Pygmalia

(from Book IV, Luke in Exile)

Feet tapping impatiently, rather trying to tap, your heavy flatfeet straining to find a rhythm but remaining frozen, solid marble. Gazing out on your little one-room world through eyes you haven’t learned how to close, the same view of the same cobwebbed corner always, the same statues your only companions. Except when she returns to work on you, which she always does, sometimes days but usually only hours having elapsed by your uncertain calculation in this state where time, if it exists, isn’t measured in hours and days but in more geological increments.

But to return to her inevitable return. Again and again she reappears—faithfully, determined—a real flesh-and-blood woman with dusty, lovely face tapping away with hammer and chisel on your ankles, your shinbones, your knees, your thighs, your cock, your balls, your torso, your throat, your temples—striving to liberate you yet seemingly unaware you can actually feel every blow, every chip, every crack—unaware (or so it would seem) that liberation of form from stone is every bit as arduous for the sculpted as for the sculptor.

You can’t remember how you got here, how you wound up in this—admittedly—strange position. It had something to do with a journey, an impossible journey taken at great personal risk in the wake of a tremendous tragedy. But try as you might, you can’t remember what you’ve lost.

Combing your memory day after day, you’ve recalled only a name: Luke Soloman. It may or may not have been, be your own name. It strikes you most peculiarly, like the name of a character in a novel—a novel, however, you can’t recall having read. A novel that may not even exist, or that may not exist yet. A novel someone out there, someone you may or may not know, might or might not at this very moment be in the process of writing. Luke Soloman. Maybe it’s just a name, but at least it’s something to hold onto.


Sometimes, as a consolation prize for having lost your identity, she tells you stories about herself, this woman who comes to you. This woman who speaks in spiraling, stream-of-consciousness French sentences, beautiful and poetic, which at first you follow with great difficulty but which, as time goes by and your roughhewn ears begin to acclimatize to this new language (what was your old language?), you grasp more and more fully. This woman who, by all indications, remains oblivious that underneath your Italian marble exterior you’re listening intently, that your focus is entirely centered on, dominated by her, that she has become your obsession, that it nearly drives you insane being unable to respond.

A simple understanding nod would be enough to satisfy you. At least it would be a start. But no, you’re forced to listen without interacting as she shares with you, her masterpiece-in-process, bittersweet vignettes from her life.

How as a little girl growing up in Picardy she once dreamed her house was on fire, her maman screaming like a Jabberwocky one morning from the kitchen, and how she woke up to find the house really was on fire, her papa dancing around in his underwear in a sea of flames because her maman had accidentally (?) put the gasoline where the kerosene should have been beside the woodstove.

How that was shortly before he ran off. How it was probably what made him run. How she and her maman put out the fire by throwing blankets on it. The fire ate up every blanket in the house, and it was a cold winter. How she remembers his feet, the way they were so burned, his toes all gooey, melted marshmallows with the crust pulled off. How for weeks he couldn’t walk, for weeks he didn’t knock anybody around when he came home smelling like a liquor store. How they kept a trashcan beside his bed for him to roll over and piss in. He turned bitter and would curse and moan and call her maman a sale pute. How the whole house stank of roasted flesh and stale piss. And how then one day he left. Without even saying goodbye. Not even to his petit ange, his name for her when he was sober and himself.

How her maman cried as if God had just stood up and walked out of her life. And then the silence and staring eyes, the weeks and months passing. And then things finally beginning to look up. How they purchased a color TV and would sit and watch TV while eating American-style TV dinners. How it was the first time she’d ever been happy for more than a few hours consecutively.

But then the men from Crédit Lyonnais came and said they had to leave. How her maman pleaded, she would go out and get a job to pay what was owed. But it was no use, the house had been sold to a retired British couple. So the TV dinner days came to an end.

How she and her maman moved into a leaky attic apartment in a rundown section of Amiens. And how then her maman did, indeed, become a sale pute, a pute anyway, trading her slight Asian body for slight sums of francs to pay the rent and put food on the table, regularly asking her daughter to go out and play (alone usually) while she attended to her clients in their one and only bed.

How later, at night, they would lie in bed together, just the two of them, reunited, and her mother would tell her things about the world. The difference, for example, between black heart cherries and red heart cherries. There was a weeping cherry tree down the road from their apartment that in spring produced thousands of tiny pink petals softer than silk. She rode her bike by it to and from school. How they had a big gray cat now, Henri, who used to be a stray. Henri only had one ear. He probably lost it in a fight over a female, her maman explained, never failing to point out Henri was a tomcat. All men were tomcats at heart, her maman insisted, shooing away Henri with her cigarette.

How she—by now you’ve learned her name, Amanda … Héloise Amanda Gonfleur, a name you find as beautiful as her person, though you’ve never felt it (or her) on your frozen lips—how she suffers from elephantiasis in her left foot, which makes it nearly twice the normal size and mottled with blue and purple as if from a severely sprained ankle that won’t heal.

Even this blemish you’ve come to find charming. How it has been that way ever since she was little, and is considered incurable. How, as a teenager, she visited her mother’s island (population 800) off the southern coast of Japan, and how the local healers took it on themselves to cure her foot. They performed elaborate ceremonies burning incense while chanting and waving giant leaves called “elephant leaves” over it, which they insisted would draw the evil spirit out of her leg. How she put up with it all patiently. And how, when the remedy didn’t take, the healers were perplexed and apologetic to the point of tears, and she found herself comforting them.

Yet how, for all that, she wasn’t known on the island for her foot; she was actually famous for her hair. Her papa was a fair-skinned Norman formerly with the French navy in the South Pacific, and though Amanda looks very “Japanese,” her hair has a slightly reddish tint that gives away her non-Asian heritage.

How every morning after bathing, she let her hair air-dry while breakfasting in her mother’s family’s garden. How the event literally turned into a spectacle for the people on the island, who would gather outside the garden and watch through the lattice fence with astonishment as her hair slowly changed from jet black to its normal dark reddish brown. Most of the islanders had never seen a Westerner before. How they were so amazed they gave her an honorary title. And so she became known as “la Blonde.”

Your heart, stone though it may be, has long since gone out to her. You hang on her every word, her every mannerism. The way she blows her hair out of her eyes while working, for instance, without even bothering to take time to pull it back.

She’s especially lovely in the clear morning light when, after a long night standing all alone dreaming of her, you’re filled with an intense desire to run your fingers through her silky hair (which drifts sideways like a little girl’s when she first awakes) and kiss her (almond-shaped) eyes, gaze into her subtle (brown with a touch of green) irises and caress her supple (creamy porcelain) skin. An intense desire to shed your hard exterior, your marble shell, your lifeless exoskeleton, and experience her softness and warmth, cuddle with her under the sheets, touch her like a lover, whispering promises all the while. An intense desire to lose yourself inside her, in the living sanctuary of her flesh, where, dying, you might be reborn.


Then one day, she finishes you, sands down the last of your sharp edges and stands back, exhausted and exhilarated, to assess her work. You wish you could see yourself through her eyes; it’s obvious she has fallen deeply in love with you, her creation, that she would turn to marble herself if only she could be with you. But faced with the impossibility of such a union, she sinks into despair, slumping on the floor beside your pedestal and sobbing until she runs out of tears.

Her extreme emotion triggers the fabulous change in you, heightens your desire to the point that a spontaneous chain reaction initiates, a domino effect in which your molecular structure transforms in the blink of an eye from that of stone to flesh and bone. Before you can even make sense of what has occurred, question the radical physics of the situation, you’re stepping down off your pedestal, a modern-day David come fully to life, feeling the hot blood coursing through your arteries and veins, feeling your astonishing strength and flexibility, your incredible reality, as you pick up Amanda’s lifeless form and carry her out of the atelier into the bedroom, where you lay her gently on the bed and proceed to undress her—slowly, timidly, tenderly—with genuinely cultivated adoration.

Her clothes you fold neatly and place on top of the antique Louis XVI dresser whose mirror is warped and yellow with age. Struck by the novelty of your image, you pause to examine your somewhat distorted self carefully. The angular cheeks, the long pointed chin shaved clean. The unruly, mischievous eyes in which an unspeakable sadness yet seems to reside. The collarbones in bas-relief, the sculpted chest, shoulders and arms ...

Suddenly you feel more naked than you’ve ever felt. It seems the greatest of mysteries that you should be here, alive, in this room, standing beside this delicate sleeping creature with such graceful curves at odds with her callused stoneworker’s hands and deformed foot, this enigma wrapped in silence and porcelain skin. A vital link is missing from your life. There’s no compatibility between then (whenever that was) and now (whenever this is). It’s as if you went to sleep one person—and woke up quite another.

Trying your best not to disturb her, you lie down on the bed and wait for her to wake up. When she finally does, opening her eyes and staring at you dreamily, you realize she no longer recognizes, no longer acknowledges you as her creation—that she loves you still, naturally, but has forgotten her role in bringing you to life. You’ve become real to her.

She opens automatically to you, completely and utterly, sensuous and ripe, melting like butter against the hot irons of your fingers, your tongue, your cock, as your bodies fuse, dissolve into a single nameless, faceless entity, become as one in the Church of Touch, as the two of you turn to salt together: tears, sweat, mucous, semen.

Kaleidoscopic linguini tangled-hair images of your erstwhile unconnected bodies welded at the sex and the eyes, penetrating each other with your minds. Sinking blissfully in a congealed nectar of the sweetest possible intimacy, sated by moments but always soon hungry again, bared souls revealed in all their splendor and splinters wrapped around each other like strawberries grown together in the field. Tears spilling from her ancient eyes, tears spilling unexpectedly from your own eyes, tears raining down into nostrils, mouths, flesh like soap in boiling water slick with sweat as you climax together one last time in the afterglow rose of early evening, your tears ones of love but also relief, her tears pumping life back into you like a summer shower falling from a fleeting cloud.

The way she reaches out so bravely and pulls you in touches you on the most essential, the most basic of human levels. You feel like a prodigal son being welcomed back, after long and painful exile, into the nurturing fold of Womankind.

And then sleep. The kind of total sleep that only bears know in their winter hiding places. And then latewaking and more lovemaking. A day that becomes a week that becomes a month and more, the long hours dripping with laziness and love honey, summer slowly disappearing.

Love in another language, love stripped of all the usual, clichéd, petty, pedestrian, hackneyed, threadbare, banal references. Tracing pleasure in the concatenated circles formed by your slippery bodies, a sharply upward curve from tenderness to ravenous passion, rounding down slowly and cooling off in oily contentment.

“Sonde-moi!” she cries at the height of ecstasy, an expression you’ve never heard before and look up later in a French-English dictionary, which roughly translates, “Plumb the depths of me!”

So you plumb the depths of her, again and again, as you roll like smooth animals to and fro in an exquisite melding of the skin that seems to have no end, thrusting and thrusting and then coming inside her, so good and sweet, then sleeping again, your lips pressed like stamps against her shoulder blades, the two of you compressed like flesh spoons in a drawer.

Once, hearing a strange noise, you open your eyes long enough to realize the apartment is being burgled; a thief is just slipping out the door, some cash in hand. But you can’t be bothered and, silently blessing him in his hour of need, fall back sound asleep.


As anyone who has ever tried it can attest, the only place to learn a foreign language is in bed. For weeks, months now, between lovemaking sessions, Amanda’s bed has become a classroom. She is the teacher and you are the student. In the beginning you sometimes try to ask her questions in English—it was English you once spoke, wasn’t it?—but your questions are met with blank, doelike stares.

Since she apparently doesn’t speak your language, you’re forced to learn hers. Many words, many phrases you already know; many more, however, are entirely new. You master first the parts of the body (naturellement) and the expressions of love and passion (mais bien sûr), then solidify the days of the week, the months, the hours, the cardinal and ordinal numbers, everyday questions and their everyday answers, idioms, polite expressions and small talk—before moving on to more challenging (but also more rewarding) subjects: slang (le français branché), philosophical and theoretical discours, technical and scientific jargon, and finally, most rewarding of all, artistic and poetic langage.

You practice with Amanda until, suddenly, the world of French puns, the sparkling universe of jeux de mots reveals itself to you—puns being, after all, the punnacle of wit—and you finally get the humor in such formerly neutral expressions as la Sacrée-Queue, débats de soie, une femme d’affaires, the humor in Amanda’s Dances with Wolves nickname for you when you’re aroused, Deux Hommes Qui Marchent, the humor in such cognate mistranslations as la merde volante, frapper la rue, la confiture de la circulation, le champignon du monde ...

Long days of liquid conversations, oil massages, pastis and Gauloise cigarettes. Hot days made for falling in love. Cover-me-with-summer days. Simmering August days giving way to simmering September ones. Summer days made for doing nothing, glorious in their futility.

Amanda’s sun-warm hair, the way the light brings out little rainbows in it, smoke rings drifting in the still air. Pretending to sleep just so she will wake you. Lovesick looks that almost break your all-too-real-now heart. Getting horny, then hungry, horny, then hungry again. Amanda giggling as she fumbles through the sticky sheets looking for matches. Opening bottles of wine, breaking baguettes and, in the Catholic spirit, improvising the Sacrament in bed. Then rousing yourselves finally to sit at the little balcony in the atelier, white curtains shifting gently in the wings, Paris, that other woman, spreadeagled at your feet.

A sunshine city, zinc roofs silver in the light, contrasting orange tile chimneys in a way that seems always already Paris. Smoking scrolls and feeling medieval as evening approaches. Evening with its crickets, shrill and urgent, singing their little lives away. Evening with its canopy of burnt sienna making of the entire city the inside of a vast cathedral, its million flickering lights votive candles. Evening with its warm breezes trembling the stylized plane trees that in the dusk look like German woodcuts. Evening with those same humid breezes clicking the wooden sticks of the little Asian cemetery around the corner. Evening with its shops shutting down and bars gearing up. Evening with its taxis and sirens, its thoughts of Amanda’s body so near you can hear her breathing.

Evening with its prospect of making love to her again in just a little while. Evening with its lavender twilight surmounted by a waxing crescent moon looming cloud-free above the buildings. Evening with its abrupt even startling realization you’re thousands of miles away from anywhere you could possibly call home and anything you could possibly call a past. Evening and the poetry of awakening without memories in a strange land.


Then days of rain, rain-sloppy days. Paris all muggy, unlivable. The sky speckling like a trout with tiny white clouds that become almost imperceptibly big and gray as you relax and stare through a rain that barely wets the skin at nothing in particular.

Staring at, if anything, the yellow epidermis of the buildings under a sky grown equally cadaverous as the cool mist blows in on your shoeless outstretched feet. Your two big matching feet and Amanda’s delicate geisha foot alongside her elephant appendage.

The two of you motionless like saplings soaking up the rain by the roots, the buildings and monuments in the distance now obscured. The rain blowing in harder by degrees, up your naked thighs, your naked groins, your naked chests, against your throats, your faces. Emptying you, washing you clean of everything, the bad and the good, as you grow like grapevines up around and inside each other. As your mutual love fills these pages, so the rain fills the air.

Then the autumnal equinox, your twenty-sixth birthday though you don’t realize it at the time. The year, as you will soon learn, is 1994. The first day of fall. At least you think it’s the first day of fall. It certainly feels like fall.

After a night in which the moist air crept in through the window, humidly brushing your exposed skin, making you draw closer together in the sanctum of your bed, the rain has stopped, the air has turned dry, and you can feel the seasons conflating.

It occurs to you, sniffing your armpits, maybe you should get up and shower—but right now feels too good. You’ve woken up from yet another night of deep sleep beside the untwining enigma, this mysterious woman who has wrapped her entire world around you.

You’ve rolled over and touched, kissed, licked the soft inside of her wrist. She’s as white as an angel covered with nothing but a sheet, staring meditatively at the ceiling in the first pensive mood you’ve ever caught her in.

“A quoi tu penses?” you ask in your best French accent, sincerely wondering what, indeed, she’s thinking.

“I’m thinking,” she replies in perfect English, with hardly any accent to speak of, staring at you with pragmatic eyes, eyes you’ve never seen before, “it’s time you got a job. I can’t go on supporting you forever.”

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.