Yearn (36 page)

Toby had commented on this disappearance of self when he first watched her work. “You vanish and something else enters you,” he'd said, and to Jennifer's surprise and dismay he'd sounded frightened. It had only been when she'd watched him at work directing on set that she'd realized why: when Toby worked he became more himself. He was the opposite; it was as if he was more present, more conscious, his mental energy ramped up to a rattling pace. It was another difference that widened the gap between them.

Jennifer's hands stopped modeling. She stared down and the primitive mask stared back up. It already had a presence; the alchemy had begun. Time for lunch, she thought.

 • • • 

At the end of the day the face was complete—a delicate white rendering that, unfired, looked uncannily like a death mask. It sat drying on a table just outside the sliding door of her studio, sheltered by the branches of an old eucalyptus tree that dominated the yard. Above her the leaves rustled in the breeze and a fly, attracted to the scent, buzzed in erratic zigzags around the clay face. The mask was so realistic that even resting flat it gave the illusion that the man himself might be lying on the table, his face tilted up toward the sun. All that was missing was the flushed skin tone and blood pulsing under that thin epidermis. Jennifer, creation still racing through her own flesh, oblivious to the cooling evening, glanced down, then kissed it. Hot mouth on cold.

Inside the house the phone began to ring. She knew it was Toby with his daily check-in from Italy. With her lips still pressed to the mask she let the phone ring out into the garden, ignoring it as it bounced against the thin blue-green gum leaves to sweep around the corners of the studio like jealousy. His jealousy. She ignored it. The powder from the clay tasted chalky and when Jennifer lifted her face up from the mask her mouth was stained white. She didn't wipe the ghost kiss off. The tip of her tongue tasted the powder again. There was an under-hint of salt, of some distant sea—perhaps even tainted with the metallic pungency of blood, but then again she could have been imagining it. The phone stopped ringing.

“Let him wait—I'm always waiting for him,” she told the clay face.

 • • • 

The next day she made two nipples and a penis, visualizing an organ that would be proportional to a slender man of about six foot. As she squeezed the clay into a cylinder, running her hands backward and forward, the clay squeezing up between her cupped fingers, the penis grew in both length and circumference. It was as if she was actually pleasuring the man himself. For a moment she even thought she heard a faint sigh coming from the drying tray beside the kiln, from between the lips of the clay face. And as her fingers slipped across the viscous surface, she thought about herself, her own sex—she was making it to fit her, her ideal cock.

She came to the tip, then paused, wondering whether to give him a foreskin or not. He only looked about twenty years old, which would mean if he were European or Australian he would most likely be uncircumcised, but from a sculptural point of view it was easier and more visually pleasing to make him circumcised, so she chose to model the tip without a foreskin. Toby's own rather short and stubby organ came into her mind, and she remembered her initial disappointment on their third date when she first slipped her hands down into his jeans as he fumbled with the buttons of her blouse.

But what he lacked in size he had made up for with his mouth, pleasuring her with a genuine and rare enthusiasm. And later, on that first night on the rickety single metal bed in the cheap Italian pensione she was staying in, his lovemaking had not disappointed her. But if she had the chance to redesign his body, to sculpt in changes to a physique she loved because of its fallibilities and not its beauty, his penis would be one of the things she would change.

The erect clay penis was about seven inches long and she could just wrap her fingers around the girth with one hand, the tip was slightly larger than the shaft, curved so that she could imagine the way it would nudge against her, brushing across the tip of her clit. The testicles that sat at the base were large enough to be able to cup comfortably and were in perfect proportion to the rest of his organ. The whole sculpture lay supine, now drying next to the face, as if she had recently dismembered the living man and these parts were all that were left. But already Jennifer felt a growing godlike power, the adrenaline of complete control.

 • • • 

Two weeks later Jennifer had created and assembled all of the parts she had decided were important for the alchemy: the face, two ears, two nipples, two hands (with fingers), one penis and balls, two feet. She had cast multiples of all of these organs. They were all fired and solid. She left all of the pieces white and raw, without any kind of glaze, except for the penises. These she lovingly glazed so that the surface was polished like white glass, as if they had already been worn smooth by some fictional woman's body. She stared down at them, fixated by this idea. What kind of lover would her muse take? A beautiful creature like himself, someone who reflected his own physical perfection like a mirror? She glanced over at the magazine photo pinned up on her workboard. She didn't think he was a narcissist like that; there was something in his expression, an intelligence, that made her believe he wasn't just some professional model they'd hired for the photograph; rather, he was some handsome passerby the photographer had noticed and recruited. He would understand an artist like her; he would understand what she was trying to achieve.

She lifted one of the penises. It was the perfect weight in her hand. Unfurled and erect, there was a defiant poignancy to its arched form, as if it were a homage to fecundity itself—ancient, classical. She rubbed it against her cheek and closed her eyes. The glaze was so flawless it actually felt like skin, soft, soft skin, and a little hollow opened up inside Jennifer. Sighing, she leaned against the wall. It had been a good two months since she'd last had sex and suddenly she realized she'd been so distracted she hadn't even masturbated the whole time Toby had been away.

Jennifer sank down onto the floor and lifted her skirt. She lay there with her legs apart, the coolness of the stone seeping up into her skin. The sounds outside—the noisy magpies squabbling in the ghost gum, the faint buzz of a plane flying overhead, the drone of the cicadas—faded away as she pulled down her underpants and ran the clay penis up her leg.

“Imagine if you were waiting for him,” she thought to herself. Imagine he was about to step into the studio, his skin still smelling of sun and sweat, of the dust of the bullring, of orange blossom and all the things you associate with Spain. Imagine he spoke no English but when he looked at you, you both knew you wanted each other, without talk, without hesitation, without any of the social constraints of culture and mores. Imagine . . .

She was wet already, and as she played the tip over her clit, she imagined that the penis was real, was warm and hard, that he was pressing into her, his lips on hers, and that she was falling into those dark blue eyes. She slipped the penis into herself. The circumference pushed against her clit, then slowly at first, she began moving it backward and forward, her breath emerging in short stifled cries at the imagined pleasure of him as he took her faster and faster. His long lean legs pressed hard against her thighs, as deeper and deeper she thrust the clay penis until finally she came with a short scream. Outside one of the magpies perched on the lawn cocked its head up toward the studio.

Afterward, filled with a sweet release, she stood up and straightened her skirt back over her legs. It was as if nothing had happened. She placed the penis back on the workbench next to its comrades, then carefully arranged the pieces so that there was some spatial relationship between them all, like a jigsaw puzzle of outlandish prototypes of body parts waiting to be assembled into the perfect man.

 • • • 

Toby stayed in Italy. Jennifer spent her days in solitude, broken only by the clink of the garden gate when either the postman delivered the mail or the cleaner arrived to clean the house as she did twice a week. Her friends, knowing how insular and absent she was when preparing for a show, kept away. For once Jennifer hadn't minded. She worked with a frenetic energy, an inspiration she hadn't felt in over a year, and with each new piece the man's presence seemed to swell, pushing out the walls of the studio until he almost felt like a sound, a musical note. On the twelfth day she wrapped and packed all the pieces and placed them carefully into a box to take to her art dealer.

 • • • 

“Big secret, Jenny, eh? Big mysterious bloody secret yours truly is gonna have to flog to the public, God help me.” Max Reiner, a man who had an uneasy relationship with both his body and the large amounts of alcohol and food he consumed to maintain his Falstaff-like physique, was just back from lunch and, as was his custom, still tipsy from the two bottles he and a client, a banker from the Macquarie Group, had drunk. The art dealer's massive face, with its broken capillaries, unshaven chin, and copious amounts of nose hair, was flushed. Jennifer was the only one of his many protégées he was secretly intimidated by, and her visit was unexpected. He sat heavily on the edge of his desk and stared suspiciously at the cardboard box Jennifer had just placed on the floor.

“It's the concept for my next show, the Alchemy of Coincidence,” the artist announced a little apprehensively.

Max, turning over the title in his mind, worried at a forgotten piece of his lunch between his teeth.

“The Alchemy of Coincidence—too much of a mouthful, my dear, too intellectual for these times. What we want is snappy and flasher—something that will appeal to your average Australian nouveau riche, something that doesn't involve too much thought, too much intellectual analysis. Lifestyle, that's what the Australian cares about—lifestyle,” he finished, belching conclusively.

Jennifer did not reply; instead, lifting out the first piece, she began to unwrap it. It was one of the man's hands, fingers raised. She put it on the desk, where it sat reaching out toward the art dealer in a silent plea. Max was unimpressed.

“Okay, it's a hand, beautifully modeled; one could almost mistake it for being cast from life. As usual, Jenny, you have displayed your remarkable ability to create extraordinarily lifelike detail. I suspect that was what sold the vaginas, especially to the English. Now that was an easy, accessible concept—powerful, succinct, and very sellable. Vagina as flower . . . but hand? Of course we could put the two together, now that's a workable idea—“Hand and Vagina,” or maybe we could go more street, “Hand and Cunt.” Of course we'd have to make sure the gender of the hand is established.” He guffawed at his own wit.

Again, Jennifer ignored him and continued to unpack the pieces, the next one of which was a nipple, obviously male; imprinted into the clay were tiny pores from which hair would have sprouted. She placed the nipple next to the hand.

“This is far more ambitious, Max. The whole show will be more of an installation.”

Max groaned audibly, but forced an indulgent smile. “An installation. I guess there're always the state galleries and major collections—much harder sale though, especially in these economic times.”

In lieu of a response Jennifer reached into the box and unpacked the penis. She was sure it was the one she'd masturbated with and it gave her a secret thrill to see it now, disembodied, singular, and proud. Max picked it up and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand.

“Now I might be able to do something with that.” Max smiled—he had a fatal love of the double entendre. Jennifer grabbed it back and placed it tenderly beside the other pieces.

“Max, I'm not selling them off individually—I am conjuring up an encounter with the man whose body parts I have re-created. A complete stranger I saw in a magazine photo, a magazine from the other side of the world.” She pulled the page out of her pocket and held it up for him. Pushing his bulk away from the edge of his desk, he snatched it out of her hand and stared at it skeptically.

“You mean to say that all of these body parts belong to that bloke in the background? The one half out of his seat?”

“That's right.”

“Well, he's a looker. But he's not famous or anything, is he? I mean, why him? He's a totally arbitrary figure.”

“Exactly, and now he's not. I have begun to immortalize him by taking his image out of the temporal and into the permanent.”

Max pressed the side of his temple with a fat thumb ringed by gold. He usually made a point of having a quick nap in the back room after lunch and already the combination of the young artist's intensity and the esoteric concept she'd begun to describe was giving him a headache.

“I think I'm following—you are trying to direct events through making art?”

“An encounter with the man I am faithfully reproducing over and over.”

She unwrapped the face and held it up at about the height the man's face would have been had he been standing in front of them. Max shivered. He was a superstitious man despite a strong mercantile streak and, frankly, the mask's hyperreal appearance made him feel as if a ghost had just entered the gallery.

With a dramatic flourish Jennifer placed the face next to the other pieces and strolled over to the far wall of the gallery, the white walls broken only by the current exhibition of pastoral watercolors inspired by the artist's experience in the computer game Second Life.

“I'll blow up the original magazine photo to full length, then fill the space with as many duplicates of these body parts as I can make before September. They'll be placed in complete randomness on the floor—in other words, there is to be no meaning or logic to the display.”

Max moved off the desk and stretched out his arms; they seemed to encircle the space he regarded as both sacred and entirely his own—no matter what his artists might assume. “Linking the notion of randomness to coincidence—random events equal coincidence, whereas ‘meaning' is what we project to understand such things?”