Next to the lion, practically horizontal on a bench, she lay. She wore a thick, grubby men’s overcoat and a scowl. Her dark hair was unkempt and practically dreaded, and her hands were covered in scars. Piercings glinted dirtily from her nose, ears and lip, and I could see from where I stood her heel, poking proudly out through a hole in her shoe. Anyone passing might have thought she was homeless but for the way she gazed at the lion, jerking slightly when anyone touched it.
“It’s delicate,” she growled at a middle-aged couple laden with bags.
“Did you make it?” said the man.
“Yes,” she said, and with her tatty foot, she nudged the old hat positioned under the lion’s pedestal.
On the second day the sculpture was a mermaid: a glistening siren calling out to me silently from a melting rock. I tried to strike up a conversation about the sculpture with its creator. I thought art might make me interesting. She looked at me with a bored expression that seemed to say, You’ll do, and invited me gruffly to get coffee somewhere.
There, in a dingy midafternoon bar, she ordered two double whiskies for herself and another to go with my coffee. We spoke little. I was afraid. I asked her about her sculptures. She explained that she was a former rich brat and earned a fortune making ice sculptures for exclusive parties for ten months of the year. The rest of the time, she said, licking the rim of her glass like a savage, she moved from town to town displaying her work on the streets, got up like a beggar with a ragged cap for spare change. She was, apparently, doing it all to write a book on perceptions of art and poverty. I think she just liked to glower at people from a smug self-induced state of poorness. I didn’t say so. I smiled at her and said it was fascinating. At that, a flash of joy passed over her features, and she seemed to be about to thank me. Instead, she asked me to take her home with me.
Once we were through the door, she slammed me against a wall in the fading light. I was shocked to say the least, but delighted that I was suddenly part of this rock ’n’ roll artist lifestyle. She kissed me and I tasted booze and tobacco and a little desperation on her mouth. I kissed back eagerly as she made no attempt at ceremony. She reached down and began fucking me hard, glaring at me as if daring me to come. Losing myself in it all I began to feel the waves of tension wash over me and my knees weaken.
“So,” she said casually, as if she weren’t controlling my body from the inside out, “you like my work?”
“Yes,” I said breathlessly. She nodded to herself.
“And you’d like me to sculpt you someday, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, imagining standing naked under her gaze while she chiseled the shape of my hips and thighs into the ice.
“Say so then,” she spat, almost disdainfully.
“I’d like you to sculpt me.”
“You’d what?” she demanded, knowing I was losing the power of speech.
“I’d love you to sculpt me. I… want you… to…” I felt my hips buck and my head roll back involuntarily as the orgasm swept through me, and I abandoned my words to screams. She left almost as soon as I had got my breath back.
So now, she was moving on.
Since the second day I had seen her, we had fucked every day. In that time we had barely spoken. Or at least, I hadn’t. My chattering in her silences made me nervous, and she rarely spoke apart from sudden rants about Prejudice, Capitalism and the Right Wing, and I was afraid to interrupt. Aside from in bed, she barely looked at me, and even there she seemed not to really see me. She enjoyed toying with me, holding me on the edge of orgasm for what felt like hours and making me tell her whatever she wanted to hear, about her sculptures, about her, about us. It was that power that kept me coming back. I craved her hold over me, almost as much as I longed to exert the same hold over her.
After five weeks of this, she called me, as she often did, to summon me. I licked my lips as I answered the phone.
“I’m going tomorrow,” she said.
“Going where?”
“On. Out. Next place,” she said. She rarely spoke in full sentences.
“What the fuck?” Panic rose in my voice, surprising me. I composed myself. “Well, thanks for the notice.”
“Whatever,” she replied. “Come over.”
“There’s no point really is there?” I said, attempting to sound bored but only sounding indignant.
“Just come. The workshop. I’ll be there all night, so whatever.” She rang off. I seethed for a moment. Then I cried a little and then drummed my fists on my knees.
“Bitch!” I shouted at the telephone.
I shouldn’t have cared, but I did. I should have just gone over there for quick sex and left, because that was what we both should have wanted, but it wasn’t. She had ignored and used me for just over a month and now she was leaving. It shouldn’t have been such a big problem, but I was stuck. I wanted so badly to crack that veneer and make her see through all her miserable judgments and her big philosophies. I convinced myself that it wasn’t for my sake but to simply prove a point.
If there is one thing I can’t resist, it’s proving a point, even if I have to fight for it long after the argument is relevant. Convincing myself that this stubbornness drove me, not my longing for her, I stamped into the bathroom. I was a mess, I conceded, as I looked at my blotchy face in the mirror. Rising to the challenge I slipped into the shower and began to prepare. I lathered, shampooed, shaved and scrubbed until I was pink, glowing and soap scented all over. After drying off in my room, I applied rich moisturizers and a perfume I knew had caught her attention before. I chose my clothes carefully, deciding on a short pencil skirt that had made her eyes linger longer than usual and a crisp white shirt that made me feel stern. I knew, despite all her feminist rants about sexualized clothing, that nothing turned her on faster than a pair of heels worn with confidence, so I selected my favorite black patent kitten heels to complete the outfit. Next, I dried and combed out my hair until it shone and applied light makeup. Once I was sure I was looking the best I could, I drove across town to meet her.
The workshop she squatted in was a former shop with a basement below it. The basement led to a bay where delivery vans had unloaded stock, and this was where she loaded her sculptures into her clapped-out transit each day. The windows at the front had been boarded up and the shop itself gutted. There was an old sofa against one wall that she slept on, and toward the back in an alcove behind a ragged curtain was a sink. Aside from that, it was empty. I found the door to the shop open and walked through to the back, where the stairs led down to the basement.
The basement was freezing, appropriately, and lit with institutional strip lighting. Leaning against the nearest wall was a chainsaw and a canvas strip full of hammers and chisels freshly cleaned and dried after the latest creation. She stood in the center of the room, smoking and leaning against what I presumed was a sculpture hidden under a dust sheet. She rarely let me see the sculptures before they went out on display. In fact, she rarely sculpted at night, preferring to create something early in the morning and then display it from midday in public. I anticipated another of her games and remained silent as I reached the bottom of the stairs. Once there I stood still, hoping she would feel awkward.
She acknowledged me with a slight twitch of the eyelids and went on smoking and staring about. I cracked first.