Broken for You (36 page)

They downed their cider.

"Shall we?" Margaret offered, indicating her tankard.

Bruce held up his hand. "Listen, y'all. I have to say this. I don't mind what everybody else does with these things, really I don't, but I have to say that it doesn't exactly sit right with me. I mean, my sweet grandmother almost kicked the bucket when I came out. She'll flat out DIE if she finds out I'm impersonating a Nazi thug breaking dishes on Kristallnacht."

"That's not what we're doing," Wanda spoke up suddenly, her voice serious and emphatic. "We're breaking things as ceremony. We're breaking them in remembrance."

There was a pause after that, not only in response to the content of Wanda's speech, but because it was the most anyone had heard her say since she'd come home from the hospital.

Bruce spoke. "I think that would be good enough for Bubie Katz." He hurled his tankard to the floor. "L'chayim!" he shouted. They all followed suit.

The carriage house was thus officially reappropriated as Wanda's studio.

From then on Wanda spent her days and nights breaking, sorting, and making more preliminary sketches, paintings, and models. It was strange to be engaged in such an amorphous creative process. There was no structure to it, no deadline. No calendar of events that led in a linear way from preproduction meetings to actor auditions to casting sessions to rehearsals to techs to opening night. And the end was nowhere in sight: With no
final performance, no closing night parties, no striking of the set, how would she know when her work was finished?

Troy was often near, also working. One night when they were both up late—he was putting up drywall, she was planning the colors for a wall mosaic—he came over and stood next to her.

"I have an idea." He'd started to grow a beard; this had the unfortunate effect of making him look both older and more handsome.

Wanda's heart started pounding. "For what?"

He leaned on the table. She stared at his arms, dismayed that she still found them immensely compelling.

"Your three-dimensional pieces," he said. "I think I've solved the problem." He brought his hands together and mimed the action of molding something pliable. "You start by sculpting a model in clay."

Wanda dropped her pencil.

"You cover it with fiberglass resin." His hands described the action of painting.

Wanda tilted leeward, enough to feel the heat of his body.

"You let the resin harden and then saw the sculpture in half—it's rigid now, understand—and then you scoop out the clay." Troy's hands made slow scooping movements.

Wanda leaned her cheek against her hand; she felt woozy.

"Then," Troy concluded, slowly bringing his hands palm to palm, "you resin the halves back together again. See?"

Her gaze was level with his jaw, and she forced herself to look there instead of into his eyes. His beard was a tangle of chestnut and auburn, flecked with gold.

"It'll be structurally strong," he said, "hollow, and lightweight. You'll be able to glue your pieces onto the fiberglass form."

"What if it doesn't work?" Wanda murmured.

"It will," he whispered. "I already tried it." He put something on the table in front of her. "Good night."

Wanda stared. Troy had mosaicked a life-sized sculpture of one of her high-heeled shoes. Not with black pieces, though. As she gazed at the shoe's pieced-together surfaces, Wanda felt like a high-flying bird winging over fields that were every imaginable shade of yellow.

Her first work would be two-dimensional, a wall mosaic; of all the ideas she'd planned so far, it was the most simple technically. She didn't want to start with anything too complicated, too structurally risky. Certainly not the sculptural pieces—even though Troy's suggestions for their execution seemed like sound ones. There was just too much at stake. She cut two large sections of cement board that would serve as substrate. She framed and hinged them—this mosaic would be a riff on Renaissance diptychs. She transferred her drawings. She laid out her palette of tesserae—opaque fragments of porcelain and china; pieces of paper on which she'd scrawled the stories, poems, drawings; clear and colored glass.

She spent days moving things around. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle—but a jigsaw puzzle with endless possibilities. Or like painting, without the headaches of paint. She liked the way you could lay in a color and change it if it wasn't absolutely right.

In the beginning, it was easy for her to become obsessed, hard to stop, especially when she couldn't find the right piece.

"Give it a rest," Troy would say. "Take a break."

But she'd keep on anyway, angry, miserable about being thwarted in this way. She'd make something fit if she had to.

Once in a while, though, the right piece seemed to simply find her hand. That was the way it felt. She struggled to understand how this happened, and why. The more she struggled, the less she understood, and the harder the work became.

But then it would happen again: The right pieces would find her. It was a mystery.

After several days, when she was finally satisfied with the layout, she moved on to the next step: application—buttering the thousands of pieces one by one with adhesive and applying them, gluing the torn paper to the substrate and over this adhering bits of glass so that the words and pictures were visible.

Halfway through this process, she stopped.

"This looks like shit."

"Wait until you're done," Troy said. "Keep going. You need to grout it."

"But it looks like shit."

"Grout it," he repeated. "You'll see. It's all in the grout."

She finished adhering the tesserae. Then, she waited: one day, two days, three days. She had to be absolutely sure that the pieces were set, that they wouldn't move—not even one single millimeter—once she started to grout.

"Ready?" Troy asked. I suppose.

As Troy looked on, she added water, bit by bit, to the grout. "That's it. Take your time."

Wanda mixed slowly. The next step would involve covering the mosaic completely, working dollops of hardening cement into every gap, and then waiting—for thirty minutes—before sponging off the excess. She had been dreading this. Grouting meant losing sight of the familiar. There was risk here, terrible risk. The risk of separating herself from those in the picture—people she'd imagined, tended, and come to love. The risk of stepping aside as the subtleties of color and shade and placement were bulldozed behind a wall of gray. The risk of losing Margaret's faith and trust if all of this went to shit. The risk of failing, again.

When the grout was the right consistency, Troy said, "That looks good. We've got to work fast now. Remember, it's not drying, it's setting."

The two of them started slathering grout over the mosaic, pushing it into the crevices, obscuring everything. When they were done, Wanda sat down on the floor.

"I hate this part," she groused.

"I figured," he answered. "I'll make coffee."

Half an hour later, they wiped the surface clean.

Troy was right. The space between the pieces, the
negative
space, was hugely important—maybe even more important than the pieces themselves.

The grouted space was what literally held the fragments together, gave them their definition; it also made the colors—especially the yellow stars on the children's coats—even more vivid. But more than that, it was there, in the space, where order was created, rhythms of line, movement. The space made a pathway for the eye, a route which the viewer could take to get from one part of the picture to another.

Space unified all. Space made everything possible.

"See?" Troy said.

"Yes," Wanda replied. "I see."

"Do you have a name for
it?"

"Etoiles,"
she answered. "
'1942-1943'
"

Troy nodded. "Perfect."

Wanda was still looking at the mosaic—it had turned out better than she'd hoped, and for the children's sake and Margaret's she was glad— but her real preoccupation was with the shape, color, and quality of space between her body, and Troy's.

The more she worked, the more she became familiar with a kind of magic which only happened when she let go. For years her mind had looked like a legal pad, lined and occupied with carefully written numbers, to-do lists, counts, cues, imperatives: "Fade #2, bring up moon and star gobos on a slow 3 count," "Make this week's plan for Operation Musical Beds," "Check rigging and harnesses," "Finish homework, take Jackie to the mall," "Cue Hell: moans, smoke, chains," "Buy grocs, pay bills, pick up cleaning, call AA for Peter," "Delay door slam to 4
V2
counts after his exit," "I am going to find him, I am going to find him, I am going to find him."

This was the kind of inner noise she struggled to eliminate; it was this chatter which kept the pieces from finding her hands—and kept her hands from giving life to the dead. Only when she was quiet inside, when her mind was a large empty room instead of many cluttered ones, only then did the magic happen.

She became more familiar with this state of being. She began to recognize when she was in its presence and when she was not, and she got better and better at getting there: The Land of No Words, she came to call it. She had heard artists sometimes describe themselves as "vessels"; now she understood what they meant. An abandonment of
ego
was required, an evacuation of the self, and—this was hardest—a letting go of the need to be constantly in control.

She began to trust when the elements fit, when the crisscrossing roads between bits of clay, paper, and glass made sense in a way that couldn't be sensibly described and weren't necessarily what she'd had in mind. She brought Monk, Bird, Miles, and Trane into the studio with her. They helped transport her to the Land of No Words. They set up a collaboration—her hands, the Holocaust, smashed clay, and bebop. An
improvisation that was underpinned with structure and technique, but played out with a pure heart open to the possibility of surprise. It was crazy, but it was right. The pieces started finding her hands more frequently. She took to filling her pockets. She sounded like a walking crash box.

Her thoughts still sometimes turned to Peter, to losses in her life, and to what she regarded as her failings, faults, sins. The nearness of Troy, the pain and the pleasure of that nearness, reminded her of futures that were no longer possible. This could have been hazardous; she was, after all, surrounded by sharp objects.

But she was held together more and more by the practice of traveling to and residing in the Land of No Words, and by the physical rituals of her work—breaking, sorting, planning, adhering, grouting.

There were things owed, promises to be kept. And as time went on, she accepted the fact that, in taking on this work, what she owed and promised was not only to Margaret and the living; she was just as much in debt to the dead.

T
w
e
nty-six

Artist Glues t
h
e World!

"
God
," Bruce griped good-naturedly. "When you're built like Audrey Hepburn you look stunning in anything!"

"'Gamine' is the word," Susan added. "I always longed to be gamine."

"You're statuesque!" Bruce said.

"I have size-twelve feet."

Bruce and Susan had set up chairs in the foyer near Wanda's door. They were watching her model the dozen evening dresses they'd taken out on approval from clothiers around the city.

"Which reminds me," Susan continued, "what's your shoe size?"

"Five," Wanda answered sheepishly. "Sometimes five and a half."

Susan sighed. "I would really hate you if I didn't love you," she said.

Wanda modeled dress after dress. Bruce and Susan praised the way she looked in all of them, but Wanda was harder to please. Nothing seemed right.

"I've wondered for years what the inside of a 'Petites Department' looks like," said Susan, wistfully.

"I have to admit," Bruce added. "I'm living out several fantasies."

A year had passed since Wanda's accident. She still had no idea what
s
trings Margaret had pulled, what connections she'd reeled in, what
d
eals she'd struck, but somehow she'd arranged for Wanda's mosaicsto be part of a small group show at a downtown gallery. The opening of the exhibit was tonight.

"You have to like something," Bruce admonished. "There's no way we're going to let you wear jeans."

Finally, she appeared in a two-piece black ensemble: a floor-length full skirt made of silk and flocked with swirls of velveteen, and a short, tight-fitting jacket with a peplum, stand-up collar, jet buttons, and leg-of-mutton sleeves. Bruce and Susan literally gasped.