On some nights, David did not come back to the boardinghouse with us. When he did stay with us, he slept only fitfully. Once, just before dawn, in his sleep, I heard him whisper one word: aurora. He looked to be dreaming, like a child. It made me smile. My favorite time of the day or night happened watching David sleep.
Not all of us worked on the crown, but David did. He had read, in the papers, that the crown was modeled after the bonnet given to Roman slaves when they were freed. The seven rays, he said, were meant to symbolize the reach of freedom, across all the oceans and continents. The twenty-five windows in the crown were meant to give the illusion of light, reflecting the light like facets of a diamond.
To us, it seemed right that David worked inside the crown. Whatever had happened to his body gave him some kind of right to ascend into that space.
Frédéric and the Apple
(1870)
Strewn across my desk on cream-colored parchments, my own drawings stare back at me: designs in red Conté crayon, at once regal and sublime and then mocking, like specters who materialize only to laugh at my incompetence before they dissolve into abstraction again. I cannot seem to find the form. The body. In the dim piss-yellow light of my office, my project demands a design: a sculpture like no other. A monument to the Franco-American alliance. I push the failed drawings aside until I uncover Aurora’s most recent letter. I close my eyes. I smell it. Ocean water and the faintest hint of lavender. And perhaps dirt.
Sometimes I think my relationship with my cousin Aurora is like the relationship France has with America. She has always inspired me and simultaneously challenged me. So it is fortuitous, and both exciting and frightening, that we will reconnect as a result of my work. When I open one of her letters, for a moment, I want to cross oceans of time and water to reach her. When I open her letters, I have to sit down. I smell the envelopes, eager for hints of her, of lavender and skin. My hands shake as I open the envelope.
My brilliant cousin, my obscene genius, my Adonis Frédéric,
I am in love with the drawings of your colossus, with your mind at work. If you should ever stop writing me, I will throw myself out of this window into the river, sink myself like a stone statue. The might of your imagination! Your drawings give me a world of visions — enough to palpitate a heart, to throb a cleft. What a gorgeously unholy perfect union we have made.
Of the three you sent, here are my assessments:
Too Egyptian. This is not the Suez Canal, my dove. I understand your disappointment at losing that project, but still. And she’s not really a lighthouse, not in the traditional sense, right? I think your imagination is exoticizing. Or else that trip you took with your delicious painter friend Jean-Léon Gérôme to Egypt has left you aching.
What has this majestic androgyne got in its hand? A broken chain? Those poor dimwitted god-addicted souls, still tortured by their loss in the Civil War, will consider this heresy. They’ll protest, riot, try to tear it down. This bawling, sprawling infant of a country will never get over losing its power to enslave and slaughter other humans as if they were objects. We’re built from it. They’ll fight you on it. But, oh! How I love those perfect broken shackles, held in the air for everyone to suck!
I miss her breasts. Where are they? Though I do admire the masculinity of her face. This one may be my favorite.
Now let’s discuss this book I’ve told you about, this work you must read. Yes, I understand your objection; yes, the author was merely a girl in her teens; yes, this is meaningless to me. How can you dismiss the modern Prometheus? You don’t know what girls know. I, however, do, as I think you will remember. The apple? Your own awakening? When we were children?
How precise she was, this “girl author,” as you call her. What she created was, I believe, the most perfect articulation of the drive of men — so much so that it made me gasp, left me wet, left me taken by her brain. This monster she conceived, so worthy of compassion. This girl gone mad from loving a man — for isn’t the author writing herself as well? Creating a new creation story to combat her grief? Did not her offspring die at the moment of birth? Or prematurely? Child loss induces a grief in a woman that is never overcome. A hole inside a woman is a monumental thing too.
My idea is this: We should rob all the churches of bibles and hymnbooks — like we did when we were eleven, remember, cousin? And we should honor her, the monster’s creator, by replacing them all with her work. Break the very ground. Frankenstein every pew.
Remember, I went to war at eighteen. Lost a leg before I was twenty. That’s the kind of “woman” I am. Puzzle upon that, beloved.
Love in endless waves,
Aurora, my uncontainable dawn,
I accept the transaction. My Darwin for your Shelley. How your words move me. As always. And I am grateful beyond language for your assessment of the drawings.
I remain haunted by that question that so vexes me and so bores you as the point of origin: What does an abstract idea look like? Is it possible to bring the ideal to life?
I have a horror of all frippery of detail in sculpture. The forms and effects of that art should be broad, massive, and simple. “Virtue” and “courage” and “knowledge” cannot take shape directly in stone or metal. Least of all “freedom.” By their very nature, concepts have no shape, design, or texture. They shoot the mind outward into space and time, leave it hanging there without traveling anywhere real. To make ideas visible, an artist must personify them, reduce them to a form recognizable to the beholder. Think of the Pietà, of the Venus de Milo. A mother’s sacred grief and love, or the so-called figure of desire.
Yet in this project something made my imagination falter. Bodies like those are beautiful, but not right for the ideas. That is, until the first time I clapped eyes on the Winged Victory of Samothrace — and I dropped to the floor. I stared up at her, this headless, armless woman larger than life. How how how, I wondered, did the Christ figure ever beget a faith, compared to this glory? This true figure of worship! For me, she conjured every idea — action, forward momentum, triumph — all in Thasian and Parian marble. In her body, the violence of motion meets a profound and eternal stillness. Before she lost her arms, her right arm was believed to have been raised, her hand cupped around her mouth to shout, Victory!
Those lost pieces of a woman — pieces of woman — troubled my vision. Her head never found. Her hands lost to history. A wing partially gone. And though they continue to haunt me, the concept that haunts me is not victory. Victory is not my commission.
It is freedom.
Is freedom a man, a woman, neither, or both?
—
My first memory of my cousin Aurora is a scene from her bedroom when we were children. She was twelve, and tall for her age. I was just ten. She stood in front of an extraordinary pair of deep-red velvet curtains.
Aurora had recently undergone surgery for a partially cleft lip. In this and other ways, her body has always carried the trace of things gone wrong in the world. Unable to eat solid foods, she’d been fed for days on nothing but milkshakes and ice cream and porridge, which made me painfully jealous, even though she shared what she had.
On this particular day, she led me into her bedroom and pulled an apple from a pocket of her dress, a look of great seriousness in her eyes. I was mesmerized. When she held the apple up between us, her lips stitched and swollen and red, she said, “Don’t move a muscle, don’t tell anyone, or I will forget you ever existed.” Her words were almost swallowed up by her wounded mouth. “Hold as still as a statue,” she said. I did.