Twelve Stories

Matthew Olzmann

Here’s Walter, naked, in a rocking chair.

Here he is again, not a shred of clothing, posed like The Thinker, thinking.

Walter on his back, or tucked in a fetal ball, or curled like a hairless cat in the middle of a room without furniture. Charcoal-on-Canvas Walter, so detailed, you can see the basilic vein of his right arm. Graphite-on-Paper-Walter, so blurry, you can’t tell which part is Walter and which part is a passing cloud.

You never met Walter. Until recently, you didn’t even know he existed. You also don’t know most of the mourners gathered in the gallery. And because of this, you feel like a weird tourist as you shuffle down the long hallway, this celebration of Walter’s life and career.

A month ago, a phone rang. After that, your roommate, Catherine, was on the couch sobbing for the rest of the night. Walter is dead.

Here’s Walter with the beginning of a beard.

Here’s Walter with a hairline receding into the darkness behind him.

The community of professional artists’ models in this city is small. Sure, there are hundreds of people who tried it once or twice, people who posed, fidgeting, in front of a college class for an hour or two. But the models who do it year after year—the ones who know the sitting rates for every art program within a fifty-mile radius and can tell you which instructors will want them to hold the same position for three consecutive hours and which will ask for several varied poses—these models all know each other. They’ve been staring at drawings of one another, sometimes for decades, and when you can identify a friend’s body from a penciled silhouette—just from the slope of her abdomen or the texture of his thigh—that’s an intimacy, a bond that few will ever understand.

A phone rings in the middle of the night. Catherine answers it and later says, “I won’t let my colleague be forgotten.” Schools are contacted. In less than a week, every professor who ever hired Walter is asked to contribute to the memorial. Artists and their former students rifle through studios. Crates are pried open; closets are excavated. Phones keep ringing.

Here’s Walter, laughing.

Here’s Walter, far away, possibly asleep.

Impressionist Walter. Surrealist Walter. Walter as a bunch of jagged lines. Walter as a perfectly-engineered machine of muscle and light.

Catherine is standing by the guestbook, talking with someone who you think must be a famous artist.  In her black dress, she glows in a ring of tea candles, and everything about her seems so—what’s the word you’re looking for? Refined? Cultured? Experienced? Her five earrings. Her soft tattoos of dragons and orchids and pagan things. Symbols and stuff that radiate some kind of restlessness and mystical beauty. Though accompanying her to this event seemed like a good idea this morning, you’re feeling increasingly out of your league in this room of sophisticates.

What are you supposed to say to the people you meet? When you see a lady, crying quietly in the corner, do you try to comfort her, or just leave her to her own private grief?

Here’s Walter, head bowed as if in prayer.

Here’s Walter, pointing into the distance at something just beyond the canvas.

You move from one portrait to the next and pass through most of Walter’s adult life in less than ten minutes. Walter after Walter after Walter after Walter. And then, something makes you stop. The drawings at the end of the hallway. They’re on small scraps of paper and each image seems incomplete. There are fifteen or so, and these are the figures that will haunt you later, images that will enter your memory the way a draft slips under a doorway.

Walter with immaculate knees, but the rest of his body—just shadow and fog.

Walter’s jaw line and cheekbones, but his neck and shoulders are only an outline.

The hint of two eyes looking back at you.

The impression of a mouth.

These fragments remind you of when, years ago, fresh out of college, you aimed yourself at Europe, and blazed a trail through the museums and cathedrals of the Renaissance. It was there you were first awed by God and art. In Florence, you found Michelangelo’s Awakening Slave—a block of marble with the shape of a man emerging from it. And while everyone claimed it was unfinished, to you, it seemed utterly complete.

Since childhood, you’d heard God created man in a single day. That’s a short time, but for that first man—carved painfully from the Earth—it seemed much longer. Imagine how it felt for Adam to be born one piece at a time.

Here’s Walter’s torso, no legs.

Here are Walter’s arms and nothing else.

In Michelangelo’s sculpture, the face has no distinct features, no clear mouth; the slave is forever unable to scream. He pulls himself from the block of marble, then the marble seems to wrench him back. Even now, they fight like this.

The marble: offering a breath of air to his lungs, and taking it away.

And the man: half unable to enter the world, and half unable to remain.

_______________

Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize and will be published by Alice James Books in 2013. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, Failbetter and elsewhere. He is currently the poetry editor of The Collagist.