Skin (34 page)

    "Yeah," leaning back, then as abruptly forward, hinged doll-back and staring at Tess. "There's something else we need to talk about, I meant to tell you at the show but you left."

    Exhausted, rubbing over and over at a tiering eye. You left; leave it. "What?"

    "That stuff you're doing," and anger spreading, cloudlike, diffuse as poison in water. "Why'd you have to do that? Why didn't you just tell me to my face?"

    Already at a loss: "Tell you what?"

    "Tell me what, shit. I saw them, Tess, he showed them to me-fucker couldn't wait to show them to me, naturally, but I'd've seen them anyway eventually. So why?"

    Why what? and she said it aloud, confused, Bibi again unhearing, quick agitated bitterness, "And they're not even good art, they're fucked, the workmanship is fucked -I said, I said I was worried about you if you were producing such-"

    "Bibi, wait, stop a minute." Bending to her, squatting as you would to a child, tired nervous child, there was some kind of new sore on her bottom lip, dark crust, and for Tess the monstrous hammer of pity and love so great she felt it like a blow: wretched face, twisted skin and body wrenched and prodded and pulled in ways that were, no matter what Bibi claimed, no path, no road to enlightenment, only the signposts to the dark and darker and going down; she was finding nothing or else there would never be such crippled animal need, need like heat from her skin like a furnace, she had cut and torn to no purpose but the purpose of pain and pain had given her nothing, nothing; it was as clear on her face as if she had shouted it, written it in letters carved from her own flesh. If there was beauty on the knife's road, she had found it in a way only she could; but if there was light, it was not for her.

    Tears in Tess's eyes and Bibi shifting, some underskin twist like the turnings of her flesh and "No, don't, I don't want to see that, you're the one who's making fun of me and I don't-"

    "What are you talking about?" shouting, finally, rising to turn away, turn back, hands to her head as if to keep it from splintering; tears down her cheeks. "I don't even know what you-"

    "You know damn well what I mean: those fucking boxes! That vegetable thing, that dumb TV, don't tell me you didn't make those expressly-"

    Vegetable thing; TV. What-and remembering with a swoop that was almost physical, swift dropping sensation as if all her breath had been sucked by vacuum from her falling body: those horrible boxes, horrible mimicry of that which was itself unworthy of parody or response; how had Bibi seen them? How in- fucker couldn't wait to show them to me Who? and where had they ended up, those disenfranchised relics carried by ex-students as terribly estranged, carried to-who? Who would want them? As if in terrible transfixion, panic's circular wiggle on the silent tip of the knife, thoughts round and round and Tess herself walking, round and round the room as if she could prove the offending sculptures were there, why weren't they there?
Should we destroy them,
who had said that? Nicky? Edgar-Marc? And she,
no, never destroy your work, never do that-

    -and Bibi staring at her from the couch, saying Why again and Tess pulling at a long sheet of matte gray plastic, cheap tarp and looking, see here they are, here they and Bibi beside her now-how had she crossed the room so quickly?-quick little silver hand ripping at the sheet, to bare what lay under it, bring it up to the light: the gouge-face legless body, sprawled obscene in harness; hydraulic dummy with its prim-pinned mouth. The spiked breasts in the icon cube, symbols: exclamation, question mark, dollar sign and why no death's head, where was it: here: and now, staring at her, anger and pain the clamoring handmaidens to the terrible red empress of need; and past those draperies as well the core, the human locus-heart and from it that high cracked infant's voice, saying-

    "You made more?"

    "Bibi, for God's sake-they're not mine! I would never- Bibi, listen to me!" but she was not listening: as if unable to listen or hear, as if Tess spoke the language of a species of steel and she so patently a creature of the bleeding earth; and Tess saw like a box cracked open Bibi changed in ways past all sane charting, her angry soul grown only angrier with each turn of the knife, each pierce of the warm needle, grown now both wizened and monstrous, crouched resentful and wet as a tumor in the blind cave of her brain. Could no one see this? bodyguards, lapdogs, a troupe full of drooling yes-man sycophants crawling avid and openmouthed as if to catch the flecks and driftings of her very skin as it fell, queen, mother, master in adoration, those stupid fucks there in the corner, didn't anyone see this? "Bibi!" Shouting, as if down a well, a hole, a hole in the center of the earth's beating heart; her own heart, beating like falling down the stairs; runaway, arrhythmic. "Will you listen to me? I'm telling you they're not mine!"

    Eyes turned on Tess now, stare like an animal on a choke-chain. Her hands, visibly shaking, her whole body one bright jitter, chains and hooks and slender silver rings. She opened her mouth twice before she could speak, working muscles and tight tendons suggestive horribly of feeding; and when she finally spoke her voice was ultimatum.

    "Then smash them."

    Silence, the quiver before the stroke, the graceless blow that splits here from now, wrong from right, expediency from the moist blind obedience of love that sees only one road: and Tess at that crossroads: "Bibi," her own voice flat with fear, fear of Bibi there before her, with the power to burn every bridge Tess could build, burn it instantly as if it had never been. "Oh Bibi. You know I can't."

    More silence, pause like power building, huge static to discharge in one surge like lightning; and Bibi blinkless, staring as if vindicated in a dreadful conclusion, a terminal diagnosis.

    "He said you wouldn't."

    "Who said?"

    "Michael."

    Staring now as if she, too, was blind, deaf, adrift on a vast confusion, and Bibi's sudden siren shriek, "Michael! Michael motherfucking Hispard, that's who, Tess, like you didn't know, like you-"

    "Michael never even saw these things, he was gone before they ever-Bibi, stop it. Stop it!" but she was screaming now, wild, one arm pumping up and down as if to drive her point like a metal stake into frozen ground and one part of Tess stood apart and silent, frightened in the way we fear fire, or the twist of a tornado across a flat ledge of ground: Bibi was completely out of control, completely gone in an escalation of rage and hysteria that no matter the cause was in itself horrible, and threatening, to watch. But why was Tess the only one staring, why weren't Bibi's bodyguards upset? Because, the calm of her answering logic, the voice that can speak in the midst of the whirlwind, they see her like this all the time.

    And Bibi's mouth Kabuki, siren and that pumping arm, faster and faster, "I thought it would bring you back, that's what I did it for, having him there with me-you might follow him, I thought you loved him, I thought it would make you come back but you didn't! it was for nothing! It was for nothing!" in one long atonal screech, now the bodyguards were moving to her, were trying to calm her down. But it was like laying hands on a hurricane, on the face of motion itself, her screams were energy and-now she wept, hideous sobs without tears and "Smash it!" shrieking, advancing on the torso, Nicky's work, Nicky's mean-spirited vision and "Smash it, Tess, smash the fucking thing, smash it!"

    "I can't!" Someone else's work, someone else's rights, oh God Jesus must she always fight for other people, other people in the face of Bibi's naked rage, oh God and in agony she raised the nearest implement, long-handled chipping hammer to strike, nearly weeping, strike without heart at the misformed body, legless, escapeless, all for nothing for it did not soothe or placate, did not penetrate the juggernaut shell of Bibi's pain, her anger and her unconvinced disgust and Tess dropped the hammer, let it fall to try to take Bibi's arm, grab her, stop her but Bibi pushing her off, shoving her with such loathing violence that Tess fell, pratfall sprawl on her ass, her twisted arm; and screaming something, back over her shoulder like one last curse: and gone. Bodyguards trailing, tailing, trying to take her in hand and Tess risen from the floor, crying in big ugly sounds like an animal, is everything broken? Does everything have to be broken? and turning on the sculpture, her own rage now, frustration like a burning ulcer and she battered the torso as if it were living flesh, breaking it more, splitting it to chunks and pieces and then slinging the hammer aside to crouch, no longer even weeping, breathing hard and fast and heavy through constriction like a band, pain made metal clenching tight and tighter around the fist of her breaking heart.

    Michael is the one.

    
Try to call him; he will not return your calls, he will evade you every way he knows how and he knows them all, he is a very clever boy, Michael, he knows how to get lost and stay there while being insultingly visible everywhere else
: Tess had seen him three times this week alone, once on local TV, twice in print: skinny and beautiful in heavy black, almost burlesque his smile beatific, arms around Bibi who looked like a rabid wolf and took up half the page with her theories, the purity of primitive cultures, their unreason, their expression of primum moveos, the urge of man to transcend himself, to re-create. "Women have babies to try to satisfy this urge," the red-lettered quote, "but in the end everybody's got to remake herself, or himself, one shred of skin at a time." None of which sounded like Bibi, surely incapable now of a sentence this linear; it had come, Tess knew, from Michael.

    Who had somehow shown to Bibi what she should never have seen; had lied, in the showing, about Tess, a monstrous lie. What other lies were there, the ones she knew-to Nita, be Tess's eyes-what others? Links of chain leading back to his hands, monstrous Michael whom she had-almost-loved.

    Why?

    She chased him, grim frenzy to confront confronting the wall of flesh impenetrable: there was no way to get to him, she did not know where he lived and when she assaulted the rehearsals was turned back each time more roughly, the last after what was escalating into a full-scale beating before Matty Regal, of all people, broke it up.

    And grabbed her, dirty hand on her arm, lips scabbed as if recovering from a monthlong fever; all of them dirty here, willfully unkempt as if ill with a proud disease: his breath in her face oddly fragrant, warm sweet coffee breath. "Tess," harshly. "Quit it."

    Cuts on her hands, a long scrape down one arm; she had torn her jeans. Hair in her eyes. One of the boys she had hit was crying; she could hear him through the door. To Matty she said, "Fuck you."

    "I'm serious," but not unkindly, pushing her sore back against the wall. "I know you don't like me, I don't give a shit, I don't like you either. But you're making it worse for her, do you realize that? Huh? Every time you come around she goes a little bit crazier, it takes Michael hours to calm her down."

    "Calm her down?" Enraged, last flagging energies like a legless bug spinning circles on the floor, trying to sting the foot that has crushed it. "He's the one who's making her crazy! He's-"

    "She is crazy." Mouth almost to her ear, that scented breath past her dry eyes. "She's a crazy saint. She can't leave herself alone, she's cutting on places that haven't even healed yet, she keeps talking about the skin being the gate, like she has to keep cutting to get somewhere-she is so close, Tess, I mean she is really on to something here, and the last thing she needs is you stirring her up. Just let her alone, all right? If you really care about her, let her alone."

    Staring at him as if he, too, were crazy; maybe they all were. Maybe she was, too. The boy behind the door had stopped crying and was now cursing, drab repetition like a barking dog; someone else kept saying, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," each time he stopped for breath. Her own voice like a stranger's, "I just want her to-" and she stopped; what did she want? For Bibi to come back, be safe? Not be crazy? Love her again, what?

    
But she does love you-

    -and it was true, she had seen it: still there, crippled, twisted as Bibi herself, cut and broken and cut again; but still there. Almost more terrible than anything else, what in fact made it terrible: she still loves you. And yet in the knowing some small and dreadful joy; for Bibi, too? Who knew.

    "I want her to be okay," she said, and Matty's face closed, disgust: "She's past all that shit," and closing the door, too, cracking it again to say if Tess came back, he would not "step in" again. Step in. "Fuck you, Matty," she said again, but there was no heat to it; there was no heat to her. She walked home through the dregs of afternoon, came to her building to find shit smeared on the door, dogshit maybe, maybe not; Nicky was swearing, trying to scrape at it with newspaper, a tilted L of cardboard. She passed him without speech or comment, went up to lie on the bed and stay there.

    Too worn out to cry, the one question circling her like a virus closing in, the sickness that brings death, why. Why? As if questioning the fact of death itself. What had turned him so against her, what lure? Hate, love, jealousy, what? The brute sweetness of betrayal? The urge to punish? and make no mistake, he was punishing Bibi as well, punishing in fact all three, did he see that? She had made love to them both, in this bed, their sweat on her hands, teeth bare, hair gripped and flying, they had both talked to her about love, about loving her; Jesus God; how it had hurt, to think of them together and she the fool outside; this, now, made nothing of that. Everything broken and she without impetus to rise, to try in her own way for re-creation, to make not new but whole the wreckage around her; she had lost purpose, thoroughly and completely, the way a limb is amputated.

    Sleepless in bed, talking to no one: not Nicky or Nita or Edgar-Marc, not Jerome when he and Peter returned; not the phone when it rang which it did; infrequently, but she left the machine on: Bibi might call. Or Michael.