Robert Walker - Absolute Instinct

Perhaps the letter represented an earlier brush-off, he now realized. Perhaps it was time to move on. Lucinda had led him by the nose long enough. Fuck her. Fuck this city. Fuck this state.

However, when he got home, Lucinda stood in his doorway. “I'm sorry about earlier. I apologize, and I've come to look at your work, Giles.”

It shouldn't have surprised him. She needed to bankroll a new artist. Still he said, “That's surprising.”

“What do you mean? I've always said I'd take a look, see if you're as good as you say.” She gave him a coy smile.

“All right, if you're sure…. Come on up.” He led her to his studio.

The surprise visit worried Giles, as his work in progress hadn't had the final touches applied, and one spinal cord remained in a solution and hadn't as yet been painted.

Inside the dimly lit room, he quickly placed a towel over the tub in which Joyce Olsen's spine lay in a saline solution. He then turned a spotlight on his two finished sculptures and his work in progress. She stared at the lifelike clay representations of serene looking women with pleasant smiles and an aura of peace, while backbones bulged outside of their backs, floating just above them, hovering in dragonlike grace in the air. And it stirred something inside Lucinda. “My god… Giles… who… who is your model for these? Don't tell me. Your mother? Beautiful… the perfect expressions… the perfect ages… so tranquil… and the touch of life in the skin tones, and the animals milling about their feet, and their blood red backbones bulging through their backs-such a… so startling a contrast… such a juxtaposition of materials, motifs…”

Giles beamed. He saw she meant what she said, saw it in her gleaming eyes. He dared say nothing. He held his breath instead.

“It makes me at once agitated, excited by the work, and perhaps a bit fearful… uncomfortable-no, agitated-no, disturbed, yeah, that's it. Disturbed to my core. And the animals are a stroke of genius. What a touch. Birds, how sweet.”

She then turned her full attention to the work in progress.

“This one's without animals?”

“A dog this time. Being finished in the other room, along with a horse.”

“A horse? Really. How soon before all of them are finished?”

“Not long, really. I just have to attach the parts I'm working on.”

“The animals and to this one the spine, right?” she asked.

“Right… that part takes time.”

“The sculptures are so… so unusual, Giles. Photos don't do them justice, not even the oils you showed me do the work justice. Have you only the three pieces?” She went straight for the towel he'd covered the tub with and snatched it away, gasping at the sight before her. “My god, it's so lifelike. How did you get the lifelike tones? And why is it in water?”

“It's not water. It's a special solution that gives the clay a sheen so the paint adheres better.”

“So you sculpted it of clay? Amazing. It doesn't look like clay.”

“It's a discovery of my own making.”

“It's so lifelike, not like the two red ones on the finished work. Why do you paint the bones red? It might look better if you used this natural bone color.”

“I use a specially mixed paint on them that sends a message. Red stands for life, the lifeblood in us all. It represents our essence. I want to capture that in my work.”

“Yeah, but you're missing the point.”

“What point?”

“Don't you want to… I mean isn't your aim to disturb your audience?”

“Disturb on the one hand, enlighten on the other, to find eventual peace. I want them to find peace and comfort in my work.”

“Really… That's beautiful.” She turned toward Giles and said, “I wish you had maybe two or three more completed. We could launch a showing first at the gallery, charge a mint for these, and then, who knows, if it's successful…”

“That's my dream,” he replied. “But these take time to create.”

“How much time do you need?”

He feared answering her. Feared losing his chance. “What if we put these three up alongside the oils?”

“I've only seen the two paintings you brought to the gallery, sweetheart.”

“Let me show you more. Come over here.” He guided her to a bedroom area where the walls were lined with oil paintings of women in various poses with animal friends about them, their spinal columns showing like an exaggeration of those starving Nigerian refugees seen on TV.

“The, paintings do have a certain strange appeal,” she said. After looking closely at each painting, Lucinda sat on his bed, took his hands in hers and guided him to stand facing her close in between her legs. Giles wondered if this was how Orion had gotten an exhibition of his work. He decided, danger or no danger in showing his work here in Milwaukee, he would go for it.

He pressed his lips to Lucinda's, and he began to fondle her, giving her what she wanted. As he began making love to her, he thought of the box his mother had given him to be opened after her death, and her repeatedly saying, “Your father's in that box. All you've ever wanted to know about the bastard, you have in that box-my final gift to you, Giles, your legacy. It isn't much but it will tell you why you are the way you are, trust me on that score.”

The sagging bed on which he made love to Lucinda bounced over the lid of the large box bequeathed him where, so long as he had resided in Milwaukee, the box had rested, still unopened and unexplored after all these years-just waiting for Giles to find the nerve and the right time and place to delve into it, and to learn about Father.

Giles pushed it from his mind now as the joy of sexual release and the eroticism of sleeping with a rich, spoiled brat who held his career in her hands began to excite him to greater and greater passions.

Lucinda moaned and brayed under him, the rod of his manhood ramming into her, his perspiration falling into her eyes.

Part of him stood in the corner and marveled at the double-backed, four-legged crab created of their bodies there on the bed. But one of the eyes of his second self wandered to the beautifully carved wooden and leather-bound box tied with ribbons still smelling of Mother's perfume, wafting up from just below the lovers.

With Darwin using her restroom to throw water on his face and freshen up, Jessica sat on the terrace under light flooding from the room. It was nearing one in the morning. She'd been poring over her copy of Asa Holcraft's If Christ Came to New York and the Ensuing Autopsy, part coroner's memoir, part handy, compact compendium of information on all facets of the human body and body parts, from organs to eyes and back again to see what her old mentor had to say about the spinal column.

After dining, they'd ordered up drinks, and after a couple of beers and whiskey sours, Darwin had become somewhat drowsy and was now working toward getting his second wind. Jessica called to him from the terrace, asking if he were all right and getting no answer, she stepped back into the room.

Darwin had removed his shirt and his rippling muscles shone in the half light of the bathroom. He came nearer, toweling off his hair, replying, “Must be getting old. Past my bedtime.” Darwin spoke through the towel.

She stared for a moment at his enormous pectorals and felt a momentary attraction she quickly put in check. I'm old enough to be his mother, she thought, lifting his shirt off the back of a chair and throwing it at him. “Get dressed. We've got a lot of work yet to do.”

“Sure… sure,” he replied, working the buttoned shirt over his head and slipping into the sleeves. What would I do with a twenty-six-year-old Sidney Poitier-Vin Diesel look-a-like? Jessica wondered.