I follow Guillermo Garcia down a dark dusty hallway with many closed doors leading to rooms where all the other sixteen-year-old art students are kept chained up. It occurs to me that no one knows I’m here. Suddenly the whole gravestone-cutter thing doesn’t seem like such a plus.
For courage, say your name three times into your closed hand
(How about a can of pepper spray instead, Grandma?)
I say my name three times into my closed hand. Six times. Nine times and counting . . .
He turns around, smiles, points with his finger into the air. “No one makes coffee as good as Guillermo Garcia.”
I smile back. So that didn’t seem particularly homicidal, but maybe he’s trying to relax me, ease me into his lair, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
Health Alert: A respirator is in order. Whole civilizations of motes are caught in the thick stripes of light beaming down from two high windows. I look at the floor, jeez, it’s so dusty I’m making footprints. I wish I could hover like Grandma S. so as not to stir it all up. And this dankness—there’s got to be toxic black mold spores creeping all over these cement walls.
We enter a bigger area.
“The mailroom,” Guillermo says.
He’s not kidding. There are tables, chairs, couches, land-sliding with months, maybe years of mail, all unopened, falling to the floor in piles. There’s a kitchen area to my right teeming with botulism, another closed door, surely where some bound and gagged hostages are, a staircase leading to a loft area—I can see an unmade bed—and on my left, oh Clark Gable yes, to my great happiness, there is: a life-size stone angel that looks like it lived outside long before it moved in here.
It’s one of them. It has to be. Jackpot! In his biography, it said that to this day, in Colombia, people come from far and wide to whisper their wishes into the cold stone ears of a Guillermo Garcia angel. This one is spectacular, as tall as me, with hair that falls down her back in long loose locks that appear to be made of silk, not stone. Her wide oval face is cast downward like she’s gazing lovingly over a child, and her wings rise from her back like freedom. She looks like David did in Sandy’s office, one breath away from life. I want to hug her or start squealing but instead ask calmly, “Does she sing to you at night?”
“I am afraid, the angels, they do not sing to me,” he says.
“Yeah, me neither,” I say, which for some reason makes him turn around and smile at me.
When his back is to me again, I make a hard left and tiptoe across the room. I can’t help it. I have to get my wish in that angel’s ear immediately.
He waves an arm in the air. “Yes, yes, everyone does that. If only it work.”
I ignore his skepticism and wish my heart out into the perfect shell-like ear of the angel—Best to bet on all the horses, dear—noticing, when I’ve finished, that the wall behind the angel is covered in sketches, mostly of bodies, lovers, blank-faced men and women embracing or rather exploding in each other’s arms. Studies, I suppose, for the giants in the other room? I survey the mailroom again, see that most of the walls are similarly covered. The only break in the cave art is where a large painting hangs without a frame. It’s of a woman and a man kissing on a cliff by the sea while the whole world around them spins into a tornado of color—the palette is bold and bright like Kandinsky’s or my Mom’s favorite Franz Marc’s.
I didn’t know he painted too.
I walk over to the canvas, or maybe it’s the other way around. Some paintings stay on a wall; not this one. It’s color-flooding out of two dimensions, so I’m smack in the middle of it, smack in the middle of a kiss that could make a girl, one not on a boycott, wonder where a certain English guy might be . . .
“It saves paper,” Guillermo Garcia says. I didn’t realize I’d started tracing my hand over one of the wall-sketches by the painting. He’s leaning against a large industrial sink watching me. “I like the trees very much.”
“Trees are cool,” I say absently, a bit overwhelmed by all the naked bodies, all the love, the lust everywhere around me. “But they’re my brother’s, not mine,” I add without thinking. I glance at his hand for a wedding ring. None. And no feeling that a woman’s been here for ages. But what about the giant couples? And the woman wrenching out of the male form in the sculpture he made last night? And this painting of a kiss? And all these lusty cave drawings? And Drunken Igor? And the sobbing I witnessed? Sandy said something happened to him—what was it? What is it? There’s definitely the feeling here that something’s gone terribly wrong.
The clay on Guillermo’s forehead has crinkled up with his confusion. I realize what I just said about the trees. “Oh, my brother and I divvied up the world when we were younger,” I tell him. “I had to give him the trees and the sun and some other stuff for an incredible cubist portrait he made that I wanted.”
The remains of the portrait are still in a plastic bag under my bed. When I got home from Brian’s going away party that night, I saw that Noah had ripped it up and scattered it all over my bedroom. I thought: That’s right, I don’t deserve a love story. Not anymore. Love stories aren’t written for girls who could do what I just did to my brother, for girls with black hearts.
Still, I gathered up every last piece of the guy. I’ve tried to put him back together so many times, but it’s impossible. I can’t even remember what he looked like now, but I’ll never forget the reaction I had when I first saw him in Noah’s drawing pad. I had to have him. I would’ve given up the real sun, so giving him an imaginary one was nothing.
“I see,” Guillermo Garcia says. “So how long did these negotiations last? To divide the world?”
“They were ongoing.”
He crosses his arms, again in that battle stance. It seems to be his preferred pose. “You are very powerful, you and your brother. Like gods,” he says. “But honestly, I do not think you make a good trade.” He shakes his head. “You say you are so sad, maybe this is why. No sun. No trees.”
“I lost the stars and the oceans too,” I tell him.
“This is terrible,” he says, his eyes widening inside the clay mask of his face. “You are a terrible negotiator. You need a lawyer next time.” There’s amusement in his voice.
I smile at him. “I got to keep the flowers.”
“Thank God,” he says.
Something strange is going on, something so strange I can’t quite believe it. I feel at ease. Of all places, here, with him.
Alas, that’s what I’m thinking when I notice the cat, the black cat. Guillermo leans down, takes the black bundle of bad luck into his arms. He nuzzles his head into its neck, cooing to it in Spanish. Most serial killers are animal lovers, I read that once.
“This is Frida Kahlo.” He turns around. “You know Kahlo?”
“Of course.” Mom’s book on her and Diego Rivera is called Count the Ways. I’ve read it cover to cover.
“Wonderful artist . . . so tormented.” He holds up the cat so she’s facing him. “Like you,” he says to the cat, then lowers her to the floor. She slinks right back to him, rubbing herself against his legs, oblivious to the years of rotten luck she’s filling our lives with.
“Did you know that toxoplasmosis and campylobacteriosis are transmitted to humans from the fecal matter of cats?” I ask Guillermo.
He knits his brow, making the clay on his forehead break into fissures. “No, I did not know. And I do not want to know that.” He’s spinning a pot in the air with his hands. “I’ve erased it from my mind already. Gone. Poof. You should too. Flying bricks and now this. I never even hear of those things.”
“You could go blind or worse. It happens. People have no idea how dangerous having pets is.”
“This is what you think? That it is dangerous to have a little kitty cat?”
“Most definitely. Especially a black one, but that’s a whole other bunch of bananas.”
“Okay,” he says. “That is what you think. You know what I think? I think you are crazy.” He throws his head back and laughs. It warms up the entire world. “Totally loca.” He turns around and starts talking in Spanish, saying Clark Gable knows what as he takes off his smock, hangs it on a hook. Underneath he’s wearing jeans and a black T-shirt like a normal guy. He pulls a notepad out of the front pocket of the smock and slips it into the back pocket of his jeans. I wonder if it’s an idea pad. At CSA, we’re encouraged to keep an idea pad on our person at all times. Mine’s empty. He turns both faucets on full blast, puts one arm underneath, then the other, scrubbing both with industrial soap. Brown water runs off him in muddy streams. Next he puts his whole head under the faucet. This is going to take a while.
I bend down to make friends with bad-luck Frida, who’s still circling Guillermo’s feet. Keep your enemies close, as they say. What’s so odd is that even with Frida and the toxoplasmosis and this man who should terrify me for so many reasons, I feel more at home than I have anywhere for so long. I scratch my fingers on the floor, trying to get the cat’s attention. “Frida,” I say softly.
The title of Mom’s book Count the Ways on Kahlo and Rivera is a line taken from her favorite poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Do you know it by heart?” I’d asked her one day when we were walking in the woods together, just us, a rarity.
“Of course I do.” She did a joyful little skip and pulled me close to her so that every inch of me felt happy and leaping. “‘How do I love thee?’” she said, her big dark eyes shining on me, our hair whipping around our heads, blending and twisting together in the wind. I knew it was a romantic poem, but that day, it felt about us, our private mother-daughter thing. “‘Let me count the ways,’” she sang out . . . wait, she is singing out! “‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach—’”
It’s her, here, now—her deep gravelly voice is reciting the poem to me!
“‘I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.’”
“Mom?” I whisper. “I hear you.”
Every single night before I go to bed, I read this poem aloud to her, wishing for this.
“Okay down there?” I peer up into the unmasked face of Guillermo Garcia, who now looks like he just got out of the ocean, his black hair slicked back and dripping, a towel thrown over his shoulder.
“I’m fine,” I say to him, but I’m far from it. My mother’s ghost spoke to me. She recited the poem back to me. She told me she loves me. Still.
I get to my feet. What must’ve I looked like? Squatting there on the floor, no cat in sight, totally lost, whispering to my dead mother.
Guillermo’s face now resembles the photos I saw online. Any one of his features would be dramatic, but all of them together, it’s a turf war, a rumble for territory, nose against mouth against flashing eyes. I can’t tell if he’s grotesque or gorgeous.
He’s examining me too.
“Your bones”—he touches his own cheek—“are very delicate. You have the bird bones.” His eyes drop, sweeping past my breasts, landing with confusion somewhere in the middle of me. I look down, expecting the onion to be in plain view or something else I forgot I was carrying for luck today, but it’s not that. My T-shirt has risen up under my unzipped sweatshirt and he’s staring at my exposed midriff, my tattoo. He takes a step toward me, and without asking, lifts my shirt so he can see the whole image. Oh boy. Ohboyohboy. His hand’s holding up the fabric. I can feel the heat of his fingertips on my belly. My heart speeds up. This is inappropriate, right? I mean, he’s old. A dad’s age. Except he sure doesn’t seem like a dad.
Then I see in his face that my stomach’s about as interesting to him as stretched canvas. He’s mesmerized by my tattoo, not me. Not sure if I’m relieved or insulted.
He meets my eyes, nods approval. “Raphael on the belly,” he says. “Very nice.” I can’t help but smile. He does too. A week before Mom died, I spent every penny I’d ever saved on it. Zephyr knew this guy who’d tattoo underage kids. I chose Raphael’s cherubs because they reminded me of NoahandJude—more one than two. Plus they can fly. Mostly now I think I did it to piss off Mom, but I never even got to show it to her . . . How can people die when you’re in a fight with them? When you’re smack in the middle of hating them? When absolutely nothing between you has been worked out?
To reconcile with a family member, hold a bowl out in the rain until full, then drink the rainwater the first moment the sun shines again
(Months before she died, Mom and I went on a mother-daughter day to the city to see if it could improve our relationship. Over lunch, she told me she felt like she was always, in her mind, looking for the mother
who abandoned her. I wanted to tell her: Yeah, me too.)
Guillermo motions for me to follow him, then stops at the entrance to the grand studio space, which unlike the rest of the place is sunny and fairly tidy. He holds his hand up to the room of giants. “My rocks, though I suppose you’ve already met.”
I suppose I have met them, but not like this, towering above us like titans.
“I feel so puny,” I say.
“Me too,” he says. “Like an ant.”
“But you’re their creator.”
“Perhaps,” he says. “I don’t know. Who knows . . .” He’s muttering something I can’t hear and conducting a symphony with his hands as he walks away from me toward a counter that has a hot plate with a kettle on it.
“Hey maybe you have Alice in Wonderland Syndrome!” I call after him, the idea taking hold of me. He turns. “That’s this totally cool neurological condition where the scale of things gets distorted in the mind. Usually people who have it see everything teeny-tiny—miniature people driving around in Matchbox cars, that sort of thing—but it can happen like this too.” I hold my hands out to the room as proof of my diagnosis.
He does not seem to think he has Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. I can tell because the loca tirade in Spanish has begun again as he bangs around the cabinets. While he makes coffee and rants, good-naturedly, I believe, this time—it’s possible I’m amusing him—I circle the pair of lovers closest to me, brushing my fingers over their gritty granular flesh, then step between them and reach my hands up, wanting to climb up their giant lovelorn bodies.
Maybe he’s suffering from a different kind of syndrome after all. Lovesickness, it would seem, if the repeating motif around this place is any indication.
I keep my new diagnosis to myself as I join him at the counter. He’s pouring water from the kettle through two filters poised over mugs and has begun singing to himself in Spanish. It occurs to me what the unfamiliar feeling is that’s overtaking me: well-being. At ease has graduated to a full-on sense of well-being. And maybe he’s experiencing it too, what with the singing and all.
Perhaps I could move in? I’d bring my sewing machine and that’s it. I’d just have to dodge the English guy . . . who maybe is Guillermo’s son . . . a love child he didn’t know about until recently, who grew up in England. Yes!
And . . . looking around for a lemon.
“As promised, nectar of the gods,” he says, placing the two steaming mugs on a table. I sit down on the red sofa beside it. “Now, we talk, yes?” He joins me on the couch, as does his ape-man smell. But I don’t even care. I don’t even care that the sun’s going to burn out in a matter of years, ending all life on Earth, well, five billion years, but still, guess what? I don’t care. Well-being is a wonderful thing.
He picks up a box of sugar on the table and proceeds to pour a ton into his mug, spilling as much.
“That’s lucky,” I say.
“What is?”
“Spilling sugar. Spilling salt is bad luck, but sugar . . .”
“I’ve heard that one before.” He smiles, then whacks the box with the back of his hand so that it falls over and its contents spill onto the floor. “There.”
I feel a surge of delight. “I don’t know if it counts if you do it on purpose.”
“Of course it counts,” he says, tapping a cigarette out of a crumpled pack left on the table, next to another one of those notepads. He leans back, lights up, inhales deeply. The smoke curls in the air between us. He’s examining me again. “I want you to know I hear what you say outside. About this.” He places his hand on his chest. “You were honest with me, so I be honest with you.” He’s looking into my eyes. It’s dizzying. “When you came the other day, I was not in good shape. I am not in good shape sometimes . . . I know I told you go away. I don’t know what else I say to you. I don’t remember much . . . that whole week.” He waves the cigarette in the air. “But I tell you, I am not teaching anymore for a reason. I don’t have it, the thing you need. I just don’t have.” He takes a drag, exhales a long gray stream of smoke, then gestures at the giants. “I am like them. Every day I think to myself, it happen, finally I become the rock I carve.”
“Me too,” I blurt out. “I’m made of stone too. I thought that exact thing the other day. I think my whole family is. There’s this disease called FOP—”
“No, no, no, you are not made of the stone,” he interrupts. “You do not have this disease called FOP. Or any disease called anything.” He touches my cheek tenderly with his calloused fingers, leaves them there. “Trust me,” he says. “If anyone knows this, it is me.”
His eyes have become gentle. I’m swimming in them.
It’s suddenly so quiet inside me.
I nod and he smiles and takes his hand away. I place mine where his was, not understanding what’s going on. Why all I want is his hand back on my face. All I want is for him to touch my cheek like that and tell me I’m fine again and again until I am.
He stamps out the cigarette. “I, however, am a different story. I have not taught in years. I will not. Probably not ever again. So . . .”
Oh. I wrap my arms around myself. I’ve been terribly mistaken. I thought when he invited me in for coffee he was saying yes. I thought he was going to help me. My lungs feel like they’re closing up.
“I only want to work now.” A shadow has darkened his face. “It is all I have. It is all I can do to . . .” He doesn’t finish, just stares off at the giants. “They are the only ones I want to think about or care about, understand? That’s it.” His voice has grown solemn, leaden.
I stare down at my hands, disappointment pooling inside me, black and thick and hopeless.
“So,” he continues. “I think about this, assume you are at CSA because you mention Sandy, yes?” I nod. “There is someone there, no? Ivan something, he is in that department, he can surely help you with this piece?”
“He’s in Italy,” I say, my voice cracking. Oh no. How can this be? Now? Oh not now, please. But it is now. For the first time in two years, tears are streaming down my cheeks. I wipe them away quickly, again and again. “I understand,” I say, getting up. “Really. It’s fine. It was a dumb idea. Thank you for the coffee.” I have to get out of here. I have to stop crying. There’s a sob building inside me so immense and powerful it’s going to break all my bird bones. It’s Judemageddon. I keep my arms tightly fastened around my ribs as I make my trembling legs move across the bright sunny studio, through the mailroom, and down the dark musty hallway, completely blinded from the contrast, when his baritone voice stops me.
“This sculpture needs to be made so much you cry like this?”
I turn around. He’s leaning against the wall by the painting of the kiss, his arms crossed.
“Yes,” I gasp out, then say more calmly, “Yes.” Is he changing his mind? The sob begins to retreat.
He’s stroking his chin. His expression softens. “You need to make this sculpture so badly, you will risk your young life by sharing space with a disease-carrying cat?”
“Yes. Totally, yes. Please.”
“You are sure you want to forsake the warm, moist breath of clay for the cold, unforgiving eternity of stone.”
“I am sure.” Whatever that means.
“Come back tomorrow afternoon. Bring your portfolio and a sketchpad. And tell your brother to give you back the sun, trees, stars, all of it already. I think you need.”
“You’re saying yes?”
“I am. I do not know why but I am.”
I’m about to leap across the room and hug him.
“Oh no.” He wags a finger at me. “Do not look so happy. I tell you ahead of time. All my students despise me.”