Marianne Engel was still unconscious when Jack arrived that evening. Finding myself alone with Ms. Meredith again, I spun the cap off a new bottle of bourbon.
Jack told me about the customers who purchased gargoyles. The names were impressive: prominent businessmen, heads of state, noted patrons of the arts, as well as a Who’s Who of the entertainment business. I recognized a number of chart-topping musicians and A-list Hollywood actors, as well as one writer who is almost universally recognized as the king of the horror genre. One director, known for his highly poetic films about outcasts, had purchased at least half a dozen works. (With his mop of wild dark hair and gaunt face, he could easily have been mistaken for Marianne Engel’s anemic half brother.) While I was not surprised to discover that a number of churches bought her gargoyles, I was caught unawares at how many universities were also major clients.
Jack ate most of the Chinese food that we ordered in, washing it down with glass after glass of bourbon. She wiped the sauce from around her mouth with the back of her sleeve and asked whether my penis was really gone. When I confirmed it was, she apologized for joking about the fact earlier. I accepted her apology with as much grace as I could muster and she got a little weepy at this point; I was discovering that alcohol—as it often does with even the manliest of drinkers—tended to make her sentimental. When I asked Jack whether she was planning anything for Christmas, she basically answered by reciting her life’s story.
She had become pregnant while still in her teens and had given birth to a boy, Ted, who was now in his thirties. Jack married Ted’s father, who proved violent and constantly drunken, and she stayed with him only because there didn’t seem to be any other option. She’d managed to finish high school, but college was out of the question. When Jack got pregnant a second time, her husband blamed her for trying to wreck his life: “You go get knocked up again, even though we got no money. Bitch!” Ted, six at the time, watched his father beat his child-heavy mother at least once a week throughout the pregnancy.
On an evening in Jack’s seventh month, her husband administered a particularly heavy beating. When he passed out from the alcohol, Jack packed a few small bags of clothing and bundled up young Ted. She placed the boy by the front door and then returned to the bedroom with a frying pan, which she used to bash her sleeping husband in the head. Jack claimed that she did this to ensure he didn’t wake up and give chase, but I suspect it was mostly because it felt good. For days, she said, she scanned the local paper to see if she’d killed him. When no obituary turned up, she was mostly relieved but also slightly disappointed.
“After I left my husband, I was sometimes worried that he’d be waiting at my mother’s hospital. She had schizophrenia,” Jack said. “But I never saw the bastard again. Wasn’t motivated enough to be a stalker, I guess.”
It was a revelation that Jack’s mother had been schizophrenic. Was there a connection, then, to Marianne Engel? Indeed there was.
“I loved my mother and I had to visit her, especially since no one else did. My father was long gone. I suppose he couldn’t stand watching the woman he loved go crazy.”
I made some small comment that her life sounded as though it had been difficult.
“Damn straight. All the men in my life have been such shits that while Ted was growing up,” Jack confided, “I secretly wished that he’d turn out gay.”
“And?”
“No such luck,” she grumbled, refilling her bourbon.
“Well, don’t give up hope,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“Yeah, whatever.” She took another large sip. “Anyway, things were pretty difficult but we got by. Gave birth to Tammie, that’s the kid I had inside me when I left my husband. Got a job as a waitress. Moved up to cook, then assistant manager. Crappy little greasy spoon, but what can you do? Some lawyer tracked me down after my father died, and he’d left me a bit of money. So I guess the bastard was good for something, after all.” She held up her glass towards heaven. “I knew I couldn’t raise two kids with what I was making in that restaurant, so I used some of that money to enroll in a night course, accounting. Got decent grades, and was able to get a bad position with a good company.”
“That’s still a long way away from being a gallery owner,” I noted, “and Marianne’s agent.”
“Not as far as you might think. I kept visiting my mom in the hospital and one day I noticed a new patient, a young girl. Attractive, you know, sitting alone at a table. Drawing. She was different from the others. Maybe it was the hair and eyes.”
“Marianne,” I said.
“Bingo,” Jack said. “Except she didn’t have that name back then. She was a Jane Doe who the police had found on the streets. Marianne Engel is just what she asked the doctors to start calling her one day.”
Marianne Engel was not her real name. My surprise at the fact brought a smug look to Jack’s face. It pleased her that there were still things about our mutual friend that she knew and I did not.
“The nurse told me she had been found with no identification, and fingerprints turned up nothing. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell them anything about her past. Maybe her parents were dead or maybe they just abandoned her, who knows? Anyway, after a few visits, I decided to say hello. She was shy, then. When I asked her to show me her drawings, she wouldn’t. But I kept asking and, after a few more visits, she finally did. I was blown away. I’d expected incoherent doodles and all that, but here were fantastic beasts, monsters, and they were so ugly, but they all had something so fragile about them. Something that gave them life in their eyes.”
Jack paused. I looked out through the slots in my plexiglass facemask and, for a moment, I was worried that she was going to add that there was something sympathetic in my eyes, too. But she only took another slug of bourbon and continued speaking. “She said that she wasn’t really a sketch artist. Said she was a sculptor and that these creatures were waiting to be released from the stone.”
“So,” I said, “even as a teenager…”
“Yeah, even as a teenager,” Jack confirmed. “I guess I was kind of fascinated by the idea, but I didn’t know shit about art. Most of the time, I think I still don’t. But I do know this—there’s something unique about her vision. I liked it, and it turns out that so do a lot of other people. But in those days, I just nodded my head, because what the hell was I going to be able to do about it? As the months passed, I kept coming to visit my mom, and Marianne kept showing me drawings, and I don’t know…she just grew on me. I suppose I felt sorry for her. She was so young, and maybe I understood about being trapped someplace that’s no good for you. The asylum was the right place for my mom, no question, but it was the wrong place for Marianne.”
“So what happened?”
“The doctors played around with her meds forever until they found a combination that worked and her condition leveled out. Marianne can function, you know, when she takes her medicine. But she’s always thought that it’s poison against her hearts.” Jack paused. “Yeah, that fantasy is nothing new, either. One time I even got them to take chest X rays to show her that she had only a single heart and she still wouldn’t believe me.”
“But how did—?”
“I’m getting to that, if you’d just shut up.” Jack jabbed her chopsticks at me, a piece of kung pao chicken wedged between them. “After the docs got her all straightened out, they put her in a group home and she ended up getting a job in a cafeteria. Washing dishes, can you believe it? When I heard about it, I paid her a visit and found her elbow deep in dirty water, and all I could think about were those amazing sketches. In the meantime, she’d gotten her first tattoo, one of those Latin sayings on her arm. When I asked why, she said that since she couldn’t afford stone, she might as well use her body as a canvas. All those tattoos she’s got, she got them when she couldn’t carve for some reason. Anyway, I said, Fuck this. If she wants to carve so bad, I’ll help her. So I paid for a course in the evenings, even though all I had was a little mone
y left from my father’s death, and all this when I had a couple of kids at home. Completely stupid, right?”
It was stupid, but I also thought (although I certainly didn’t say it aloud) that it was wonderful. Jack took another of Marianne Engel’s cigarettes—because Jack didn’t smoke, as she’d told me more than once—and continued with her story. Whenever she got to a dramatic part, she poked the cigarette around in the air as if trying to pop invisible balloons.
“The instructor said Marianne was the most gifted student he’d ever had, that she just took to the chisel. When I couldn’t afford to shell out any more cash for lessons, he told Marianne to keep coming anyway. Said that someday he’d be bragging that he was once her teacher. So I made another stupid decision and suggested to Marianne that I should be her agent. She accepted, even after I pointed out that I knew squat about selling artwork. But I knew enough to get her a half-decent set of tools, which I found at an estate sale, just dumb luck, and then some stone. This first block was this horrible, cheap stone that practically crumbled away under her chisel, right, but she gets the gargoyle out anyway and it looks pretty good. So now I have this statue and I have to sell it before we can afford a second block of stone, so I borrow this beat-up old truck to drive around to different galleries with this big statue in the back. Finally I find someone willing to display it but only if they get a bloody outrageous commission, but by this point, we’re totally out of options, and so I say yes. When it finally sells, can you fucking believe this, I actually lose money on it. The whole process takes months and Marianne Engel is getting tattoos the whole time, going crazy without any stone. But eventually we sell another, and another, and then suddenly we have some cash flow and it all works out.”
I was fascinated to hear a history on Marianne Engel that did not include medieval monasteries. It made me realize how completely I had been engrossed in her fairy tales.
“When she really got rolling, the statues just didn’t stop coming. That was the first time I saw how she could get like this, you know? The first time she worked herself into collapse.” Jack cast her eyes up towards Marianne Engel’s room. “She was younger and stronger, and I thought it was just the flame of youth. The passion of first creation. I had no idea it would be like this for—how long now? Going on twenty-something years.”
“She must be doing all right,” I said, “I mean, the house and everything…”
“Yeah, moneywise, sure. Marianne is the best in the world at what she does, and I’m not just saying that. Five years in, we set up the gallery. Ten years, we got her this place. Cash down, not even a mortgage.”
“How did you become her conservator?”
“Just sort of happened along the way,” Jack answered. “No, fuck that, it took a lot of paperwork and endless visits to the courts. But you gotta remember that she doesn’t have a family, at least none that I know of. She never told me anything about her life before we met and, honestly, I don’t know if even she knows.”
“Jacqueline,” I said, “you never did answer my original question.”
“Don’t call me that, fuck, and I can’t even remember your stupid question.”
“If you were doing anything this Christmas.”
“No, my mother died about ten years back and my kids don’t talk to me anymore.” She grabbed her coat and said it was time for her to leave. At the door, she added, “Don’t think we’re all buddy-buddy now. If it was my decision, you still wouldn’t have a credit card.”
“Understood,” I confirmed. “I hope this doesn’t sound bad, but I’m actually pretty glad that Marianne collapsed. At least she’ll have to take some time off.”
Jack snorted. “She’s not finished yet.”
When Marianne Engel woke, she proved Jack correct. She ate a huge breakfast, then descended into the basement, where she spent the next four days. All her movements were sluggish, as if someone had taken a film of her working and was running it at half speed. She simply lacked the energy to work faster.
IF YOU SLIPPED HER A LITTLE MORPHINE What? SHE WOULD FALL ASLEEP.
On the twentieth of December, Sayuri came for my final exercise session before the holidays. We tried our best to ignore the slow tap-tap-tapping of Marianne Engel’s lethargic tools.
“Gregor tells me that you’re going to meet his parents,” I said. “Big step.”
“He’s never done this before,” Sayuri said, “taking a girl to meet them.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“No drama for me, but I’m a bit nervous for him. I think he feels like he’s never good enough for his folks.”
“Does he think you’re going to disappoint them?” I asked incredulously.
“He’s more worried that they’ll think he’s not good enough for me.” Sayuri increased the resistance settings on my exercise bike and implored me to fight, fight, fight! “It’s ridiculous.”
“So, do you think he’s planning on…?” I tapped at her wedding finger, which was completely ring-free.
“No,” Sayuri responded quickly. She drew back her hand, but I could see on her face that she didn’t mind the idea of it. “He just wants me to see his hometown.”
There had been a change in the sound coming from the basement—the slow metronome of the hammer was missing. By this point in our living together, I knew Marianne Engel’s carving schedule well enough to realize she couldn’t possibly be finished with her current statue. “I should check on her.”
MORPHINE IS GOOD. Not for her.
I couldn’t see her when I started down the basement stairs. I called out, but there was no answer. Half a cigarette was smoldering in the ashtray. Then I saw her behind a mostly completed gargoyle, her arms splayed at awkward angles. Her fingers were still half closed around her hammer; her chisel had bounced a few feet away.
When I came around the rock, I saw that she was unconscious, with a large gash on her forehead. I presumed this was from falling headfirst into the stone as she passed out.
The hospital held Marianne Engel for four nights. Her head was stitched closed, and an IV pumped her arm with electrolyte solution to combat the dehydration. Luckily, she was too exhausted to work up much anger over the fact that I had put her under the care of the enemy doctors. I left her side only to go home to get some sleep. I let Bougatsa share my bed, even though Nan would have had a fit about the irritation that dog hair can cause burned skin. YOU CAN’T EVEN LOOK AFTER YOURSELF. In the mornings, I immediately returned to the hospital. HOW CAN YOU LOOK AFTER HER?
Marianne Engel was released on Christmas Eve. Honestly, the doctors should have held her longer, but they discharged her in consideration of the date. When we got home, she wanted to eat marzipan and nothing else, but I persuaded her to eat some mandarin oranges as well. I hauled my television and video player from the belfry into her bedroom and we watched It’s a Wonderful Life, because that’s what normal people do on Christmas Eve. After it ended, she insisted that I stay in her bed, because she wanted to wake into Christmas Day with me at her side.
I lay in that bed with my thick pressure suit pressed up against her thin nakedness, aware that I should have been enjoying our closeness. But I wasn’t; I was contemplating why her body affected me as powerfully as it did. I had spent much of my adult life in the company of naked women—it had been my job during the day, and my hobby at night—but with Marianne Engel it had always seemed different. It was different.
There are many possible explanations for my discomfort. Perhaps her body had a greater effect than that of other women because I actually cared for her. Perhaps it was because for the first time in my life, as a result of my penectomy, I could not dismiss the woman’s body by conquering it. Perhaps my feeling was simply pheromonal. All these theories are plausible, and to some extent perhaps all are valid, but on that Christmas Eve, lying beside her unable to sleep, I worked it through. The principal reason, I believe, that her body so thrilled mine was this: her body affected me as if it were not only human, but
also as something that approached memory and ghost.
The first time that I had seen her body, fully, was in the burn ward when she had undressed to show her tattoos. The sight made me aroused and bashful, and when I ran my fingertips over the plumage of her angel wings her body trembled and, in return, trembled my heart. At the time, I did not understand why I felt the way I did, but in the many months that had passed, I had grown into the realization that it was because my fingers felt not as if they were visiting her body for the first time but as if they were returning to a familiar location. I did not understand this until I saw how, when Marianne Engel gave me my first bath in the fortress, she had reached out to touch my body as if it was hers to touch. She moved her arm just as I had reached towards her winged back that first time. It was as if the other’s flesh was already owned, and the reaching hand belonged to a master who had been long absent and was now returned. When I had touched her that first time, it did not feel like the first time I had touched her.
Now, in the bed next to her on this Christmas Eve, her body retained that effect upon me. When I lay beside her, it was as if I were meant to be there, as if my body had rested against hers thousands of times before. So it felt as if I were lying not next to a person, but next to the memory of a person, while at the same time that memory was undergoing a transformation into something even less material. Her body was all too human in its ravagedness, but it also struck me as an entity becoming ghost, as if in her thinness she were slipping into something less than solid. I ran my fingers across her bumpy ribs and traced the gaunt hill of the pelvic bone that overlooked her stomach. Her body, whose flesh and memory had always confused and excited, still felt as if it belonged to me but also as if it were disappearing. It was not only that she was losing substance as she worked, it was as if she were working to lose substance; as if it were not only the gargoyles that were backwards art, but also the artist herself, progressing to a state in which they were both less and more than the material from which they started.