Authors: Mark Nykanen
She rushed inside, eager for caffeine, figuring that if she wasted not a minute she could squeeze in a ride on the Slick Rock Trail, which she’d been reading about for years, and still get out to Stassler’s by six.
Within five minutes, Kerry was back in her pickup and headed out of town with a double Americano and directions from the girl who’d served it.
She passed several groups of mountain bikers riding to the trailhead, and suddenly felt like too much of a tourist ferrying her bike on her truck. Never again, she vowed. If she hadn’t been so pressed for time, she would have turned right back, saddled up, and joined the throng making the trip on pedal power alone.
Parking was tight—
lots
of tourists—but she wedged the narrow pickup between two mammoth SUVs from California.
She looked around. No one nearby. She unbuttoned her Levi’s and looked again. No one. Go for it! In the tight space between the two cars, she stripped off her jeans and panties and wrestled on her Lycra bike pants. Another quick look, and off came her cotton top and on with a garish bike shirt provided by her sponsor, a shop in Portland that gave her bike clothes, bike maintenance, and tires and tubes in exchange for her blood, sweat, tears, and torment.
Bike shoes next, then the hydration system, basically a body hugging backpack molded around a plastic pouch with a drinking tube she could flip in her mouth whenever she needed water.
Sunglasses and helmet. A new one. She’d taken a “header” a few weeks ago on Mt. Hood, and her old helmet had been the principal casualty. The Styrofoam shell had cracked open, but it had absorbed the impact and saved her skull. The shop had given her this one, and mounted the old brain bucket under a photograph of her atop the winners’ stand at last year’s Oregon Mountain Bike Championship. The new helmet looked as sleek as a Porsche. She wouldn’t think of riding without one.
She reached up to the rack and unlocked her bike, holding it above her head as she maneuvered to the rear of the truck, careful not to scrape the forty-thousand-dollar Expedition crowding her from behind.
Bike gloves. Almost forgot them. She leaned her Cannondale against the rear bumper, hurried back to the cab, bent over the front seat, and grabbed them off the dash. Time to lock up. She slammed the door, turned around, and that’s when she spotted the guy in the Expedition watching her through tinted windows, casually munching an energy bar. He gave her a thumbs-up, and she turned red, could feel her face burning as she realized that he must have seen her strip off her clothes and change. She hated tinted windows.
But he wasn’t leering, and he didn’t look sleazy, kind of cute actually, so after taking a deep breath she managed a nervous smile, and set off.
• • •
The ride was markedly different from the trails in Oregon. Up there you rode in trees almost all the time, lots of shade, except for the clear-cuts. But this was amazing. She could feel her skin come alive in the sun, like a duck finding flight after a winter in a marsh.
She sang to herself as she nimbly navigated up a twisting stretch of smooth rock, easily passing a group of guys, just smoking them, not even close to her lowest gear. Her legs were practically singing too. Endorphin high. She crested the rock and saw the sinuous line she’d have to take down the other side, so steep that if she didn’t raise the left pedal to the twelve o’clock position, it would bump against the rock and buck her over to the right, and that would mean … the unthinkable. That’s how steep it looked.
But her tires held the rock like they were made of Velcro, and she descended at an angle impossible on even the gummiest dirt. Fun riding, as long as you had the stomach to take the steeps in stride.
Kerry did. She had the
power
. She finished the ride in under two hours, nineteen miles of rock and sand and smooth, wicked descents.
As she pedaled back to her pickup, she drained the last drops out of her hydration system. She still felt about a quart low, so as soon as she opened the cab she pulled out a water bottle, downing about half of it before the murmur of a power window gave her a start. The guy in the Expedition.
“Good ride?” He looked like he was waking up. She wished he’d been asleep earlier.
“Yup, real good,” she said, settling down. “You been out?”
“Did it twice today. I can hardly move.”
He said his name was Jared. He sure was cute. Light hair, not blond or red, but kind of like the color of the rocks on the trail, and strong-looking shoulders. She dug that on guys, when the caps of their deltoids looked as hard and round as baseballs.
“You must be dyin’ then,” she said, checking him out some more, glad to have her sunglasses on, though not confident enough in the dark lenses to let her eyes wander too much. But the sculptor in her still wanted to soak up his musculature, the way his pecs formed nice clean inside edges before disappearing into his sleeveless shirt. Hard on top, hard down below. That’s what she and her riot grrl buds always said. That and “A hard man is good to find.” At least one of them would just
have
to say that, usually with more irony than intention as they whipped past some creep on a five-thousand-dollar ride. But this guy didn’t look creepy, he looked cool.
“Yeah,” he allowed, “I’m hurting, but hey, I’ll be back out tomorrow.” He paused to look her over; she could see
his
eyes. “You?”
“I don’t think so,” she said reluctantly. “Got to work.”
“Yeah, you local?” He sat up straighter. “You work around here?”
“I’m just starting. With a sculptor. Ashley Stassler? Ever heard of him?” She hoped, really hoped that he had.
“Ashley Stassler?” he said slowly, as if the name might catch on some barb of memory.
He rubbed his chin, then shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”
“He’s like one of the top three or four sculptors in the world. I’m going to be working as his assistant for the next two months.” She preferred “assistant” to intern.
“That sounds way cool.”
“What about you? You live here?” She’d noticed the California plates when she’d pulled in, but maybe he’d moved.
His head shook again. “Vacation. Chilling for a week. I leave Sunday.”
Two days from now. Already she was calculating whether she could spring loose long enough to spend some time with him.
“You want to go get a burrito? Have a beer?”
Now it was her turn to shake her head, say no. “Sorry. I’ve got to get out to the guy’s place before it gets dark. He kind of lives out in the boonies.”
“You got a way for me to call you?”
“Yup, that would be cool. I’ll give you my cell number. Give me yours too.”
He scrambled to find something to write on, and told her that he
would
call.
As she drove away she felt a familiar buzz, the post-ride endorphin high along with the kind of bubbly excitement that made her bike pants feel way too tight.
Stassler’s directions sucked, and it took her an hour to find the cattle gate that he’d said was “right off the road.” Right? Try
left
next time. And then maybe point out that it’s another three miles!
She searched around the gate post before finding the key he said he’d stash away for her. The sun was all but gone, and she’d had to flick her headlights on about half an hour ago.
After pulling across the cattle guard, she locked back up. He’d been very specific about that. Ten minutes later she saw Stassler’s compound, the barn with the guest house, and the old home that he said he didn’t use. How could he not? It was beautiful, and huge, with an old fashioned veranda that stretched clear across the front and wrapped all the way around the side. Two stories. Real cedar board and batten. And the barn was almost as big, painted the palest yellow with white trim all the way up to the cutest cupola. The brick foundry, single story and the least impressive of the three buildings, sat back behind the barn.
No one greeted her. Thank God for that. Maybe she could slip inside and clean up before meeting him. She wished she’d found a place to shower and change before coming out here. She felt conspicuously grimy. Her arms were streaked with the sweat and dirt she’d picked up riding, and her hair was a mess. She worried that she smelled funky too.
She heard something, or someone, in the barn. The big double doors were open to the early evening air. She took a few steps toward the entrance as Stassler himself came striding out, still managing to startle her with his sudden appearance.
“Oh,” she sputtered.
“You must be Kerry Waters,” he snapped. “You’d
better
be Kerry Waters,” he added so crisply that even if she hadn’t been, she would have claimed the name.
“Yes-yes,” she stammered, recovering awkwardly from her surprise.
“I’m Ashley
Stassler,”
he said, emphasizing his last name as if he had to, and stabbing his hand toward her. It took Kerry a moment to understand that he was extending it in greeting. She shook it, noticing the dry grip, the calluses, and knowing that her own hand probably felt just as abrasive.
He had a smile as sharp as a chisel, Kerry thought, or something a chisel might chip out of rock, a hard rock like granite, not sandstone or soapstone. Lean, too, and not much taller than she, which made him fall an inch or two short of six feet. Handsome, no denying it, his face familiar from the PBS documentary, and from all the photographs of him in the stories about the
Family Planning
series. She’d read them all, and had studied the photos: Stassler serious, Stassler laughing, Stassler straining to achieve perfection in his foundry. She figured she’d seen every variation of his face, but she’d never seen this, the canine curiosity of his eyes, the way they combed over her. Not like the boy in the Expedition. Way different. Like Stassler was taking stock of her, doing an inventory, studying her flesh, fingering her dimple with his gaze. She’d had a lot of men look her over, and had never liked it. She didn’t like this either.
“I’ll show you your room.” He started walking toward the house, abruptly gesturing toward it with those rough hands. “It’s all yours. For the next two months.”
• • •
It was magnificent inside as well. Kerry had grown up on Portland’s northeast side. A bungalow built in the twenties. Broken down, dry rotted, like a lot of other bungalows in the neighborhood. Gentrification hadn’t come to her hood because it was a hood, and the dotcomers hadn’t considered it tony enough, not with all the drive-bys and gangs and TV action news crews always looking for more of the gore.
She’d dated a couple of guys who came from money, seen their homes, their parents’ homes, but nothing like Stassler’s place. The foyer had a hammered copper ceiling, and maple wainscoting. The front hallway opened to an immense living room with thick carpets, stone hearth, and a beamed ceiling that rose at least twenty-five feet. It was a rugged, masculine manse with a dining area and a kitchen larger than the apartment she’d been renting near the university.
He’d taken the trouble to stock the refrigerator, one of those enormous stainless steel boxes that took up a wall. He also showed her the well-packed shelves of the pantry before leading her to the master bedroom near the rear of the house. Master bath, too, with a long bear-claw tub perched on black-and-white tile.
“This is really nice,” Kerry said, trying not to sound impressed, like maybe she was used to all this, which only made her sound overwhelmed and underprivileged.
“It is, isn’t it?” Stassler said. “Maybe I should live here, and give you the guest house.”
“Sure. That would be—”
He waved her silent. “I’m kidding. I like living so close to my subjects. I can walk down … out to the foundry any time; it’s only a few steps away. And this would be too much for me. I’m a simple guy.”
She nodded, even though “simple guy” was the last thing Ashley Stassler would ever be. She sensed this after being in his presence for less than fifteen minutes.
They walked back to the front door. She couldn’t imagine having a place like this and not using it, but the barn and guest quarters were closer to the foundry. She stared at the red brick building from the edge of the veranda. He followed her eyes.
“That’s my favorite spot. It doesn’t look like much, but that’s where we do all the work.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Tomorrow we’ll start getting the molds ready for casting.”
“We will,” Kerry said excitedly. “A new part of the series?”
“No, I’ve got to repair one of the figures in
#8
. It got damaged during shipment. But eventually we’ll do
#9
. It’s interesting the way that one’s turning out. Not quite what I’d had in mind when I started it.”
She asked him what he meant.
“Only that I had envisioned a husband, wife, and two children, but there’s only one child now.”
“Couldn’t you, y’know, go ahead and add the second kid?” Was she missing something?
He shook his head as if that would be the worst of violations. “No, you’ll learn that you have to let the materials speak to you. As I got into the piece, I could only feel a boy and his parents. No girl.”
“Right-right.” She felt
so
stupid. Lauren had talked about this as well, letting the materials speak to you, the subjects too. No preconceived notions about how it
had
to turn out. That’s how a true artist worked.
“But I do like
#9
. I feel like I’m getting to know the figures in the piece really well. I’m starting to see their bodies more clearly, the bones and muscles, the facial features. It takes time, but they’re starting to emerge. Maybe in a couple of weeks they’ll be ready for the molds.”
“Can I see them?”
He shook his head without looking at her. “I can’t do that. It destroys my focus if I let anyone see me creating them. It takes me a long time to make them come alive, and I can’t risk any break in concentration.”
Kerry nodded, then worried about her access to the foundry. “But how can I work in there,” her eyes returned to the brick building, “if I can’t see them.”
“They’re not in there. They’re in my guest quarters.” He pointed to the second story of the barn. “That’s where I create them, and that’s completely off-limits. Right?”