Ashes (18 page)

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 lumps 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?"