Ashes (13 page)

Karen.

Karen in the hallway, glorious, almost
perfect.

The last person he expected to see, yet the
right person at this stage of the work in progress.

Karen as a statue, as a painting, as the
person who shaped John's life. John tried to breathe but his lungs
were basalt. Karen had not aged a bit. If anything, she had grown
younger, more heavenly. More perfect.

John could read her eyes as if they were
mirrors. She tried not to show it, but truth and beauty couldn't
lie. Truth and beauty showed disapproval. That was one look she
hadn't forgotten.

John weighed every ounce of the gray that
touched his temples, measured the bags under his eyes, counted the
scars on his hands.

"Hello, John," Karen said.

Just the way she'd started the letter.

"Hi." His tongue felt like mahogany.

"You're surprised." Karen talked too fast.
"My old roommate from college still lives here. I had her look you
up."

"And you came all this way to see me?" John
wanted a cigarette. His hands needed something to do.

"I was passing through anyway. Mountain
vacation. You know, fresh air and scenic beauty and all that."

John glanced out the window. A plume of
diesel exhaust drifted through his brick scenery. College buildings
sprawled against the hillsides in the background. The mountains
were lost to pollution.

John had been silent too long and was about
to say something, but his words disappeared in the smoky caves
inside his head.

"I'm not interrupting anything, am I?" Karen
asked.

"You're not interrupting. I was just thinking
about my next piece."

That meant his next sculpture rather than his
next sexual encounter. Karen knew him well enough to
understand.

She could never interrupt, anyway. John was
an artist, and artists never had anything to interrupt. Artists had
years of free time, and artists would rather give their free time
to other people. Art was sacrifice.

His time was her time. Always had been. At
least, it had been years ago. Now she lived two thousand miles away
with no forwarding address and John had endless buckets of time to
devote to his art.

Except now she stood at the door of his
studio, eyes like nickels.

"Can I come in, then?"

Come.

In.

To John's studio.

With Cynthia lying in the corner, weeping
blood and becoming. Becoming what, John wasn't sure.

Himself, maybe. His soul. The shape of
things. A work in progress.

John tried on a smile that felt fixed in
plaster. "Come in."

Karen walked past him and lifted objects from
his workbench. "A metal dolphin. I like that."

She touched the stone sailboat and the
driftwood duck and the rattlesnake walking stick and John watched
her until she finally saw the portrait.

Or rather, The Painting.

"Damn, John."

"I haven't finished it yet."

"I think you just liked making me get naked.
You painted me slow."

Not as slow as he should have. He wanted the
painting to take a lifetime. She had other plans, though she hadn't
known it at the time.

"It's a work in progress," he said.

"What smells so funny?"

Oh, God. She had flared her wondrous
nostrils. John did not like where this was headed.

"Probably the kerosene," John said. "Cheaper
than paint thinner, and works just as well, if you overlook the
stink."

"I remember."

She remembered. She hadn't changed.

Had John changed?

No, not "Had John changed?" The real question
was how much John had changed. A soft foam pillow in the corner was
studded with steak knives.

"Did you ever make enough money to buy an
acetylene torch?" She ran a finger over the rusted edge of some
unnamed and unfinished piece. "I know that was a goal of yours. To
sell enough stuff to—"

John knew this part by heart. "To buy an
acetylene torch and make twelve in a series and put an outrageous
price on them, hell, add an extra zero on the end and see what
happens, and then the critics eat it up and another commission and,
bam, I'm buying food and I have a ticket to the top and we have a
future."

Karen ignored that word "future." She was the
big future girl, the one with concrete plans instead of sandstone
dreams. John's future was a dark search for something that could
never exist. Perfection.

Karen walked to the corner, hovered over the
spattered canvas.

No one could see it until he was
finished.

John looked at the shelf, saw a semi-carved
wooden turtle. He grabbed it and clutched it like a talisman. "Hey.
I'll bet you can't guess what this is."

Her attention left the mound beneath the
canvas. "How could I ever guess? You've only made five thousand
things that could fit in the palms of your hands."

"Summer. That creek down by the meadow. The
red clover was fat and sweet and the mountains were like pieces of
carved rock on the horizon. The sky was two-dimensional."

"I remember." She turned her face away.
Something about her eyes. Were they moist? Moister than when he'd
opened the door?

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.