dark, Paul, the misogynist creep was the occupant of a warehouse that he
’d taken all sorts of pains to paint black, and so by his own definition, had built himself a made-to-measure female void. That was my interpretation anyway. Paul Bleeker had created a monumental womb for himself and crawled inside it.
Why hadn’t I seen right away that he was a first-class weirdo?
I knew his mother’s death must have affected him, perhaps even traumatized him a little, but I had no idea that he was thinking such dark thoughts about women all that time that he was pretending to be so charming and understanding. No wonder sex with him always happened like an air raid.
On automatic pilot, I wandered through the area, pouring champagne and picking up whatever was dropped. Humiliation buzzed through me, making me blind and deaf to everything and everyone.
When the crowd had finally left, Nadine gave me her mile-long list of closing-up instructions. Then she left, arm in arm with Paul, who blatantly ignored me.
I stumbled out of the spiral and into the dark storeroom. It was warm compared to the rest of the gallery. I plopped myself down onto the pile of old coverings, pulled a couple of sheets over myself and sank into a drunken sleep.
I dreamed the chocolate women. There was a battalion of them, and in the way that dreams try to tell you things you’ve overlooked in your waking life, I knew those women were familiar.
They were also gothic, horrifying. Rags and bits of gauzy bandage hung and fluttered from their torsos and limbs as they moved toward me like zombies, like the living dead, their sickly-sweet aroma filling me with nausea.
I could see myself at the back of the group, moving with them, as big as a circus Fat Woman, lumbering along and falling behind as usual. The only difference was that I was fresh and undamaged in my fat way, no bandages hung off my body. I had to take this as a good omen, that I was at least alive.
Paul appeared out of nowhere. At first his eyes seemed normal, black and flashing, but then his pupils began to glow bloodred. He was touching the chocolate women, unbandaging them, licking them all over, chewing bits of face and limb.
I understood in a flash. It was a question of eat or be eaten.
I sat bolt upright. It was impossible to tell what time it was. I staggered to my feet and back out into the freezing gallery. I stumbled from one cubicle to another, scrutinizing the sculptures. How had I missed it? As well as I knew artists and what it meant to be their “model,” I had chosen not to see the obvious.
The Other Women.
Recognizing Nadine wasn’t hard. She was the spidery one, all elbows and ribs. Naturally, I’d expected her to be one of Paul’s models. She had more than one tick. She had a megalomaniacal habit of forcing artists to involve her in their work whenever they were going to have a show in her gallery. But it still made me furious.
I broke the big toe off the chocolate Nadine’s foot. It was a full two inches of dark chocolate that in real life had seen more Ferragamo shoe leather than was decent.
And Anna the Viking. He must have been sloshing and pillaging with her behind my back since the day he met her—that evening when she had been doing yoga in the front room, her buns in the air, and I had been running around collecting my things. I took both of her white chocolate index fingers.
Francesca St. Claire de la Roche was the one that stuck in my craw the most. Because she was beautiful and could have whoever she wanted. She was the biggest surprise. How had she infiltrated my social circle so quickly? All that pale milk chocolate, I took her thumbs, her ring finger and both big toes.
Nelly the Grape from La Tazza was among them, too, dark chocolate with a purplish tinge. I took both of her middle fingers.
Of the rest of them, those of Paul’s chocolate lovers that I’d never met, I took one digit each. I found some clean tissue paper in the storage room, wrapped all the appendages neatly and stuffed them into my purse.
Then I went on a final random binge, breaking off little bits here and there and popping them into my mouth. My face shivered with too much sweetness.
When I’d had enough, I emptied the contents of my desk into a plastic bag, grabbed Jeremy’s ashes and left the gallery, oblivious to where I was going.
I stood in front of the launderette. I’d walked for most of the night and ended up in Jeremy’s neighborhood. Unable to face Anna back at my apartment, I’d wandered, still blurry from all the champagne but buzzing with chocolate-powered energy. I blended in with the bag ladies and threadbare night people. I should have been terrified but I wasn’t. I was too angry, striding in a fury past the central knot of cement and glass high-rises, toward East Hastings and Chinatown. I’d clutched my bags in one hand and my little brass urn with Jeremy’s ashes in the other, holding it out in front of me as if it were a talisman for warding off evil spirits.
I felt seasick with Jeremy gone, his life, my safe island, had vanished, the magic had fallen into the sea like Atlantis, and left me to swim or drown.
It was seven in the morning. The venetian blinds had been lowered on the inside. The launderette seemed as dead as its owner. There was a card on the front door that announced in large sloppy handwritten letters: Closed Until Further Notice.
I still had the emergency set of launderette keys that Jeremy had given me years back. I unlocked the door and went inside. At the far end was a little utility room with a two-way mirror and a big lost-and-found box. I unlocked the door, went inside the little room, turned on the light and locked myself in. I pulled a few towels and some sweatshirts out of the lost-and-found, improvised a bed and lay down. The smell was delicious. Laundry soap, Borax, bleach and fabric softener.
I dreamt I was walking with Jeremy. The landscape shifted constantly. We were visiting places where we’d spent parts of my childhood. We walked through a forest. The trees, huge Douglas firs, were bending toward us, eavesdropping and sighing. He said, “It’s okay, Lucy, honey, it’s okay to look at these places again with me. It’s okay to think you’re always gonna come back to them. But if you do things right, it doesn’t matter if you do come back to them or not.”
“How can you say that?” I screamed the words and hit his chest with my fists. He just looked at me, softly, unresisting. We had come to the ocean, a sparkling cove. There was a little dock, and the slurp slurp of dinghies rocking against it. The water was a rich sapphire blue, ruffled by wind.
Jeremy said, “The way that water looks out there on the ocean, that was our time when you were a kid jumping out of boats, swimming all summer. It belongs to that time. You won’t remember it any better than that.”
“I will. I will,” I protested.
“Don’t get attached to it. Let it go.”
“What are you telling me?”
We had moved on and were standing in a vast sunlit field. It smelled of damp hay and late summer sun. His hair was whiter and longer than I had ever seen it. His feet were not quite touching the ground. “My house, all the stuff in it. Don’t get worked up over it. Try to forget it.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I sobbed. “You’re crazy. You’ve completely lost your mind.”
“You see, you’ve gotta let me go because my leaving is your permission to fly. Lucy, the past is weighing you down.”
“Crazy, crazy, you’re crazy.”
“Your memories of me will be a drag unless you know how to use them. And the way to use them is to let them go. I’ll be part of you, count on that.”
“You can’t fool me. I know this is a dream and that your voice is really my voice. I’ve been through a little therapy, too, you know.”
“Therapy shmerapy,” he said.
“I’m not afraid.”
“It’s only natural to be afraid. You’re supposed to be afraid. It’s part of the game. Hold my hand.” I took his hand. We began to lift off the ground and glide over the field. I could hear the ocean roaring in the distance. The sun was shining but the moon and stars were glimmering in a darker sky as well. We glided toward that part of the sky.
Jeremy’s hair was growing longer and
gleaming silver. We glided higher and I could feel the terror of falling growing in me.
“Don’t let me go,” I cried.
“I’m with you. I’ll always be with you. Don’t look back. And don’t look for me. It’ll just slow you down.”
“But I’m in pain,” I cried, “my world is gone. You died and took my world with you.”
“Connie,” he said, and I could feel my hand slipping out of his.
“No,” I yelled.
His voice became distant. “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy…”
I opened my eyes. Looming above me were shining stainless-steel spokes. It was a wheelchair. Sitting in it was a bulky bearded grizzly bear of a middle-aged man.
He was leaning over the edge of his chair and shaking me with one hand, saying my name. “Lucy. Lucy. Chrissake, Lucy, wake up.”
I sat up and stared around me in a daze, unable to get my bearings.
“Bob.”
Bob smiled and said, “I gotta tell you, Lucy. Thought somebody was gonna call the police with all the screamin’ you were doin’ back here. I could hear you through my apartment wall. What the hell you doin’ here anyway? How the hell did you get in?”
“I missed Jeremy. I’ve still got the keys. When I was a kid, I used to curl up on the washing and go to sleep.”
Bob laughed—it sounded like tires on gravel—then said, “Think we all miss Jeremy, Kiddo. C’mon, get up. Let’s go to my place. You look…” He scratched his head. “I was gonna say you don’t look so good but it ain’t true. You always look good to me, Lucy Madison.”
“Thanks, Bob.”
“Yer welcome. C’mon. You turn sideways, you gonna disappear. Jeez, you’re lookin’ kinda thin. I mean, you look great. I’m just not used to seein’ you lookin’ so thin. How much you lost anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
Bob wheeled ahead of me out the front door of the launderette, around to the back, and into his entrance. He maneuvered the two steps expertly. I followed him into the apartment.