I laughed and smiled. I would have been delighted just at this act, but she had more to show me. One of the girls, a new one, I don’t know her name, only that she is short and a bit chubby, starting whimpering, then gasping repeatedly, like a hysteric. Darvulia looked to me, said that my girls were snivellers, and that she could quiet them.
I nodded and she moved towards the girl, grabbed her by the hair, dragged her away from her table and pulled her towards the stove where the flatirons were heating. The girl continued to scream. Darvulia picked up an iron and shoved the hot triangle into the girl’s nose and face. The girl made an unintelligible noise, her mouth first blocked, then transformed from orifice to wound by the searing metal. Her nose, which was piggish to begin with, seemed to melt under the pointed tip of the iron, and the flesh, then the bone of her jaw sank in. I could hear the muscle and fat bubble, and the room smelled of burnt meat. The girl eventually fainted, and Darvulia pulled the iron away, dropped the body on the floor. The face was ravaged; the eyes were intact, but the nose, mouth and jaw were a raw, simmering wound.
After supper, I asked Darvulia to stay for some Tokaji. I told her how pleased I was with how she handled my seamstresses. And I told her what I had discovered, with the blood and my skin. She did not blink once. Instead, she put down her glass of wine and put her hand on my forearm. She said that if I would allow it, we could do much of this work together.
She is to move into the castle and join my entourage at the end of this week.
The lips threaded shut, the iron melting the girl’s mouth. The images of Darvulia torturing the seamstresses consume me, make my anxieties about Henry and Maria’s friendship seem small as a hangnail. I think of Foster’s evasions. I imagine him in his sideroom with his little pile of books and magazines. What would he tell me in exchange for a look at a copy of Báthory’s diaries?
I need to get the rest from her, to know if they are authentic. Maybe it’s best to be friendly. I dial her number.
“Darling,” she says, “so wonderful to hear from you. My email, you received it?”
“Yes.” I want to ask if I can come over right now and look at the photos, the proof that they’re real. “Very compelling.”
“I thought you would like it. I am very glad. And you and Henry, you are coming to the Tate tomorrow?”
The way she says it sounds like she assumes there’s no way we wouldn’t. It almost makes me want to tell her no. But I try to sound cheerful and force myself to say, “Um, yeah, I think we can.”
“Good, good,” she says. “We have hardly seen each other lately. It will be so wonderful for all of us to go out, do something fun.”
“Yes, sure.” It’s true, I haven’t seen her since the opening, even though she’s been almost omnipresent: the emails, diaries, studio visits with Henry. She’s too much in my life, but only as a phantom; I haven’t been alone with her in weeks.
“So, did you see your Henry’s review last week?” she asks.
“Yes. It’s clipped out and posted on our fridge. Nice photo.” I can’t keep the sarcasm from creeping in.
“Yes,” says Maria, “Edward said the paper was very pleased with it. Much good feedback, from readers.”
“That’s nice.” I pause and restrain myself from asking if Edward has heard anything else Foster-related around the newsroom.
“And Henry, he is pleased?”
“Of course.”
“Did he mention, Edward and I, we visited with him yesterday, at his studio.”
“Yes, he mentioned you were very friendly.”
“Ah, well. He is very kind. So, we shall all meet tomorrow, two o’clock?”
Again, she seems sincere. Maybe she is in her own spontaneous and eccentric way. Maybe, as Henry said, she’s the most interesting friend I have.
Chapter Seventeen
We file onto Millennium Bridge and merge with the pedestrians pouring across the Thames. Henry’s in a good mood this afternoon. We’re walking slowly, watching boats on the river. I reach to hold his hand. He looks at me, smiles and puts his arm around my shoulder, pulls me in synch with his step, his hipbone brushing my waist. We stop halfway across and lean against the railing. “You look nice today, peach delight,” he says. “Pretty dress.” He runs his hand down the side of my skirt, holds me close.
Things feel easy together, how they used to feel all the time before we moved. It’s just been a period of adjustment, I tell myself. The new city, new flat. The new job that’s a lot more complicated than I anticipated.
We hadn’t been dating long when I decided to move here with him. We were in his studio and he was smoothing strips of plaster-soaked cotton around my left leg. Six inches above my kneecap, the brush of his fingers against my inner thigh tickled.
“I told you, stay still.” He didn’t look up and continued to wrap.
“I’m trying.”
“Just relax. Have more wine.”
In my right hand I held a cup half full of shiraz. I took a sip, careful not to wiggle too much.
It was February. Two months before Henry’s graduating show. We were in his studio and I was a model for his final project. He had piles of plaster casts of body parts scattered around the room. Hands in one corner, a few backs in another. Four chests, two female, rested by the door; three torsos and a male pelvis lay nearby. I sat in the middle of the room on a folding chair in my bluebell-print panties. My leg was propped up on a plastic milk crate, knee bent at a thirty-degree angle.
“That’s better,” he said. “Don’t I take care of my models?”
His head was down, focused on the plaster. He wrapped the damp cotton farther up my leg. The cloudy plaster water bled off the material, inched towards my hipbone and blotted out the faint café-au-lait birthmark on my inner thigh. I watched the top of Henry’s head as he wrapped, his severe widow’s peak, an occasional flash of the half-hoop earrings that looked like fangs in his lobes. He stopped wrapping the plaster a few inches from my panties. Finally he looked at me, a half smile, his gold-brown eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Think you can stay still while it dries, princess?”
“I’m a professional.” I said. “We models suffer for art.”
“That’s the way I like it.” He stood up and ran his hand up the right side of my abdomen, his hands still wet from the plaster, threatening to tickle me.
“Hey!” I shouted.
“Just kidding, relax.” He crossed to the other side of the room, grabbed a few rags and started to clean his hands. His green T-shirt, littered with white smudges, was a half size too small for his tall, lean frame.
“Only the most dedicated model could maintain her composure in such a challenging environment,” I said.
He dropped the rags, poured himself a glass of wine from the box he kept on the shelf beside his books. “Well, then,” he said, pulling up another milk crate and sitting down beside me, “I’ll have to keep you around. Not that you’re going anywhere right now.” He motioned to my leg.
Henry had been accepted to the residency in London the previous week. We’d gone for pints of Moosehead the afternoon he received the news. But for me the celebration was tinged with anxiety. We hadn’t discussed what would happen between us when he left in the fall. We’d been dating five months. I was due to defend my dissertation in the spring and I was applying for a few jobs, but I didn’t really know yet what I was doing after graduation. Ever since the letter came, Henry had been talking about nothing but London.
I drank the rest of my wine. “You’ll never find a better model in London.”
He laughed. “Really, it’s a pretty big city.” He stood up, took my plastic cup and refilled it from the box.
“Yeah, but, I mean...”
“What?” He handed me the cup and sat back on the milk crate.
“It’s just, you know.” I wanted him to say, No one could be better than you, I’ll miss you terribly, would you come with me?
“Know what?” He leaned
back, tilted his head down and stared. His eyes were close-set, wolfish. When he stared at me like that, I felt exposed, a stray kitten. I didn’t know what to say.
I squirmed.
“Stay still—it’s not quite set yet,” he said.
I wanted to leave, but his almost-dry cast kept me captive. Underneath, my skin was starting to itch.
Henry stood up. “London’s going to be amazing. The program, the city. Everything. So much more going on there.” He moved behind me and put an arm around my shoulder. He started smoothing my hair.
I didn’t want to lose him to this move, yes. But I also felt jealous. He was moving to an exciting city to pursue an opportunity, a discipline he was passionate about. I pictured what the year ahead held for me: stacks of job applications, intense interviews, grant proposals, laborious research studies. No adventure. No risk. Since he’d received the news, I’d been daydreaming of going to London too. I’d pictured myself working at Stowmoor, where I knew Foster was serving his sentence. I imagined starting an exciting, important new job at one of the biggest forensic hospitals in Europe and working on my dream case.
“You’re quiet,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “Five more minutes and we’ll cut you loose from this thing.”
“Henry, what if I came with you?”
When Henry and I hit the south end of the bridge, we walk around the outside of the Tate Modern and down the concrete ramp to the huge, factory-like entrance. Henry drops his arm; we weave between families pushing strollers and green-haired teenagers sporting ripped black fishnets.
I see Maria waiting for us at the base of the ramp; she spots us and starts to wave. Her hair is loose and looks almost white against her bright red wool coat.
“Henry! Dani! Over here!” she says, hopping up and down.
I can’t help but smile a little. I look at Henry and he’s full-on grinning. “Good to see you!” he says, as we approach Maria. She embraces him and kisses him on each cheek.
“And Dani!” She hugs me as well, gives me the two kisses, and then keeps hold of my hand. “It is so wonderful that you could make it, with the short notice. We will all have such a wonderful day.”
“Where’s Edward?” I ask.
“He is sliding.” She points up. Henry and I crane our necks towards the ceiling and see a criss-cross network of Plexiglas slides in the middle of the building. There’s an entrance to a slide on each floor, and the tubes corkscrew down to the ground floor. We see bodies jetting through the transparent slides, people spat out, a little dizzy, at the bottom.
“It is an exhibition, see?” Maria hands us a leaflet that explains the piece, Test Site, by Carsten Höller. It says sliding is supposed to inflict “voluptuous panic on an otherwise lucid mind.”
“Is Edward reviewing this or something?” I ask.
“No,” Maria laughs, “I do not think so. He wants just to slide. Ah, there, he is at the bottom now!” She points again.
Edward picks himself up from the end of one of the Plexiglas chutes.
“That’s good fun, yeah?” says Edward, putting his arm around Maria’s waist. “Hello, hello,” he says and shakes our hands. “Nice to see you again. So, are any of you going to give it a go?”
“With these shoes, I do not think so,” says Maria, pointing to her heeled Mary Janes. “But I am glad you had fun.”
“I might give it a go,” says Henry.
“You boys,” Maria laughs. “Let us see the exhibit first. Here, already we have the tickets.” She hands us one each.
“Thanks, but you didn’t have to get them,” I say.
“It was really no trouble,” says Edward. “Shows are free for members, so that covers us, and I always get comp tickets. I’m happy to see them go to use.”
“Shall we go?” Maria links her arm with mine, and the men pair up ahead of us.
The Louise Bourgeois exhibit is not very crowded. I hear Edward and Henry art-speaking ahead of us: “Her work really didn’t get sufficient critical attention until later in her career, and it’s hard to say which movement can really claim her”; “Really, I think she resisted categorization, both organically and intentionally...”
Maria is silent. She reads the pamphlet about the retrospective and breaks away to look at the works. I’m floating around the gallery, trying to focus on the paintings, but I’ve got one ear open to eavesdrop on Henry and Edward, and one eye on Maria. I feel outside of their little group. It’s probably something I’ve constructed in my head, but still I worry I’m being purposefully excluded.
I’ve been standing in front of the same painting for five minutes: it’s a long, rectangular piece, the canvas coated with a dark grey wash, a tall, blocky skyscraper in the background and a woman’s naked body from the waist down, legs splayed, in the foreground. I’ve managed to register the title, one of the Femme Maison series, but the rest of the blurb is lost on me. What would I say about this piece if Edward asked me? Maria and Henry would have brilliant commentaries, and I would probably stutter or relate it back to some outdated, boring inkblot theory I learned about in third-year undergrad.
I see Edward and Henry move into the next room. Maria hovers near the doorway. She’s studying a caged sculpture.
“Like it?” I ask. I scan the curatorial statement: it’s a scale marble sculpture of the artist’s childhood home, enclosed in a cage, meant to symbolize the trauma of her childhood.
“Like is perhaps not the right word,” she says. “Very skilled—the detail, the house, amazing. Simple, yet so precise.” She still doesn’t look at me; her eyes fix firmly on the piece. She starts to walk around it; I follow. She makes a full circle and seems ready to move on to the next room. I try to get her attention again.
“Do you think Henry and Edward are having a good time?” I whisper. Through the archway, I see that they are already halfway down the next gallery.
“Hmm?” She looks at me, seemingly startled from a reverie.
“Henry and Edward?”
“What about them? Look, already, they are there. Probably they are talking shop, as you say.”
They are engrossed in an animated conversation, presumably about the sculptures in front of them. Edward gestures, Henry nods; then they reverse the actions.
Maria puts her hand on the small of my back, leans towards my ear. “Dani, they are fine. They are in their element. Do not worry.”
“I’m not worrying, I just want to be sure that everyone is having a good time.”
“But are you? You are distracted. Here.” I follow her to a line of totem-like sculptures displayed in the next room. “Just be still. Just look. Experience this. You do not have to think, just feel what you feel.”
She says this in the kind of tone we are supposed to use for patients who get stuck on the literal details of questionnaires. Except, in contrast to my fake-calm voice, hers sounds sincere. Like she cares, like she knows for certain that she’s leading me towards some new and special place.
I try it. By the fourth room, I even stop looking at the pamphlet to see if my reaction to the spider-nest-vortex sculpture matches what’s been written by the curator. I feel a relaxation, a freedom from judgment. I walk into the sixth room, lost in my thoughts. I’m drawn to one of the sculptures; it’s called Avenza Revisited. The name means nothing to me, and for the first time I don’t worry that it doesn’t. Instead, I focus on the piece: a blobby plaster creature, with egg-sac type bubbles on the top. Languid streams of plaster extend from the bottom and settle into fleshy ribbons on the floor. Entrails, a sliced abdomen, guts spilled. Like Báthory’s diaries.
The next room contains installations staged within cages. I lose Maria in a series of larger pieces, miniature rooms, boudoirs filled with sculptures of limbs, red stuffed animals, pillows on beds. Cages containing textiles, old clothes, a white woollen peacoat with the cold of anxiety is very real painted on the back in red letters.
I step into the last room. Small sculptures, arranged on shelves behind gl
ass, line two walls. I wander down one strip until I come to another Femme Maison piece. A Barbie doll encased in a brick of clay. Her face is embedded in the grey mass; only her blonde hair, her arms and her long legs stream free. A few cracks run up the side of the clay, like the doll tried to struggle against this smothering.
“I think Báthory, she would wish she had thought of that.” Maria is to my left. I’m not sure how long she’s been there.
I don’t respond at first. Then I say, “But there would be no blood.”
“True. But I think that was rather secondary. Something she could take. She craved it, wore it. It became hers.”
“And how would she make something like this hers?”
For a moment she stands very close. I feel the hairs on my arm tingle, my skin aware of her proximity. I wait for her touch.
She walks out of the room.
I push open the doors and walk into the foyer and gift shop area. Maria and Edward are standing near the shop entrance, chatting over a stack of souvenir cards.
“There you are!” says Maria.
“You enjoyed the retrospective, then,” says Edward.
“Yes,” I say. “Very engaging.” Suddenly I start to worry again about saying something clever about the art. Maybe engaging was too vapid. “And you?” I manage to ask back.
“Yes, yes, brilliant. The Tate does manage some wonderful shows, even though it is somewhat like a supermarket for art.”
“Oh, do not be such a snob,” says Maria.
Edward laughs, puts his arm around her shoulders and kisses her hair. “You are right, my darling. You always lighten me up.”
I feel like he’d rather I weren’t there. “Where’s Henry?” I ask.
“Oh, he’s having a go on the slide,” he says. “Shall we meet him down there?”
“Sure,” I say, and we all start walking towards the stairs.
“I will meet you there in a moment,” says Maria, “I must stop at the loo. Go on, I will be a moment only.”
Quiver Page 13
