Ashes

by Scott Nicholson

  When he'd started it three years ago, the memory had flesh and was in the same room with him. Now he had to stagger through the caves of his brain to find her and demand she undress and model. And she had been so elusive lately.

  Karen.

  Her letter lay in a slot of his sorting shelf, just above a cluster of glass grapes. The paper had gone yellow, and rock dust was thick across its surface. If he opened the letter and read it, maybe she would come out of the smoky caves inside his skull. Except then he'd have to finish The Painting.

  Looking out the window was easier, and had a shorter clean-up period. Painting had been foolish anyway. Every stroke was wrong. When he needed a light touch, he cut a fat swath. When he needed bold colors, he bled to mud.

  He was born to sculpt, anyway. And now that he had the perfect subject, his frustrations could fall away. The anger and passion and sickness and hatred could go into the new work in progress and not poison his brain any longer. No more dallying with oil and charcoal, no more dancing with acrylics. That was a dilettante's daydream, and the dream was over.

  Because this was real.

  This was the most important moment in the history of art.

  This was The Living Painting.

  Except the materials didn't cooperate. Not Cynthia nor Anna and not Sharon in the trunk of his Toyota.

  Life was a work in progress. Nothing was sacred. Art was a work in progress. Nothing was sacred.

  If you rearranged the letters of "sacred," you got "scared."

  John had not been scared when he asked Cynthia to be his material. Cynthia was a work in progress. Cynthia was an artist. Cynthia was art.

  The body beneath the canvas in the corner of John's studio dripped.

  John wondered if the blood would seep between the cracks in the floor and then through the ceiling of the used bookstore below. Even if it did, no one would notice for months. His studio was above the Classics, a section almost as long-dead as the authors themselves. Proof that even when you created something for the ages, the ages could care less.

  So all that was left was pleasing himself. Envisioning perfection, and striving for it. Pushing his hands and heart to match his mind's strange hope.

  He lifted the razor and was about to absolve himself of failure forever when the knock came at the door.

  The studio was a shared space. John loathed other human beings, and other artists in particular, but his lack of steady income had forced him to join five others in renting the makeshift gallery. They were drawn together by the same fatalistic certainty of all other dying breeds.

  Knock, knock.

  And the knock came again. Some people didn't take "no answer" for an answer.

  One of the five must have knocked. Probably wanted to chat about art. Not like they had anything better to do. John threw a spattered sheet of canvas over the corner of the room and went to the door.

  Karen.

  Karen in the hallway, glorious, almost perfect.

  The last person he expected to see, yet the right person at this stage of the work in progress.

  Karen as a statue, as a painting, as the person who shaped John's life. John tried to breathe but his lungs were basalt. Karen had not aged a bit. If anything, she had grown younger, more heavenly. More perfect.

  John could read her eyes as if they were mirrors. She tried not to show it, but truth and beauty couldn't lie. Truth and beauty showed disapproval. That was one look she hadn't forgotten.

  John weighed every ounce of the gray that touched his temples, measured the bags under his eyes, counted the scars on his hands.

  "Hello, John," Karen said.

  Just the way she'd started the letter.

  "Hi." His tongue felt like mahogany.

  "You're surprised." Karen talked too fast. "My old roommate from college still lives here. I had her look you up."

  "And you came all this way to see me?" John wanted a cigarette. His hands needed something to do.

  "I was passing through anyway. Mountain vacation. You know, fresh air and scenic beauty and all that."

  John glanced out the window. A plume of diesel exhaust drifted through his brick scenery. College buildings sprawled against the hillsides in the background. The mountains were lost to pollution.

  John had been silent too long and was about to say something, but his words disappeared in the smoky caves inside his head.

  "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?" Karen asked.

  "You're not interrupting. I was just thinking about my next piece."

  That meant his next sculpture rather than his next sexual encounter. Karen knew him well enough to understand.

  She could never interrupt, anyway. John was an artist, and artists never had anything to interrupt. Artists had years of free time, and artists would rather give their free time to other people. Art was sacrifice.

  His time was her time. Always had been. At least, it had been years ago. Now she lived two thousand miles away with no forwarding address and John had endless buckets of time to devote to his art.

  Except now she stood at the door of his studio, eyes like nickels.

  "Can I come in, then?"

  Come.

  In.

  To John's studio.

  With Cynthia lying in the corner, weeping blood and becoming. Becoming what, John wasn't sure.

  Himself, maybe. His soul. The shape of things. A work in progress.

  John tried on a smile that felt fixed in plaster. "Come in."

  Karen walked past him and lifted objects from his workbench. "A metal dolphin. I like that."

  She touched the stone sailboat and the driftwood duck and the rattlesnake walking stick and John watched her until she finally saw the portrait.

  Or rather, The Painting.

  "Damn, John."

  "I haven't finished it yet."

  "I think you just liked making me get naked. You painted me slow."

  Not as slow as he should have. He wanted the painting to take a lifetime. She had other plans, though she hadn't known it at the time.

  "It's a work in progress," he said.

  "What smells so funny?"

  Oh, God. She had flared her wondrous nostrils. John did not like where this was headed.

  "Probably the kerosene," John said. "Cheaper than paint thinner, and works just as well, if you overlook the stink."

  "I remember."

  She remembered. She hadn't changed.

  Had John changed?

  No, not "Had John changed?" The real question was how much John had changed. A soft foam pillow in the corner was studded with steak knives.

  "Did you ever make enough money to buy an acetylene torch?" She ran a finger over the rusted edge of some unnamed and unfinished piece. "I know that was a goal of yours. To sell enough stuff to-"

  John knew this part by heart. "To buy an acetylene torch and make twelve in a series and put an outrageous price on them, hell, add an extra zero on the end and see what happens, and then the critics eat it up and another commission and, bam, I'm buying food and I have a ticket to the top and we have a future."

  Karen ignored that word "future." She was the big future girl, the one with concrete plans instead of sandstone dreams. John's future was a dark search for something that could never exist. Perfection.

  Karen walked to the corner, hovered over the spattered canvas.

  No one could see it until he was finished.

  John looked at the shelf, saw a semi-carved wooden turtle. He grabbed it and clutched it like a talisman. "Hey. I'll bet you can't guess what this is."

  Her attention left the mound beneath the canvas. "How could I ever guess? You've only made five thousand things that could fit in the palms of your hands."

  "Summer. That creek down by the meadow. The red clover was fat and sweet and the mountains were like pieces of carved rock on the horizon. The sky was two-dimensional."

  "I remember." She turned her face away. Something about her eyes. Were they moist? Moister than whe
n he'd opened the door?

  She went to the little closet. John looked at her feet. She wore loafers, smart, comfortable shoes. Not much heel.

  Beneath the loafers rested Anna. The experiment.

  The smell had become pretty strong, so John had sealed the area with polyurethane. The floor glowed beneath Karen's shoes. John let his eyes travel up as far as her calves, then he forced his gaze to The Painting.

  "Aren't you going to ask me about Hank?" she said.

  As if there were any possible reason to ask about Hank. Hank had been Henry, a rich boy who shortened his name so the whiz kids could relate. Hank who had a ladder to climb, with only one possible direction. To the top where the money was.

  Hank who could only get his head in the clouds by climbing. Hank who didn't dream. Hank who was practical. Hank who offered security and a tomorrow that wasn't tied to a series of twelve metal works with an abstract price tag.

  "What about Hank?" he heard himself saying.

  "Ran off." She touched a dangerous stack of picture frames. "With an airline attendant. He decided to swing both ways, a double member in the Mile High club."

  "Not Hank?" John had always wondered about Hank, could picture him reverting to Henry and going to strange bars. Hank had been plenty man enough for Karen, though. Much more man than John.

  At least the old John. The new John, the one he was building, was a different story.

  A work in progress.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked.

  She turned and tried on that old look, the one that worked magic four years ago. Four years was a long time. A small crease marred one of her perfect cheeks.

  "I came to see you," she said. "Why else?"

  "Oh. I thought you might have wanted to see my art."

  "Same difference, silly."

  Same difference. A Karenism. One of those he had loathed. And calling him “silly” when he was probably the least silly man in the history of the human race. As far as serious artists went, anyway.

  "No, really. What are you doing here?"

  "I told you, Hank's gone."

  "What does that have to do with me?"

  She picked up a chisel. It was chipped, like his front tooth. She tapped it against a cinder block. Never any respect for tools.

  "It has everything to do with you," she said.

  A pause filled the studio like mustard gas, then she added, "With us."

  Us. Us had lasted seven months, four days, three hours, and twenty-three minutes, give or take a few seconds. But who was counting?

  "I don't understand," he said. He had never been able to lie to her.

  "You said if it weren't for Hank-"

  "Henry. Let's call him 'Henry.'"

  Her eyes became slits, then they flicked to the Andy Warhol poster. "Okay. If it weren't for Henry, I'd probably still be with you."

  Still. Yes, she knew all about still. She could recline practically motionless for hours on end, a rare talent. She could do it in the nude, too. A perfect model. A perfect love, for an artist.

  No.

  Artists didn't need love, and perfection was an ideal to be pursued but never captured.

  The work in progress was all that mattered. Anna under the floorboards. Cynthia beneath the canvas. Sharon in the trunk of his Toyota.

  And Karen here before him.

  His fingers itched, and the reflections of blades gleamed on the work bench.

  "I thought you said you could never be happy with an artist," he said. "Because artists are so self-absorbed."

  "I never said that, exactly."

  Except for three times. Once after making love, when the sheets were sweaty and the breeze so wonderful against the heat of their slick skin, when the city pulsed like a live thing in time to their racing heartbeats, when cars and shouts and bricks and broken glass all paved a trail that led inside each other.

  "You said that," he said.

  She moved away, turned her back, and pretended to care the least little bit about the Magritte print. "I was younger then."

  Karen didn't make mistakes, and if she did, she never admitted them. John didn't know what to make of this new Karen. How did she fit with this new John he was building? Where did she belong in the making?

  Art, on a few rare occasions, was born of accident. Or was even accident by design? Karen had entered his life, his studio, his work, right in the midst of his greatest creation. This making of himself.

  She walked past the collection of mirror shards he had cemented to the wall. Suddenly there were a dozen Karens, sharp-edged and silvery. All of them with that same fixed smile, one that welcomed itself back to a place it had never truly belonged. John's jagged world.

  "What are you working on?" she asked. She'd wondered such things in the beginning, when showing interest in his art was the best way into his head. Then she'd slowly sucked him away, drained his attention until all he could think about was her. She became the centerpiece of his gallery, the showcase, the magnum opus. And when at last she'd succeeded in walling him off from his art, when she herself had become the art, along came Henry who called himself Hank.

  "Oh, something in soapstone."

  The piece was on his bench. She hadn't even noticed. Her eyes were blinded ice.

  "Oh, that," she said. "That's pretty neat."

  Soapstone had a little give, some flexibility. You could miss your hammer stroke and create an interesting side effect instead of complete and utter rubble. Soapstone could be shaped. Unlike Karen, who was already shaped to near perfection.

  The soapstone piece was called "Madonna And Grapefruit." Madonna was a long graceful curve, skin splotched by the grain of the stone. Grapefruit was the part he hadn't figured out yet.

  He hadn't touched it in four months.

  "I'm calling it 'Untitled,'" he said. That statement was a lie for the piece called "Madonna and Grapefruit," but was true for the work in progress for which three women had given their lives.

  "Neat. You always were better at sculpting than painting." She looked again at her unfinished portrait on the wall. She added, "But you're a good painter, too."

  "So, what's new with you?" As if he had to ask. What was new was that Henry was gone, otherwise she was exactly the same as she'd always been.

  "Visiting. My old roommate."

  "The sky was two-dimensional," he said.

  "What?"

  "That day. That day we were talking about a minute ago."

  "Don't talk about the past."

  "Why not?" he said. "It's all I have."

  Her face did a good job of hiding what she was thinking. Marble, or porcelain maybe.

  "Where are you staying now?" she asked.

  He didn't want to admit that he was sleeping on the couch in the gallery. "I have a walk-up efficiency. Not enough elbow room to get any work done, though. That's why I rent this place."

  "So, have you done any shows lately?"

  He considered lying, then decided to go for it. "I won second place in a community art show. A hundred bucks and a bag of art supplies."

  "Really? Which piece?"

  John pointed toward a gnarled wooden monstrosity that sulked in one corner. It had once been a dignified dead oak, but had been debased with hatchet blows and shellac.

  "What do you call it?" Karen asked.

  "I call it…" John hoped his hesitation played as a dramatic pause while he searched his index of future titles. "I call it ‘Moment of Indecision.’"

  "Heavy."

  "I'll say 'heavy.' Weighs over two hundred pounds. I'm surprised it hasn't fallen through the floor."

  "And you made a hundred dollars?"

  "Well, 'make' isn't the right word, if you're calculating profit and loss. I spent forty dollars on materials and put in thirty hours of labor. Comes in at less than half of minimum wage."

  He was surprised how fast he was talking now. And it was all due to Karen walking toward the rumpled canvas in the corner, leaning over it, examining the lump
s and folds and probably wondering what great treasure lay underneath.

  The artist formerly known as Cynthia.

  "Say, Karen, how's your old roommate?" The same roommate who wouldn't leave the room so they could make love in Karen's tiny bed. The roommate who thought John was stuck up. The roommate who was so desperately and hideously blonde that John wished for a moment she could become part of the work in progress.

  The distraction worked, because Karen turned from the canvas and stroked a nest of wires that was trying to become a postmodern statement.

  "She's the same as ever," Karen said.

  "Aren't we all?" John looked at the handles of the steak knives. They almost formed the outline of a letter of the alphabet.

  "I don't know why I'm here. I really shouldn't be here."

  "Don't say that. It's really good to see you."

  John pictured her as a metal dolphin, leaping from the water, drops falling like golden rust against the sunset. Frozen in a moment of decision. A single framed image that he could never paint.

  He looked at the oil of Karen. The endless work in progress. Maybe if he ran a streak of silver along that left breast, the angle of the moonlight would trick the viewer.

  If Karen weren't here, such a moment of inspiration would have brought a mad rush for brushes and paints. Now, he felt foolish.

  Because Karen was here after all. This was life, not art. This was life, not art. This was life, not art.

  He clenched one fist behind his back.

  Ah.

  Untitled.

  Sharon in the trunk of his Toyota.

  "The sky was two-dimensional," John said.

  "What?"

  "That day."

  "John." She picked up his fluter, a wedged piece of metal. Nobody touched his fluter.

  "What?"

  She nodded toward The Painting, the one that showed most of her nude body. "Did you like painting me just because you could get me naked that way?"

  A question that had two possible answers. Yes or no.

  The artist always chose the third possible answer.

  "Both," he said. "How's Henry?"

  "I think he goes by 'Hank' now. At least that's what his boyfriend calls him." Karen wiggled her hands into the pockets of her blue jeans. Tightening the fabric.

  John's fingers itched.

  "So, how's the job?" he asked.