It’s the next afternoon and I’m hurrying down the grimy fungal hallway in Guillermo Garcia’s studio because no one came to the door when I knocked. I’m sweating and nervous and reconsidering the last sixteen years. Under my arm is my CSA portfolio of broken blobs and bowls. The only reason I even have a portfolio is because we’re required to take a progression of pictures of every piece we make. My progressions are insane, certainly not an advertisement of ability—more like an accounting of a ceramic shop after an earthquake.
Right before I enter the mailroom, I hear the English-accented voice and a whole percussion section bursts to life in my chest. I back against the wall, try to silence the pounding. I was hoping he wouldn’t be here. And hoping he would be. And hoping I’d stop hoping he would be. However, I’ve come prepared.
Carrying a burnt candle stub will extinguish feelings of love
should they arise
(Front left pocket.)
Soak a mirror in vinegar to deflect unwanted attention
(Back pocket.)
To change the leanings of the heart, wear a wasp nest on the head
(Not this desperate. Yet.)
Alas, perhaps I’m not prepared for this: sex noises. Unmistakable sex noises. Moaning and groaning and obscene murmurings. Is this why nobody answered the door? In an English accent, I hear: “Holy Christ, so good. God, soooooo damn good. Better than any drug, I mean any. Better than anything.” Followed by a long drawl of a moan.
Then a deeper groan, which must be Guillermo’s. Because they’re lovers! Of course. How stupid could I be? The English guy is Guillermo’s boyfriend, not his long-lost son. But he sure seemed straight when he was taking pictures of me in church and when he was talking to me outside the studio yesterday too. So attentive. Did I misread him? Or maybe he’s bi? And what about all Guillermo’s hyper-heterosexual artwork?
And not to judge, but cradle-rob much? There’s probably a quarter century between them.
Should I leave? They seem to have settled down and are now just bantering back and forth. I listen closely. The English guy is trying to convince Guillermo to go to some type of sauna with him later this afternoon. Definitely gay. Good. This is great news, actually. The boycott will be a snap to maintain, oranges or no oranges.
I make a bunch of noise, stamping on the floor, clearing my throat several times, a few more stomps, then step around the corner.
In front of me is a fully clothed Guillermo and a fully clothed English guy on opposite sides of a chessboard. There’s no indication they were just in the throes of passion. Each has a half-eaten donut in his hand.
“Very clever, aren’t we?” the English guy says to me at once. “Never would’ve suspected you of such subterfuge, whoever you are.” With his free hand, he reaches into the messenger bag resting beside him and pulls out the orange. In a flash it’s airborne, then in my hand, and his face has broken into five million pieces of happiness. “Nice catch,” he says.
Victorious, he takes a bite of donut, then moans theatrically.
Okay. Not gay. Not lovers, they both just appear to like donuts more than your average bear. And what am I going to do now? Because my invisibility uniform doesn’t seem to work with this guy. And ditto the vinegar-soaked mirror and extinguished candle stub.
I stuff the orange in with the onion and pull my cap down.
Guillermo gives me a curious look. “So you’ve already met the resident guru? Oscar is trying to enlighten me as usual.” Oscar. He has a name and it’s Oscar, not that I care, though I do like the way Guillermo says it: Oscore! Guillermo continues. “Every day, something else. Today it is Bikram yoga.” Ah, the sauna. “You know this yoga?” he asks me.
“I know that’s a real lot of bacteria in one hot sweaty room,” I tell Guillermo.
He drops his head back and laughs heartily. “She is so crazy with the germs, Oscore! She think Frida Kahlo is going to kill me.” This relaxes me. He relaxes me. Who would’ve thought Guillermo Garcia, The Rock Star of the Sculpture World, would have this soothing effect on me? Maybe he’s the meadow!
A surprised look has crossed Oscar’s face as he studies Guillermo, then me. “So how did the two of you meet?” he asks.
I rest my portfolio and bag against an easy chair that’s smothered in unopened mail. “He caught me on the fire escape spying on him.”
Oscar’s eyes widen but his attention’s back on the chessboard. He moves a piece. “And you’re still sentient? Impressive.” He pops the remaining piece of donut in his mouth and closes his eyes as he slowly chews. I can see the rapture taking him over. Jesus. That must be some donut. I tear my eyes off him, hard to do.
“She win me over,” Guillermo says while studying Oscar’s move. “Like you win me over, Oscore. Long time ago.” His face darkens. “Ay, cabrón.” He starts muttering in Spanish as he nudges a piece forward.
“G. saved my life,” Oscar says with affection. “And checkmate, mate.” He leans back on his chair, balancing on the rear legs, says, “I hear they’re giving lessons down at the senior center.”
Guillermo groans, for the first time not donut-related, and flips the board so pieces go flying in every direction. “I kill you in your sleep,” he says, which makes Oscar laugh, then Guillermo picks up a white bakery bag and holds it out to me.
I decline, way too nervous to eat.
“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’” Oscar says to me, still balancing on the back legs of his chair. “William Blake.”
Guillermo says to him, “Yes, very good, one of your twelve steps, Oscore?” I look at Oscore. Is he in AA? I didn’t know you could be an alcoholic if you weren’t old. Or maybe he’s in NA? Didn’t he just say something about no drug being as good as that donut. Is he a drug addict? He did say he has impulse-control issues.
“Indeed,” Oscar says with a smile. “The step known only to the in crowd.”
“How did you save his life?” I ask Guillermo, dying to know.
But it’s Oscar who answers. “He found me half dead from pills and booze in the park and somehow recognized me. According to him: ‘I hoist Oscore over my shoulders like a deer’”—he’s slipped into a perfect Guillermo Garcia impersonation that includes hand gestures—“‘and I carry him across town like Superman and deposit him in the loft.’” He turns back into himself. “All I know is I woke up with G.’s monstrous face in mine”—he laughs his god-awful laugh—“and had no idea how it had gotten there. It was mad. He started barking orders at me right away. Told me I could stay here if I got clean. Ordered me to go to ‘two meetings a day, understand, Oscore? The NA in the morning, the AA in the evening.’ Then, maybe because I’m English, I don’t know, he quoted Winston Churchill: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ Understand, Oscore? Morning, noon, and night he said this to me: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going,’ so I did. I kept going and going and now I’m at university and not dead in a ditch somewhere and that is how he saved my life. Highly abridged and sanitized. It was hell.”
And that is why there are several lifetimes in Oscar’s face.
And he is in college.
I glance down at my sneakers, thinking about that Churchill quote. What if there was a time when I was going through hell too, but I didn’t have the courage to keep going? So I just stopped. Pressed pause. What if I’m still on pause?
Guillermo says, “And to thank me for saving his life, he beat me at chess every single day since.”
I look at the two of them mirroring each other across the table and realize: They are father and son, just not by blood. I didn’t know that family members could just find each other, choose each other like they have. I love the idea. And I’d like to trade in Dad and Noah for these two.
Guillermo shakes the bag at me. “Your first lesson: My studio is not a democracy. Have a donut.”
I walk over and peek into the bag. The smell almost makes my knees give out—they weren’t exaggerating. “Wow,” I hear myself say. They both smile. I choose one. It’s not covered in chocolate but drowned in it. And it’s still warm.
“Ten dollars says you can’t eat that donut without moaning,” Oscar says. “Or closing your eyes.” He looks at me in a way that causes a minor cerebral hemorrhage. “Actually, let’s say twenty. I remember how you got in front of the camera.” He knew how I’d felt that day in church?
He holds out his hand to seal the bet.
I shake it—and quite sure I experience close to a lethal dose of electricity. I’m in trouble.
No time to dwell, though. Guillermo and Oscar are giving the show before them—me—their undivided attention. How did I get into this? Tentatively, I lift the donut to my mouth. I take a small bite and despite the fact that all I want to do is close my eyes and moan a porn soundtrack, I resist.
Oh . . . It’s harder than I thought! The second bite is bigger and brings joy to each cell in my body. This is the kind of thing you should only do in private, not with a Guillermo and an Oscore staring you down, both of them with arms crossed and very superior expressions on their faces.
I’m going to have to up the ante. I mean, I have a bevy of horrific diseases to choose from, don’t I? Diseases to imagine in vivid moan-repressing detail. Skin conditions are the worst.
“So there’s this disease,” I tell them, taking a bite, “called tungiasis where fleas burrow and lay eggs beneath your skin and you can see them hatching and moving around under there, all over your body.”
I take in their appalled expressions. Ha! Three bites down.
“Remarkable, even with the fleas,” Guillermo says to Oscar.
“She doesn’t have a prayer,” he replies.
I bring out the heavy artillery.
“There was this Indonesian fisherman,” I tell them. “He’s called The Tree Man because he had such a severe case of human papiloma virus of the skin that thirteen pounds of horn-like warts had to be removed from his body.” I make eye contact with one, then the other, repeat, “Thirteen pounds of warts.”
I relate the way the poor Tree Man’s extremities hung from him like gnarled trunks, and with that disturbing image firmly planted in my head, I’m pumped, confident, and take a bigger bite. But it’s the wrong move. The rich warm chocolate overtakes my mouth, erases my mind, spinning me into a state of transcendence. Tree Man or not, I’m defenseless and the next thing I know, my eyes are closed and out of my mouth explodes, “Oh my fucking God! What’s in this?” I take another bite and then unleash a moan so obscene I can’t believe it came out of me.
Oscar laughs. Guillermo, equally pleased, says, “There it is. The government should use Dwyer’s donuts to control our minds.”
I dredge a crumpled twenty-dollar bill from my jeans pocket, but Oscar holds up a hand. “First loss on the house.”
Guillermo pulls up a chair for me—it feels like being admitted into a club—then holds the bag out. We each take another donut, and then the three of us proceed to visit with Clark Gable.
After, Guillermo slaps his thighs with his hands and says, “Okay, CJ, now we get to it. I leave a message for Sandy this morning on his voicemail. I tell him I agree to do a studio credit for your winter term.” He stands.
“Thank you. This is so amazing.” I stand too, feeling jittery, wishing we could just sit around and eat donuts all afternoon. “But how . . .” I realized last night I hadn’t yet told him my name.
He registers my surprise. “Oh. Sandy leave a message on the machine, a garbled message—I kick that old machine one too many times—said a CJ wanted to work in stone. That is all I understand. Days ago, he call. I did not check until today.”
“CJ,” Oscar says like it’s a revelation.
I’m about to tell them my real name, then decide not to. Maybe for once I don’t have to be Dianna Sweetwine’s poor motherless daughter.
Frida Kahlo slinks into the room and pads over to Oscar, curling around his leg. He picks her up and she nuzzles her nose into his neck, purring like a turbine. “I have a way with the ladies,” he says to me, stroking Frida under her chin with his index finger.
“I wouldn’t notice,” I say. “I’m on a boycott.”
He lifts his green and brown Cezanne eyes. His eyelashes are so black they look wet. “A boycott?” he asks.
“A boy boycott.”
“Really?” he says with a grin. “I’ll take that as a challenge.”
Help.
“Behave, Oscore,” Guillermo berates. “Okay,” he says to me. “Now we find out what you are made of. Ready?” My legs go weak. I’m made of fraud. And Guillermo’s about to realize.
He puts a hand on Oscar’s shoulder.
“I have to meet Sophia in two hours,” Oscar says. “That work?”
Sophia? Who’s Sophia?
Not that I care. In the slightest.
But who is she?
And work for what?
Oscar starts taking off his clothes.
I repeat: Oscar is taking off his clothes!
My mind’s racing and my hands are swampy and Oscar’s cool violet bowling shirt is now strewn across the back of a chair and his chest is sinewy and beautiful, his muscles long and taut and defined, his skin smooth and tanned, not that I notice! There’s a tattoo of Sagittarius on his left bicep and what looks like a Franz Marc blue horse on his right shoulder that twists all the way up his neck.
Now he’s unfastening the button of his jeans.
“What are you doing?” I ask, panicking. Imagining the meadow. Imagining the relaxing effing meadow!
“Getting ready,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Getting ready for what?” I ask his bare butt as he struts in that slow summer way of his across the room and grabs a blue robe from a hook on the wall next to the smocks. He swings it over his shoulder and heads down the hall to the studio.
Oh, duh. Got it.
Guillermo tries to hold back a smile, fails. He shrugs. “All models, they are the exhibitionists,” he says lightly. I nod, flushing. “We have to put up with them. Oscore is very good. Very graceful. Much expression.” He frames his own face with his hand. “We are going to draw together, but first I see the portfolio.”
When Guillermo said to bring my sketchpad, I thought he’d have me work on the studies of the sculpture I want to make, not sketch with him. And in front of Oscar. Sketching Oscore!
“Drawing is critical,” Guillermo says. “Many sculptors do not know this.”
Terrific. I follow him down the hall, portfolio in hand, stomach in turmoil.
I spot Oscar’s leather jacket hanging on a hook—yes. I slip the orange into the pocket without Guillermo noticing.
Guillermo opens one of the doors that line the hallway, flicks on the light. It’s a jail cell of a room with a table and a couple chairs. In one corner are bags of clay stacked on shelves. In the other, hunks of stone, all different colors and sizes. There’s a shelf full of tools, only some familiar to me. He takes the portfolio case from me, unzips it, and opens it on the table.
The thought of his eyes on my work is making my toes curl.
He flips through quickly at first. Photos of bowls in every size in various stages of development, then the final photo of the piece broken and glued together. His forehead creases in confusion more and more with each passing page. Then he comes to the blobs. It’s the same. Each blob whole and then all broken and glued together in the final photo.
“Why?” he asks.
I go with the truth.
“It’s my mother. She breaks everything I make.”
He’s horrified. “Your mother breaks your artwork?”
“Oh no,” I say, understanding what he’s thinking. “She’s not mean or crazy or anything. She’s dead.”
I see the earthquake in his expression, the concern for my safety turn into concern for my sanity. Well, whatever. There’s no other explanation.
“Okay,” he says, adjusting. “Why would your dead mother want to do this?”
“She’s mad at me.”
“She’s mad at you,” he repeats. “This is what you think?”
“This is what I know,” I say.
“Everyone in your family is very powerful. Your brother and you divide the world between you. Your mother come back to life to break your bowls.”
I shrug.
“This sculpture you have to make, it is for your mother then?” he asks. “She is the one you mention yesterday? You think if you make this sculpture she will not be mad at you anymore and she will stop breaking your bowls? This is why you cry when you think I do not help you?”
“Yes,” I say.
He strokes an imaginary beard, studying me for a very long time, then returns his attention to Broken Me-Blob No. 6. “Okay. But that is not the problem here. Your mother is not the problem. The best part, the most interesting part of this work is the breaks.” He touches the final photo with his index finger. “The problem here is that you are not here. Some other girl make it all maybe, I don’t know.” He looks at several more blobs. “Well?” he says. I glance up at him. I didn’t realize he was waiting for a response.
I don’t know what to say.
I resist the impulse to step back so I don’t get swatted by his hands. “I do not see the girl who climbed up my fire escape, who thinks spilled sugar will change her life, who believe she is in mortal danger because of a cat, who cries because I will not help her. I do not see the girl who told me she was as sad as me, who says her angry dead mother break her bowls. Where is that girl?” That girl? His eyes are blazing into mine. Does he expect an answer? “She is not making this work. She is not in this work, so why do you waste your time and everyone else’s?” He sure doesn’t mince words.
I take a deep breath. “I don’t know.”
“That is obvious.” He closes the portfolio. “You will put that girl in the sculpture you make with me, understand?”
“I understand,” I say, except I have no clue how to do that. Have I ever done it? Certainly I haven’t at CSA. I think about my sand sculptures. How hard I used to work to get them to look like they did in my head. Never getting it. But maybe then. Maybe that’s why I was so afraid Mom wouldn’t like them.
He smiles at me. “Good. We will have fun then. I am Colombian. I cannot resist a good ghost story.”
He taps his hand on the case. “I am not sure you are ready for stone. Clay is kind—it can do anything, though you do not know this yet. Stone can be stingy, ungenerous, like the unrequited lover.”
“It will be more difficult for my mother to break it if it’s in stone.”
Understanding crosses his face. “She will not break this sculpture no matter what it is made of. You will have to trust me on that. You will learn to carve first on a practice rock. Then together we will figure out the best material for this sculpture after I see the studies. Will it be of your mother?”
“Yes. I don’t usually do realistic, but . . .” Then, before I know I’m going to, I’m telling him. “Sandy asked me if there was something I needed in the world that only my two hands could create.” I swallow, meet his eyes. “My mom, she was really beautiful. My dad used to say she could make trees bloom just by looking at them.” Guillermo smiles. I go on.“Every morning she used to stand on the deck staring out at the water. The wind would stream through her hair, her robe would billow behind her. It was like she was at the helm of a ship, you know? It was like she was steering us across the sky. Every day it was like that. Every day I thought that. The image is always somewhere in my mind. Always.” Guillermo’s listening so intently and I’m thinking maybe he’s the kind of man who makes all the walls in people fall down too, not just rooms, because like yesterday, I want to tell him more. “I’ve tried everything to get through to her, Guillermo. Absolutely everything. I have this weird book and I scour it for ideas nonstop. I’ve done it all. I’ve slept with her jewelry under my pillow. I’ve stood on the beach at midnight, holding up a picture of the two of us to a blue moon. I’ve written letters to her and put them in her coat pockets, in red mailboxes. I’ve thrown messages into storms. I recite her favorite poem to her every night before I go bed. And all she does is break what I make. That’s how angry she is.” I’ve started to sweat. “It would kill me if she broke this.” My lips are trembling. Covering my mouth, I add, “It’s the one thing I have.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder. I can’t believe how much I want him to hug me. “She will not break,” he says gently. “I promise you. You will make it. You will have this. I will help you. And CJ, this is the girl you need to let into your artwork.”
I nod.
Then he walks over to the shelf, grabs some charcoal. “Now we draw.”
Unbelievably, I’d forgotten about Oscar naked in the next room.