“Oh, I'm sorry, Giles. I don't want you to think I'm just blowing you off like that, no!”
“Then just say when.”
“Sheeze, you can be pushy for a shy guy. All right, as soon as ever I can find time. Now you mustn't become a pest about-”
“What about tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“After the Orion exhibit. Come back with me. Promise me.”
“I can't promise you it will be tonight, Giles. Perhaps sometime tomorrow.”
“Promise? Really.”
“I give you my word, but you know how busy my schedule is, so please don't be disappointed if… Oh, don't pout. Now you've learned my secret horror! My word is worthless!” She laughed nervously and patted his hand. “I will get there, soon. Not tonight but soon, I promise, Giles. OK? Tell me it's OK. I'll just die if you don't.”
“Yes, I see…” The bitch is never going to see the work, he thought.
They walked the few blocks to the Fine Arts Center. She spoke of Keith Orion and Keith's melancholic nature, and Keith's showmanship, and Keith's genius, and Keith's wonderful chances for a showing in Chicago. Giles wanted to kill Keith before ever having met the man, and once they arrived, Lucinda immediately latched on to Orion's arm without a thought of introducing them. Giles was left to wander about the center on his own.
Orion was all that she'd said and more. He even dressed like a successful artist in the most expensive cloches Lucinda could find for him. He'd been well turned out, and his booming, masculine voice, good looks and charm filled the gallery. But an hour into the showing, Orion and Lucinda had a posh but loud falling out with one another on the gallery floor, and even in this short measure of time, Giles realized that the show had quickly sagged of its own weight. In Giles's estimation, and obviously in the estimation of the combined Milwaukee, Wisconsin, art critics' circle, Keith Orion had relied too heavily on his David Copperfield imitation, his charm thinning rapidly, and too many of Orion's oils and sculptures derived from Picasso and his disciples, showing nothing really original save the colored lighting and the special effects around and outside the frames, with little to recommend what was inside the frames. The sculptures, too, had taken on the feeling of Moore derivatives. Nothing unique. Nothing challenging to the eye, and certainly nothing leaping out at the audience, grabbing hold, and holding it hostage. Nothing like Giles's work.
“I sculpt circles around this clown. I make him look like a Boy Scout,” he told himself, but others near him overheard and moved away as if he might pose a threat.
Still Giles felt happy, and if not happy, hopeful. Guardedly hopeful. He could clearly see that the public reaction to Orion's work proved disastrous. The comments of the evening spelled death for Orion in Milwaukee, and so Chicago was a pipe dream for him now.
Giles didn't see Lucinda again; she'd simply disappeared. Never going up to Orion, not bothering to pursue any contact, Giles inched toward the huge glass doors and left. Outside, he located a cab and went home to his sculptures.
Milwaukee was a loss. Besides, showing his work so near his scavenging could prove unwise and unhealthy. Lucinda had told him of a small cafe in Chicago where she knew the owners, and she felt his work would fit perfectly their little galeria de' artes. To this end, she had penned a letter of recommendation, should he ever care to use it.
Perhaps the letter represented an earlier brush-off, he now realized. Perhaps it was time to move on. Lucinda had led him by the nose long enough. Fuck her. Fuck this city. Fuck this state.
However, when he got home, Lucinda stood in his doorway. “I'm sorry about earlier. I apologize, and I've come to look at your work, Giles.”
It shouldn't have surprised him. She needed to bankroll a new artist. Still he said, “That's surprising.”
“What do you mean? I've always said I'd take a look, see if you're as good as you say.” She gave him a coy smile.
“All right, if you're sure…. Come on up.” He led her to his studio.
The surprise visit worried Giles, as his work in progress hadn't had the final touches applied, and one spinal cord remained in a solution and hadn't as yet been painted.
Inside the dimly lit room, he quickly placed a towel over the tub in which Joyce Olsen's spine lay in a saline solution. He then turned a spotlight on his two finished sculptures and his work in progress. She stared at the lifelike clay representations of serene looking women with pleasant smiles and an aura of peace, while backbones bulged outside of their backs, floating just above them, hovering in dragonlike grace in the air. And it stirred something inside Lucinda. “My god… Giles… who… who is your model for these? Don't tell me. Your mother? Beautiful… the perfect expressions… the perfect ages… so tranquil… and the touch of life in the skin tones, and the animals milling about their feet, and their blood red backbones bulging through their backs-such a… so startling a contrast… such a juxtaposition of materials, motifs…”
Giles beamed. He saw she meant what she said, saw it in her gleaming eyes. He dared say nothing. He held his breath instead.
“It makes me at once agitated, excited by the work, and perhaps a bit fearful… uncomfortable-no, agitated- no, disturbed, yeah, that's it. Disturbed to my core. And the animals are a stroke of genius. What a touch. Birds, how sweet.”
She then turned her full attention to the work in progress.
“This one's without animals?”
“A dog this time. Being finished in the other room, along with a horse.”
“A horse? Really. How soon before all of them are finished?”
“Not long, really. I just have to attach the parts I'm working on.”
“The animals and to this one the spine, right?” she asked.
“Right… that part takes time.”
“The sculptures are so… so unusual, Giles. Photos don't do them justice, not even the oils you showed me do the work justice. Have you only the three pieces?” She went straight for the towel he'd covered the tub with and snatched it away, gasping at the sight before her. “My god, it's so lifelike. How did you get the lifelike tones? And why is it in water?”
“It's not water. It's a special solution that gives the clay a sheen so the paint adheres better.”
“So you sculpted it of clay? Amazing. It doesn't look like clay.”
“It's a discovery of my own making.”
“It's so lifelike, not like the two red ones on the finished work. Why do you paint the bones red? It might look better if you used this natural bone color.”
“I use a specially mixed paint on them that sends a message. Red stands for life, the lifeblood in us all. It represents our essence. I want to capture that in my work.”
“Yeah, but you're missing the point.”
“What point?”
“Don't you want to… I mean isn't your aim to disturb your audience?”
“Disturb on the one hand, enlighten on the other, to find eventual peace. I want them to find peace and comfort in my work.”
“Really… That's beautiful.” She turned toward Giles and said, “I wish you had maybe two or three more completed. We could launch a showing first at the gallery, charge a mint for these, and then, who knows, if it's successful…”
“That's my dream,” he replied. “But these take time to create.”
“How much time do you need?”
He feared answering her. Feared losing his chance. “What if we put these three up alongside the oils?”
“I've only seen the two paintings you brought to the gallery, sweetheart.”
“Let me show you more. Come over here.” He guided her to a bedroom area where the walls were lined with oil paintings of women in various poses with animal friends about them, their spinal columns showing like an exaggeration of those starving Nigerian refugees seen on TV.
“The, paintings do have a certain strange appeal,” she said. After looking closely at each painting, Lucinda sat on his bed, took his hands in hers and guided him to stand facing her close in between her legs. Giles wondered if this was how Orion had gotten an exhibition of his work. He decided, danger or no danger in showing his work
