Yearn (35 page)

She glanced back up at him. Here he was entirely in his element, and she'd never seen him more beautiful. An old familiar emotion swept through her, catching at her throat. As impossible as it seemed, she knew it was pointless fighting it.

 

Jennifer sat staring out the window. The studio at the back of their large garden was a wooden bungalow with a tin roof, and the heavy Australian rain beat across the metal as if triumphantly announcing the breaking of the drought. It was ironic, Jennifer thought, because it felt like the beginning of her own. Drought, dry, I am parched. She scrawled the sentence in the margin of her sketch pad with her thick 2B pencil; the rest of the crisp, creamy page was blank. She liked the writing—it was defiant, a declaration. Somewhere in the corner of the large studio rain had started to drip through the ceiling. A singular soft persistent plop she decided to ignore. She placed the drawing pad on the wooden foldout chair she'd been sitting on and walked over to her modeling table.

A couple of old sculptures from her last show sat on the simple worktable, two porcelain vaginas—one young, the other older—as delicate as orchids, the fragile lips as thin as petals. The one-woman show had been hugely successful and had landed her a London gallery as well as several wealthy English collectors. But that was last year, and her next one-woman show was only a month away and she hadn't even begun. Oh, she knew the theme. It was to be based around a theory she'd started to develop over the past few years, a theory based both on experience and whimsy. But that didn't worry Jennifer, who had learned to regard inspiration as something as elusive as threads of gossamer that one had to gather in and then make tangible. The artist had become an expert in such matters—she was good at making emotions and ideas manifest.

The theme of the show was to be the concept that an artist could induce coincidence through image making. It wasn't a theory that her husband, Toby Gladwell, shared, but then Toby, although he too was an image maker (a film director), was not a romantic. No, indeed, she smiled, bringing to mind his oft-repeated philosophy: Toby believed in
concrete realism
, the concrete being a reference to concrete playgrounds of the housing commission flats he often set his documentary-style movies in. Despite this championing of realism the film director was most renowned for launching the career of Australian film star Jerome Thomas, an actor most famous for his romantic leads.

As a practitioner of cinema verité, Toby regarded whimsy as the terrain of the middle classes—in other words, it was utter escapism and a complete waste of time. In this the couple differed greatly from each other—her art was all about whimsy; his art was about realism. And yet, despite this, the five-year marriage was passionate, a meeting of both the sexual and intellectual.

At least that was how Jennifer, the romantic, had viewed it. But lately Toby's long absences while shooting had begun to alienate them from each other. It felt to Jennifer that while Toby's life was filling up with actors, crew, media, as well as characters from his scripts and general entourage, her own life was emptying out. It was the culmination of all her long, isolated hours in the studio, and the way all her girlfriends seemed to be getting either married or pregnant, or leaving Australia to pursue their careers overseas. And finally there was the loss of her mother, who had been one of her best friends, which had suddenly pushed Jennifer over the edge. She felt as though her life and Toby's were like scales with a dish at either end—Toby's dish was weighed down while her own floated up empty. It wasn't how Jennifer had imagined her day-to-day existence would be.

Restless, the artist got up again and counted out the space between the stool and the empty easel in long strides like a child. Outside the rain had intensified and she had to fight off the urge to rush back inside the large terrace house and cocoon herself in the quilt to spend the rest of the day listening to the rattle of the wind against the windows and the roof. She arrived at the empty easel, lifted up a whiteboard, and clamped it between the wooden bars, then picked up a whiteboard marker, her hand poised over the board. What she required was an example, a working example of her theory that would be the subject of her one-woman show—half installation, half sculpture. But to begin she needed something or someone to be an inspiration, a muse. She wrote the word
Coincidence,
then listed as many coincidences in her life as she could remember:

1. My first boyfriend had the same first name as my husband.

2. My mother was born in the same English town as Toby's grandfather.

3. My birthday is on the same day as the painter Van Gogh's.

4. We live on Verona Street, Hawthorn, and I first met Toby in Verona, Italy.

Written out like that none of it seemed very significant, and yet Jennifer could clearly remember the absurdly large number of times she'd made a small sketch of a sculpture or a maquette and then seen an element of that sculpture or something pertaining to it the next day. Like the time she accidentally chipped the nose of a stone head she was working on and the next day Toby broke his nose; or the sketch she made of the reflection of a couple in a broken mirror, then six months later the very same couple suddenly separated. She was convinced that image making was a kind of alchemy but the question was how to prove it.

The sound of the phone ringing inside the house jolted her rudely back into the prosaic. It was Toby from Rome, his voice sounding drained but hyper. There was pop music somewhere in the background, then a barrage of hooting car horns. He explained that he was standing in the Piazza Navona and it was about three a.m. and the clubs were emptying out.

“How's the shoot?” Jennifer's voice emerged smaller than she wanted, and she wished she sounded stronger, happier, more self-reliant.

“It's okay but slow. How's the work going? You still working on that theory of coincidence?”

“Kind of . . . I've just started now.”

“That's what I like to hear; you're like my own live-in sorceress.”

“Oh don't say that; you make it sound so trivial.”

“Come on, babe, you know I like your work. But listen, darl, I'm going to have to stay on for an extra week or so, and there's a producer they want me to meet. . . .”

“An extra week? But that will make it over two months.”

“I know, sweetheart. Do you want to come here?”

“You know I can't; I have my show.” Her voice tensed as an old fear surfaced, the idea that her work was less important than his.

Picking up on it, he snapped back, “I just thought I'd ask. You can always change the date of your show.”

“You know I can't do that, so why do you always say it?” She was shouting now as the car horns and the thumping disco music pulled him further and further away from her, the studio, the soft drumming of the rain on the roof. On the other end of the line she heard the sound of a woman's laugh.

“I have to go now, Jenny; we'll speak tomorrow. Love you,” his voice now pat, casual.

“Love you back,” she replied automatically as he vanished into the disconnected tone.

 • • • 

The next morning Jennifer had an appointment with her gynecologist. It was the usual checkup—breasts, smear test, and pelvic examination. She was only twenty-six but the thought of getting pregnant had already begun to hover somewhere in the recesses of their marriage. Sitting in the elegant waiting room with the pinewood furniture and gleaming steel-framed coffee tables, she glanced across at a very pregnant young girl sitting on a couch opposite. The girl smiled wanly. She was extremely pale and it looked like all her strength and energy had gone into her distended womb. Looking at her, Jennifer wondered whether she should discuss conception with the doctor, but the reality of ending up home alone with a screaming baby and no husband for months at a time was just too daunting. No, procreation would have to wait—and in any case her art was a kind of procreation.

She picked up a French edition of
Vogue
that was six months out of date. There was a photo shoot displaying a series of dramatic evening gowns in a Spanish bullring. The models—a statuesque African and an icy blonde with dead eyes—struck poses around the arena and a tethered straining bull. Behind them in the wooden stands were several rows of spectators. One of them, a tall dark-haired young man, appeared to be rising up in his seat. The serenity of his expression in a broad sculptural face was in stark contrast to the burning of his blue eyes. Fascinated by him, Jennifer stared down at the page, momentarily transported into the arena, the hot sun, the smell of the sand, the blood and the fear of the animal, the shouting in Spanish, the sharp inhalation of the mysterious young man, his fragrant sweat. . . . There was something about his proportions, the vulnerability of his expression and that rare combination of unusual good looks, that completely captivated her.

She looked around the waiting room. Now that the young girl had left, there was only one other person waiting, a thin, depressed-looking woman in her midforties. A name was called and, after getting up slowly, the woman disappeared behind the dark paneled door of the surgery. Jennifer glanced over at the receptionist. She had her back to the artist and was on the phone. Taking advantage of her distraction, Jennifer tore the page out of the fashion magazine and slipped it into her handbag. Three minutes later her own name was called.

 • • • 

Jennifer smoothed the magazine page out on her workbench, then carefully placed a sheet of glass over the top of it to flatten all the creases. Then she placed the thick orb of a magnifying glass onto the surface and ran it over the image to the man's face staring up from underneath. The details of the magnified photo curved up suddenly like a bubble of moving time.

Now she could clearly see the shape of his jaw, the balance between the fuller, slightly pouting lower lip and the thinner, more defined upper lip. The nose—strong, with a pronounced bridge and slightly asymmetrical at its tip—provided a pleasing counterbalance to the perfection of the shape of his whole face, a diamond broken only by the flare of his jaw. The eyes themselves were large but deep-set, the hooded eyelids giving him a Mediterranean look. The eyelashes were thick and black, almost too feminine in such a masculine countenance. His irises were a piercing cobalt shot through with golden yellow. They reminded Jennifer of a solar eclipse, with the sun's rays blazing up behind in a deep blue sky. They reminded her of that sense of eternity one has as a teenager, of time and age being infinite. It was a sense she, at twenty-six, had now completely lost.

His hair was thick, black, and tousled. He did not have the grooming of the beautiful who are aware of their own beauty; instead he seemed to be at war with it—it was almost as though he wished to shake it off himself, like a coat he'd inherited but wasn't comfortable wearing. The paradox made him more desirable, more complex, and, within that, fallible. Pausing, she ran the magnifying glass down his torso. His white shirt was unbuttoned at the top and the olive skin of his neck and chest were visible. He looked as if he was quite hairless. He looked, she guessed, younger than she, around twenty years old.

Toby was fifteen years older than she and, at forty-one, had a chest covered in whorls of curly brown hair. This man would be like satin, she imagined, polished wood under the fingers. The man's shoulders were quite narrow, his torso long. Slim in both hip and shoulder, he had the leanness of the intense, tipping forward as if he were about to shout at the bull.

Jennifer sat back, feeling like a swimmer taken out by the tide and only realizing it when it was too late. Was it a question of perceived loss of control? It would be risky to choose this image, this man, as her muse for the show. If she were to select a local photograph the chances of coincidence would be far higher, but Jennifer was renowned for her inability to compromise, a propensity she prided herself on. She had always set herself impossibly high standards. Besides, she now felt as if the mysterious man had chosen her and not the other way around, as if somehow he had sought her out. But the magazine was six months old and the photograph had obviously been taken in Spain. Who knew who the man actually was—a local, a tourist, perhaps even a hired model or actor? But that was exactly why she had to choose him. This photograph, the way she had come across it, was perfect. The process had been so completely random, and randomness, Jennifer felt, was exactly the right medium for her alchemy of coincidence to take place within. She would try to summon him to her and document her process. This would be her artwork. Toby might call it witchcraft, but she liked to think of it as an ancient science.

Jennifer reached for her sketchbook and studied the image under the glass. In an hour she had drawn his portrait, realistic enough for her to begin. She propped the sketch up on the easel and pulled her modeling stand out in front of her. A lump of cool white porcelain clay now stood passively on the metal turntable, waiting to be spun into life. It was that moment before creation, the junction between detachment and commitment.

Jennifer dipped her hands into a bowl of water and began kneading so that the clay became a convex ball ready to be modeled into the man's face. For a minute she paused with her hands covering the curves of the soft blank clay, summoning up the feel of his face through her body, up from the ground where her feet touched the floor, down her arms to the ends of her fingers. Closing her eyes, she imagined how the strong planes of his face, warm and yielding, would hollow and bloom. The two deep valleys that were his eye sockets, the T of bone that was his forehead and jutting nose, the pronounced arch of his mouth, the swooping curves of his cheekbones rushing back out to meet the jawbone.

Her fingers now flew over the clay, thumbs pressing in here, a wire tool subtracting mass there . . . the rough facsimile growing beneath her hands was like a primitive ancestor of the man himself, as yet unrefined and raw. The features blurred in a primordial struggle as Jennifer lost herself in the process, her conscious mind eclipsed by a far more direct and instinctive compulsion. This was what she loved about being a sculptor, this disappearance of self. It was as if she became one with the clay, the only conscious force being the creativity flowing through her hands. It was the purest emotion she knew; the only other time she ever felt something quite like it was during orgasm.