Tableau
It always happened when the room was too quiet. Voices–a murmur of mood and inflection, the words unintelligible above the simmering of water and the low whoosh of gas jets. Randi flexed her fingers and shook her head to clear the sound.
She wiped her hands across her smock, checked the thermometers in her pots, then squeezed a drop of orange colorant into a swirl of flesh-toned wax. Her eyes softened as the color merged beneath the glassine surface, glowing peach in the early light. She loved this part of her work—the faintly sweet smell of the wax, the steamy heat against her face, the sensual translucence of the color. She felt her nerve endings open, like a great flowering across her skin, so sensitive that she felt the air shift with the movement at her back.
Movement? She hesitated before she turned.
The figures sat motionless in the vintage diner booth, just as she’d left them. No. Almost as she’d left them. Julie’s head had rotated half a turn on its dowel, and was now looking at her with sad glass eyes.
These others. I don’t belong with these others.
Randi scowled.
She’d grown used to the murmers, had even begun to harbor a secret affection for the eccentricity of them. They were less pretentious than Sartre’s hallucinations, less debilitating than Poe’s melancholia, less expensive than Basquiat’s addictions. This small peculiarity (easily overcome with a quick toggle of her Ipod’s volume control) allowed Randi to feel vaguely other. It also let her work five days a week.
The murmurs were fine.
Actual full sentences from over-sized wax dolls were another matter altogether. She shot Julie an accusing glare before stepping back to survey the rest of the scene.
Mavis had been the first of the party, and the easiest to conceive. Smoke-blue hair billowed around a wrinkled face made clownish with bright rouge, bright lipstick and bright black mascara. Randi still felt a little guilty about the clothing. She’d pinched the brown silk Capri pants and a leopard-print sweater from Nana Wentz’s closet after the funeral. She wasn’t sure if the guilt arose from this small act of larceny, or from the fact that they really were Nana’s clothes. In fact, her favorite clothes. At least the cork platforms were a thrift store find; Nana had been more inclined to teetery patent leather stilettos.
The rest of the characters came to Randi in bits as she roamed the supermarket, or rode the elevator to her office job, or lunched at the vegetarian restaurant on Broadway. Reba—the aging southern belle, tartish and shopworn, well on her way to becoming Mavis. Her husband Cash, her perfect male counterpart, his gut pushing at the Sansibelt waistband, a gold chain tangled in graying chest hair at his open collar. Their daughter Julie, and her depressingly suitable fiancé. Randi hadn’t officially named the fiancé yet, but she thought of him as Slimeball.
Randi stirred the beeswax-and-paraffin concoction, and picked a brush from the canister on the counter. She’d quit last night at ten–finished, with two days breathing room before the gallery installation. She’d poured herself a glass of Chianti and fallen asleep in front of the television.
She woke at two A.M. with a stiff neck and the absolute certainty that she was not finished at all. She’d pulled a chair up to the booth and sat with them while she drank coffee, studying each wax face, envisioning their moment. Cash caught in mid-gesture, his booming voice frozen at the climax of his story. Mavis laughing, mouth open, dentures flecked with bits of food. Reba’s heavy-lidded gaze and seductive half-smile focusing beyond the perimeter of the tableau, directed to an unseen someone. Slime leaning forward with his toothy smile and icy eyes.
And Julie…
Julie sat at the edge of the booth. While the Cash/Reba genes were writ plain across her face, nature formed her with a far more practiced hand. Cash’s pug nose reinvented itself as delicately upturned on her pale face, and Reba’s pillowy lips reappeared–still sensual, but more discrete. Her wide gray eyes stared into the scene with no attachment, and her straight-backed posture engaged with no one.
She didn’t belong there.
Randi sat with them for nearly two hours. She sketched revisions, wadded them into balls, and tried again. She pulled at Julie, repositioned her, and sketched some more. Finally, she got up, made her cuts beneath the white turtleneck, and pulled the head free. She turned the body toward Slime, and adjusted the neck to give the head a slight tilt. She mixed new wax.
Now with the wax beside her on the warmer, she prepared to cut into a cheek, to erase the stoic, vaguely sad set of the mouth and eyes. Julie would smile into Slime’s shark-toothed face, lean toward him ever so slightly…
As Randi reached for her knife, something shifted at the edge of her vision. She jumped, turned, saw that Julie’s head had again rotated away from the tableau, and her body tilted toward the edge of the booth.
I DON’T BELONG HERE!
The words exploded all around her, through Randi’s brain and in her ears. She sat rigid, eyes wide, staring at the sculpture.
And then she set to work.
* * *
“You’ve outdone yourself, my dear.” Cyril Cunningham offered Randi a flute of champagne. “Hell, you’ve outdone us. Gavaille was actually raving about ‘Family Dinner.’ If his review’s half as effusive, you’re on the map.”
Randi nodded. The exhilaration of the opening was receding, a raw edge of exhaustion creeping in behind it. The black pumps pinched her feet, and the black silk sheath constrained her body. Eight women, four men, and an art critic of indeterminate gender had told her she looked stunning this evening. She wondered if being on the map meant she could skip the pantyhose at her next show.
The gallery would close in fifteen minutes. The early crowd had dwindled to a few stragglers. A middle-aged couple stood looking at “Family Dinner,” and Randi drifted toward them, listening. Beyond them, the characters sat suspended in a glare of diner lights.
The changes had gobbled up Randi’s two-day lead and left her working on the piece until the gallery movers knocked on her door. She’d made adjustments during the installation, then a few more this afternoon.
Cash and Reba and Mavis and Slimeball had not changed. They were frozen in their moment, perfectly themselves, perfectly engaged. Julie sat on their periphery, eyes forward, her expression still stoic, still a little sad. But now it barely masked the tension beneath. Her body leaned toward the booth’s edge, her hips swiveled out, one leg taut and bent at the knee, the other poised to follow. Ever so subtly, ever so quietly, by inches and fractions of inches, she was leaving this place she didn’t belong.
Randi stood behind the couple. They didn’t speak, but the woman caught her breath in a hitched sob, and the man put his arm around her shoulder.
“We should go, dear,” he said. “They’re closing.”
Randi watched them walk toward the door, the woman’s agitation bleeding into her, but woven with a bright thread of elation.
I’ve done it.
She slipped her feet out of the pumps and picked them up. As she straightened, she felt a new presence, someone standing at her elbow.
The girl was about twenty, slender, with a delicately upturned nose and discretely sensual lips. She looked at Randi with wide gray eyes and reached out to touch her hand.
“Thank you,” she said.
The girl turned and walked away, following the couple into the night.
Randi stood very still as the heavy glass door eased shut, as the sounds of wind and rain muffled and receded. She could not turn around, could not look at the tableau.
One by one, the exhibit lights dimmed to the distant clicking of switches. The wind hesitated, and the rain slowed.
Even the voices went quiet.
–Dana Kouba
