while the other hand never stopped jabbing a finger at me. “She say you could live here?” Apparently Jack knew the answer, because she didn’t give me time to answer. “How’s she going to look after you? Tell me that, huh?”
“I don’t need her to look after me,” I said, “and I don’t care about her money.”
“What is it then? Sex?” She spat out the word with enough disdain to suggest that she thought sex was nothing more than an ugly argument between two opposing bodies.
“I have no penis.”
“Well, thank God for that.” She burned her lip with her first sip of coffee. “Lord love a duck!”
She grabbed a handful of tissues to wipe away the spill on her chin, as she eyed me with a combination of contempt and curiosity. “What happened to you, anyway?”
“I was burned.”
“Well, I can see that, you think I’m stupid?” She wadded up the tissues and lobbed them towards the garbage can. She missed and, angry with herself for missing, took the few necessary steps to pick the tissue ball up and drop it in. “Burned, huh? That’s a damn shame.”
“Do you always just walk into this house?”
“I’ve been walking into this house since you were sneaking drinks at the high school dance,” Jack barked, “and I don’t much like you being here. You got a cigarette?”
“Don’t smoke.”
She headed towards a pack that Marianne Engel had left on the counter. “Probably a good idea in your condition.”
“So you’re Marianne’s agent?” I never got an answer the first time.
“That and more, buddy boy, so watch your step.” Jack inhaled deeply and now jabbed the cigarette towards me in a most accusatory manner. “This whatchamacallit, your living here, it’s a horrible fucking idea. I’m going to talk her out of it, you little monster.”
Perhaps you can guess that I liked Jack Meredith plenty. For one thing, she was the only person who spoke loudly enough that I never had to ask her to repeat herself. But more than that, I was taken with the general outsizeness of her personality: she was like an anthropomorphized butterball turkey, cast as the lead character in a Raymond Chandler novel. However, what I appreciated most was that she entirely dispensed with burn patient sympathy. We spent a few moments staring at each other over the table. She rolled her cigarette between her thumb and forefinger and squinted her eyes, real tough-like, before saying: “Whaddaya think you’re looking at, Crispy Critter?”
A few days later, Marianne Engel and I were sitting on the back porch waiting for a delivery of new slabs of stone, and she told me that she’d instructed Jack to set up a credit card for me. When I said I couldn’t imagine Jack being very happy about that, Marianne Engel said, “She’ll do as she’s told. Jack’s all bark, no bite.”
I KNOW WHAT WE CAN DO WITH A CREDIT CARD.
Our conversation wandered around a bit, before I asked a question that I had from the last part of our story: I wanted to know what a pluviale was. Marianne Engel explained that it was a type of raincoat that priests used to wear, decorated with scenes from the New Testament. I asked whether Father Sunder’s pluviale had an image on it. She confirmed that it did. “And I’ll tell you what it was,” she said with a playful pause, “later in our story.”
When the truck arrived, she clapped her hands like a child at the carnival and sprinted to her basement doors to insert a heavy key into the great lock. She laid down iron rollers that allowed the blocks of stone to slide into the house. Seeing the stones disappear into the opening made me think of a hungry parishioner receiving communion. She stood off to the side, imploring the deliverymen to be gentle with her friends. The deliverymen looked at her as if she was crazy but continued their work. As soon as they were gone, she took off all her clothes and lit candles. After putting on a recording of Gregorian chants, she stretched herself out over one of the new slabs and fell into a deep slumber that lasted until the next morning.
She came into my bedroom with a huge smile and proclaimed that she had received wonderful directions, but that she would wait until after my bath to begin her work. As she scrubbed me, I could tell she didn’t want to be doing it-her fingers wanted stone, not flesh-but that she felt it was her duty. The moment she was finished with me, she raced to the basement. I sat in the living room on the middle floor of the house, trying to read, but was too distracted by the rhythm of her chisels. I moved up to the belfry to occupy myself with other things-videos, reading, teasing Bougatsa with a towel on a string-but after a few hours, my curiosity grew too great. I cracked the door to the basement and crept a few steps down the stairway to spy on Marianne Engel.
I needn’t have worried that she’d find my presence intrusive, for she was working so intently that she didn’t seem to notice me at all. To my surprise, she was carving in the nude; it was somewhat unsettling to see her working so swiftly with sharp metal tools. The instruments flew around furiously but her hands looked sure, and I sat hypnotized by the dance of metal, stone, and flesh.
To say that Marianne Engel “carved” is not enough: it was so much more than that. She caressed the stone until the stone could no longer stand it and gave up the grotesque inside. She coaxed the gargoyles out of their stony caverns.
Over the many hours that she didn’t notice me, I became amazed by her stamina. She was still working when I went to sleep, and continued through the night. She went all the next day as well, and into the night again. In total, she labored for over seventy hours, drinking gallons of coffee, smoking hundreds of cigarettes. This was just how she had claimed to work-carving nonstop for days at a time-but I’d never quite believed her. I assumed it was a boastful exaggeration of her artistic discipline. But it wasn’t. Skeptics might think that she waited for me to go to sleep before she herself took a nap, but her hammering kept waking me up. On the first morning, she did haul herself away from her work long enough to clean me, but I could see-could feel-that it was done grudgingly. There was an anxiousness in her eyes, a barely contained frenzy, as she raced the sponge over my skin.
Around the sixty-hour mark, she asked me to order two large vegetarian pizzas. Normally, she had no objection to eating meat, but I soon learned that when she was in her carving like this, she manically refused to do so. “No meat! No animals!” When I brought down the pizzas, she went to three corners of the room to ask her Three Masters for permission-
Over the hours, her stereo passed through the works of Carl Orff; Berlioz’s
When she finished, she could barely stand. The completed monster was a human head with horns, atop a kneeling dragon’s body, and she kissed its stony lips before crawling up the stairs to collapse into her bed, still covered in dust and sweat.
“Well, obviously manic depression is common among artists,” Gregor said across the table, as he poured a shot of the bourbon that he had brought for us to drink. The sun was going down and we were sitting on the back porch; Marianne Engel was still sleeping off her efforts. After reaffirming that he could not address any specifics of her previous treatments, Gregor said that he’d be happy to answer general questions.
“After reading all those books,” I said, “I decided that her symptoms were more consistent with schizophrenia than with manic depression.”
