The Bone Parade (6 page)

She’d told him about the bronze phase of her career, but not how she felt about the material itself.

“Yes and no. There’s something very primal about bronze. It’s so ritualistic. You’re taking something hard—metal—and you’re making a liquid out of it, and then suddenly it gets hard all over again in a whole new form. And all of that is wrapped up in this weird sense of permanence. Even bad sculpture can appear impressive in bronze. You see it all the time. It’s mediocre art, but it looks meaningful because it looks immortal. Look—here they go.”

The shank and the pourer lifted the steel bar with the steaming crucible, and stepped toward the molds clustered on a dirt floor inside the pouring area. The bronze blazed, and even with all of her experience, it was difficult for Lauren to remain unimpressed. So much was at stake: so much work and so much inspiration. All art was a gamble, a casino with its own roulette wheels and baccarat tables and rolling dice and deadeye dealers. You staked a good part of your shaky financial status on a piece that had taken perhaps months to finish, handed it over to a gallery owner who would take fifty percent of the sales price, and bet on the buying whim of the public; but all of that was loose change compared to turning your sculpture over to others to cast. Here was a liquid that could betray you in a second, yet so cunning in its artfulness that it could fill the farthest reaches of a mold and lend itself to the most exquisite shapes—curves and angles and contours that would outlast life itself.

Already great puffs of invisible scent rose from the mold, the slightly sweet odor of the metal as it began to harden and give new form to the world. Thousands of hours at stake. She could see the pressure in the bent back of the pourer, the way he remained so tightly in control, and in the intensity of the shank’s eyes as he looked out from behind the face shield. But wait, that’s Kerry, Lauren said to herself as she glanced again at the shank. The girl must have finally come up for foundry duty; students had to wait months for a chance to work in here. Kerry was staring at the pourer, following his every cue, letting him lead, a richly choreographed pas de deux with a blazing sun between them, holding them firmly in its orbit.

They finished filling the first mold, took two short rehearsed steps to the right, centered the crucible, and the pourer started to turn it on its side. But then he hesitated.

“No-no. Don’t!” Lauren whispered, painfully aware that she could do little more than plead as a splatter of bronze fell to the top of the mold, flattened, and instantly began to harden.

From where she stood, she couldn’t see if the chute had been splashed, inadvertently sealed, destroying all the efforts that had gone into creating this piece of sculpture.

Kerry’s head rose. Lauren could see the tension in the girl’s eyes. It wasn’t her fault, but it was her first pour, and Lauren considered it entirely likely that she would blame herself.

“You’re fine, girl. You’re fine.” Lauren again found herself whispering from behind her face shield, overheard by no one.

The pourer took a small step, repositioned the crucible, and this time poured cleanly into the mold, which accepted the bronze.

Lauren took a welcome breath of the foundry’s warm air as drops of perspiration ran down her sides. She’d always perspired heavily for a woman. Why-oh-why had she worn these clothes?

She hung her helmet on one of the hooks by the door, and shed the heavy coat. Her fingers rose to her brow, then ran through her hair, harvesting perspiration from both. Her wan complexion had turned as red as a stoplight.

Ry’s skin certainly looked moist. Beads of sweat had formed above his upper lip, and she had to resist the urge to dab them away with her finger.

When they stepped into the hall, the normally tepid air felt cool.

“So what did you think of your first pour?”

“Except for feeling like I was in a sauna,” he wiped his face with the crook of his elbow, “I thought it was really impressive.” He drew deeply on his water bottle.

“Did you notice the little mistake that almost turned it into a disaster?” she said as they headed up the stairs to the third floor.

“Is that what it was? I wasn’t sure. I noticed the guy facing us staring at the guy who was doing the pouring.”

“That was Kerry. It wasn’t her mistake.”

“Kerry? Really? I couldn’t tell.”

“It’s pretty hard with everyone in face shields and coats.”

They stepped around the sawhorses that still formed a pentagon outside her office.

“Are they ever going to fix that thing?” He looked at the crack, which had been crudely patched with cement.

“I have no idea. They never tell us anything.” She unlocked the door. “They did seal it.”

He looked back at the barrier. “They obviously don’t trust their own work.”

“By the way,” she walked over to her desk, “I found this on the net. I thought you might want to take a look at it.”

She handed him a copy of an article called “The Triangle of Life.”

“It turns out that we did everything wrong when the quake hit. You’re not supposed to stand in doorways. The fatality rate for people who do that is extremely high.”

“No kidding? I’d always heard doorways were the safest places in an earthquake.”

“Me too, but now they’re saying that you’re much better off finding the nearest solid object and standing by it, or curling up next to one if you have to. Then when the ceiling and walls fall in you have this triangle,” she demonstrated with her hands, “between a file cabinet or a desk, let’s say, and the chunk of ceiling that’s leaning against it.”

He looked at the article she’d copied, then her. “So it’s really true: you
do
learn something new every day, if you’re not careful.”

He was smiling as he tried to hand it back.

“No, go ahead and keep it. I made that for you.”

“Thanks. Look, you’ve been so generous with your time, how about if I take you to lunch. Or dinner?”

The way he’d said “Or dinner?” made her realize that they’d reached a crossroads: Lunch was safe. Dinner was sex. The distinction felt as real as the crack in the ceiling.

“I can’t go to lunch, not today. I’m supposed to meet with one of my students. But dinner … dinner would be nice. Tonight?” She thought that’s probably what he meant; he had to drive all the way in from the coast.

“That would be great. Seven sound good?”

She nodded, part regret, part pure anticipation. A jumpy feeling in her stomach.

“Where shall I pick you up?”

She gave him her address, and they shook hands as they had each time he’d left. She wondered how they’d say good night. The student she had to meet with was Kerry. She hadn’t wanted to know if the prospect of the girl’s presence would spark Ry’s interest, make him linger; and she definitely didn’t want to put up with Kerry’s flirting again.

Kerry arrived a few minutes late, as was her habit. Lauren could not get accustomed to this any more than she could get used to seeing her students piercing their bodies with rings and bars and studs. Kerry, she’d been pleased to see, had confined her self-mutilation to her belly button, nose, and the obligatory half dozen holes that ran along the outer fold of each of her ears.

Lauren had noticed that the most oft punctured students, the ones who looked aggressively unattractive, like furious warriors from a sci-fi flick, inevitably turned out to be the sweetest kids. She had come to believe that excessive body piercing was a means of warding off sexual interest, perhaps the predictably sad response to a culture that had sexualized them from childhood, through ads, music, and movies, and sometimes, most grimly, through touch.

Kerry wrapped her long legs around the base of the chair, and rocked forward. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“Stassler says I can stay in a room in his house. He says he has a guest house above a barn that he stays in, so I can have the big house to myself. He says he’s so far out in the country that getting in every day would be a drag.”

“That’s accommodating of him.”

“I’m bringing my bike anyway.”

“How far is his place from town?”

“From Moab, it’s about twelve miles.”

“That’s a long way to ride.”

“Not really. I’ve been racing mountain bikes every summer since I was sixteen. I can do twenty, twenty-five miles like it’s nothing.”

Kerry was feisty, and Lauren could see why she’d be so appealing to men. There was sexiness in that sort of zip. Looking at her features in isolation, you wouldn’t consider her a beauty, but put it all together—the dimple in her chin, her henna hair cut in a strange V on her forehead, those bright brown eyes and straight nose, and truly perfect lips—and you beheld an extremely attractive combination.

“It’s the mountain biking capital of the world,” Kerry said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“I hope that didn’t influence your—”

“No way! Come on, there’s plenty of good riding around here. I want to work with Stassler,” she said with conviction. “His vision is so, I don’t know, dark, but real.”

Yes, thought Lauren, dark, but real. As an undergrad she’d also been impressed with all that dark but real, Sturm und Drang crap; but she’d outgrown it, and thought most other artists did too. Only a few insisted on wallowing in it, mostly the ones unlucky enough to have found early success, and who then sentenced themselves to the prison of popular expectations where they repeated themselves ad nauseam. She thought of the painter who had his first big commercial success more than two decades ago with highly stylized hearts. He was still painting them. He lacked either imagination or courage. She asked herself which one applied to Ashley Stassler. But it wasn’t her job to criticize him. Better to let Kerry reach her own conclusions in her own time. As she herself had. When Lauren had set up the internship program, her goal was to put budding sculptors together with the men and women they admired. Stassler had surprised her by his willingness to cooperate. For that she was grateful, even if she now thought of him as more artisan than artist, good with technique, but absent of any original vision. But hers was a minority view, and unlikely to prevail.

“Okay, let’s review your goals for the next two months.” It was important for a student to keep her own objectives in mind, lest she become an errand runner for an artist. Part of the compact required the sculptor to help the student with her own work.

Kerry opened her portfolio, spilling out copies of the material she’d sent Stassler, including black-and-white photographs of the pieces she planned to cast under his supervision. Her drawings also fell out, along with her curriculum vitae, and a color photo that showed her kneeling by the piece she’d exhibited on critique day. But there was nothing vaguely anthropomorphic about Kerry in this picture: she was wearing a short skirt and a snug halter. Lauren had to repress a groan; her stomach felt as if it had sunk to her knees.

“You sent this to him? All of it?” Her hand moved over the material, including the sassy picture of Kerry herself.

“Yup,” Kerry said. “I wanted him to see everything,” she added with no self-consciousness whatsoever.

Lauren felt badly for her. Kerry’s photograph would have been bait for a lot of men. Perhaps this was especially true for a man who lived in the desert by himself. Maybe Kerry had intended this, but Lauren didn’t think so. The girl could be flirty, no question about it. But sexually scheming? No, Lauren didn’t think so. More than anything, Kerry was obsessed with sculpture.

The work she planned to cast was impressive. So were her drawings. If he helped her in the foundry, then he would be giving her a great gift. They could not reasonably ask for more from a sculptor of his stature. Except, of course, for him to keep his hands off her.

Lauren planned to dress down for dinner. She had no idea where Ry planned to take her, and didn’t want to appear overly … Overly what, she demanded of herself. Overly … eager? Overly … interested? Overly … sexed?

When was the last time I felt like this? She held a red sweater up to her chest and looked in the vanity mirror, which nestled in the corner of the tiny room and revealed the double bed and comforter in the background. She began to hum “Norwegian Wood,” the words flitting across memory, teasing her with certain sweet possibilities,

The sweater had a fetching split up the back that stopped an inch or two above the waist, and flared away on both sides. Oh hell, she tossed the sweater aside and slipped on a white blouse.

No, absolutely not. You look like a schoolmarm. I
am
a schoolmarm. Kind of.

Off with the blouse, on with the sweater. And a calf length gray skirt that buttoned down the front. The last time she’d worn it had been to an opening with Chad in December, the night before she’d told him that she wanted marriage, maybe a family too. She’d unbuttoned it to just above the knee. For all the good it had done. She moved to button it up, but then didn’t.

Now she applied more of the red lipstick she favored, touched up her mascara, and froze when she considered cologne.

Do it, she ordered herself.

Over dinner at one of Portland’s better seafood restaurants, she finally got him to open up. It had taken almost a month. He surprised her by saying he was the second of four children, all raised by their mother; his father had fled when he was four.

“The four of you, by herself?”

“She’s an amazing woman. Very smart.”

“Did she work? I mean, outside the home?”

“You bet. She had to. She had a masters in counseling. She was a therapist. My sisters and I used to tell everyone that she treated severely emotionally disturbed people, and then she went to work.”

Lauren laughed. Ry smiled, clearly pleased that an old family joke had succeeded once again.

“I’ll bet you were pretty healthy kids.”

“We were. We are. I missed having a father around, but she never missed a ball game, or a school play, or anything that was important to us.”

“Plays?” She had designed and built sets in college. “Did you act, or work behind the scenes?”