Authors: Mark Nykanen
“You’re not going to make me look like a fool, are you?”
He smiled again. “I’d say that would be an impossible challenge.”
The computer screen chose that moment to jump alive with a rattle she’d never noticed before, and as her schedule began, once again, to beam, she assumed she must have bumped the keyboard, not considering in those first few innocent moments that it was the building itself that had moved, was moving. Shaking violently. He sprang to his feet at the very moment she did, and they leaped to the open doorway. The walls shook so furiously they blurred. Then she spotted gray dust raining down in the hall, and heard a vicious rumble as the concrete ceiling cracked open. The seam raced toward them, widening in sudden shifts from an inch, to two, three.
“Stop-stop-stop,” she implored, but her voice could not be heard above the terrifying rumble.
From the ceiling in the hall her eyes fell to the floor of her office where the wheels of her chair jumped angrily, like drops of water on a hot greasy grill. The heavily laden bookshelves raged with a frenzy she felt in her own body. Two thick volumes spilled out and landed on their spines, then jittered insanely on the floor.
The quake ended seconds later, and she found that their hands now rested on each other. She noticed—she could not help herself, she was a sculptor attuned to touch—that his arms were firm, the muscles in relief as he steadied her, and she steadied him, and they both, perhaps, unsteadied each other.
Together they rushed downstairs to the street where scores of students had gathered. She’d walked up this sidewalk little more than an hour ago. The sun had been shining, the traffic thick, her thoughts anxious with the minutia of minutes. Now she felt lucky to be alive, uncrushed, if not unfazed.
A general giddiness filled the air as everyone tried at once to share stories of other quakes. Everyone but him. His reserve, even here, surprised her. Pleased her in a way that she recognized quickly: It seemed that every man she’d met in the past twenty years, except Chad
most of the time
, hadn’t been satisfied until he’d let her explore the deepest recesses of his soul. Solipsism masquerading as sensitivity.
“They’ve started looting,” a student joked. “We better get back in there and get our stuff.” Most of them laughed, but not so hard that they didn’t start filing through the doors immediately.
• • •
Forty-five minutes later Lauren’s floor was cleared for occupancy. Five yellow plastic sawhorses had been placed in a pentagon under the crack in the hallway ceiling, though she wondered how they had determined that this area alone could possibly, just maybe, collapse. Wasn’t there likely to be unseen collateral damage? Hadn’t the quake sent shivers of destruction elsewhere? Wasn’t that the nature of chaos theory, after all? What were all those butterflies in China doing at this very moment anyway?
She’d spent most of the down time trying to find out what had happened. The quake had been every bit as powerful as it had felt, registering a six point eight. It had killed a man in Seattle, and injured dozens of people in both cities. There had also been tens of millions of dollars in damage.
Now she made a grand attempt to put aside her worries, and called the chair’s office. The faculty meeting had been postponed till one. At least she’d regained her eight minutes per student, assuming that they could stay an hour later, which might be assuming too much: most of them worked, or had children, or both, and schedules as tight as seamen’s knots. It was a commuter campus, so she’d have to find out who
had
to leave at noon and work around them.
The first three pieces surprised her. Skillful, inspired, “eye candy,” as Kerry, tall and henna-haired with a perfect dimple in the middle of her chin, called the soapstone statues they’d just viewed.
Lauren had quibbled with the installation that Kerry had chosen for her own sculpture, the first one they’d critiqued, a vaguely feminine, anthropomorphic figure reclining as a woman might, buttocks back on her heels, head forward to the floor. But the human form was an illusion, for Kerry’s creation had no arms or legs, or any other discernibly human features, and that’s what made the piece so effective: it evoked, it did not spell out, and Lauren saw that no one would “get” the work in an instant. They would have to linger, walk away perhaps, and return. They would have to give it thought because the form was girded in mystery. Remarkable for an undergrad, but not for Kerry, whose work had been among the best student sculpture that Lauren had ever seen.
But Kerry’s mistake was to place it on a pedestal, and Lauren had her move it down to the floor. She accomplished this with the aid of an apparently gay, neurasthenic young man, who appeared incapable of lifting his own arms, much less half of this substantial work. But he did, with surprising ease. And once the figure lay before them it possessed, paradoxically enough, much more power.
They now came upon a piece that exemplified what Lauren found most uncomfortable in so much student art: banality. One of her better students, no less, had wrapped purple fleece around three oddly shaped, chicken wire forms. Protruding from each were shards of clear broken glass. It looked like that children’s critter, Barney, had gone on a binge and landed on a case of broken gin bottles.
She saw Ry looking at it earnestly, too earnestly, as if he might betray his real feelings if he suffered even a momentary lapse of attention. Not so for Kerry and a couple of other students who kept shooting glances at him, evidently—and justly—finding him both more attractive and interesting than the work before them.
“It’s very bizarre,” said Lauren, finally unable to spare her student’s feelings. But the girl was not offended or startled by her frankness, she was gratified.
“Thanks. It’s about people. The way they get their defenses up.” The girl swept her long curly hair over her shoulder.
“Why did you choose purple?” asked Kerry, who had survived her own eight minutes of critique with little but praise, and now had a pass to open up. Not that she necessarily would, but she was an exceptionally bright girl with a sharp tongue.
“Purple?” The artist retrieved a strand of curls and wrapped her finger around it, then gazed at her work as if pondering her color choice for the first time. Lauren hoped the girl had an answer to this, the most basic of all questions. She was rooting for the young woman’s grade, even as the girl brushed her hair aside and shrugged. Feeling defeated herself, Lauren offered that purple was the color of the gods.
“I was thinking of children, especially when I made that one,” the young woman said, as if she hadn’t heard Lauren at all.
The artist was pointing to the smallest of the three shapes, a shriveled, pathetic offspring, presumably of the purple parents, who appeared much larger and clearly capable of slicing and dicing their wee one to bits.
They moved on, a tour that included a painfully obvious performance piece by an anorexic girl in black nylons, garter belt, and satin half slip, who’d had herself bound unpersuasively with rope and tied with no more ardor to a bathroom stall, beside which lay a whip and highly specific instructions on how to flog her, along with pedantic passages extolling the virtues of outré sex play. It made the Barney piece, as Lauren now thought of it, look like a Brancusi.
Thankfully, they finished on two high notes. The first was a duct tape shell of a female body with a puffy white lining. The artist had created the piece by having herself completely sealed in the silvery tape while sitting on a simple wooden chair. A poster sized photograph documenting the original, mummified state hung eerily on the wall behind the sculpture. When she looked from one to the other, Lauren saw how the artist had torn herself out of the mold, leaving behind a particularly convincing chrysalis.
The final piece pleased Lauren even more. At first glance, Melanie was the most normal-looking student in the class. Her girlish, frail frame generally skipped or flounced around in the loose fitting cords and tired pink sweaters that she favored. She looked altogether ingenuous in her pigtails and beaded bracelets until the warm weather stripped her down to a halter and revealed her childlike back, which was nearly blanketed with tattoos.
Lauren saw that Melanie’s piece worked in much the same manner, by revealing meaning in layers. She had formed three bras and a single thong from grapefruit and orange skins. The rinds had dried and shrunk, leaving undergarments that would fit only a very young girl. Chillingly, she’d constructed the thong out of the skin of a blood orange, then installed each of the “garments” on elegant white hangers, as their satin and silk counterparts were often displayed in high-end boutiques. Lauren loved the piece, the installation and the imagination that had given rise to both. Whimsical at first sight, but horrifying as the hints of brutal eroticism and the oversexualization of children began to reveal themselves.
Ry walked with Lauren back to her office to get his denim jacket, which he’d left draped over a chair. They talked easily about the quake as they stepped around the yellow sawhorses. She unlocked the door, passing the threshold where they’d watched and felt the building shake.
“There it is,” he said needlessly as he reached for the jacket. She detected the slightest unease in him for the first time.
“So, next Wednesday at eight then? Does that work for you?” he asked.
“Yes, I’ll be here. And I promise to take care of the parking pass. I’ll walk it out personally.”
He thanked her for her time, and as he slipped his jacket on, she stole a glimpse of his torso, and imagined him as a nude model on a stool, a pleasant if entirely brief reverie because Kerry burst in holding up a letter.
“I got it! I got it.”
“What did you get?” Lauren tried to remember what Kerry had been angling for with such keen enthusiasm.
“The internship with Stassler.”
“That’s great. Congratulations. When do you start?”
“Next month.”
“Stassler?” Ry said. “You’re going to intern with Ashley Stassler?”
Kerry turned her attention to him and nodded. Lauren noted the light in the girl’s eyes, as she had earlier. Kerry was flashing interest, smiles, and way too much sexiness for a woman her age.
“Yup.
The
Ashley Stassler.”
“That’s interesting because I’m scheduled to interview him at the end of May at his home. We’re talking about the place just outside Moab, right?”
“Yup!” Kerry snapped the letter in the air, and her smile widened to include all of her face. Lauren considered it enlivened as much, perhaps, by the prospect of interning with a renowned sculptor out in the Utah desert as by Ry’s imminent association with both.
“Say,” Kerry said, appraising Ry openly, “anybody ever tell you that you look like that journalist guy Sebastian … I can’t remember his last name but he wrote
The Perfect Storm.”
“Yup,” he parodied her gently, “I’ve heard that a few times.”
Kerry’s eyebrows rose and fell while her gaze remained steady, and Lauren wondered if another reason men found young women so attractive was their utter lack of subtlety. It was as if the fertility festival taking place in their bodies could beat only the loudest possible drums.
Kerry finally turned to Lauren. “I’ll be gone for two months. Thanks so much for the letter.”
Ah, the letter of recommendation, Lauren remembered.
“You’re welcome.”
“This is
so
incredible! Totally, totally awesome.”
It is indeed, Lauren thought as Kerry ran down the hall, and Ry Chambers ducked out. An internship with one of the premier sculptors of our time, though his work no longer appealed to her. Far too representational. Families—children, mothers, fathers, pets even—cast in varying degrees of strictly enforced terror, bronze figures bearing “the ever present latency of unendurable pain,” as a noted critic had written about Stassler’s huge show last winter at the Guggenheim.
But the weakest aspect of Ashley Stassler’s work, as far as Lauren was concerned, were the faces. They were clichés. Every eye appeared too stark, every brow too furrowed, every cheek and chin too rigid. The mouths were even worse. Even the lips of the children appeared uniformly contorted, twisted, never quite sealed. It was as if he’d taken the undeniable agony of the bodies, each of them unique in the bald expression of the most abject suffering, and mated it to a stereotypical portrait of facial pain.
But what she saw as a weakness was considered a great strength by the most influential art critics. Only last year, in a review of the Guggenheim show, the editor of Europe’s most highly regarded arts journal had written about Stassler’s “metaphorical use of the mouth, as if bound by the brutal constraints of convention, rendered silent by the screams that no one can hear.”
Lauren had squirmed when she’d read the review, squirmed because she herself had praised Stassler, though less eloquently, when she’d written that the mouths of his subjects “called out with words to a world that could never be known.” But that had been more than twenty years ago, back when she’d been an undergrad overwhelmed by much of the art she saw, and not surprisingly enamored of Stassler’s work, which had been placed on loan to her college. Enamored, too, of bronze, the immortality it promised. She’d sent him a copy of her review. He’d never replied.
T
HEY’RE TOO TIRED FOR TERROR
anymore
.
I can see it in their faces. They’re not only tired, they’re cranky, thirsty, and hungry. I’ve seen it before. I’ll have to give them food and shelter and clean clothing before they’ll focus on anything outside of their selfish little selves. I’m going to have to nurse them back to terror.
Not a peep out of them. Going on twelve hours in the van, and they might as well be as dead as the dog. Ol’ Missy was pretty rank by the time I gave her the boot. Opened the doors and five pairs of eyes stared back at me. Did any of them blink? I don’t think so. Certainly not that sweet little hound. Starting to get pretty stiff too. I stood her on her hind legs and kind of shook her paw to wave good-bye. That’s when the girl laughed. I wasn’t sure at first because of the duct tape over her mouth, but her mother gave her one of those
Don’t you dare
looks, and that’s when I knew. She laughed again when I made the dog dance on her mother’s legs, dragged those claws right across her pantyhose.