‘It’s not the kind of thing men ordinarily want to watch me do.’
He laughed. ‘I mean for my sculpture. I like body parts.’
She finished her drink. ‘Whole bodies too, I hope.’
Alix went to Dan’s studio after dinner. Although, she thought, ‘studio’ was a word too poetic to describe the triangular attic at the top of his flat. It had very little furniture, just an armchair and a desk. Most of the space was taken up with white figures, like the ones she had seen at the exhibition the previous night.
‘Plaster breathes,’ Dan said, taking her hand and placing it along the torso of a figure of a woman.
Alix felt moistness beneath her fingers, a dampness rising like sweat from the white rock.
‘It takes the moisture from the air,’ he continued. ‘That’s why I like to work with it. It’s not lifeless.’
Dan’s hand traced her fingers, which rested still on the plaster woman. ‘But if the moisture in the air disappears, she begins to desiccate. To thirst. And then she becomes too fragile to shape.’ He touched Alix’s arm, then her collar bone, the middle of her chest, and stopped to rest at her belly button.
To turn around? To move? To stay where she was? Before she could decide, he lifted the hem of her skirt and moved his hand up along her thigh; he found the top of her knickers and slid his hand inside, over the thin line of hair on her pubic bone. Then he traced a path downwards, pressing lightly, circling around and around, increasing the pressure by the slightest increments until Alix felt her legs part because he wasn’t pressing firmly enough nor circling quickly enough and so she began to move backwards and forwards against his hand, to rub, hard, and she came just as his other hand found her nipple and his mouth tasted the skin along the back of her neck.
Six months later there was a wedding, a house in Elizabeth Bay for the now famous and wealthy sculptor and his heart-surgeon wife, and a year or so of bliss.
CAMILLE’S HEAD
(Plaster, 13x11cm. The only piece from this time that is not of the artist’s wife.)
Bliss. For Alix, it was the kind of bliss she had always imagined Cinderella and her prince must have shared in their happy ever after, the sort of bliss that came after the full stop, that was never written about because it was too private and also indescribable – how could something as simple as words on paper be capable of depicting this?
Take their honeymoon. Europe of course. Gorging on art. And then the discovery of a small gallery down a lane into which they had only ventured because they were lost, but didn’t care because what greater delight was there than to be lost beneath the sun in Florence with the person you loved, holding hands, kissing, desiring, finding your way out only because then you could do more than kiss, more than run hands beneath the backs of shirts, more than feel one another through a filter of clothing.
Dan had seen the sign over Alix’s shoulder. ‘Another gallery?’ he asked and she shrugged, not caring enough to say either yes or no.
But, walking inside the gallery is a scene Alix will remember later, when Dan lies dying, and she will understand that they were not lost, that something, fate if you will, had made them turn down that lane and into that gallery, the walls of which were hung with masks. Death masks.
Alix didn’t understand what she was seeing at first until Dan told her. ‘Some are made from plaster,’ he said, indicating the far wall, ‘and these ones are made from wax.’
Alix moved in close, so close that she could see or imagine, she wasn’t sure which, the faintest etchings of the fine hair that covers a person’s cheeks. ‘It looks like the wax is lit up from behind,’ she said.
‘Wax soaks up light,’ Dan said. ‘See how the skin looks almost moist.’
‘Yes.’ Alix paused. ‘Some of these faces look more alive than the people I treat in the hospital every day.’ She looked up at Dan. ‘When I see things like this I wonder what being dead really means. The moment I take out someone’s heart on the operating table, they’re dead, really – a machine is keeping them alive until I can stitch in a new heart. But I look at this mask and it’s a person. I can almost feel them breathing. If his wife walked into this gallery and saw his face here on the wall she’d think he was still living, surely?’
‘They used to take death masks of unidentified bodies. That way, if someone came looking for a missing person, they could view the death mask and see if it was the person they were searching for.’
‘What about just to keep someone with you, forever? A mask is more reliable than memory, more immediate than a photograph.’
Dan stepped closer, ran the backs of his fingers across her cheekbone. ‘Are you saying you’d need a mask to remember me after I died?’
‘You’re not allowed to die. Ever. Besides, I’m a heart surgeon. I can fix anything that goes wrong.’
The house in Elizabeth Bay straddled their two worlds of real bodies and plaster bodies. The hospital was just a short drive away and Dan had a studio built, separate from the house, at the back of the garden.
He worked when she worked and so their life worked, perfectly. If she was called in at midnight then he would get up too, go to the studio and sculpt until she returned home. Then they would cook breakfast together – always bacon and eggs, mushrooms and toast because working at midnight made them both ravenous. Then they would collapse into bed in a flurry of arms and legs and hips and backs before finally falling asleep, waking whenever it suited them to go out for dinner or to a gallery. He sustained her, made it possible for her to work twenty hours straight at the hospital because he did the same, they did everything the same; sometimes Alix forgot that there had ever been a time before Dan.
Then there would be a few days when she would work normal hours. Go to work at seven in the morning, come home at seven in the evening and not be on call at night. She loved those days, loved stepping into their house and feeling the warmth – Dan always kept the heater on high and so Alix only ever wore T-shirts, even in winter – but she cherished the fact that he did because when she opened the door and felt the rush of hot air, that was when she knew she was home. The house smelt warm too; the ginger tea that he drank with the commitment of a caffeine addict fragranced the air, as did the pot of soup he’d reheated for lunch, or the vegetables he’d roasted for dinner. And the wall in the hall that he’d insisted on painting amber did have the effect he’d said it would – she’d thought of Betadine when she first saw the colour – but when it was finished and every time she came home she thought of welcomes and friends and drinks and Louisa. Then there was him. Dan. She could feel the heat of his art, his inspiration, scalding the air, could almost see it firing on his skin. She could hear it too, in the rasp crackling over plaster, the fall of dust onto the floor.
She tried hard to understand his world – the slurry of white paste and the way he transformed it into art, working away on it long after she thought it was finished, until he’d made it into something more than she could have ever imagined it would be – because he was the only person who understood Alix’s world. She would often take him into the hospital late at night and show him things, because who else could she talk to – the only woman in a team of alpha males.
She took him up to the roof where she had stood for the first time as a surgical resident, watching the row of green traffic lights and the two police cars, sirens slicing into the quiet of night, speed to the hospital with a heart on ice in an esky in the boot. She told him how she felt as she raced down the stairs to tell the surgical team that the heart had arrived, intoxicated with the thought of the power she might have one day as the surgeon stitching in the heart, rather than being, as she was then, so inferior as to be often overlooked, happy to have been given a job – even one as lowly as being the runner on the stairs – and not fighting for once to be that most impossible thing – a female hoping to be a heart surgeon.
Occasionally, Alix would take Dan into the anatomy lab at the hospital late in the evening when she knew the int
erns would be gone. She introduced him to her cadaver, the one she practised on every day, knowing she had to be more than perfect if she wanted to be a heart transplant surgeon – she had to be peerless.
The cadaver was a man, aged about forty she guessed, slightly overweight, covered in hair and sporting a curly black mullet on his head. A man whose heart she knew better than anyone’s.
Dan jumped when she snapped on the lights in the lab and she laughed. ‘They’re all well and truly dead, especially now that they’ve had interns hacking into them every day. They’re not about to leap up and tickle your neck.’
As she finished speaking her hand crept up and brushed his neck. He jumped again, then grabbed her hand, laughed, pulled her towards him and stopped. ‘I don’t think I can kiss you in front of dead people,’ he whispered.
‘You don’t have to whisper, they definitely can’t hear you.’
He smiled. ‘Maybe if I pretend that this is a studio and the bodies are sculptures or something.’
Alix unzipped a white body bag on a trolley and nodded. ‘They are sculptures. As a surgeon I get to find the beauty in them that no one else sees. Like the thinness of the wall of his atrium. If it tears, you die. But mostly it doesn’t. I have an old T-shirt that’s about the same thickness and it’s full of holes.’
Dan stepped up beside her and Alix could see that he had become used to the smell of formalin, that his eyes were no longer focussed on the tattoo of a butterfly that sat in the middle of the man’s chest, asserting the fact that he was once a person, an individual who chose, for a particular reason, to have a butterfly drawn between his lungs.
‘Show me,’ Dan said and his face had become the one he wore when he was working, the expression in his eyes that of a concentrated dream.
Alix took his hand, just as he had done in his studio the night of their first date. She pulled back the incised skin, lifted out the pre-cut ribcage and plunged his gloved fingers into the opened thorax. She moved his hand as she spoke. ‘Here are the four chambers of the heart: right atria, left atria, right ventricle, left ventricle.’
She stopped moving his hand, looked up at him and continued. ‘I like the word chamber. It makes me think of bedchamber, a private space, a lovely space. Just like the heart. The filling and pouring and looping of blood, the relaxation and contraction that must all occur, that usually does occur, in sequence, in perfect time over forty million beats a year.’
Dan ran his hand over the surface of the heart. ‘What does it feel like to touch a heart that’s still working?’
Dan was the only person she knew who would ask, who would think of such a thing. She leaned over and kissed him, reflecting on how unromantic the situation should be – two people with their hands stuck in a dead man’s chest – and almost laughed. Then she answered him. ‘In surgery you get to feel what it is that makes a person alive.’
For the first time in her life, it occurred to Alix that the feeling was similar to love.
‘Let’s have a baby.’ Dan said this to Alix one night as she stepped into his studio, expecting to see what he’d been working on all day but seeing instead the grin that always made her lean in to him so that her lips were right there, waiting to taste the air into which his words would fall.
She laughed. How could he be serious? How could their life, their crazy, awake-at-all-hours, eat-when-you-can and almost-never-sleep existence accommodate a baby?
‘I mean it,’ he said, drawing a circle with his finger over her belly. ‘I want to feel a baby kicking my hand. I want to watch over your shoulder while you feed the baby. I’ll sculpt you both.’ He laughed. ‘But there isn’t a plaster strong enough to hold in it all the love that I’ll feel. I tried though.’
And Alix’s eyes moved to the sculpture he was indicating, one she’d never seen before and which he must have worked at furiously all day, because it was finished, or so she thought.
It was the head of a baby, Dan’s imagined image of his child before he even knew that he would be a father, because he never knew that he would be a father. The sculpture was small, the size of a ball, but finely detailed – half-closed eyes, waxy newborn skin, an imperfectly shaped skull, a searching mouth.
That night, in the studio with Alix, he named the baby Camille, even though Camille was just a dream.
LIFE/DEATH
(Plaster, 75x35cm. Part of a series called Transformation.)
When she was a medical student and before she met Dan, Alix had sometimes imagined, in a kind of immature, Hollywood-style movie fantasy, that someone she loved would declare to her that they were dying. In her imaginings, upon receiving such news, she would be stoic, an unattractive word, reminiscent of dowagers with unwaxed moustaches on their stiff upper lips but perfectly suited to the way she would respond. Because, in her eyes, another death brought with it another harvest. Time to cut. To plant. To grow.
But then, at half-past eight on a Tuesday night over dinner at a restaurant, Dan told Alix he was dying. Stoicism was the furthest thing from her mind.
There was nothing surprising about the way Alix’s week had begun. On the Monday, for instance, she had begun an ICU rotation and was working with donors rather than recipients for six weeks to see the other side of the transplant equation. The frustrating side. Especially when, as now, a family withdrew their consent to donation at the last minute because the wife was no longer convinced that her husband was dead.
‘I thought you died when your heart stopped. That’s what death used to be,’ the wife had said to Alix at the hospital.
‘Technically, that’s true,’ Alix had replied. ‘The Harvard criteria for certification of brain death have only been around since 1968...’
‘My husband’s heart is still beating.’
‘But his brain is no longer functioning. If we turn off the machines that are breathing for him, his heart will stop.’
‘You mean his heart will be beating when you cut him open and take it out.’
‘Yes. But he won’t feel anything. He has no brain activity...’
‘He always followed his heart. Always believed in heart over mind. He’ll feel it. I can’t give you his heart. Or anything else.’
‘Technically, hearts can’t feel.’
At this point the intensivist had stepped in and asked Alix to leave because she wasn’t supposed to harangue the kin of brain-dead patients for their organs. As Alix turned away, she saw the wife lay her hand on her husband’s chest and smile.
Alix was thinking about that conversation when she arrived home. She went straight to Dan’s studio, as was her custom, wincing at the noise of his rasp filing away at the plaster sculpture.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
She walked around the piece, seeing it from all sides. It was a woman with a hole right through the upper left section of her chest. In the woman’s hand was a strawberry with a bite taken out of it.
Alix leaned in. On closer inspection, she could see that it was not a strawberry; the woman was holding her heart in her hand and the bitten piece was in her mouth. The woman was smiling and Alix thought, she hasn’t felt any pain.
‘I’m not sure what it means,’ Alix said.
‘I don’t have a particular metaphor in mind,’ he said.
She frowned. ‘So why did you sculpt it?’
He wiped the dust off his hands and moved over to hug her, to kiss her mouth. ‘She’s you. I’m doing a series about death. She’s the centrepiece. Transforming death into life.’
‘That’s not what I did today.’ Alix stretched out her hand and then withdrew it. She wanted to touch the plaster woman but wasn’t sure whether that would damage her. So she said, ‘She doesn’t look dead. The plaster glows like ... warm cheeks.’
He didn’t laugh although she expected he might. Her observations about sculpture were never as lyrical as she would like them to be.
‘When Rilke worked as Rodin’s secretary he talked about plaster being alive. He thought it had trans
parent whiteness,’ he said.
‘I thought Rodin did bronzes.’
‘He cast lots of figures in plaster too. Most of them are incomplete, parts of bodies, hands and feet, torsos, legs.’
Transparent whiteness. Yes, she has that. Alix remembered the woman whose husband was not quite dead enough. She looked again at the sculpture and thought, this woman has no heart and yet she is alive.
Alix was half an hour late for dinner on Tuesday night and although Dan did not once mention her lateness, she felt honour-bound to point it out, repetitively. But he waved her apologies away and ordered champagne, poured, lifted his glass and began to toast.
‘To...’ he said and she waited for him to finish, to say, ‘to us’ or ‘to you’ or ‘to art,’ or something innocuous and unimportant and not at all memorable. ‘To the next six months,’ he said.
She raised her glass and asked, ‘Why?’
‘It’s a brain tumour. Glioblastoma multiforme.’ He knew she’d want the specifics, knew she’d know exactly what glioblastoma multiforme meant, not just medically, but to them, to him, to his life. ‘The doctor says I’ve got about six months.’
For some reason, she did not lower her glass. What was a brain tumour? And then she remembered. The headaches in the morning. The tripping over nothing when they went for their morning walk. The occasional vomiting. His doctor had wanted him to get it checked out. Probably a virus. And she hadn’t gone with him today because she was working and because it was just a virus.
‘It shouldn’t be summer,’ Alix whispered as she took his hand and they both looked out the window at the still-light sky dipping into the harbour. She knew that he was thinking the same as her: that it should have been autumn. They should have been surrounded by trees disrobing themselves, by branches casting their leaves aside to bathe their bark in the last warmth of the season.
CAMILLE
FIVE
If I Should Lose You Page 4