by SK Dyment
“And that was it?”
“Since that day, Ben and I have been on our own.”
“Who was your father?”
“Men. Possibly men who might have cared. In my case, a very beautiful Russian artist, paid to paint flames on motorcycle gas tanks, made love to my mother on a boat in the Stockholm harbour. It was a party. Vanished the next day. No clue she was pregnant. In Ben’s case, an American traveller she met in a bar. An artist, a writer, and dancer. Stayed with her for week, no forwarding address, also no clue she was pregnant. That’s why Ben is African American and Scandinavian. Children were not kind to him, and I used to get in fist fights all the time. There are racists and people who are curious beyond the point of comfort.”
In her memory, Vespa sees herself as one of two little children left alone on the ice very much like seal pups on a floe, their eyes were large and searching. And although no one had struck them with a club, to Vespa, their helplessness seemed complete. The only relatives in their lives had been an uncle and his wife in Canada, and so the two children were sent there when they were ten and twelve.
She extends herself across her bed and lights a cigarette. “The uncle was Catholic, fascinated by the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and preoccupied with arguments about the existence of a moral Divinity. I was familiar with philosophical and theological talk and allergic to it at the same time.”
Jackie, who spent her girlhood escaping evangelical wrath in foster care, says nothing. She does, however, give Vespa an injured look that suggests the possibility of an enormous, silent common ground.
“My uncle, like my mother, also knew a great deal about motorcycles. That’s where their similarity ended, but it was endearing enough to me that I hung around him until I was a fourteen-year-old drug abuser and hooker. I don’t think he really noticed the turn my life was taking.”
“He could have looked at the earth plane, instead of always looking at a higher one.”
“With teenagers, that is wise advice.” She pauses, not wanting to be self-absorbed in the way she has just described her uncle.
Jackie laughs, guessing at her hesitation, and takes the cigarette from her fingers. “This isn’t oppressing me.”
Vespa reclines. To Jackie, she looks very much like a marble sculpture, only her eyes are dancing and full of life.
Vespa explains that the point she turned to hooking and hanging out in galleries coincided with a corrupt moment in the history of Western art, which was almost exclusively appreciative of long, thin females with black clothes and European affectations. This was a matter of taste that made life more difficult for any serious female artist who might be built with a body type that did not conform to the sexual code of the day. Vespa had felt fortunate to be slender.
“Taste,” as Jackie agrees, is frequently another word for “cowardice,” and cowardice is the foundation of “eugenics.”
“Wherever ‘taste’ defines access,” Vespa remarks, “Fascism is lurking in the garden.”
Vespa, however, new on the scene, was ardent about her own abilities as a fledgling artist and finicky about which flatterers she actually took home. As unjust social laws go, she soon had a reputation for sleeping with everyone she refused to sleep with.
Although her accent was something people found interesting, at that age, she also had a deliberate-sounding stutter and the problem of repeating phrases in a sort of poetic Tourette’s compulsion she could not control or predict. A speech therapist would have relieved her of hours of suffering owing to teasing. A few years later, or in a different circle, performance at a microphone might have declared her an avant-garde poet. Realizing that all the other wispy but apparently successful women were attached to males who defended their honour, Vespa tells Jackie she decided to follow their lead. “I caved in and became involved with a man called Skip Donkely. Skip Donkely was thirty-five years my senior. Since it was his opinion that I was a genius, he set me up with a studio that allowed me to sculpt clay, cast in plaster, and then transfer my casts to bronze.”
“What was the trade-off?”
“My soul, almost my life, but at first, it was mornings of contortionist sex in his studio.”
“So, you have no soul now?”
“I haven’t got the nice untarnished one I started out with. He only asked that I let him care take all of my pieces, photograph them for my portfolio, and that I help him with details such as realist renderings of hands and feet.”
“Oh, so it’s like Camille Claudel and The Gates of Hell.”
“Who?”
“One of the best sculptors ever to have lived. She did all of Rodin’s details, and was a model for The Gates of Hell. Her likeness is quite visible amongst his damned. ”
“As I worked with Skip, he subjected me to theological lectures about the necessary existence of evil. It was as if he was trying to warn me of a locomotive I could not see coming down the rails. He was. For a while, I felt comfortable with his lectures because they reminded me of home, and I even wondered if my uncle would approve. Then his arguments began to annoy me, and I offered him an elaborate objection to God.”
“I think Skip was far too old for your uncle to approve of him.”
“He would’ve smacked Skip Donkely on the head with a religious statuette. Definitely not given him approval.”
“So, did he promote your sculptures?”
“No, actually, caretaking my work seemed to mean hiding it away. As the days wore on, he became more insistent that I model for his, or work on his sculptures for him, and that I put off sculpting and designing mine.”
“Creative deferral. Our fucked-up society is built on it.”
“At this point, I began to wonder which one of us was the good one in the relationship, and which one was the necessary evil. I already had a feeling I knew which one considered himself the omnipotent God. One night, I drank too much boxed white wine at a vernissage and told him what I thought.”
With it, came a terrible fight.
Skip Donkely threw her out of the studio and kept her art. Later, she saw it in a gallery. She was beginning to drink every day. Next to it were other pieces she had done major details on. These were of special mention by the critics. Everybody loved them. All of the pieces had his name on them, something she declared a career-rescuing con job, a life preserver stolen from a drowning artist.
“I could only comfort myself with the idea that my stolen life preserver made of metal and rock must eventually sink even the most buoyant of male reputations.”
With very few friends, the thought was colder than the ice cubes swimming in her many glasses of Southern Comfort. She was still drowning. Left without even a photo, and no money to make the kind of expensive sculptures that she had trained herself to make, she wandered down to Gastown, to drink amongst the damned.
“That’s where I met Wanda,” she announces.
Jackie, who is drifting under the stroke of Vespa’s fingertips, but definitely paying attention, responds, “In hell! One-armed Wanda, armed at all times with a prosthetic limb so heavy it floors the most challenging of combatants.”
“Yes, and armed with a vulnerable streak and fine-tuned mind, despite her religious side.”
“Blessed with a good mind,” says Jackie.
Now that she has said it, Vespa thinks she sees Jackie realizing it sounds nicer than she had thought it would. Not contrite, but kindly. Maybe Jackie, Vespa wonders, like herself, spends days wishing she had a little more perspective on basics like blessings and luck.
“It was Wanda who told me that what had happened to me, happened all the time. Wanda encouraged me to go to art school, and I did. To pay for the classes, I landed work with a number of escort agencies. In my books, that gave me complete independence. But the work was not pleasant, often cruel. Then I smashed my fingers with a chisel hammer and had to work with only one hand.
I moved slowly toward an arts degree. Of course, I read about Camille Claudel. I resolved to not spend my old age in an asylum, or ‘hell’ as you put it. I wondered if it could be done. I toured my sculptures. It was hopelessly expensive. Skip Donkely accused me of plagiarism and told me he was getting a lawyer. He did this by leaving my most important opening after having a tantrum in front of the press. With Skip flexing his influence over my life, the galleries, of course, all gave me bad reviews. People said everywhere that my work was a knock-off of a Skip Donkely.”
“Someone should have knocked him off,” says Jackie.
“Well, Rudy, my old boyfriend, broke into Skip’s workshop, found, right where I told him they would be hiding, pornographic photos of me dated before the legal age of consent, And me, the fallen angel, took the old man to court, as well as his fictitious lawyer.”
“Fictitious lawyer?”
“His rampage at the art opening, the speech he gave to the press, all made up. Even the lawyer was invented.”
Jackie blows out her cheeks.
“Yes, and I was awarded the expense of my arts studies, while the newspapers splashed the embarrassing photos of my juvenile self draped next to the old man’s sculptures all over the living section and the arts section pages for days. Those photos that they did not deem overly pornographic, I should say. Something else they went to lengths to mention in the press was how some of them were just too pink for publication. Skip, instead of apologizing, was thrilled to be the rogue in the centre of the scandal.”
“Well, after all, it wasn’t him naked in the middle of the newspaper.”
“You know, Jackie, I actually think he got some sort of amusement out of seeing that humiliation.”
“Humiliation? You said you were vindicated.”
“There was still conjecture about which claims were his and which sculptures were mine. It dragged. He got to be the bad boy, and I was allowed to remain the exploited virgin, as long as people could see the nudes.”
Vespa tells her how she moved on to abstract masses of wires and elaborately welded steel strips, trying to live down the feeling of being a famous old man’s pet.
“I loved my metal animals and began trying to automate my welded pieces. I felt happy for the first time, until my closest allies started to criticize my new work. It was Rudy that hurt the most because even though he was a cruel genius, he had been my cruel genius. I should have guessed he was too fucked-up to love a woman without having his penis involved.”
“Not all men are like that,” Jackie says, “but basic human decency is when caring does not require fucking. So where was your brother?”
“Ben was all hot about his new motorcycle, and his plans for a shop, but there was nothing for me to offer him about my life, except that I had been horribly exploited. Ben had risen above the drag of experiencing racism and was making a brave life for himself, while I felt hollow and useless to him. After we finished laughing about how I had punished Skip, he wanted to see what I had done next. To me, in those days, everyone had the same disappointed look when they saw the wire animals I had created. Like I had lost it or something, or let them all down. Not like I was evolving, just like they were, but that I had really cracked up. “
“You needed someone to tell you it was all right to follow a bliss.”
“Rudy would have told me that. Only, almost overnight, Rudy had become someone I didn’t want to know. Someone who abused me. So, I came up with the idea that I needed to get out of my head and release something in my mind and really have a breakthrough. Instead, I spent two nights in the hospital after overdosing. I almost died, and it was a total miracle that I got help.”
“I’m glad you’re still here,” Jackie replies.
“And in the hospital, I dreamed of a woman behind strips of steel, caged inside her own desires. Almost at the same time, Ben had the accident with his bike. So, flying out on the plane, I thought the dreams were of me. Then, when I met you, I realized it was your face.”
“My face?”
“Your face was the strange woman.”
“A woman behind bars.”
“Caged desire.”
Jackie lies on her back, drawing slow circles around Vespa’s breasts with a finger dipped in wine, and listening to a pop song on the radio as if the vocalist on the radio, who will be there when Vespa is not, is the one with whom she needs to feel a bond. They watch the ceiling fan and make love. They are twin engines mounted on the same featherbed frame, racing down a long dusty road patched with sunlight and shadows. Jackie, who understands small motors and knows exactly how to automate any of Vespa’s steel sculptural animals, needs to talk to her new girlfriend at the same length as Vespa has spoken to her. Vespa who knows how to bring Jackie out of the cage, where she can love more than only books and machines, needs to wander naked into the lonely places in her lover’s heart. Jackie, who had no idea desire could involve caring, tilts her head and listens to the hot words of Vespa’s passion, syllables whispered behind an electrical arc.
12.
“EVEN THOUGH I had removed a banking machine with a thousand-notes dispensing coil inside, I went back to my regular day job and was at work a half-hour early the next day. I stayed employed that way, not celebrating my new money but continuing to appear to be the most unlikely person to have done such a thing.”
“You just carried on as if nothing had happened?” asks Vespa, a strawberry and vodka mixer in her hand. She stretches herself across Jackie’s sheets.
“Only I couldn’t stand it,” Jackie replies. “I completed ten more days welding for Turner’s all-expenses-spared Vancouver Twin Towers project, and then, after seeing several of my cohorts leave on stretchers, I collected a letter of recommendation from my supervisor and bowed out.”
“You shouldn’t brag about these things. I don’t have to know.”
“Well, you don’t know the salient details, but I trust you. I am taking you into my trust.”
“What if you someday brag to the wrong person?”
“Well, I didn’t, or I wouldn’t be here. If the police ever try to solve it, they’ll never prove it was me. They’ll never know, and you won’t tell them. That’s the whole point.”
Vespa nods. Jackie is right about her, but it is still troubling. Vespa is the sort of person who wishes she could shoplift or tell a lie.
“I won’t tell,” says Vespa.
“I know you won’t tell, because you believe me. You don’t know anything.”
“Well, I have to know something about you. Just don’t tell me anything I’m not going to be able to handle. You haven’t killed any animals, have you?”
“My God! I’m a vegan, Vespa. I can’t even kill mice. If you ever eat at my place, you’ll see. Everything in the cupboard has been played with by my mice. I don’t care, I never care. One is called, ‘Slinky,’ and one is called, ‘Stinky.’ They are the grandmice and they have many children. I wouldn’t even move to a new apartment without making certain they get in the box.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“So?”
“So, I took the cool twenty grand and drove to New York City. It was my first visit there, and I was romantic about the place. I had received a very excited letter from Wanda.”
“Wanda?”
“She was getting parts as an extra in art-school movies, but they looked like they were leading to something big. In Wanda’s letters, all her female friends were talented, but were all getting treated like sewage. And they were all going to art school by any means they could.”
“Well, that was me!”
“Well, I guess that was you. I kept the letters. We can look for them some day. I placed them all in a special folder and read them again from time to time, responding with a postcard of the Empire State building, Mirror Lake in Lake Placid Village, and Prospect Point, Niagara Fal
ls. I continued my life, plucking off outdoor ATM drive-throughs in the resort areas of New York State and Ohio. I enjoyed the fact that it is legal to be in possession of the tools of burglary in New York State. I returned to Toronto and found an automated bank machine actually parked up against a steel door in a busy restaurant-deli with a narrow alley running along its side.”
“That’s too easy!”
“As far as I was concerned, I was convinced the people who worked there had placed it there so they could rob it themselves at their own convenience. That’s the way my mind used to work in those days.”
“In those days? How about now?”
Jackie grins at her, ignoring the question. “The next night, I used a new plumbing gas with acetylene in the mix, outfitted it with a cutting tip, and went to work cutting a hole through to the deadbolts on the inside.”
“The next day?”
“I never leave luck past the point of spontaneity,” she adds, taking the drink from Vespa’s hand and sipping. “I found the gas disappointingly slow. Or maybe it was just the minutes ticking off while I worked. I cut through the first layer of steel, and then I found there was a second panel more reinforced than the first. I took out a mallet and began going to work on those hinge pins, heating up the metal around them,” she mimes the action, “and punching them up!” she punches an invisible bolt with an invisible hammer, “as fast as I could!”
“Well, you were…” Vespa gestures to her invisible watch.
“Yes! Running out of time! But then, to my complete surprise, the entire door fell open on an angle and struck me—bam! Full force on the head!” She points to her forehead.
“My God! Were you okay? I mean, you’re here.”
“No, I was not okay. I’m here now, but I was not okay. I had a nosebleed, and my scalp bled heavily, and a three-hundred-pound door was angled and blocking my way. I sank to the ground and noticed I was not breathing at all if you can believe that, at all. And my pulse, which normally races, was slowed to a crawl. I dropped the bag of tools, bang-bang, and I went to sleep.”
