Skin (2 page)

    Even the stairs were an oven, going up. As soon as she got inside she pulled off her T-shirt, gray with sweat, tossed it to the couch-bed to maybe dry, then changed her mind and took it into the shower with her. The shower was her one luxury, the only thing free and now in its cold drench she felt her sunburned neck, the ache of her wrist gentle down, her nipples grow pleasantly hard. She was almost out of soap so was careful with the sliver, small and pink like an animal's tongue, faint smell of flowers that would never grow here. It was nearly two; time to get to work.

    Almost at once she saw she had been right about the nibbler-thing: its ruined cables hung like seaweed about the blistered arms of her sculpture, its warped shaft the piece's new throat. Faulty heat gun to melt a pink scum of bubblepack across the shaft; thinnest leaves of solder where the skin would be.

    The opening was at seven; she worked till six, cleaned up, chose clothes from the zipperless husk of a three-suiter hung from the gibbet of a railroad nail: short black pants, long black T-shirt, the soiled white of her bandage bright as found jewelry against her skin. Sandals instead of steel-toes. She let her hair hang, coarse, long, half-auburn and half-brown, it was beautiful hair and she knew it and she wore it the way another woman would have worn a favorite dress. Snapping the elastic keyring on her unburned wrist, slamming the door on heat to more heat, sweat on her upper lip, on the pale ridge of skin behind the bridge of her sunglasses. On the bus two boys tried to pick her up, cute boys, ten years too young for her. She joked with them a little until they got off, watched with half a smile their brisk extravagant postures, hips cocked big-man as the bus pulled away.

    The opening was crowded, Gallery Isis, hieroglyphic entryway in overdone reds and golds. Big plastic letters made to look like iron; pig iron; THE ART OF STEEL. She had to pass all the pieces to get to the food table, pass men in linen suits and women with heavy gold bolts hung from gold neckchains, pass the two professors and the five guys with dayjobs, none of whom noticed or spoke to her. She already knew where they had placed her work, one piece in a corner, poorly lit, she had argued about it for most of an afternoon before abruptly giving in; why waste breath.

    Mineral water and cut-up lemons, lots of rye bread squares and little cheeses sliced into shapes. One was dark and sharp and tasted like liquor, loose and heavy in her mouth; she spit it into the tiny red fanfolded napkin, balled it up in her hand and kept it there as the gallery director paused in passing: chunky jewelry, heavy brown lipstick on a thin white smile.

    "Isn't it a terrific show?"

    She said nothing. The spit-out cheese had begun to soak through the napkin, touch her skin like the moisture from a leaking boil. Let's shake on it.

    "I think your pieces look wonderful."

    "I only have one." Pointing with the napkin hand. "There in the corner." It was one of her best, too, Archangel, and how she had struggled to transmit the sense of motion: wings like knives, the chum of flayed metal sheet stock, the mouth all teeth like God's own engine come back to earth to burn. The teeth alone had taken a week. She wasn't asking much for it, much less after the gallery's cut; in the end it would probably work out to a dollar an hour, but if you calculated things that way, why bother? You did it to do it. Everything else was extraneous.

    "-and Matty Regal, too." The director was talking, apparently had been. "So we're very pleased with that as well."

    Her mouth still tasted sour from the cheese. "Excuse me," and stepped away, back to the food table, more flat mineral water that she drank as if she were dehydrated, three plastic cups one after the other. After she had eaten as much bread and cheese as she could stand she left, through chatter and wine and the shine of fake gold bolts and nuts beneath aimed light less bright than her Spartan circle, talk so cheap a week's worth would pay her rent for a year; and the heavy glass door with its gold-stenciled icons closing silent on its own behind her, night and heat and work safe on her side.

    

    

    She still had an answering machine; sometimes people wanted her for pickup jobs, missing a call might mean missing half a month's rent. Tonight there was a message, some guy, Crane somebody.
Want to talk to you, maybe I'll see you at the opening.
He didn't sound like anybody who would want to buy anything from her, but you never knew.

    Back into work clothes, sweaty-hot but being burned was hotter and took longer to go away. She remembered her real school, welding school: truck bodies and they had let her watch, they thought she was cute or something, had not driven her away. Hot, always, and the big ventilators going on and on and on, the endless revolution of blades big as bodies, rod and arc and the fountaining shine like stars ground to pieces, the endless eclipse one must not watch. Fascinated, silent, in roll-down pants and her hair skinned back, baseball cap and wanting to make the fire, make the metal run; she had never gotten over it, the idea of liquid metal. She remembered the smell of scorched clothing, heavy coveralls burned straight through, everything seen through the underwater gloss of welder's goggles, the helmets most exotic: round-headed spacemen with flat square eyes, the world's most faceless mask. She had seen men-it was all men, only men-hurt, burned, once she saw a man drop the fluxless tail end of his welding rod into his low-cut shoe: hideous and funny his screaming dance; he had danced her into taped-up pant-legs as an article of faith. Liquid metal and so much to learn, and then the shop closed down, moved to larger quarters where the only access was through an air-conditioned office with a big red OS HA notice taken as lawsuit gospel; no trespassers at all.

    So. Get your own gear, melt your own metal. No one would hire her, the welding shops she applied to thought she was hilarious, so: fast food, and to speed it up she started barmaid moonlighting, still underage but nobody cared since she didn't drink. After a month she quit the dayjob, worked all the hours no one wanted: saving, saving, busy as a little beaver, wise little underage ant. In a few months she had enough for a welding-cutting outfit and the space in which to use it. Another three months' worth bought her time.

    First embarrassing works but she got that out of the way fast, quick study, learning that what she made could be called sculpture, actual art. You could apply for grants, too, but to Tess taking somebody's money was just carte blanche for taking their shit, too, and she got enough shit as it was, nobody wanted a welding shop on the premises, even in the places she could afford. So. A year here, there, cinderblock storefronts getting shabbier all the time, earning the rent at pickup jobs: they quit laughing when they saw she had her own gear, but still she wasn't certified so no real-money jobs, no municipalities or building tanks for her. Just keep moving, further down the food chain, all the way to this shithouse where Grace downstairs was so greedy she would rent to anybody. Even a welder. She was probably hoping Tess would burn the whole place down one day so she could claim the insurance and leave town. No such luck; there was too much work to do.

    This piece, now, was reaching completion, with the addition of the nibbler parts. Little left, but something, not sure what but she would know when she found it. In the green metal rack was a dishpan jumbled sharp with small parts. Picking through it with the care of a carrion crow, big anonymous bolts skinned with grease, a broken baffle for an old heat gun, the springless trigger from something, a thin strip of Lexan the width of a bookmark. A blindfold. Holding it like a microscope slide, she placed it before the sculpture's headless neck, a little higher. Higher. There. Not a smile but an inward nod: now how to hold it?

    Hot in the white light, and downstairs the tingling chitter that meant a payoff on the keno machines, some guy yelling "Yes! Yes!" over and over again. Careful crack of last night's empty juice bottle, slivering the glass to insert three slim splinters into the Lexan, just where a mouth might be. Her burn ached less. Sweat under her breasts, salt in her mouth. Solder on the floor, a cooling drop that spread unnoticed like silver rain and dried at last to the unseen thickness of a tear.

    On her way downstairs to buy breakfast and on the phone, Crane; picking up while he was in the middle of his message, "Hello, yeah, I'm here."

    "I called yesterday." He sounded like he had a cold, a wet cold. "I want to come by and see you."

    Silence. She didn't like people in her workspace. Finally, "How about I meet you somewhere?"

    "No, I need to see you in your workshop." Workshop; Santa's littlest metal-grubbing elf. "I'm a sculptor, too- you've probably seen some of my work. Crane Kenning, I do aluminum constructs, I just had a show at the Gerry Hilbin last-"

    "Right. Listen, I don't do much aluminum, just steel and iron, I don't know if-"

    "I'm sure you can help me, I mean the differences are not that great."

    
Asshole.
"Look, I'm really busy today."

    "How about tonight then?" and he talked her finally into a place from which she could not escape without great rudeness; he would be brief, he promised, though sounding somewhat aggrieved that he need promise this at all. Brief and succinct and maybe she could learn something from his methods, too. She hung up angry at herself, clomped downstairs to the street, to another and what called itself a farmer's market but was more like a jumped-up fruit stand; Tess bought two oranges, the luxury of a peach, and stole a handful of cherries when no one was looking, chewed them stones and all as she paid then spit the stones and stems on a straggly stand of weedy grass. The rest she carried home, sat outside just past the party-store door to dissect with her thumb one orange, careful of the juice. Two women started pushing over who would board a bus first. A passing radio advised that temperatures would be a little cooler today, lows tonight in the seventies. Hurray. Her hair was sticking to the back of her neck. She sucked the orange thoroughly, down to chewy rind, the other orange between her knees, the peach beside her on the pavement like the firm and thoughtful heart of a liberated beast. Across the street one teenager yelled "Suck me!" at another; Tess licked her fingers slowly and as slowly went inside.

    Crane was six feet tall and all in black, steel-rimmed glasses with tinted lenses round as the little juice bottles she bought downstairs. He started talking as soon as the door opened and worse yet had not come alone: a woman with him, behind him, hanging a little back in the hall but not shy; waiting. Waiting, Tess saw, for her and not Crane to say it was okay.

    "Come on in," she said, and the woman stepped forward, past Crane; not quite as tall as him, not quite as tall as Tess: younger but more muscled, athlete's legs, or dancer's, smooth bare skin like Teflon over steel. Her handshake was very strong but she did not squeeze the way a man might.

    "I'm Bibi Bloss," she said.

    Foxface bones, pale bright hair and eyes the same: in-canescent, less broken glass than the sheer act of breaking. When she smiled Tess saw her teeth were very small, milk teeth, strange childish grin.

    "You do all your own welding, don't you?" Crane was looking around the room, moving to the pieces she had pushed in a corner, sculpture forestry about his legs and waist. "This one's kind of interesting," he said, careless hand above the razored ribs of Mater Intrinsecus, fierce her crown of sheared bearings and Tess pushed his hand brusquely away.

    "That's really sharp," she said. "Listen, why don't you tell me what you need."

    "Fine," he said. "I don't even know if you can help me at all. What I need primarily," and Bibi now to where the toilet was, the green wall of the shower, moving as if through a particular silence of which no one but she was aware, "is information. I have a special piece in mind," and off on some weird impossible tangent, he worked with aluminum, he should know better. Maybe he didn't. She tried to explain why there was no doing what he wanted to do but he wasn't listening, he was talking about layers of metal mimicking layers of meaning, talking about metallurgy as metaphor and the intrinsic barbarism of iron in such a way that she felt like striking an arc off his steel-rimmed glasses; and looking past him to see Bibi beside another piece, Dolores Regina and her fingers loose and deft on half-deliberate spatter, the flat fillet weld, streetlight from behind less halo than warning light and chicken-wire shadows on her face like the solemn etching of tattoo. Standing there she was sculpture, strong iron bones and solder muscles, the tilt of her head a construct so subtle that Tess stared, the flat appraising stare of the scrapyard as with the grace of gears meeting Bibi's head turned, to watch Tess watching her.

    Crane just noise in the background now and Bibi's gaze calm and calmly thorough, Tess and the room and the sculpture both harbored, everything plain to those eyes. Tess still as metal in her own silence and Crane finishing up, so what did she think? How long would it take to do?

    Shaking her head, can't be done and his irritation immediate, "Why not? It seems easy enough to me."

    
Then go do it, asshole.
"Look, all I can tell you is I can't do it. All right?"

    "Well, then," a busy man in pursuit of his art, "can you recommend anybody? I have to get-"

    From across the room, still in that posture: "Tess. Why haven't I seen your stuff before?"

    Glance down, reluctant now to meet those eyes straight on. "I don't show much."

    "Why not?" Nodding inclusion, the sculpture, the worktable. "It's brilliant work. Don't you have an agent or anything? Are you represented by a gallery?"

    Tess's smile involuntary, and Crane again, excluded and annoyed, "She's showing right now at the Isis," and again Bibi ignored him, or rather accepted the information as if it had dropped like a pearl from the bodiless air: "The Isis? You don't belong there."