The Clay Head Benediction

by Marty Rafter

started to look at me, and am finding myself to petrified to look back. I have been thinking about it though, the next time she looks at me, I am going to look back. Maybe I will even say something. I have been thinking about something clever, I have gone over a few options, even something about the art. She is younger than me. I’m a bit of a late bloomer. I lot of things I thought of to say contained the word “lovely” for some reason, and I realize that that makes me sound really old and strange, so I have decided to play it by ear. Either way, if she looks at me, I am saying something.

  The inside of the gallery is calm and cool as it always is. In my haste with Ben at the library, I forgot to return home to get my prop, but that is ok. I walk around for a while, and then decide to sit in the only chair that affords me a slight view of the girl at the cart. It is in front of Alex Katz’s Lake Time which as Alex Katz goes, is a lump of garbage, but his really good portraits aren’t in cities like mine anyway, or if they are, they are in some rich guy’s house. I sit there for a while, I start to feel a bit awkward, so I pretend that I am writing something. The girl is probably too far away from me to notice that I don’t have a pen and paper anyway, but I have to abruptly stop when I notice that she has escaped the safety of her cart and is walking directly towards me. In an instant, she is standing in front of me, and I make a futile effort to disguise my imaginary pen and pad in my pocket and look casual.

  She is even prettier in person. With her inches from me, I can’t think of anything to say, at all, but she seizes the opportunity.

  “Can I ask you a question?” She says

  I try to smile, concealing my anxiety “Of course”

  “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “I...I don’t have a problem”

  “So, it is just a coincidence that you lurk around here every week and stare at me? Let me see the picture you were just drawing...”

  “Oh, I wasn’t drawing a picture. I was taking notes.” I say

  “Let me see your notes, then” She says extending her paint splattered hand

  “I have already put them in my pocket”

  “..And you can’t get things out of your pocket once you put them in there?”

  “No, that’s not it. I just don’t want to.”

  “You don’t want to because you are pervert who comes and sits here every week and draws pictures of me”

  “I wasn’t drawing a picture of you”

  “Then, prove it” she says, folding her arms across her chest.

  So I dig into my pockets, and since there is no paper there, I withdraw the only logical distraction available, the small clay head that had once belonged to Ben

  “You are half right. I am here to see you” I say holding out the clay head. “I have been working up the courage to talk to you. I’m sorry I was so strange, but I actually made this for you. I think you are quite lovely”

  “Oh, sure. Well, for the future, handing someone a tiny head, is not the best way to apologize for being strange”

  I look down at the clay head in my hand. The green Fimo is shiny on one side from being rubbed like a magic talisman by Ben, and the face, which was crude to begin with, looks particularly distorted in the gallery lighting.

  “Well, it isn’t supposed to be you” I say and smile

  “That’s good” she says, still looking down at the clay head in my palm.

  “Look, this was a mess. “ I say “I can’t actually imagine how this whole thing could have gone worse. It's just, that I think you are really pretty…and you know, when you see somebody, that you think might like you, or maybe be like you, you kind of imagine ways that your first conversation would go." I put the clay head back into my pocket. “This wasn’t it. Like, super wasn’t it. I’ll go, but I didn’t want to scare you, I was just working up the courage to talk to you” Then, I stand up and start to walk away.

  “You’re just going to keep the head then?” She says

  “Oh no, I just thought you didn’t want it”

  I rush back over and hand it to her, but I don’t make eye contact.

  So then I needed to make another head for Ben. It wasn’t the only one, there are lots and lots. The heads are my other preoccupation. I make them all of the time. Lately, the best ones have been really detailed. I brought some of my hair home from the barber and made hair and eyebrows for the last few. Then I hide them. In the woods in the park mostly, but also behind books in the library, and if I travel somewhere I will bring a few. I left a really good one in the Canadian National Gallery. I still wonder if anyone had the guts to notice it didn’t belong. Someday, I will retire to them like Aureliano Buendía and his little golden fish, but in the meantime, I will need to get more clay.

  There is a store in between my apartment and the museum that has Fimo, but they don’t always have all of the colors. The store that has most of the colors is on the South Side, and I just sold my car. I do that every year, sell the car. A couple of years ago, I made friends with a mechanic who has a car dealers license and he takes my money to one of the wholesale auctions and picks me up something decent every spring. Then, at the end of the rental season, I sell it again. It has been a great arrangement, really. I save on insurance, parking, maintenance all that stuff; except for now because I need to get to the South Side and I have no car. I could take the bus, but I never really bothered to learn how the routes work, so I decide to walk.

  I try not to think about the girl from the museum as I do. That whole thing was mortifying, and worse still, I didn’t even bother to ask for her name or try to recover when I gave her the clay head. Even worse, is that particular head is in an extremely primitive variation on what I am capable of. It was a rough draft. That is why I gave it to Ben. The good ones, the ones with the eyes that I bought from the taxidermy supply company, are the ones that I want to be found, not give away. I hope that the people who find the heads, keep them though, or maybe that they decide to put something else that they made in its place. I have a recurring fantasy that that I will place a lotus flower garland around the Mr. Rodgers statue that is near the stadiums. Then, a reporter for the newspaper will happen by, and that person will take a picture, and somebody will see the picture, and that person will do some research about Mr. Rodgers and Lotus flowers. Perhaps then that same person will be another person to realize that Mr. Rodgers is a bodhisattva and she will figure out her own way of getting that message across to people without beating them over the head with it.

  I read this short story about some kids, who find a porno magazine by a baseball field, and it leads one of the finders to discover the truth about his sexual identity, and then later he becomes somebody who throws a pornography magazine out of a window by a baseball field. I am quite sure that the author figured that he was making some important statement about the nature of identity, but this kind of thing is a pile of horseshit. I’m not waging a moral war, but life can’t be about throwing porno magazines out of windows. …the whole thing is just so goddamn unimaginative.

  At the art supply store they have a bunch of different colors of Fimo, but they don’t have the exact one that I used to make the head for Ben. I will just have to convince him that a different colored one is just as good. I never tried to convince him that that original one had magic powers or anything, he actually did that on his own, but now he is committed, and I guess I am too. Maybe I will make a better one for the girl at the museum. I will think of way to explain that what I had was a rough draft that I was carrying with me to see if I could imagine giving it to her, and then I’ll hand her a much better one. Maybe I could just come clean entirely, and tell her the whole story. That I am trying to spill a little magic into the world and unseat Disney as the builder of the world of wonder. He’s another one too, Robertson Davies; World of Wonders would have been much better if the damn magician wasn’t a pervert. She might not listen though. I could ask Donald to look into it. He’s a guard a
t the museum, and the only other person over thirty that lives in my building. I will have to figure out a way to get him to come up to my place though, because every time I knock on his door he tells me that I am interrupting his “two beer time” or else he pretends like he has a female guest. I don’t believe that though because I have never seen anyone other than him go into his place. He still goes out every Friday night. He calls the jitney to pick him up. I could try talking to him while he is waiting for the jitney, but he normally doesn’t like to talk to me then either. He just stands out there with rings on every one of his narrow fingers reeking of Bay Rum aftershave and holding his cigarettes like he is about to throw a dart.

  I have a big picnic table that serves as my work surface in my apartment. On it, I have all of my tools to make the heads: the scraping things that the dentist uses for your teeth, various repurposed spoons and forks, empty soup cans filled with plastic eyes and a few baggies of my hair. I lay out the new Fimo and mold it around for a while. I make a few faces using only my fingers until I settle on one that will be good enough for Ben. Then, I play around trying to make one good enough for the girl at the museum, but I still can’t decide on what she would like. So I decide to bake the head that I made for