The Gargoyle

what I do to them, they’re still going to be stone. They know they don’t have to yell at me to get what they want.”

Over the course of a few weeks, she finished off a few of her lingering pieces. The bird’s head, which had been sitting on human shoulders with everything below remaining untouched, was given a male torso and goat’s haunches. The uncompleted sea-savage clawing its way out of a granite ocean got the rest of its body, as well as foam on the crests of the waves. Trucks came to pick up these statues and take them to Jack’s gallery for sale, because cigarettes and pressure garments do not pay for themselves.

It was a bit of a surprise when, after a few weeks, Marianne Engel asked me to accompany her into the workshop, the one area of the house that was unequivocally hers. She puttered around for a few moments, not saying anything, not looking at me, trying hard to come across as casual. It was such a contrast to all the times I’d seen her immersed in her working rapture. She took the broom and swept a few rock crumbs into a corner, then blurted, “I hope you aren’t mad.”

She walked over to a block of stone that was covered with a white sheet. I hadn’t given it much thought; amid all her other eccentricities, concealing a piece of artwork until it was finished seemed positively sane. I could see a somewhat human silhouette beneath the contours of the sheet, making me think of a child dressed up as a Halloween ghost. When she pulled away the cover, she said, “I’ve been doing you.”

There was a half-completed statue of me. No, not half-more accurately, it was just the outline of my body. None of the detailing was done, but it was impossible not to recognize the vague perimeters of my bulk: the shoulders were properly hunched; the spine had a serpentine curl; the head looked correct, in the wrongness of its dimensions when compared to the rest of the body. It was like looking at myself in the mirror, in the morning, before my eyes had really opened. I stammered that I was not angry that she’d been “doing me,” but confused. Why?

“God is acting through me,” she said, quite seriously, before laughing so that I’d know she was joking. I laughed, too, but it didn’t sound very convincing.

“I want you to sit for me, but think about it before committing,” she said, indicating the half-finished gargoyles all around her. “I don’t want you to suffer the same fate as these ones.”

I nodded-to indicate that I’d think about it, not that I agreed-and we headed back up the stairs. I concentrated on climbing with correct form, but when I looked back over my shoulder at the stone figure in the corner, I couldn’t help but think I really needed to work on my posture.

· · ·

Jack came barging through the front door, straining under the weight of a leafy plant, which she slammed into a corner of the living room. “Last time I was here, I noticed you have no plants. Isn’t anything alive in here?” Jack looked at me, then added, “Good Lord, you haven’t got any better looking, have you?” She swung her attention quickly in the direction of Marianne Engel, who had been watching her entrance with amusement. “And you, I’ve got a couple of private buyers looking for originals. They’re not crazy about anything at the shop, so they want to know if you’re working on anything new. I told them you’re always working on something new.”

“Good homes?” Marianne Engel asked.

“Yes, they’re good homes.” Jack sighed. “I always find good homes, and your little beasties will be well looked after. Even though they’re only bloody stone. You know that, don’t you? Oh, and Princeton needs some repair work done.”

Marianne Engel shook her head. “Not interested in travel right now.”

“Right. Too busy looking after Crispy, here,” Jack said. “Christ, Marianne, it’s a great paycheck and you’re going to let it pass you by. When art meets charity, it’s bound to be a fuckup.”

Marianne Engel gave Jack a big hug, saying a few words in my defense, but mostly she just giggled at Jack’s bluster. This only made Jack angrier. “Remember when you brought Bougatsa home?” she said. “He was a stray, too.”

· · ·

In our supposed previous life, I’d given Marianne Engel a stone angel that I had carved-the one that sat on her bookshelf-while in this life she’d given me a stone grotesque that she had carved. The symmetry is much like the reversal of our jobs: back then, she had been the one who worked with books and I had been the one who worked with stone.

That observation is academic, I suppose, but my reaction to the idea of her carving me was entirely visceral. It’s flattering when an artist wants to do you, of course, but it also made me feel awkward to contemplate that my hideousness would be so permanently captured. For the first time, I understood the fear savages have, that cameras will capture their souls along with their images.

“How would it work?” I asked. “What would I have to do?”

“You wouldn’t have to do anything,” she answered. “You would just have to sit there.”

The reply made me think of our conversation after she forced me to apologize to Sayuri, when she had said that I would need to “do nothing” to prove my love to her. I didn’t understand what she had meant, but if this was what she had been talking about, how could I turn her down? “Okay, I’ll do it.”

“It’ll be nice to work from life for a change,” she said. “I’ll finally get to put the form into the stone, instead of pulling it out.”

She started to remove her clothing and I asked what she was doing. She always carved nude, she said, and was not about to change now; did I have a problem with that? I answered that I didn’t, but I really wasn’t so sure. There was something about her unclothed body that affected me, the ex-porn actor and prodigious seducer of women, in a way I could not quite comprehend. There was something so raw and disarming about her nudity…

But I could not tell her what to do in her own home. As soon as she was undressed, she pulled the pressure garments from my body and ran her fingers over the folds of my burned flesh, as though her fingers were memorizing a path. “I love that your scars are so red. Did you know that gargoyles used to be painted in bright colors to help their features to stand out?”

She walked over to one of her creatures and ran her fingers over it, just as she had been touching me moments earlier. As I watched her hands move, I imagined how a river runs perfectly over a stone for a thousand years. She pointed out the deeply carved lines under the eyes of one of her beasts. “See how the features are undercut to emphasize shadows, to create depth? The parishioners looking up at the gargoyle, they can’t even see these details.”

“So why do it?”

“We work also for the eyes of God.”

Being carved made me feel more naked than any porno, and that first sitting was made bearable only by its shortness. I could take off my pressure garments for only fifteen minutes at a time, a limit that Marianne Engel always respected. It didn’t matter that the work would progress slowly; I was confident that we would have years to complete me.

At the end of each session she would show me the progress she’d made and we would talk about whatever was on our minds. On one occasion she mentioned casually, while stubbing out a cigarette, “Don’t forget that we’ve got a Halloween party coming up.”

This was the first I had heard about it, I said.

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “Last year in the burn ward I promised we’d go, remember?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“A year is not a long time, but I’ll make you a deal. Would you agree to go if I told you another story?”

“About what?” I asked.

“I think you’ll really like this one,” she said. “It’s about Sigurðr, my Viking friend.”