Bones Beneath Her Skin, deux
Jill came with Chicago’s Indian summer: lush, blushing and ripe like a late summer’s peach, letting sunlight stream in behind her. She tripped up the creaking stairs of Molly Malone’s boarding house, a cardboard box sending loose slender arms and elbows like lonely and distant hills out at sharp angles and this is where Sam first caught her. She paused before 2E and jostled the box (meticulously labeled “Philosophy: Classic” in a infinitely precise hand) against the blade of her hip and the peeling, yellowing wallpaper that wrapped up the boarding house like a forgotten gift.
He didn’t offer to help her with her burden, but rather clutched his keys tight in his hand until the bite of the metal teeth against the flesh of his palm stayed him. Here before him, fiddling with her own ring of keys was a mystery—a creature not of this world, though whether angelic or demonic he would never know. As she wrestled with her load, he tried in vain to pull apart the divine draw that had set him to her immediately, had made his heart pound the ache of a heathen’s devotion: fierce, wild and consuming. But, as she tried key after key, first brass, then silver, he could not know her, could make no sense of the magic that coursed through the web of veins that climbed up her arms like tendrils of ivy beneath the veil of her cream-clear skin. He could put no myth to the constellation of freckles that swept across her cheeks, nor find the hymn’s refrain dedicated to the lithe line of her body or the curl of her spine.
Finally, the key was found and the door thrown open; the too long barren room opened to her with yearning. Sunlight poured forth the room and into the hallway, splashed across the floorboards that creaked and washed up to him. And then she looked up at him for the first time, blinked wide blue-grey eyes and the freckles spilled across her cheeks danced as a smile flooded her face, rearranged skin and bone and sinew until all he saw was her and the mystery that was beauty beyond the roll of her joints and the tendrils of veins scaling her arms. His heart seized, his shoulders pinched together tightly and in an instant, he was gone, stumbling free from the boarding house and into the hot, heavy air of late August and he drank of it greedily, welcomingly.
*
She haunted him for weeks. He tried to put down her likeness in chalk, in graphite, in charcoal, but she remained elusive, inscrutable. He watched her come and go those first long weeks, perched on his windowsill, a cigarette tight between the tips of two fingers, fierce smoking burning his lungs. He ran into her in the hall from time to time, once in the basement where he found her, neatly and precisely folding her laundry. She was unflaggingly polite when he met her and he was as immutably brutish, withdrawn.
There was something to her, he knew, that held the answer to everything: to life and creation, but no matter the number of pages he covered, he could not set the mystical down. He could not put to paper the sharps crests of her shoulder blades—scapulas, like scapulars, he thought, holy, profound, the beacon of a greater being’s life force brought to Earth. Nor could he capture the glade between her shoulder blades—the Eden of smooth skin pebbled with the hills of vertebrae. The wisps of dark blond hair that wrested themselves free of their elastic tie when sweet slicked her impossible brow eluded him no matter how intense his study of her. He went through reams of sketch paper, papered his walls with whatever collection of lines most evoked the divine. With the rest, he lined the floor of his room, his cage.
*
No amount of dedication, no number of sketches examining the way her eyes narrowed when she’d forgotten something, could ease him of a yearning he could not quite understand. Still he observed, hoping to unravel the mystery of her light, feeble footfalls, pull apart the gaze she reserved for history books alone, work free the tangles of secrets that skulked about the twists and turns of neurons and grey matter. He listened to her flick page corners between fingertips, froze whenever he heard her door creak open and waited to breathe again until he heard he return (with a cup of tea—she drank tea with plain white tags, labeled in green) or until he heard the door to the boarding house shut behind her, giving her over to the wilds of the city, to class and classmates, study sessions and wanderings through dusty library stacks.
When courage or desperation sent him after her, he took up a corner of the kitchen on a sunny afternoon. Though the first chill winds of autumn cut through the boarding house and rattled the glass in the windows, the kitchen was warm and inviting: a womb of close walls, golden wood floors polished over decades. He sat at the long, scrubbed wooden table and sketched her as she fretted about the kitchen like an anxious, trembling sparrow. He sketched idly, a few reference photographs set before him—an easy alibi should she take interest in his work, but as soon as she’d set foot in the kitchen for afternoon tea, he took down only the lines of her body.
As she reached into the cupboard above the sink for the canister of tea Molly had brought back from a late visit to Ireland, he followed the thread of her from delicate first metatarsal to medial cuneiform, traced the curve of her instep as though pinning her open, discecting. He traced up her legs, which didn’t quite fill out her jeans, swept up the curve of her flank, and upward, through pelvis toward the small of her back.
He dwelled, eyes on the womanly swell of her hips, though they were sharp, lingered at her sacrum, where spine met pelvis and he thought about what was sacred, the blooming sanctum of her womb and womanhood. The bones of her spine, twisting, curling beneath her skin, were as a ladder, but to where? To Heaven or Hell? Or perhaps, rather, her vertebrae were the blood soaked steps of Tenochtitlan, of the Aztec Templo Mayor, sacred yet profane. As she set the kettle on, he climbed those steps, setting down smudge of charcoal to the toothy paper and there, vertebrae Atlas and axis, on which the orb of her skull rested like the Earth on Atlas’ shoulders and here he searched for the mystery, for the divine or wicked that she was. Perhaps it was in the point of her chin, which drew together the two halves of her heart-shaped face, or the eddies of her blue-gray eyes, but as she worked, as she paced before the stove, he watched her.
And she him. She came to him, turned the sketchpad to face her and gazed at it with an emotion he couldn’t make out.
“Do I really look like that?” she murmured, her eyes narrowing.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I cannot put you to the page as you are. Pose for me?”
She nodded, the same inscrutable expression clouding her eyes. He graced her with half of a grateful smile, his mind already working a thousand calculations and theories through. At his smile, he noticed, her shoulders sank and the warm sliver of her smile returned like the waxing moon.
“I’ve never done this before,” she murmured, voice catching in her throat like leaves in a gutter. There she stood in the very center of his room, in jeans with the knees worn through, in a navy blue sweater whose sleeves tripped over her wrists toward her fingertips. She hadn’t patched the knees of her jeans—instead striped tights leaked through the shreds and flowed down to the very tips of her toes, which she wriggled uncomfortably on his cold wood floor.
He frowned, thoughtfully, seeing her there in his room, in the warm light of the fading sun streaming in the westward window, skin painted—already, painted though he hadn’t raised his brush yet—a soft pink. She smiled faintly, though the set of her mouth quivered and she shifted her weight as he appraised her, come to life in the glow of late afternoon. There she stood, a puzzle, an ode, a curse, right before him, malleable and soft as clay. “Would you…?” He nodded toward the hem of her sweater, not able to meet her wide blue eyes.
“You want me to—” The intoxicating warble of her uncertainty failed her, examining the hem with fluttering fingers.
“Would you?”
She bit her lower lip hard enough to bruise it and nodded slowly. “Could you… could you turn around?”
He did as she asked, a jolt zipping down his spine, a stone settling in his gut. Bare, she wouldn’t be able to hide her secrets from him, would lay out every part of her that he yearned to untangled on the traipsing tendrils of her veins, dark beneath her skin like rivulets slicing through stone. He heard the rustle of denim against denim, the soft falls of her toes as she stepped free of her jeans, felt as much as heard the lycra of her tights slip down over the curve of her hips and down her thighs. A dark, devilish flush creeping up in his own cheeks, he busied himself in the arrangement of brushes and the twist of aluminum tubes of paint, set down the ghosts of the colors of her skin and the worlds upon worlds beneath it on a wide butcher’s tray.
At her soft whisper of a prompt, he turned back to her and knew nothing more and found no answers.
In their first session, she let him bend her into position with words, with directions and suggestions. Hours she’d sat before him, still and open to him and still he didn’t understand, though he had scrutinized every inch of her. Though he had traced the curl of hair that hid shadows against her neck with a steady gaze and though he had mapped the veins that traced down her arms with the patience and precision of a cartographer.
In their second session, he paused in his scrutiny and looked from the shell of her he’d laid to canvas to her, lithe, soft and unfathomable. He set down his brush and stood, went to her and asked her, “May I?”
When she met his gaze, he saw her cheeks splotch with shame, but she nodded and lowered her eyes.
She flinched when he touched her and he saw the shiver that trembled through her from head to toe, felt her stiffen beneath him.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed, and this softened her, opened her again, the warm rush of his apology against her skin. She let him mold her as he chose, position her, skim the tips of his fingers over the skin where shoulder met back, connecting the dots of her freckles into gruesome constellations.
And he set his eyes back on her, his easel between them once more, and still he couldn’t unwind the tangle of her beauty, the spell of her silence or the puzzles that flickered in her wide, anxious eyes.
*
Finally, after countless long afternoons, he frowned and set down the tube of paint he’d been considering. He went to her, and took her limp arm in his, arranging her as though she were a doll or mannequin. He could hear her heart thundering in her chest, could smell the light fragrance of her shampoo and the tobacco on his own breath against her shoulder. He held her without moving for a beat too long and felt her tense. When he met her eyes, the usual guarded apprehension had been replaced with fear and longing and in that instant, he thought he knew her. He seized her lips in a desperate kiss and when she uncoiled beneath him, he lay her down on the cold hardwood and began his examination of her with frantic, unforgiving fingertips. She unfurled, slowly, as he worked inside her and when she shuddered and when her mouth went slack and her eyes wider than he’d ever seen, the mystery of her beauty and his yen came undone and with it, every question he couldn’t put words to was answered.
But as sweat cooled on their bodies as the lay beside each other on the cold floor, he felt the knot of his insides collapse into a vacuum in which all he could know was himself and it wasn’t long before she struggled into her clothes and tripped back across the hall, covering hiccupping sobs with a trembling hand.
But, like clockwork, she came to him the next afternoon and stripped herself bare, and he worked with a frown, trying to make sense of the curve of her spine.
