by Sally Mandel
But the living quarters seemed incidental in the apartment, as if all the necessities of daily life had been only grudgingly allotted territory. Easily two-thirds of the room was given over to David’s completed work. Stone shapes, marble, sandstone, alabaster. There were busts of faces here and there and one immense torso, but mainly the carvings were free-form. They were forceful, multitextured, and pleaded to be touched. Maggie felt a lump in her throat. She turned to David, who was watching her anxiously.
“Thanks,” he said.
“May I take a closer look?”
They moved among the pieces while he introduced each one as if it were a friend.
“This,” he said, caressing the surface of a white lustrous piece, “is very recent.”
Maggie understood that the work had something to do with her. She examined it curiously. It was smaller than many of his other sculptures, only about a foot high. It was pear-shaped with a voluptuous rounded bottom. Out of the top, the suggestion of a curved shaft appeared, then tapered and disappeared into space. Maggie suddenly wished she could sit down before her knees gave way.
“What’s it made of?” she asked.
“Carrara marble. I did it after we had coffee. It was something about the way you got into that cab, those jeans …”
She knew he was going to kiss her. She stiffened, but his mouth was so tender, so undemanding and gently inquisitive, that she found herself responding. He held her for a long time, in the bright light with the dust motes dancing around them. Finally she leaned back in his arms. “I guess I don’t have to tell you that I don’t usually perform this way.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Apologize.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You really think this is a performance?”
“Oh,” Maggie said. “No. This is just not possible,” she murmured.
“You can’t be the artist you are and talk to me about impossibilities,” David said.
“Ah, David, you’ve got your work cut out for you,” she said. “I’ve been living in negatives for a long time.” She disengaged herself. “May I have a cup of tea or something?”
“Yes.” He tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “May I do your ears sometime?”
“I’m beginning to think you can do anything you please.” She laughed. “Like I mean …” She laughed again. “Oh, Lord, I sound just like my fifteen-year-old daughter.” She stopped, testing, but even the thought of Susan did not sober her. She sat at the table and watched him move around the tiny kitchen. He spooned loose tea into a tea ball and hung it inside a squat earthenware pot.
“Does a dormouse live in there?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Margaret Herrick Hollander.”
He looked at her quizzically.
“That’s me.” She shook her head. “What am I doing here?”
“You don’t sound unhappy about it.” He handed her a mug that had phases of the moon painted all around it.
“I’m thrilled with myself.” They both laughed.
“Are you looking for an explanation?” he asked, sitting down opposite her with his tea.
“Yes. All the time. Today it seems metaphysical. My friend Robin lost her baby and now I’m being born.”
“It’s probably futile to analyze,” David said. “It’s just here, and we’d better figure out what to do with it.”
Maggie’s stomach lurched. She put down her cup and tried to forget the unmade bed on the floor behind her back. “I don’t know you. Maybe you killed your mother and chopped her up into little pieces.”
“I’ll admit to the fantasy.”
“You just have the one brother, no sisters?”
“Yes. What have you got?”
“A sister. An artist. She’s the talented one.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, I have a gift, but Joanne would be a great artist if she’d discipline herself.”
“That the party line?”
Maggie looked startled. Then she began thoughtfully, “I wonder if maybe a good girl can never be a great artist. Do you think? Maybe one has to be a maverick. Joanne’s like that. Doesn’t give a damn about convention. God, she’s pretty miserable.”
“Does that go with it too, the misery?”
“I don’t know. I suppose there have to be some happy artists.”
“I know I’ve said this before, but it’s hard for me to imagine you not working,” David said.
“It got edged out, I guess. There didn’t seem to be time for it. I told myself it wasn’t important, not as much as it would be for somebody like Joanne. Didn’t you ever stop?”
He nodded. “In the army.”
“You in the army? Heavens.”
“Yes, but they let me design things—garages, a recreation room. And it was good for me, being in the service. It made me feel lucky to be what I am. I always knew I’d get out and have control over my own life. There were so many others …”
“Did they cut off your hair?”
“Yes.”
She tried to imagine him in a crewcut. It seemed impossible. Suddenly she needed to know what he looked like in every phase of his life. “Do you have a photograph album?”
“No.” He was smiling.
“Someday when you’re out I’d like to come up here and go through this place. I want to know what brand of socks you wear, what your checkbook looks like, whether you’ve got a collapsible umbrella or a long skinny black one … although come to think of it, I bet you don’t own one at all.”
He laughed. “I don’t.” He poured some more tea from the brown pot. “What kind of art does your sister make?”
“Representational. Portraits, mainly. She earns a lot of money when she works at it.”
“You like her paintings?”
Maggie thought for a moment. “Not really. Everyone always has the same kind of sour expression. She’s great with color. Acrylics.”
“You don’t approve?”
“For me, I can’t stand them. They don’t feel right or smell right. Oils are so delicious. I’d just as soon eat them as paint with them.”
“Let me get you some more tea.”
“I’ve got to go.” They watched each other. Maggie had the sensation that she was staring into a mirror. “Do we look alike?” she asked. “That might explain it.”
“A little narcissism?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head and rose with her. “I want to wait on you. Do for you. Will you let me?”
“I’m not used to it.”
“Get used to it.” He held her by the shoulders. “You’ll be back here again.” She was silent. “You’re a very strong woman. You can handle it.”
“I don’t feel strong.”
“Be strong enough. Don’t shut the door on this.” He kissed her. She could feel the tension and power in his back, and yet he was tender. He smelled of marble dust. “Maggie, Maggie,” he whispered against her mouth.
She wrenched herself from him and imagined a beautiful rich tapestry tearing in two. At the top of the stairs, she turned to see him framed in the doorway, a clean form like the pieces of stone behind him, shimmering in the light like fanciful shapes at the bottom of a transparent sea.
Maggie stumbled out onto West End Avenue and stood blinking on the sidewalk, letting the heat wash over her. Then the roar of the Seventy-ninth Street bus reminded her that a cool green apartment awaited her on the other side of the park. She walked the short block to the bus stop, stepped up onto the bus, and took a seat in the back. She could not stop grinning. A trim woman who embarked at Broadway gave Maggie the brief suspicious glance New Yorkers reserve for lunatics. But Maggie’s smile broadened. She had experienced David Golden and life would never be the same. His connection to her was a fact of natural law, as absolute and basic as the principles that governed the solar system. This afternoon, s
he had had a revelation worthy of Charles Darwin or Sir Isaac Newton.
It was not until she got off the bus that she wondered what she would say to Matthew and the children. She was nearly forty-five minutes late already. She could say that she had run into someone from her art class, started talking, and time had just flown away. It was not a lie; and it was a monumental lie. Maggie had always regarded herself as a truthful person, and yet David had made her realize that she had spent decades lying to herself. Wasn’t denying herself the worst kind of falsehood, the most pernicious betrayal?
In the elevator she imagined herself explaining, “Well, children and Matthew, today I discovered that I have a Siamese twin. Remarkable, isn’t it, that I never knew I had one? My parents kept it from us, and we just happened to bump into one another, this fellow and I. Separated at the heart when we were born, actually.”
She put the key in the door and took a deep breath. It was Fred who scared her the most.
“I’m home!” she called.
“ ‘Bout time,” Susan yelled from her bedroom.
Maggie walked into the kitchen and began unpacking the shopping bags. Matthew appeared, looking rumpled, as if he had been asleep. She felt a sudden rush of affection for him. She wanted to tell him. He was practically her oldest friend, after all. She turned the full radiance of her face on him and waited to see what would happen. Her heart was pounding crazily at the insides of her ears.
“Must still be hot out there,” he observed. “You’re all sweaty.”
“Yes,” she said. So easy.
During dinner, Fred asked her why she was so quiet.
“I’m thinking about you kids being away for eight weeks,” she lied.
“Well, you don’t look very depressed about it,” he complained. “I haven’t seen you this happy since Nixon was impeached.”
At six-thirty A.M. on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, Matthew stood beside the Camp Poqomashee bus with his palms sweating. Maggie and the children were twenty feet away talking with the Wheelers, but there was such a crush that even if Matthew had felt sociable, he would have been hard put to join them. Instead, he distracted himself by counting fishing rods. So far, there were sixteen, each gripped in the small fist of a boy. This was a co-ed camp, and yet not a single girl carried a fishing pole. Biology will out, he supposed. Phyllis Wheeler’s psychiatrist would say the rods were phallic symbols.
The camp director held up his arms as if he were about to make an important announcement. Nausea gathered in Matthew’s stomach. Everyone else seemed so festive. Not one crying child. But of course these were all older. Matthew had been six when he spent his first summer at camp.
He remembered the bus trip. It had seemed a great adventure to climb up the steep steps, wave good-bye to his parents, and set off for the Adirondack Mountains. The very name was exotic and thrilling. Upon arrival, he had gone swimming in the clear cold water that tasted sweet without a trace of either chlorine or ocean salt. He had even caught a bullfrog down by the waterfront. But after the campfire, after lights-out, he had lain very still on the top bunk in the pitch-black cabin and thought that it had been a very fine day, and tomorrow his mother could come and take him home. But she didn’t come, not tomorrow or the next day or the next. In fact, his parents never made it to visiting day that first summer. Something came up, he couldn’t remember what. Matthew had admired his counselor, who always called him “Sport.” Matthew felt obliged to live up to the nickname. A person named “Sport” would certainly not call out for his mother in the dark.
There had come a time, finally, when Matthew began to look forward to spending his summers up in the mountains. He liked the rough cabins that were set back from the lake in a grove of pines. The fragrant pine needles cushioned his footsteps as he explored the woods, imagining himself an Indian brave. He spent many hours sitting on his special rock beside the lake watching the surface of the water, how its depths reflected an endless variety of colors: turquoise, silver-white, blue, purple, and black.
Because of his physical coordination and maturity, he was soon allowed to participate in overnight hikes with the older campers. The final trip of the summer had been a three-day excursion up Mount Marcy. Near the summit on the second night, a violent electrical storm had struck. The campers clung together in the lean-to all night long, listening to the downpour and watching the lightning illuminate the forest like millions of exploding flashbulbs. That summer had been Matthew’s introduction to the majesty of natural forces. His urban life seemed a long way from those early primitive communions with the woods, but even now on the rare occasion when he was wakeful at night, he would find himself remembering the lake and its moods. The memory comforted him still, so that finally with the sound of water lapping against the shore, he would drift into sleep.
He coughed as the bus started its engine and sent clouds of foul exhaust into the air.
“Daddy, we have to get on the bus now,” Susan was saying.
“Oh,” he answered. He wanted to tell her: No, not this summer. Stay home.
“Don’t look so sad,” she said. “In ten minutes you’ll be ecstatic we’re gone. Think about it, just you and Mommy.”
“I guess so.” He hugged her. She was the oddest combination of sturdy and frail. His arm went all the way around her rib cage so easily. And yet the flesh that covered the birdlike bones was so firm. She wriggled free.
“Fred!” she called. “Come say good-bye to Daddy. He’s having a breakdown.”
Fred and Maggie pushed through the crowd together. Fred extended his hand.
“Fat chance,” Matthew said, and pulled his son close for a bear hug. Here was a substantial person, not as pudgy as he looked. That bulk was mostly muscle.
Then Maggie held them both for a moment and they were away, up the steps and behind the tinted glass that turned all the campers into identical silhouettes with raised fluttering hands. Matthew put his arm around Maggie.
“Shit,” he muttered.
Maggie looked up at him. “You’re crying,” she said, astonished.
“I’m going to miss them.”
“Yes,” she answered.
But that night when ordinarily she would have felt depressed and lonely in the aftermath of their departure, she lay in bed with a trembling sense of excitement. Susan and Fred were gone, they were safe, and she was free. David existed a mere half-mile on the other side of the park.
She searched for her guilt. It had to be there somewhere, lurking in the memories of her resplendent day like slugs clinging to the roots of a fabulous tropical flower. None. Matthew lay breathing softly, unaware that the wife beside him was no longer the wife of yesterday. Maggie’s regret was that she could not rouse him gently, hold his hand in the dark, and tell him about her happiness.
She dreamed that she was a mermaid with long streaming hair. She dove through the turquoise water, flipping her graceful tail, and when she sang in her soft sweet voice, tiny fish in many bright colors sprang from her mouth.
Chapter 12
While Maggie lay dreaming, David Golden was letting himself into his studio on Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street. At this hour, the ground-floor stores were closed and heavily gated. There was a bakery, a small grocery store, a dry cleaner, and a shoe repair. In the elevator to the fourth floor, however, David could hear the throb and thump of the latest rock band to rent space here. Among the other inhabitants were a psychotherapy center which specialized in primal screams, an evangelical organization, and a dating service which matched singles of indeterminate sex. David rejoiced in his neighbors because they left him to himself. In fact, if there was one item in his life about which he felt savagely possessive, it was this room. When David had first arrived in New York, he had shared studio space with a group of artists. David was faster and stronger than the others and did things they told him were impossible. “It won’t balance,” they would warn him. Or “Alabaster can’t take th
at kind of abuse.” David ignored them, but he longed for privacy. Finally, when he began to sell his pieces, he scraped together enough money to rent his own place.
The first studio was spacious, but it was a three-floor walk-up. After a year of hauling two-hundred-pound blocks of rock up and down the stairs, David began looking again. An apologetic real-estate broker had finally brought him here. Despite its shabby ambience, the place had everything: a large freight elevator; a window for ventilation; floors sturdy enough to support several tons of rock; twenty-four-hour access. Even now, five years later, David felt gratitude when he slipped his key into the door.
He stood blinking in the bright fluorescent light, breathing the rich musty smell of stone dust. In defiance of David’s efforts to protect the shelves with plastic and canvas drapes, the fine gray film seeped into everything. Even the inner crevices of his supply manuals were grainy with it. Pompeii probably looked like this, David thought, as he gazed at his shrouded statuary.
David walked to the window and snapped on the powerful fan. It would suck out clouds of powdered stone, which thereafter sifted down onto the two stunted bushes in a courtyard below. Every few weeks, his conscience needled him into trekking down with a watering can to clean off their encrusted leaves.
A massive piece of raw white stone loomed on his worktable. David walked around it, feeling his excitement grow. Normally, he ordered his material directly from a quarry in Italy. But last week, he had spotted this five-hundred-pound slab of Bianco marble at his favorite supply store on Nineteenth Street. It was expensive, almost six hundred dollars. David had gone to battle with himself. His pneumatic air drill was broken and required a costly new part. His toaster had expired, and he was getting tired of toasting bread in the oven. Besides, this difficult stone demanded a brand-new set of carbide tools. It took about half a minute to decide. Maggie Hollander was in that rough marble somewhere and David was going to find her.
He had never carved a woman’s torso before. A man’s once, as an exercise. Women had somehow always become abstracted into free forms that later seemed cerebral and cold to him. David caressed the rough surface of the rock and wrestled it over onto its side. He picked out a toothed chisel and the hammer that was so perfectly weighted it seemed more an extension of his arm than a tool. He slipped a safety mask over his face and started taking down the stone, beginning with the shoulders and working back. Five or six shots, then rest. Five or six, then rest. The first few bites into rock always hurt him, as though he were piercing flesh, but soon he began to feel that he was working with the stone, that they were creating something together. The marble was even more lovely than he had anticipated. It was webbed with pale gray lines like the translucent veins in a woman’s skin. He thought about the underside of Maggie Hollander’s arm as she had reached behind her head to smooth her hair.
