Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 21

by Kelly Link Gavin Grant

  Now Arla's mum said, as if by rote, “Don't spend it all in one place, Arla.” She slid a smudgy envelope across the kitchen table. Loose change of an inheritance, but still. George hung in the doorway. But he could almost pass for handsome now that he wore a cap, grew his hair out, entertained a dark stubble.

  "Hey!” Arla called him back hoarsely. He thought it was her dad for a moment. As a matter of course the dead don't talk. Arla and her mother smoked under the lamp. George saw she had on her army jacket for traveling, boots laced up to her knees like a pixie.

  He hated to watch them say goodbye. “I'll just go round to my place,” he said.

  "Look, George!” Arla was triumphant, waving the envelope.

  George could see Arla's mother had been crying. He squinted to measure: the indents of her temples—like Arla's—deep enough to hold a swallow.

  He turned so he was in the hall. A rusty, hot-water smell, scaly, papered walls. The dried herbal wreath on the facing door that had been shedding bloody thyme for as long as he could remember.

  Arla came up behind him. “Where's your bundle on a stick, Georgie boy?” she echoed her father. She rested her small, carved head between his shoulders.

  Winged scapula, temperate skin, shallow dish of a pelvis.

  * * * *

  All three—Jerome, George, and Aggie—had bushy chocolate hair like their father. Their eyes were dark and alarmingly quiet, a metallic sheen to their pupils. Still, their mother told them, perhaps it would've been worse in another town, without the C of E breathing down your back. After all, it was a warm breath, wasn't it, when they took up a collection for the heat the winter your daddy. Some people thought if you kowtowed to the towers you might allow yourself an extra pint or one more fuck before you were off the mistress altogether. God knows she'd been such a mistress, their mother blurted.

  But even in kitchens with the windows steamed over, bedrooms with hissing radiators drowning out all sounds of love, there was a pious restraint of the heart, men wore cardigans over their pajamas. A pinchy little chest since his infant days, lungs like dried plums, George's mother teased him. Sneaking about with chisels and hammers. What for, George-love?

  * * * *

  "I'm set to lose all of you, then,” his mother said flatly when George told her he was going to London. She had to look at Jerome when she said it. Jerome leered at his little brother.

  It wasn't worth the trouble, what his mum thought, or Jerome. Sex was still fresh as the taste of parsley. George squeezed his eyes shut involuntarily when he thought of it.

  Arla's skin was the frozen, mottled texture of rose quartz. Sparse lashes that didn't do enough to keep the dust out so that her eyes were always aflame like a stonecutter's or a drunk's.

  When they moved apart there was a sucking sound that shocked him.

  His love, not just his stinging groin or his pounding heart, but a bigger body, was like an overshoe. Was that the soul? Like a stupid Wellie? Well, he was up to his bloody neck in the water. He would drown for her. Her likeness in stone would rise up like a meteor island.

  * * * *

  They were spirited away in the back of the van of a pop group from Scotland. The drummer fancied Arla. She stretched out on a packing blanket and pulled George down beside her. “Not with that drummer fellow watching,” he pleaded.

  George carried the tools in an old doctor's bag stiff as a whalebone corset. Each was oiled and wrapped in flannel: the fine bright chisels, some with nibs no bigger than a fountain pen, the surprisingly heavy oak mallet. They had pushed the rest into duffel bags as lumpy and long as corpses.

  When he woke an hour later, she was leaning through the portal to talk to the musicians. “I'll do hair to get started,” she was saying, and it seemed to him, too casually. “My mum's line of work. It runs in the family, you know? I'm too old to be singing in the street."

  The musicians laughed with her. Ar-la made a smashing chorus; the drummer had a falsetto like a wire.

  She was kneeling on the floor of the van. George had seen La Danaide, photographs; he considered Rodin sentimental. Arla's back was all sharp tines rather than lush marble. She had hips like a boy rock star. Once he had examined her vertebra after they made love. He felt each headless knob between his thumb and forefinger. “Is this massage?” inquired Arla, her cheek flat on the pillow.

  He drew back instantly. She didn't think he wanted to do it again, did she? He could sense her spine's skeleton.

  "You've chosen a legendary profession, man,” the drummer was saying.

  George tried to laugh along. A profession? Well he couldn't very well call himself Mr. Rodin. A talent, it was absurd. People would laugh at him, that simple. He refused to dissect himself—thin arms with black hair like iron filings—

  But Arla he could see in segments.

  * * * *

  The flat in London was one big charmless room with finger marks on the walls so definitive you could make out the singular diagrams. The space had been used previously for photo shoots of the rather low-end variety. The iron bed was bolted to the floor in the middle and there were rays of duct tape, chalked x's from its epicenter. George began to understand there would be naked women on pedestals, platforms, whatever the studio provided, daily.

  The blanket humped its way to the floor in the dead of night where it picked up the hairs of some rodent shed by Arla's second-hand fur coat. The toilet was behind a curtain. He had never once called out for paper but Arla was shameless. There was a cold fireplace into which they blew their smoke. The city grime irritated Arla's cloud-colored eyes so that they ran continuously. A new girlfriend told her to put tea on them. Well, all friends would be new here, wouldn't they.

  George saved money by making porridge on a gas ring instead of buying a roll in the street. It was fashionable to eat your roll as you ran for the train, but George would have felt foolish anyway. You couldn't very well treat the city to your breakfast crumbs if you had a parochial slope to your shoulders.

  Arla draped herself with a cherry blossom kimono. Her hands stuck out of the loose sleeves like skinned rabbits. He thought he'd seen the granny—were you actually supposed to draw the arse like the flap of a cat door?—who modeled in his life drawing class wrap up in just such a kimono.

  Once she fell asleep with a fringe of false eyelashes pasted to her lids that made her face look primitive, like a death mask.

  * * * *

  The bath was on the hall, shared with the other non-earning artists. Arla made it a habit to track down the corridor in nothing but a towel. Cold water dripped from the ends of her hair and her breasts beneath the skinny towel were gooseplumped.

  In their childhood homes you stayed in the bath with the door shut as long as you could manage. You ran to the kitchen and put your back against the oven until your mum had to take the roast out.

  Once, George hit her. With an open hand, for coming from the bath wet, for disregarding the morality of their shared childhood.

  It wasn't from the hit, of course, but blood and water began down the warm inside of her leg, as if the warmth of her leg was melting what was inside her. She dabbed at it. The towel looked as coarse as sandpaper. The blood disappeared and more came.

  He knew he should have knelt down and gathered what was dripping from her body in his cupped hands. Put his tongue to her heart to taste its salty juice. Just taste. A prickling of lace came out on her cheek. Abruptly, he went out. Even in London he sought the underwater, interior murk of churches.

  * * * *

  In his sculpture studios naked young women rotated like halal meat on a skewer, fan heaters trained on their marbled flesh. Their backs turned pink, their nipples taut, as if he were a great lover. He built all these girls out of clay. Arla slipped in near the end of class and watched him work.

  Afterwards she said—defiantly, it seemed to him, “You're no pin-up either."

  It seemed incredible to him that this was all she could say about his body. He had made her body wi
th his hands. He had built her on a chair-sized armature. Her skeleton, then laid the muscles on, the fat, the derma layers of clay.

  In the town where they grew up the shadows of the cathedral were high contrast, dark blocks and striations like a topical layer of geography over the houses, streets, peg-like citizens.

  Where was that, then, that you grew up together? said the people in London.

  Arla and George looked at each other and neither gave their town a name. When they reached the flat Arla went straight for a glass of something. “Our last bit of solidarity,” she said with her back to him.

  What did she mean? he protested. “You're the one wanted to run away with the drummer—” he began. London! He hated it, the way there were a thousand blokes in second hand herringbone, jackets ironically too small or too large for their barrels. London was a hall of mirrors, a thousand George Muellers in secondhand jackets. Daylight plugged up with buildings that lay their stilted shadows across his pathway.

  * * * *

  He had a tin ear for music—the goats’ bells that woke him up every morning here in the Loire were no better than the metallic cacophony of London. George was thirty-five yesterday.

  He shaved in the kitchen, the loo was in the yard under a mossy roof. He had a plastic-framed mirror of the sort people put in bird cages. The pallor of a jaundiced newborn. His sister Aggie had underweight twins who were, well, the rather nasty color of cheese rind.

  The old farmer who sold him the house had told George his grandparents were married in the kitchen. Yes, even with a church across the street; the dam at the mill above them had burst and graves were washed out in the flooding waters. Tough old flowers, bones, sure, even the recent body of a child, had piled up against the great flank of the church the night before his grandparents’ wedding.

  A butcher block table a meter thick was left in the same kitchen. George loaded his clay upon it, nubile bricks, always cool, but heavy.

  He'd been in France three years now. His loss of love was a silver-gray expanse, flat as an abandoned football field. The day George Mueller bought the house—a hovel that looked more like a toothy stone wall than a farmhouse—there was also a wedding. The bells were incessant, hard and strong. It rained all day. George sat in his car and watched the procession. The French girl was wasp-waisted, with high hair, the groom had a crimson comb like a rooster. George had slammed his car door and stood in the rain with his coat over his head as if no one could see him.

  His house was made of the same fifteenth century stone as the church. He had felt relieved to hand over his small, scrimped fortune. It would have made twelve thousand pounds—the old farmer gave no sign of thanks though, and George's French sounded like a dog with a smoker's cough. There were crude outbuildings that could one day be converted to studios. Even a kiln, although he didn't have the temperament for pots, was not a craftsman, drank his tea in a glass, had eyes and hands only for the nude—classical, female.

  He was working on a study of Arla. He had been, in fact, three years on the body. His only friends here, a couple of Americans who had remodeled the rectory, suggested she might be a many-armed Shiva. He said, “Wasn't Shiva a male deity?” And the Americans were charmed by what they thought was his understated, particularly British humor. His Arla had no head, he told them.

  He tinkered with her—she was a life-sized doll, and perhaps he was just a toymaker, Gepetto. All he needed was to attach strings and wooden hubs for joints and he'd have Arlita. Arlotchka, why not.

  The hands were well done, like gulls, muscular, long-fingered, harsh and elemental. He held them in his own. There was almost no temperature to the clay. He might have been dancing with a salt bay, becalmed, and he was a terrifically bad dancer. That her feet were bare seemed frivolous, sophomorically romantic. But more laughable was a bare-breasted goddess wearing trainers. He knew he should stop trying to force her. He broke off work more and more frequently lately.

  * * * *

  The Americans spotted him and waved merrily with their safari hats. He hoped his squint would pass for a smile. Besides his humor he knew they thought he was small and dark, the stuff of fairy tales.

  "Bonjour!” they called in unison. Sometimes it seemed they were reading their lines straight from a lesser Hemingway.

  "Apricot season, Monsieur Mueller!"

  He couldn't stand Hemingway, blunt and literal. To be a Brit in the French countryside was a natural expatriatism. But to be American in the crossroads town of Les Cerquous Sous Les Moulins, the Sarcophaguses, to purchase the rectory, plunk ice cubes into everything, was the type of behavior that would cause World War III. They wore loose linen that flapped about their vitamin-long limbs, treated his scurvy back to daunting slaps, an unwelcome, physical familiarity. He could feel the reverberation through to the burr of his sternum.

  But he crossed the street in spite of himself, followed the bulk of Jim and Susanna into the whitewashed kitchen.

  Susanna rubbed her elbows into the counter. “What about our niece in Boston?” She was all relish, matter-of-fact intimacy.

  He had never meant to tell them anything, but they were such fine drinkers, and now he was their case and they were in apparent possession of a pipeline of American nieces, each awaiting his charms by electronic mail.

  George gave in, expelling the appropriate stage groan.

  * * * *

  He hadn't even had a telephone until yesterday. He'd taken to writing letters. The warp of distance—three days? A week to England?—satisfied him. Not that he wrote to Arla. No address—easy. When he moved to the Loire he'd finally given up the room in London he'd let since he and Arla shared it. The next lessee had it as a “studio” for quadruple the price. He hadn't a clue whose mailbox she would have subsequently co-opted. He couldn't see her in her own place.

  She would have been thirty-five a month before he was. He had imagined her conning some fellow into driving her out of London on her birthday. The way they used to get home together; then Arla would instruct her mother to meet them en route in the ancient Vauxhall. George could see Arla's mother braced up against the wheel, wearing her enormous, tinted driving glasses. I'm coming home for my birthday, Mum! And she wouldn't allow her mother to cook, would take her out instead to XO's Fare of China. So-what-do-you-hear-of-George-Mueller-Mum? They'd go to the pub after for spiked coffees.

  To sculpt her was like building a house. He was an old-fashioned immigrant in the land of art, a pioneer who struck out for Canada or some God awful outback, one funeral suit and a pickaxe. He was the crag-faced sod, aged thrice as fast since he'd last seen her, who called for his wife by letter, by ship, when the log cabin stood in the clearing with all the chinks filled with louse-y blankets. A widow from the settlement—would she have been pretty, such a mistress? George couldn't decide, and his heart wasn't in it—had, in exchange for some petting, hung curtains.

  Good God. George had remained utterly faithful.

  * * * *

  He took the handset from the cradle. He had never noticed it was, in fact, ear-shaped; half-moon shaped, gentle as a spoon, wasn't it. He lifted it above his head, absurdly, as if he meant to smash it like a rock-n-roller his guitar. When he put it down he pounded out the long string of numbers gracelessly.

  Her voice came tumbling out all around him. As if he found himself suddenly in the heart of a jungle, overdone foliage sucking up all the oxygen. She was well! She was brilliant! How the bloody hell had he got her mobile, anyway? She seemed so close he lurched backward, pulling the phone off its little stand with a great clatter.

  * * * *

  When she rung off he went to the huge soapstone basin where he soaked his clay tools and stuck his head in the running water. He turned his mouth to it and drank feverishly.

  He went out. He had laid flagstones like a jigsaw puzzle. The little trolls at the local quarry laughed behind your back when you hauled the junked shards off across your own axles.

  * * * *

  "August,�
� he'd said into his new telephone. “Let's start out with August."

  "You've turned yourself into a Frenchman, then,” she said almost unguardedly.

  "Well it's not terribly romantic,” he said darkly. “A pile of stone and some sunflowers. A place to stay in at weekends."

  "Hey. You sound good.” There was a firm, maternal condescension in her tone, as if she willed his well-being.

  * * * *

  Perhaps some other girl would step off the train—someone she'd sent—he imagined a flippy skirt, high calf muscles. The last time he saw Arla she'd been wearing a jet-black wig. A glossy pageboy, a gray flannel suit, eating something crumbly out of a sack. They were on a street corner in South Kensington. He had caught her pretending she didn't see him.

  "In a hurry?” he said.

  "George Mueller! Small town!"

  "Well then, Cleopatra."

  "Just borrowing the hair.” She had reached up to touch it like you'd touch the feathers of an exotic bird—ostensibly tame but with opaque eyes, ebony.

  * * * *

  By evening of her arrival date she hadn't phoned.

  He didn't bother driving to the train station several towns away. Once you'd staked your place on the platform, nodded to another loner in an anorak, it was unthinkable to go home empty handed. He made tea and told himself he could wait another hundred years to call her. He paced the lower floor of his low house. His jeans were stiff with clay but he wouldn't change and jinx it. There were gray-white body parts everywhere and the pale silt of clay on the floor that captured his footprints. He tried to see it through her eyes, his humble abode. There in the corner of the living room—although the demarcation of rooms was in the floor plan only, George had no furniture—were her faun legs.

  * * * *

  There was Susanna, the American, all turbo and shimmer. She poked her lower lip out. “Come drown your sorrows. We've got cases and cases from the pig farm.” They called the cellar in the rectory the torture chamber and kept their local, bargain wine there.

  "I must've mixed up the days,” George mumbled. He followed the giantess across the street for the second time in a day. The church was rosy in the light. There really was a sunflower field a half a kilometer down the dirt road, George reminded himself.