She knifed in the water, a rose-brushed trout. She kept under for as long as she could bear. The liquid ran colder and denser than she'd thought. It contracted her arteries and hammered her head. She felt her ideas go soft, giving in to the snow-fed current. She worked back to the shore. It took her two tries to lift herself up on a boulder. As the glaze of water on her evaporated, her core temperature plunged still deeper. She huddled on the rock, hands around her knees, convulsing.
Adie? a voice twenty feet away called.
She screamed and splayed, grabbing the rock as she lost her balance. She fought to reach her stack of clothes, and she fell. She cowered, clasping her T-shirt against her nakedness. Down the path, through the skirt of trees, his back to her, his hands folded in a cowl over his head, stood Karl Ebesen. She closed her eyes, breathed out hard, and slugged herself in the chest, to restart her heart.
Ach, Ebesen moaned. Jesus. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Plaintive burlesque crept into his apology. She had to laugh. The most anguished she'd seen the man since meeting him.
Hang on. Give me two minutes.
Fright, at least, had killed the chill. Her clothes felt good going on, wicking the water off her skin.
She stepped out from behind the rock. All hid.
Ebesen lowered his hands and edged forward, shy caller in some overgrown game of tag. Forgive me. I figured it would be worse for you to hear me slinking away through the branches.
Not a big deal. My fault, really. She reached out to reassure his elbow, which withdrew from her touch as soon as politeness permitted.
That old spirit of noblouse oblige, he said. Susanna and the Elders. A genre subject that for some reason has fallen into neglect in the last few years.
May I?
She nodded. This man could do nothing she might object to. She looked into the metal surface while he pulled her hair back until it disappeared. He rested both hands against her jaw, as if feeling for swollen glands. He lifted slowly, with delicate pressure, like a potter at the wheel. Her whole lower face rose up into her cheekbones. He molded her skin, consulting no references. He needed none.
Adie studied the result in the mirror. She turned and complied, holding the metal so she could look out on the wall of photos. And she became the cameo she was looking at. She shuddered, spun away from the photos, and dropped the mirror, freeing her face and hair.
Ebesen stepped back and raised his hands. I'm sorry. Forgive me. Twice in one day.
No, no. It was just… creepy, is all.
That is the polite word for it.
I'm not really… I don't really look much like her, you know.
No?
I mean, Karl. Really. You have to push my face all around. If you maul a person's musculature, you can make anyone look like anyone.
Really? Think we could do up Mr. Gates the Third as a good Baroque John the Baptist on a platter?
She laughed, against her will.
Ebesen sipped from his water. Do you know her?
Adie turned back to the photos. Did she know her? The possibility had never crossed her mind. She combed the mosaic again for some spark of recognition. None.
Should I?
He looked at the gallery, as at a police lineup. Gail Frank?
The name was common enough to sound familiar, but too common to place. One four-by-six exposure showed the woman in the middle of what looked like Washington Square, adjusting a mannequin into a fetal position on the pavement, surrounded by a few curious
onlookers.
She liked to work outdoors, Ebesen said. "Outstallations," she called them. Closed studio spaces made her claustrophobic.
In the next shot, Ebesen's camera had caught Gail Frank in the act of binding the hands of the now-blindfolded mannequin behind its back. In adjacent Polaroids, she manipulated various other dolls, dummies, and human figures, stacking them up in shipping crates, loading them into mailers, packing them into constrained spaces in tight crystal lattices.
Gail… Frank. A performance artist? Something nagged at her. Some buried, peripheral thing.
Ebesen shook his head. Remember performance art? Remember the seventies? God, we sure do slash and burn our genres these days, don't we?
Something in the way he said these words opened the sluice of her memory. Adie's hand flew up to her mouth. Gail Frank. Of course. The story that had the whole of artistic New York bound and entranced. At least for a season. The woman who… Mark Nyborg's…?
At the name of the fallen icon of minimalist sculpture, Ebesen's head jabbed forward.
Adie chose her words. The woman he killed.
Ebesen shrugged. Maybe.
Karl. What do you mean, maybe? The man pushed her out of a thirteenth-story window.
Fourteenth. But who's counting?
Convicted by a jury. Put away. As far as I've heard, he's still doing time somewhere.
Ebesen cleared a coating of papers off the stuffed chair and sat. He swirled his glass, then drained down to the white lees of plumbing scum. He stroked the empty tumbler like Beuys stroking his dead hare. Wouldn't that be incredible, for all of us? I mean, if we could actually "do" time?
You knew her? Adie shrank from the anemic formulation. The man had an altar of pictures erected to the woman. His home's sole decoration, aside from the piles of rubbish. You were… close?
His mouth tightened into irony's thin mail slot. We were close. She … upgraded me for him.
Her every possible response became impossible.
Strictly a matter of portfolio improvement. Gail needed to associate herself with heavy hitters. Reputation, standing, influence. That kind of thing. She was a creative vampire. Her own work fed off the attention that others were getting. After a couple of years, she outgrew whatever meager attention I was ever likely to receive in this life. And she grew into Mr. Nyborg, whose fame was expanding without limits.
Not fame, Adie snapped. Notoriety. Surprised by the anger massing in her. A poseur. A salesman.
Not without talent. She definitely traded up.
Adie looked at this man with whom she'd worked for two years in the closest of quarters. Even objection seemed shut down.
I can't say her departure left my life entirely impoverished. Gail was a… complex personality. It took me some time to realize that even grief brought its own kind of relief.
Adie turned back to the picture anthology. The woman displayed every available facial expression from hostility to helplessness — the same unbridgeable spread that any life indulged in. Gail Frank's face exerted an eerie magnetism, the pull of the scared expression that knows you want to look at it. The beauty of narcissism. Her face looked nothing like Adie's. Adie looked nothing like the woman.