I passed by the studio on my morning walk, even though it's a little out of my way. I've been doing this for a while, actually; the place holds an odd sort of attraction for me, as if it still resonates with what happened in it. It's kinda morbid, but I can't help but be drawn back. Jeffrey says it's the artist-instinct in me coming to the fore; he might be right. Every time I pass it, my hands tingle.
They're tearing it down now. It's strange to see the place like that, with the windows barred by scaffolding and plastic sheet. I think it's a relief, but I can't be sure.
I stood there on the other side of the street watching for a while. Reminiscing, I guess. It's gotten pretty cold around here, Olde New England getting ready for a blustery white winter, but we still have the breeze off the Massachusetts Bay so we're not freezing just yet. The guys up on the scaffolding were all bundled against the wind, though, so it must be colder up there. Me, I used to throw on the sweaters and gloves all the way in September, warm-blooded Californian that I was. I've adapted, though. A good jacket is all I really need these days, until the sky starts dumping snow on us. I'd keep my umbrella handy, but it's hard to jog with; of course, running through sleet isn't a happy experience either.
I'm no New Age girl, no crystals and yoga for me, but I think that behind the plastic sheets masking the windows, the studio is brooding up there. It's not as bad as I've seen other places around here--this is Boston, after all, historical center of the whole damn country or something--but it's still kinda eerie. It works its way into my dreams a lot. Maybe it's best that they're tearing the place down. It might get it out of all of our systems.
I'm working on a project, my last before I get my Master's Degree. It's been gnawing at me for a while. I didn't want to give it a fancy title or anything pretentious like that--I was kinda thinking to leave it untitled, even--but Jeffrey insisted. Since he has such a way with words, I let him suggest a couple things. It's called Requiem/Secret Worlds now. I'm trying to figure out just what that means. Words aren't like clay. You have to shape them with your mind, not your hands, and that's hard for me. Jeffrey writes miraculously; I just push and pinch things around, making blank faces and hollow bodies. I don't really know anything else.
I met Jeffrey at about the same time that I first came to the studio last year. He was always out when I took my morning jog, sitting at one of those outdoor cafes with his feet all curled up under him in the big black iron chair, hunched over a notebook. Every time I passed by, I'd notice his writing-hand; it would be twisted around the pen in the peculiar way he has, with the knuckles pointed toward his chest, in a way I swear would be impossible for anyone to write nicely with. "It's a left-handed thing," he told me once. "Everyone wants us to be right-handed so much that they refuse to acknowledge that we aren't. By the time we figure it out, it's already too deeply ingrained to be changed." I think he must have meant something more than that. He always does.
I must have gone by him a dozen times, silently wondering. He was always in the spot, always doing the same thing, with his sandy hair falling over his forehead and his goth-black coattails draped over the back of the chair. I'd seen birds perch like that, but never people before. I wanted to sculpt him. No, more than that, I wanted to touch him, just to see if all those clean flowing lines were real. I was a messy hand with an art scalpel in those days; crispness was a wonder beyond wonders to me, something I just couldn't accomplish.
One day I decided. "No more just watching him, Helen," I told myself, and instead of jogging on by the coffeeshop I took a detour. I don't really like coffee--I've ruined a few delicate pieces because of the caffeine jitters--but it was necessary. I'm not a gutsy girl, not really. A shot of something alcoholic would probably have calmed my nerves better, but Starbucks doesn't sell vodka or anything useful. I don't remember what I got, just that it drew the wind-bitten cold out of my hands.
He didn't look up as I approached, though I scuffed as much as I could in my jogging sneakers. The seat across from him was empty as usual, and the table was half- covered by thin, plain paperbacks, a deflated-looking backpack and the yellow pad he wrote on. He didn't look up as I pulled out the chair, or when I sat down, or even when I cleared my throat nervously. My thoughts were all jumbling around in my head like inept circus tumblers, and finally one rolled right out of my mouth. I didn't even realize I'd said anything until he reached up to sweep back his hair and fixed his gaze on me. I must have been bright crimson. His brows were thin, fuzzy things that quirked into funny little arches over the guarded darkness of his eyes, and I knew right then that I had to sculpt him. There was no question left in my mind.
"Poetry," was all he said before he looked back down. It took me a moment to figure out what the hell he was talking about; I must have asked a question while I was gawking. "What are you writing" or something similar. I tapped on the coffee mug for a good solid minute before my tongue untangled again.
"Do you go to school around here?"
I've asked him since then about just what he thought when I came to pester him that first time. He always says he can't remember, but I'm sure he's just trying to spare my feelings. He can't have been thinking good things, not with a chunky red-faced girl in grey sweats randomly descending on him. If I had a face like Karen's, it would have been different. For good or for ill.
He frowned at me darkly, putting down his pen, and if it was any other day I would have fled then and there, but my artist-instinct was acting up. My thumbs would fit perfectly in the spaces between his eyelids and arched brows, I knew, and by realizing that, I became committed. I would cringe, but I would not run. I'd get him somehow.
"Yes," he said reluctantly, once it was obvious that his goth glare was ineffective against the likes of me. "Boston U."
"Are you an undergrad, or....?"
"Grad." He just stared at me after that, trying to push me away with the sheer force of his antisocial tendencies, but I was unmoveable. My coffee was getting cold in its cup, my hands starting to knot up from the chill again. He bent to politeness only grudgingly. "You?"
"The same. Fine Arts."
"Ah."
It was a rocky start, I know. I excused myself, dumped the coffee and took off to finish the jog, but from then on I always took that detour. I figured I'd either scare him away entirely or that he would eventually get used to me. It was the beginning of fall semester, and I had nothing but time.
Time, and a rinky-dink apartment about the size of my mom's kitchen back at home. It was exasperating, but it was all that I could afford, art students not being the richest of folks. Waitressing can only really get a girl so far up the income bracket. There was hardly enough space in the apartment for my necessary junk; sculpting in that environment was absolutely impossible.
The University rents out studios, though, scattered around campus and in places around town that donate a bit of space. I had managed to snag a grant from the Art Department--no easy feat--so I had a little bit of money to work with. After calculating out what I needed for supplies, I figured I could afford the studio rental; it would mean subsisting on ramen and Kool-Aid for a while, but it would be worth it. I called a couple of the places nearby until I found one with space left. 157 North Revere, near the Aquarium. It wasn't a long walk from my apartment, or too terribly far from the supply store, which was a good thing since I don't have a car. The subway is just too convenient not to use.
I remember the first time I went to the studio very clearly. The street was a wind- tunnel that day, the sky forbiddingly cloudy as I pushed my way through the six o'clock crowd. Winter was edging its way in, so even the native New Englanders were running around in coats and hats; more than one umbrella got blown inside-out by a vagrant gust. It's that off-shore breeze that does it, as well as carrying in the scent of fish and sea-salt until it seems like the whole town must have been just dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. It's so different from my life on the West Coast it isn't even funny. On days like that, it's like being in Atlantis.
North Revere was a quiet little street, one of the places in Boston where you turn a corner and suddenly feel the twentieth century evaporate behind you. The folks around here have a fixation for Paul Revere, enough to build a city-wide holiday around him, so any place that bears his name is bound to be practically colonial. The buildings on North Revere are ancient to a girl like me, all gloomy brick and wrought-iron bannisters. The sidewalks were buckled and cracked from the roots of the few huge trees that apparently refused to budge to progress, their branches scraping at the walls ineffectually. I had to wander along the street twice before I found the right building, since half of the numbers had fallen off and never been replaced.
The studio was on the third floor, at the top of a staircase so old that ruts had been worn into the middles of all the steps. Walking into the studio itself was a relief; I flipped on the lights and found a wood-floored room stretching the whole length of the building, with half of one wall covered in long mirrors, not the medieval dungeon I had almost been expecting to see. Tables and folding chairs were stacked against the back wall, and someone had left an easel out. One of my fellow studio-renters, I was sure. The whole place was quiet and cool, almost meditative.
I had just gotten myself set up, with my big block of clay and all my sculpting tools fanned out across a table, when the door crashed against the wall with a shriek of abused hinges. I nearly knocked myself out of my seat turning, heart in my throat and carving scalpel in hand. In the doorway, the dark-haired guy who had so unceremoniously booted the door open glared at me and muttered, "Women."
That was my first introduction to Edward.
Edward was just one of the people who used the studio, but I saw him the most often since we both did our work at night. Most of the others were apparently daytimers, but I had my waitressing job and classes, and Edward...well, I don't know what Edward had. I think he just liked to look out the windows and see nothing but black.
As soon as I stood up in his presence, we had problems. He wasn't really short for a guy, but he was sensitive about it, and I'm not a small girl. My mother always called me big-boned--in an effort to be nice, I suppose--but it's the truth and no amount of jogging has really ever changed it. I guess having a woman looming over him kicked his constant low-grade irritation level up a notch. When I was sitting down to work, he was fine, but when I had to stand I could see him out of the corner of my eye, with his brush poised over the canvas, trying desperately to ignore me. He had a good face, a sharp-featured thing that I sometimes envisioned cutting out of one of my clay blocks, but whenever I asked him to sit for me he would just fidget and glower until I told him nevermind.
He was the painter of our little studio clan, tracking dribbles of color along the polished studio floor and leaving bright accidental fingerprints on the walls. Turpentine- scented ghosts lingered in the air after he had been there. We were all art-students in one way or another, us renters, and we knew each other by our left-behinds. There was a young woman, Judy, who worked mainly in charcoals and left halos of dark dust around the feet of her easel every time she came to work, and a watercolorist who I only heard about because he came in the mornings. I think he must have been into splatterpainting, because the windows were always dotted with pastel after he'd come. There were a lot more dancers than there were craftspeople, though, and all they left was a lingering sense of music in the air. Karen told me, when she and I first met, that the studio used to be a dance school that went under and sold the space to the University. The mirrors, and the thick wooden beam bolted to the opposite wall, were for the dancers.
I saw Karen, and consequently Eric, about as frequently as I saw Edward. She was a slim thing, small and blonde in a bubbly perpetual-motion way, the kind I always associated with cheerleaders and pom-poms. She always played opera when she danced, the volume turned up as high as we would let her, and Eric would pull up a chair and read magazines with his feet propped up on the windowsill until she took a break. They were a good-looking pair, I thought, she the petite butterfly and he a husky, thick-shouldered guy who looked like he ought to be a jock. When they were in the studio, Edward would be absolutely silent, maybe grunting a response if I asked him something and slashing at the canvas with his paintbrush. I wasn't very vocal either, not at first. I would just sit there, watching Karen and trying to fix those mercurial motions in my mind, trying to push the images out through my hands. A lot of the pieces I sculpted those first few months were ballerinas, but they were always too chunky, too clumsy-looking. Too much like me.
Much of the time, though, Karen came by herself, and she was a lot more social when Eric wasn't around. The first time she dropped into the chair opposite me at the sculpting table, I nearly died of shock. I'd been rather wrapped-up in listening to the opera, my fingers sunk knuckle-deep into the clay as I worked it absently, so I hadn't even noticed when she stopped dancing. One second the place across from me was as empty as it had ever been, and the next second it was claimed by a bright-eyed dancer in a black leotard. It was startling, to say the least, but not as startling as when she stuck her hand across the table and said, "Hi!"
I was too surprised to do anything but blink at her hand for a moment, but I got over it and pulled my own hand out of the sculpture to meet hers. My fingers were all caked with grey, and half-moons of clay were wedged up under my nails, an almost jarring contrast to her bubblegum-pink and perfect ones. She kept smiling, though, and gave my hand a good shake, and her eyes never showed a hint of disdain. "I don't think I've really introduced myself," she said. "I'm Karen. You're Helen, right?" I nodded warily, and after that nothing was the same.
She talked a lot--even to Edward!--but mostly to me. She would pull up a chair during her breaks and chatter away while I worked. I never really had to do much more than nod now and then to keep her going, but it was good to have cheerful company. One of the things about working with your hands is that it leaves your mind relatively free, and when it was just me and Edward he tended to rant. He didn't ever make all that much sense, but his general sour tone pretty much told me that I didn't want to know any more.
If there was one thing Karen was good at, though, it was drawing people out of their self-imposed shells. I found myself answering her questions first, then asking my own, then actually giggling like a schoolgirl with her over some comment about Eric. There was just something about her, some shining thing that attracted the eye. She was one of the lucky, golden ones and she knew it, and she wasn't afraid of sharing it around. I could swear that people lit up when she spoke to them...well, except for Edward, who was unrelentingly crabby. I've known girls like her all my life, but never once did they come down from their pedestals to talk to me. I felt honored, weirdly. I didn't want to be her friend, but she charmed me into it.
At the same time, Jeffrey was slowly thawing to me. We're both terribly stubborn; he refused to change his daily Starbucks routine, and I refused to give up easily. Not that I intended to force my presence on him. If he had ever looked up at me and told me flat- out to go away, I would have. He knew that, I'm sure, but he never did. And so every morning I would jog up to Starbucks, get a cup of coffee, and plunk myself down opposite him, and he would industriously ignore me. I got to almost enjoy coffee.
We finally started talking one day, deep into September. It had been our typical morning, which is to say silent. I was watching the early-risers pass by on the sidewalk and warming my hands on my coffee mug when he cleared his throat. I glanced over and he was still hard at work in his notebook, but as soon as he knew he had my attention he began.
"So who are you, anyway?"
I took a sip of my coffee before answering. I had all the time in the world, after all, and if he wasn't even going to look at me, then he could wait. "Helen Beauchamp," I said finally. "Nice to meet you."
"Eh," he said. "And did you want something?" He sounded so aggrieved that I had a hard time trying not to laugh.
"Well, your name would be a good start... Don't worry, I'm not here to steal your lunch money."
He did look up then, brows quirked over sly grey eyes. We matched gazes for a moment, my innocent one to his daunting, and I knew I'd won when he let out a long- suffering sigh and bent back to his work, shaking his head. "Jeffrey Peterson," he said. "Don't call me Jeff."
He amused the hell out of me. After a little while, he would even look at me when we talked, actually paying attention. What had started off as a little game became something much more interesting, and by the time we had to start having our meetings inside the Starbucks so my coffee wouldn't freeze, I knew him well enough to sculpt his face with my eyes closed. As I had thought, my thumbs fit nicely under the spindly arcs of his brows.
Ever since I was a little girl, I've always had this need to craft. It started out with Playdough at home, then pinch-pots and pudgy unicorns in elementary-school art class. Anything malleable that came into reach of my hands was bound to be twisted into something it was never meant to be. When my younger brother was born, my mom made the mistake of telling me that babies' skulls are soft "like clay"; it took her years to convince me that no, I couldn't actually sculpt a kid's head. Even now, I look in the mirror sometimes and wonder what I would look like if I could just push up my cheekbones, straighten out the line of my nose a little, nudge my mouth into just the right shape. Sometimes I have nightmares where I can.
I went through a long phase in middle school where all I sculpted was plump mother-goddesses. They had power, after all, or were supposed to have power. Maybe some of it would rub off on me, I'd thought as I watched all the girls around me grow willowy and golden-bronzed. My hands were always chalky with clay dust, crescents of the stuff hiding out under my nails. A stigma and a badge of pride. At least I belonged somewhere, with the art freaks, unlike the other mousy mother-goddess girls left out on their own. I wore lots of black in high school and made sure to get paint on almost everything. I had an identity. I wasn't just one of those girls.
Their hands are chalky with flour now, a lot of them. I found myself wondering, a little while ago, if dough feels just the same as clay when you're working it. It's softer, more yielding, but...less futile, I guess. And however your hands get dirty, at least you feel like you've done something with them.
Jeffrey and I started dating officially on New Years' Eve of that year. It was strange at first, since neither of us--embarassing as it is to say--had ever really had a relationship before. Karen was overjoyed for me, which made it even more embarassing because the nosy thing decided that we just had to party with her and Eric. Convincing Jeffrey to come along was like trying to lead a horse into a burning barn, and I heard that it was almost as bad with Eric. Karen and I managed to cajole the boys into coming along finally, a little after New Years'.
I'd never really been out to a club before, solitary person that I'd always been. It took me hours of desperate searching and changing to find an outfit that would look, not good, but right. My wardrobe simply hadn't been prepared for the eventuality of Karen; I grew out of the all-black phase in high school, but I'd never tried to emulate the clothing- styles of the other girls. They made me feel awkward and thick. I ended up grabbing a longish skirt and a matching top, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
We all met outside the studio, then took the T-line subway to the club. Jeffrey looked just as out-of-place as I felt, in his long black coat and uncompromisingly dark clothes; he was like a sprig of night standing next to Eric, who was dressed item-for-item the same as half the University guys I'd seen. Karen, of course, was the starlet of the group. I've never seen someone look quite so queenly when bundled up in her boyfriend's Boston U. sweatshirt.
The club was actually fun, for Karen and I. While Jeffrey and Eric were off getting drinks, we lounged around and chatted and made fun of all the other clubgoers behind our hands. When the boys got back we were both half-doubled over from the giggles. It was a heady feeling. We pestered Eric mercilessly, and he took it with easy good nature, his arms never straying far from around Karen's waist. Now and then he would see someone in the crowd that he knew and disappear for a while, and we'd turn on Jeffrey, who had ordered bottled water and seemed determined to grimace his way through the whole evening. We couldn't let him do that, naturally. He actually grinned once or twice, when he thought we weren't looking. Karen teased me too, and I don't think I've ever blushed more in my entire life.
After a while it got to be a regular event, with the four of us trooping out to a club or bar every few nights. On my own, I'd never have gone, but I liked being around Karen. People acted differently when she was there. I think she got to Jeffrey too; he certainly didn't come along for male companionship. I saw the two of them up at the bar once, getting another round of drinks. Eric was saying something, gesturing with his beer, and Jeffrey just watched at him in his patronizingly blank way, as if he was some curious but disgusting species of insect that Jeffrey was studying. I've told him at times that he's altogether too sly for his own good, and he just shrugs at me. "You're not without your own bitterness, Helen," he says. I can't really argue.
Back at the studio, projects were progressing nicely. My table was slowly filling up with small models, pencil sketches and a few abortive pieces. The charcoal swaths on the floor were getting wider and wider, Judy's silent contribution to our little home, and Edward's fingerprints were all over the sink area in blue and green and orangish-red. His finished oils leaned against the far wall, wild abstract patterns that caught the eye and spiralled it in all directions. If I looked at them too long, they gave me headaches.
I should have noticed when things started to change. After all, I did my sculpting until late at night, the same time Edward was always there. He used to ask me to come over every now and then and tell me what I saw in his most recent piece; usually I couldn't decipher anything, but as time went on I started catching recurring images in his paintings, fractal bits and warped still-life and Van Gogh-ish faces, sometimes ones I could recognize. He had a dancer in a lot of his paintings too, like the line of abortive dancers I'd wrung out of my clay. It was only natural, I thought. The truth is often sad, though, and the truth is that he had never really been more than a little dark spot out of the corner of my eye, a sour-faced fellow in a painting smock to whom I never quite listened.
If I think back, I can piece together some memories, things he said and how he looked. He was always a sharp-faced little man, but as the new year got broken-in he seemed to get sharper, as if his cheeks were being whittled away little by little with one of my flat sculpting blades. I should have noticed when his rants turned on the others, or when the handprints on the sink started getting redder and darker in tone, or when he stopped asking me to look at his paintings. I should have asked him about the slowly- growing pile of shredded canvasses, but even outcasts have outcasts, and he was in my blind spot.
Spring had come, but the sea breeze was still chilly on the last day that I came to work in the studio. The trees on North Revere were beginning to bud slowly, their delicate leaves bright green in the waning daylight. The sky was clear for once--well, as clear as spring in Massachusetts gets--and I was in a definite good mood. The restaurant had let me off a bit early since we had practically no customers that day, so I had stopped by my apartment only long enough to snag my tools before heading for the studio. It wasn't one of my usual days to work, but my fingers were itching to shape something.
I've said before that I don't believe in New Age mystic shit. I don't believe it when people say they had premonitions, that it's possibly to magically know something is wrong before you can see it. If the world really worked like that, I would have felt something other than contentment when I started up North Revere. There would have been an indication that the world just took a sharp left turn out of peacefulness. But there wasn't. When I opened the ground floor door, it swung smoothly without a hint of ominous creak. I passed Edward on the stairs, him with his portfolio under his arm and his paintbox in hand and dark paint-smudges on his chin, I with my backpack and another lump of clay. We nodded to each other. His eyes were green, envy-green, the same as they'd ever been, and they didn't quite meet mine. Then he was gone, the outer door clicking behind him. It was only later that I realized how strange it was for him, that he had come and gone while the sun was still up.
When I opened the studio door, all of my springtime thoughts washed away like so many sandcastles too close to the water. My clay hit the floor with a dull, solid thud, the same sound my heart made as it slammed up in my throat. The smell of turpentine and linseed oil was thick in the air, dizzying. Glass was everywhere, a few shards of the mirrors still hanging tenuously to their shattered frames; red and black handprints covered the mirrors that were still intact, smeared and dripping. There were words written there too, gleaming wetly. I HATE WHAT YOU ARE, they said.
In the middle of all the wreckage, curled up on the floor and shaking, was Karen. There were handprints on her leotard...all over it, especially the ripped parts. There was blood, too, lots of it, seeping out from where her hands were pressed over her face. I couldn't ask, I couldn't ask anything, I just ran. Down the stairs, stumbling out the door into the perfect spring twilight. Edward was already long-gone. I found the first open business I could and begged for them to call the police.
Everything fell apart after that. Edward got caught. He never tried to run, or even wash his hands; he just walked to the T-line, got on the subway and went home, and waited in his apartment until the police came. At least, that's what I heard. He was sentenced for rape and assault, and sent away. No one really understands why he snapped, or at least we don't. The police confiscated his last painting, which had been drying on the easel while Karen bled on the floor. They never told us what it was of.
Karen convalesced in the hospital. The University got edgy and closed down the studio, which was fine by me. I just stayed at home after work, and kneaded clay, and brooded. Jeffrey came over a lot.
I tried to visit Karen, but it was hard. I kept wondering what it was that I'd see if the doctors took the bandages off her face. I could have asked the doctors, or her, but I didn't want to know. She had been so pretty, so perfect, so doll-like. So much like what I had wanted to be. When I was younger, I used to have Barbie dolls...I used to give them the names of the popular girls at school, the pretty ones, the golden ones, and then I would go get one of my mother's kitchen knives. Every time I thought of the words on the mirror, I had images of my Barbies. I HATE WHAT YOU ARE, it said...not 'I hate you'. Nothing personal; after all, who could hate Karen? But... Every time I came to see Karen, I thought of the mirror, and I thought of my Barbie dolls, and I thought of what Jeffrey had said. "You're not without your own bitterness." And I felt sick. She was so diminished...there was no glow around her anymore, no golden halo. She cried whenever I came, jagged and raw, and I would hold her hand and try not to be ill. I couldn't take it. After a while, I stopped visiting. I didn't want to be her friend, I told myself, but she charmed me into it...
I heard, a little while later, that Eric had dumped Karen while she was still in the hospital. I'd never had a Ken doll before, but I went out and bought one after I'd gotten the news. Jeffrey didn't look too surprised when he saw what I did to it.
Watching the place get torn down is a strange experience. When I look up there, I feel like I can see through the plastic sheets to where we all used to sit, or stand, or dance, where things came together for a while. But I realize things were never really together. You can't toss Barbies and Kens and mother-goddesses and scarecrows into the same box and expect everything to turn out well once you shake them around a bit. You can't connect just by being reached-out to. You have to reach back.
I'm working on a project, on the tiny table that's all I can fit in my apartment. It's called Requiem/Secret Worlds, and it's been gnawing at me for a while now. There are three figures in it, all dancers. The first one is a weeping man, facing away from the second figure and draped in chains; on the back of his head is a second face, a monster mask. The third one is a nude, a demon-faced male moving forward, with a mask on the back of his head of a smiling human face. Between them is a woman draped in ribbons, her head thrown back and her eyes closed; she is tied to the demon-faced man by a chain, and to the man-faced demon by a thin little ribbon. I tried not to do it obviously, but the first one has a sharp little face and the third one's shoulders are jock-solid. Whenever Jeffrey sees it, he tells me I'm all together too symbolic for my own mental health, and I tell him he's still too sly. But I know we'll manage.
I've started making little mother-goddesses again. They make me feel better, somehow. I'm thinking of bringing one to Karen. I hadn't wanted to be her friend, but...I still am.
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