Stone Woman

by Bianca Lakoseljac

  Liza looks up to the stairway landing where the glass booth glows fluorescent as if it were Moses’ burning bush. Inside the booth is a shapely female figure, making love to the stainless steel pole and Liza thinks it such a blasphemy, making love in front of the burning bush. What would Moses say? Her eyelids are heavy and she lets them rest for a moment, so she doesn’t have to witness this sacrilege. But she can’t stop wondering and she yells out loud: “What would Moses say?”

  * * *

  “Margaret Atwood. Po, e, try. Po, e, try,” Helena repeats, and Liza shouts how fantastic it is. Fantastic! Anna keeps saying that Ricky’s a real fucking machine if she’d ever seen one. That chick magnet.

  Liza now feels hot tears burning her cheeks. All she wants to do is go to the moon with David in his gigantic bed and make love. She whispers in Anna’s ear: “We go to the moon and make love.”

  Anna’s eyes widen: “You and David? Make love?” She caresses Liza’s wet cheeks in her palms. “Oh my dear girl. Congratulations! At long last! I thought you’d never let go of it. What a burden it must’ve been.”

  Anna announces that they have to celebrate — Liza’s been cured of virginity. They get up holding on to each other and the wall, and walk along the hallway lit up on-and-off by the flashing neon sign.

  Anna shouts: “My dress!” — and covers her bare breasts with her hands.

  Liza places her palms under Anna’s breasts and lifts them with a gentle bounce. “They’re gorgeous! Gorgeous! The hell with the dress!”

  Helena removes Liza’s hands from Anna’s breasts. She does so methodically as if it’s part of her everyday routine. “Now, now,” she murmurs, as she pulls the dress up over Anna’s chest. She tugs at the zipper and finally the satiny garment is back on.

  Liza is sad that they are leaving the burning bush behind, but they have to celebrate. She drops on her knees and picks up her sandals, then settles on the floor and struggles to slip one on. She tries to stand up on the stiletto, wobbles, kicks it off, and is relieved to be barefoot again.

  “This way,” Helena says. “So the boss doesn’t see me” — and guides them to the back door below the “Exit” sign that leads to the street. And then, Liza is stunned. All is magic! The street is decorated with lanterns that cast streams of colourful light. Some of the trees are leaning as if they’d been uprooted, but the crowns straighten out as she passes under them. The sidewalk has wobbly potholes she tries to avoid with long strides.

  “Don’t step into the potholes,” she shouts. There is a swishing noise in her ears and she wonders if Helena and Anna can hear her.

  “Where are they?” Anna calls out.

  “Everywhere,” Liza says.

  They try to coordinate their steps so they could avoid the potholes, but Liza yells that they are stepping right into them, and it’s sooo funny, they have to crouch down and laugh and laugh. They pass their hands along Liza’s dress and recite: “M’m! M’m! Good!” Liza feels a bit woozy and wants to sit down on the sidewalk and rest, but Anna reminds them that they have to continue. Because they have to celebrate.

  Down the street at the Bohemian Embassy, they climb a narrow staircase, and Liza warns them to be careful because each step tilts as they put their weight on it, and as the staircase winds up and up, they laugh, and laugh. Finally, Margaret Atwood is reading poetry. The place is jammed. Beer mugs are placed in their hands and Liza gulps eagerly, the thick foam gathering into a moustache above her upper lip. Beer never tasted so good. They sit on the floor and Liza strains to hear the words. She repeats after Atwood, and the stanzas drift and sway, and paint the images in her thoughts — images of lakes and trees and love and death and immortality. Liza imagines what love looks like under the moonlit sky — she misses David. After the reading, someone waves a copy of Atwood’s booklet of poetry, Double Persephone — a few copies are still available at fifty cents each. And then Atwood is signing it to Liza. To the nearly six foot tall Liza, Atwood appears diminutive like a china doll come to life — with sparkling blue eyes and a wave of black curly hair framing her flushed face — and Liza can’t help but enfold the inspirational poetess into a hug. She feels sublime. Her misfit self is dissipating like the froth in her mug.

  Back on the street inhaling the warm wind, they head to the Riverboat. Joni Mitchell is singing, and as the audience joins in the refrain, Liza envisions the scenes from the song, and recalls the places I have been, and the wondrous things I have seen. Joni’s voice cuts through the chorus and reverberates through the bar. She takes a break. Helena makes her way through the crowd and introduces Liza and Anna, and Liza wants to pour her heart out and tell her how much she loves her music, but what comes out is something like, love you Joni my sister, and the moment is magical. They’re all soulmates and love is all around.

  Joni returns to the stage and sings of a girl who is alone at a carnival and goes for a ride on a Ferris wheel. Liza is now that girl, and all she wants to do is close her eyes and fly to the moon, where Chang, the enchanting woman, guides lovers on their uncharted journeys. And she does just that.

  CHAPTER 20

  AFTER GIVING HIS morning lecture, David strides along the hallway at Toronto Arts College, eager to get back to his desk in the part-time faculty office. He has a session with a group of students to discuss their project. In the afternoon, he will be meeting Liza at Sculpture Hill, where a large gathering is expected. Neighbours not only from the High Park area, but also from the Roncesvalles Village, Bloor West Village, Swansea, the Junction, and Parkdale, have decided to take the matter of the stolen marble into their own hands. The police have not made much progress, they said, so they invited a fortune teller. See what she has to say. In their words, this type of blatant disrespect for Torontonians doesn’t happen in Toronto-the-good. Although talking to a soothsayer is not David’s idea of solving the theft, he could not refuse Liza. Since that stone disappeared, her enthusiasm for the Symposium has dampened.

  Burman blames the lack of security at the sites and is holding the City responsible. The police are questioning Liza. And now the neighbours have invited a psychic. David shrugs and picks up the pace.

  By the open office door, a young police officer, the one David saw talking to Liza in the park — too young for the job, David deliberates — is scribbling in his note pad.

  The officer looks up. “Mr. David Gould?”

  * * *

  David sits on a park bench by Colborne Lodge Drive with a clear view of Irving Burman’s two granite blocks that still remain on the site where they had been delivered. Next to them, on a wooden post stuck in the ground, a hand-drawn sign reads: “Please bring back the marble block. This sculpture cannot be completed without it.” Attached to the post is a see-through plastic pouch that holds a petition with pages of signatures. A few pens and sheets of paper are tucked inside for those who wish to add their name to the petition.

  Two elderly women, arms linked, and a man walking with a cane, veer off the sidewalk and struggle up the hill toward the post. The man leans his cane against the post and removes the petition from the pouch. They take turns signing it, slip the sheets back in, and leaning on each other, slowly make their way back to the sidewalk. They walk past David, and the words of the kind of person who would do such a thing . . . flap on the wind like a torn flag.

  Does stealing a block of marble count as art-theft? David wonders. It is, after all, raw material — a chunk of stone that has been gouged out of the earth in a similar way as a lump of clay.

  It has been a few years since he has sculpted anything of note. He needs to get his hands on a project that will bring attention to his work — that will garner interest, excitement, recognition — a commissioned piece people in this city he’s made his new home would look forward to. A piece he would be driven to work on. He had lost that chance when he lost the contract for the Symposium. Or when he did not win the contract, as Anna would say, althoug
h to him it’s all alike. Losing or not winning —semantics — the result is the same. He prefers to think of it as losing. It gives him reasons to feel he’s been wronged. And it’s all over now. The sculptors have been chosen and the work is progressing, and there is nothing he can do about it.

  The rumour about Burman not being able to move on with his sculpture without that piece of marble sits heavy with David. He can certainly relate to it. That’s how he felt when his “Child Soldier” disappeared during the exhibit in Boston. He became disillusioned. He has not sculpted anything worthwhile since.

  What is it about that block of marble? David wonders. The first time he laid eyes on it he sensed a figure trapped within. He stared at it for hours. He spent the night on the hillock next to it, imagining the figure entombed in that block of Carrara stone, shaping the vision of a woman he glimpsed in his mind’s eye. That night, in the surreal dreams during his fitful intervals of slumber on the grassy lawn next to it, he saw her form.

  Now, thinking back, he shrugs off the apparition. An outlandish notion, a fixation.

  He seems prone to that lately — to his flights of imagination — as the first time he saw Liza at City Hall. He tried to avoid her after that, to block out his attraction to her — to his inspiration. But he kept seeing her here, at sculpture sites. She had been consumed by the project beyond her work duties and had been spending much of her free time here. At first, he tried to stay away from the park. But he found himself drawn to the sites, drawn to her. As if she were Burman’s block of marble and he a chisel. He began visiting the park on Friday afternoons just to get a glimpse of her. Although they now spend much of their free time together, he still hurries to the park on Fridays after giving his lecture, to be with her.

  He never thought it would happen to him. She has given new meaning to his life. A new purpose.

  The gathering next to Burman’s two blocks of granite has grown to about a hundred, he approximates. He gets up from the bench and stands at the periphery of the crowd. Liza has arrived — many people are trying to get a word with her, and he thinks it best to stay aside for a while.

  Next to the granite slabs is the soothsayer, sitting on a plastic folding chair. She is sporting a flowery kerchief, garish gold hoop earrings dangling almost to her shoulders, and a wide skirt covering her knees and spilling onto the grass. Her face is wrinkled and sunburned, but her eyes are vivid green.

  The psychic covers her eyes with her palms and sways to the left and to the right, then begins to hum and murmur in another language. Probably not even a language, David reasons. Gibberish. People in the gathering hush each other and suddenly all is silent, except for the traffic noise subdued by the gusts of wind in the towering tree crowns.

  The soothsayer stops muttering. She gets up and lifts her hands toward the sky as if she were a saint in prayer. “Great talent,” she declares in a breathy voice, looking up as if talking to the white feathery clouds. “Stolen.” She shouts: “Stone thief! I call on you! Bring stone back!”

  She repeats her call three times, her voice rising tremulously with each cry. She pauses and scans the crowd.

  “You bring stone back, thief. All forgiven,” she says, exhaling loudly, as if she just dropped an immense burden.

  She takes a long pause, breathing deliberately, as if depleted of oxygen.

  “You keep that stone, thief, and you cursed!” Her voice now threatening, cuts through the wind. “You hear me, thief? You cursed! Stone cursed! Forever!”

  She gets up and stumbles, seemingly exhausted from the task. Then she straightens up, props her hands on her hips, and scans the gathering, now wild eyed.

  “Stone cursed forever! Stone bring bad luck to them who have it!”

  Liza is pale, as if her face is made of white marble. David has never seen her so pallid. Walking back to the bench to wait for her, he has a sudden urge to turn. He stops cold. The soothsayer’s green eyes are staring straight at him, and although he is several yards away, her peridot pupils pierce right through him.

  A construction truck with a company logo rumbles by on its way to another site. The psychic points to the truck and shouts. “Like that. Stolen.”

  A man from the gathering grumbles: “Why would that construction company steal a block of marble? They’ve donated all kinds of equipment and material to the project.”

  “That stone didn’t walk away. It had to be picked up by a truck,” a woman from the crowd opines. She waves her hand in dismissal. “What are we doing here? Waste of time. The question is, who? Not, how.”

  Another man from the group shouts: “It’d be easy for these trucks. Rolling in any time day or night. You know what a slab of Carrara marble that size is worth? I think we’d all be surprised.”

  David shrugs off the uneasiness that has suddenly overcome him, and continues to the bench.

  Soon, the gathering disperses, and Liza joins him. She slumps on the wooden slats as if her body is a burden she needs to drop.

  “I’m jinxed,” she says.

  David wraps his arm around her shoulder. “Bad luck? Nonsensical superstition! Preposterous!”

  “My first hands-on project,” Liza murmurs. “Doomed.”

  “Now, that’s a bit harsh, wouldn’t you say?”

  Liza jumps up and lifts her hands toward the sky, mimicking the soothsayer. “The curse is an ominous cloud looming over, ready to disgorge malice.”

  He stares, unsure what to think of her performance. She couldn’t be serious, could she?

  “I need to get back to the office. I’ll see you later.” She waves a hasty good-by, and heads toward the Keele Street subway entrance.

  “What’s the rush, Babe? It’s Friday afternoon,” David says, but she’s gone.

  He sags into the bench. She has taken the theft personally.

  What could he do to dispel Liza’s gloom? Should he tell her it was simply a chunk of stone that could be replaced, and not a work of art? And contrary to the psychic’s claim, no talent was stolen. Should he remind her that fortune telling is a charlatan’s game? He’ll explain to her that the psychic is wrong — that she simply cannot distinguish between raw material and art.

  He’ll tell her about his sculpture that vanished during the Boston exhibit. Now, the way his “Child Soldier” disappeared from the exhibit is different. That’s finished work! That’s art-theft, alright!

  CHAPTER 21

  ON THE SUBWAY ride back to the office, Liza feels

  exhausted. It’s not like her to be so lethargic. And queasy. Is it something she ate? Maybe a touch of stomach flu. Sucking on a straw, she downs a can of ginger ale and feels her nausea dissipate.

  Just before she left her office for the soothsayer’s session, James called and insisted on meeting with her. He offered to meet her at the sculpture sites, but she and David have plans for the evening, and she did not want the meeting with James to go on too long. The office is a better place — easier to keep the discussion brief.

  Last time she and James drove to Sculpture Hill, the meeting took much of the afternoon. They checked Burman’s site and looked for suspicious details. He photographed the tire tracks, and she gave him a tour of the sites. They had lunch at the Grenadier Restaurant in the park, which gave her the chance to fill him in about her favourite park and the neighbourhood she’d grown up in. And then, James asked if she would go out to a movie or a dinner with him, sometime. Or a walk in the park.

  Now, thinking back, she has to admit — if it wasn’t for David, she would have accepted.

  Later that evening, David had asked if she had enjoyed her lunch with the cop. How did he know? This was too much of a coincidence. It was just business. But he had smiled and said: “Sure thing, Babe.” Then he had asked the question that gave him away: Do you love me, Liza? The question she dreads. The question that brings on that tightness in her chest — the tension that prevents o
xygen from reaching her lungs — the fear that she will lose him if she declares her love for him. Isn’t what they have enough? Why does he need the reassurance she cannot give?

  She did enjoy James’ company. There was something charming about him — his awkwardness, his apologies about the questions he asked, the rubbing of his large hands that stuck out of the uniform sleeves that were too short for him. There was also this sense of earnestness about him — old fashioned honesty and trustworthiness she does not often come across among those of her generation. Reminds her a bit of Anna — except that Anna has been acting strange lately.

  Over the next few visits to her office, James began asking questions about David. And now, his insistence on meeting with her on a late Friday afternoon annoys her a bit. She would have rather gone home after the park. She is not feeling well, and she puts a lot of extra time at the office — she would have appreciated a quiet afternoon at home.

  Should she get off at the next subway stop and use the telephone booth to cancel her meeting? She could turn back and be home in no time. But then, she would spend the weekend wondering about the urgency of this discussion. Might as well get it over with.

  * * *

  On Monday morning, on her way to the office, Liza is still upbeat from the Sunday spent with David. She can’t get him out of her thoughts. It is more than just having fun cycling at Centre Island, picnicking by the lake and sipping surprise health-booster he blends and brings in his yellow thermos. This time it was a carrot-mango-papaya-juice concoction. It was delish, as he put it. The man is a walking oxymoron, she ponders. He gobbles up hot dogs from vendor-carts and chips and donuts as zestfully as he savours gourmet dinners at trendy restaurants. He carries freshly squeezed juice in a thermos. One minute he is a junk-food buff and another a health-food fanatic, and yet another, a gourmet-food lover, as well versed in food etiquette and fine wines as he is in art and history and rock ‘n’ roll — this draft-dodger deeply immersed in the antiwar movement.