Elvissey (29 page)

E fixed his look on me as he sang, playing to no other,
uncaring that we weren't alone in the room. Against all
expectation or reason I felt myself soften. It possibled that
I'd adjusted to him as the weeks passed; could have been
that the control I knew I had over him, the power which I'd
never had over my husband, strengthened me enough that
I sensed my own soul's urgings as they evidenced pure, and
not moments later, after my mind had time enough to reinterpret their meaning. When E stared at me now, caressing
his guitar strings as he might have caressed his girlfriend, I
not only at last understood his figurative attraction but felt
it, as well.

Our trip had drawn John and me closer together, after all.
We were bearing in toward one another again so inexorably
as a missile returns, in time, to earth; but in our heaven I saw
no sign that we could in any way forestall such a mutually
attractive destruction. As I listened to E sing I outbodied for
an instant, allowing my soul to drift away for a time that it
might commingle with one I hadn't known. It wasn't truly E
with whom I fancied conjoining, or so I hairsplit; my dream
lover only showed in his shell, surrounding a center partly
my husband's, partly my own.

E smiled, concluding his song and laying aside his guitar.
Leverett rolled his hands together, sliding them one over the
other, as if he'd become slippier while sitting there. "It's a
feelgooder, sure," he said. "We'll go with my suggests, I
think. Your public knows what it wants. Trust me."

"Not all of my pieces have been displayed," said Tanya, as
she escorted me into her largest. "I call this one `Wailing
Wall: You've Seen Me Before.'"

After leaving E I'd had myself driven to Tanya's studio in
Riverdale, having appointed to meet her and see her works
closehand. Judy provided her with an old house overlooking
the Hudson River and the Palisades, a mansion once occupied as all in the neighborhood had been occupied by a
Home Army officer; twenty years of green paint flaked from
its exterior, snowing onto the grass, showing as healthy
weeds against the sunbroiled yard. Inside, we walked between double rows of quarter-meter-square metal boxes,
stacked twice so high as our heads. Each box bore on its
rusted face a photo of what appeared, at first, to be a sleeping baby; in many instances, even after applying close eye, it
remained unimaginable that the baby shown was truly dead.

"Each box carries one lost. A reinterpretation of Boltan-
ski. Are you familiar with memorial photography?"

"No," I said. Most images were funeral shots, head-on
polaroids snapped precremation; others were older, including some tintypes from a century and a half before, so old
that their surfaces were as one with their boxes.

"Most popular during the nineteenth century. Popular
again at the end of the twentieth, when so many began
dropping. A nineties specialty, the sort of thing you'd expect
from that period." The two walls were spaced far enough
apart that our shoulders barely brushed them as we sin-
glefiled through; their lengths mazed through the house's
ground floor, running over forty meters. "Memory pictures,
all. Shadows of ones lost."

"So many of them appear so-"

"Normal?" she asked. "Fatal deformities rarely ambient
overtly. Ten percent of these pictured, for example, died
from being born lungless."

I stared at a shot of a windowed coffin constructed for two;
the heads of a seeming couple were visible within, and I
wondered if theirs was a physical or metaphorical juncture.
"Their beauty isn't immediately seeable, even by those who
believe they appreciate fetal art. This homes it a bit too close
for most, I fear."

Small white lights affixed to the top of the walls cast
enough glow to illuminate each photo. "You know their
backgrounding histories?" I asked.

"I try. Someone should remember," she said. "The oldest
images are anonymous, needless to say. But they're not forgotten, only lost. And these are mine, in the last row."

She gestured toward the boxed images of her nonviabled
children; most had been recognizably recycled. I counted
fourteen boxes. "Only four were fullterm. Five births were
multiple. They're all still with me." Tanya switched off her
piece's lights, and guided me across the room toward stairs.
"How did you choose the fathers-?"

"At random," she said as we ascended. "As circumstanced; they're rather inessential once the spark is thrown.
Serve as seeds of ideas, as it were. Here we are." At the head
of the stairs were high double oak doors; sliding them apart,
she opened her studio. "Ignore, sweetie, we're occupied."
Tanya's daughter stood atop a rolled plastic tube on the
room's far side, placing small bones into a screened wooden
frame, sprinkling sparkling powder over them with a sifter.
While glittering their lengths she periodically lifted a femur
or rib or vertebra, holding them up in sunlight to better
judge their shine. The house's upper floor was cathedralceilinged, open from gable to gable; the walls facing the
river were glassed. The sun, setting over Jersey, ambered the
room. Tanya told her coffeemaker to pour us two cups, and
we sat in two wicker rockers; she crossed her legs beneath her
as her cat hopped into her lap.

"You were at the Columbia show, then?" she said. "It so
successed. Forgive my not remembering you."

"Of course," I said. "I'd heard of the movement, but
hadn't seen your work before."

"That was our first show, aboveground," she said. "Until
Ms. Glastonbury began assuring security, public exhibition
involved passing through gray areas. We've had no troubles
since." She nodded toward her daughter. "What a worker.
How's the look, sweetie?"

Her daughter hoisted an armbone no longer than a pencil, twirling it as if it were a baton; excess glitter spilled
floor-ways. "Like this?"

"That's lovely, sweetie," Tanya said. "Many of my co-workers who lack studio space leave their materials here, and we
appropriately treat them as desired. We're all quite close."
She smiled. "Ms. Glastonbury tells me you're pregnant."
"My first month," I said. "Perfect, thus far."

"That's correctable. What procedures would you prefer to
use?"

"That's not why I'm here."

"Of course. I'm sorry." Mayhap all who came to her
claiming such employed that line at first, to detrepidize
themselves; Tanya appeared to understand, and redirected
our conversation. "My work speaks to you?"

"It shouts, but I don't know what it says."

"Keep listening."

"How did you ..." I started to ask. "Why did you? Begin,
I mean."

"My husband ran fourteen years ago, when we lived in
Chicago," she said. "I found out I was pregnant afterward,
and had neither money nor contacts to effect abortion. The
Health Service amnioed me and forecast the stillbirth. I
dayshifted all the while at a plant that manufactured car
batteries. You can imagine the conditions. I still spew dust
each morning. One evening when I got off there was a
sandstorm and the El was shut down. A woman cabbie heading into town offered me a free ride. I was in my seventh
month, and showed plain. She asked if I was having any trouble. I flooded, but couldn't say why. We stopped at a
diner and I talked to her. Harangued, rather. Cursed the
man who'd planted and flown. Cursed the government that
demanded I birth the dead. Cursed the world that, through
its poisons, guaranteed my baby's death so long as it was
bound inside me. She said she understood. I cried again.

"Her name was Dianne. She led me into the diner's restroom. I remember hearing the rats scratching in the walls as
she lifted her shirt. She'd had a caesarean; she'd tattooed a
short-stem rose on her scar. She pushed her hair back from
her head, and flashed her earrings. They looked like golden
insects at first, but when I looked closer I saw that they were
little hands. Diane told me that there were some women she
thought I should meet.

"I went to see them the next week at her apartment, in an
old building on North Clark Street. She'd stuffed the windows with towels to keep the sand out. There were five others
besides Dianne. All'd gone to term after they'd been left
pregnant, and all birthed at home. They'd insighted independently, they told me; afterward, realizing what they could
do, they sought out others in whom they perceived .. ."
Tanya paused; sipped her coffee while she considered her
words. She gazed over toward her daughter before continuing. "You can't prettify violence and waste solely for aes-
thetic's sake, something more is needed. So what we do is
take the rage the violence arouses and make of its leavings
something bright, and strange enough to be familiar.

"Much more than this. Mind me, dear, you'll love the
baby you grow all the more, knowing it'll live only while it's
in you. It could be a nine-month funeral, if you negatived.
But these days so many would say the whole of life is but a
wake where the beloved can finally hear what's said about
them behind their backs. So ..." With callused hands she
wiped her eyes; tabled her emptied cup. "So we found ourselves. None of us were art majors. Later the theoreticians
deciphered what we'd folked. They semiograph us, but we won't reply. All we know is that we were damned if we
birthed simply to bury. Our children deserve better than
that. In this manner we endow the life we were unable to
give."

"You outbodied your daughter, all the same-"

"Memories have their house," she said, looking around
her studio. "But art doesn't propagate so well as life. Do you
see? If I'd not undertaken these designs of mine, I wouldn't
have wanted so badly to have a child who would. Nor been
able to afford having her. In my art I try to aestheticize the
nonaesthetic. Silkpurse sows. Wrap fur on parking meters. I
make bearable pain I've known, for others if not always for
myself. I don't believe that's often understood, and rarely
appreciated." She sighed. "Critics."

"I appreciate."

"That's good. It's a holistic erosion, after a time. Retirement essentials. My final project is in progress at present,"
she said, patting her stomach. "I awared Ms. Glastonbury of
my decision before she gifted me with this studio. She
thought it a pity, but then suggested I continue casting new
works using plastic, or similar material." Tanya shook her
head, and smiled. "As said, I don't believe my work's intent
is often understood."

"But Ms. Glastonbury understands enough at least to lend
support to your work-"

"True. And as head of Dryco, that is to say the government
and the world and all its works, Ms. Glastonbury as well
continues to assure that fetal art has to be done. Irony
redoubles when good's made from bad." Her chair creaked
as she leaned back in it; her cat leapt floorways and padded
to its bowl of scraps. "If you reconsider before your third
month, call me. I'll guide you as I can."

"No," I told her. "I want my baby."

"I wanted mine."