Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

Jack ate most of the Chinese food that we ordered in, washing it down with glass after glass of bourbon. She wiped the sauce from around her mouth with the back of her sleeve and asked whether my penis was really gone. When I confirmed it was, she apologized for joking about the fact earlier. I accepted her apology with as much grace as I could muster and she got a little weepy at this point; I was discovering that alcohol-as it often does with even the manliest of drinkers-tended to make her sentimental. When I asked Jack whether she was planning anything for Christmas, she basically answered by reciting her life’s story.

She had become pregnant while still in her teens and had given birth to a boy, Ted, who was now in his thirties. Jack married Ted’s father, who proved violent and constantly drunken, and she stayed with him only because there didn’t seem to be any other option. She’d managed to finish high school, but college was out of the question. When Jack got pregnant a second time, her husband blamed her for trying to wreck his life: “You go get knocked up again, even though we got no money. Bitch!” Ted, six at the time, watched his father beat his child-heavy mother at least once a week throughout the pregnancy.

On an evening in Jack’s seventh month, her husband administered a particularly heavy beating. When he passed out from the alcohol, Jack packed a few small bags of clothing and bundled up young Ted. She placed the boy by the front door and then returned to the bedroom with a frying pan, which she used to bash her sleeping husband in the head. Jack claimed that she did this to ensure he didn’t wake up and give chase, but I suspect it was mostly because it felt good. For days, she said, she scanned the local paper to see if she’d killed him. When no obituary turned up, she was mostly relieved but also slightly disappointed.

“After I left my husband, I was sometimes worried that he’d be waiting at my mother’s hospital. She had schizophrenia,” Jack said. “But I never saw the bastard again. Wasn’t motivated enough to be a stalker, I guess.”

It was a revelation that Jack’s mother had been schizophrenic. Was there a connection, then, to Marianne Engel? Indeed there was.

“I loved my mother and I had to visit her, especially since no one else did. My father was long gone. I suppose he couldn’t stand watching the woman he loved go crazy.”

I made some small comment that her life sounded as though it had been difficult.

“Damn straight. All the men in my life have been such shits that while Ted was growing up,” Jack confided, “I secretly wished that he’d turn out gay.”

“And?”

“No such luck,” she grumbled, refilling her bourbon.

“Well, don’t give up hope,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“Yeah, whatever.” She took another large sip. “Anyway, things were pretty difficult but we got by. Gave birth to Tammie, that’s the kid I had inside me when I left my husband. Got a job as a waitress. Moved up to cook, then assistant manager. Crappy little greasy spoon, but what can you do? Some lawyer tracked me down after my father died, and he’d left me a bit of money. So I guess the bastard was good for something, after all.” She held up her glass towards heaven. “I knew I couldn’t raise two kids with what I was making in that restaurant, so I used some of that money to enroll in a night course, accounting. Got decent grades, and was able to get a bad position with a good company.”

“That’s still a long way away from being a gallery owner,” I noted, “and Marianne’s agent.”

“Not as far as you might think. I kept visiting my mom in the hospital and one day I noticed a new patient, a young girl. Attractive, you know, sitting alone at a table. Drawing. She was different from the others. Maybe it was the hair and eyes.”

“Marianne,” I said.

“Bingo,” Jack said. “Except she didn’t have that name back then. She was a Jane Doe who the police had found on the streets. Marianne Engel is just what she asked the doctors to start calling her one day.”

Marianne Engel was not her real name. My surprise at the fact brought a smug look to Jack’s face. It pleased her that there were still things about our mutual friend that she knew and I did not.

“The nurse told me she had been found with no identification, and fingerprints turned up nothing. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell them anything about her past. Maybe her parents were dead or maybe they just abandoned her, who knows? Anyway, after a few visits, I decided to say hello. She was shy, then. When I asked her to show me her drawings, she wouldn’t. But I kept asking and, after a few more visits, she finally did. I was blown away. I’d expected incoherent doodles and all that, but here were fantastic beasts, monsters, and they were so ugly, but they all had something so fragile about them. Something that gave them life in their eyes.”

Jack paused. I looked out through the slots in my plexiglass facemask and, for a moment, I was worried that she was going to add that there was something sympathetic in my eyes, too. But she only took another slug of bourbon and continued speaking. “She said that she wasn’t really a sketch artist. Said she was a sculptor and that these creatures were waiting to be released from the stone.”

“So,” I said, “even as a teenager…”

“Yeah, even as a teenager,” Jack confirmed. “I guess I was kind of fascinated by the idea, but I didn’t know shit about art. Most of the time, I think I still don’t. But I do know this-there’s something unique about her vision. I liked it, and it turns out that so do a lot of other people. But in those days, I just nodded my head, because what the hell was I going to be able to do about it? As the months passed, I kept coming to visit my mom, and Marianne kept showing me drawings, and I don’t know…she just grew on me. I suppose I felt sorry for her. She was so young, and maybe I understood about being trapped someplace that’s no good for you. The asylum was the right place for my mom, no question, but it was the wrong place for Marianne.”

“So what happened?”

“The doctors played around with her meds forever until they found a combination that worked and her condition leveled out. Marianne can function, you know, when she takes her medicine. But she’s always thought that it’s poison against her hearts.” Jack paused. “Yeah, that fantasy is nothing new, either. One time I even got them to take chest X rays to show her that she had only a single heart and she still wouldn’t believe me.”

“But how did-?”

“I’m getting to that, if you’d just shut up.” Jack jabbed her chopsticks at me, a piece of kung pao chicken wedged between them. “After the docs got her all straightened out, they put her in a group home and she ended up getting a job in a cafeteria. Washing dishes, can you believe it? When I heard about it, I paid her a visit and found her elbow deep in dirty water, and all I could think about were those amazing sketches. In the meantime, she’d gotten her first tattoo, one of those Latin sayings on her arm. When I asked why, she said that since she couldn’t afford stone, she might as well use her body as a canvas. All those tattoos she’s got, she got them when she couldn’t carve for some reason. Anyway, I said, Fuck this. If she wants to carve so bad, I’ll help her. So I paid for a course in the evenings, even though all I had was a little money left from my father’s death, and all this when I had a couple of kids at home. Completely stupid, right?”

It was stupid, but I also thought (although I certainly didn’t say it aloud) that it was wonderful. Jack took another of Marianne Engel’s cigarettes-because Jack didn’t smoke, as she’d told me more than once-and continued with her story. Whenever she got to a dramatic part, she poked the cigarette around in the air as if trying to pop invisible balloons.