The Artist makes ceramic tea pots, but he drinks coffee. He makes espresso mugs and a soap dish for his new apartment. He makes an ashtray and then quits smoking before he’s fired it in the kiln. She asks once, drunk, why it’s art. Insistent, she says, “Are you sure it isn’t craft?”
He is silent.
“But I just don’t see, how it’s art if you’re not doing anything new?”
And he says, tersely, “It’s not”.
He is only the second man she has known this intimately, whose hair has curled. And with the first, she spent hours gripping it dark against her white fingers while running a thumb over his eyebrow to trace the scar, and once, when it was just long enough, painstakingly French-braiding his bangs high along his forehead, taking a photo for him, because their bodies were too languid and tangled for him to get up and see it in the mirror.
In their fifth and final month together, he gets it cut so short that it no longer curls, and then leaves ten days later. She learns to count, to keep score. It’s easiest to avenge your losses when you’ve kept a manifest.
With this second head, she pretends that she does not notice how the waves are grown long at the front, swept to one side and groomed immobile against the forehead. She swallows back, guiltily, the phrase, comb over. She wonders if she would want him without this false hairline, and whether he would offer it to her, to be tended to like a deformed child. Does she have it in her to be its custodian? The shudder she feels when she cradles that truth is the fragile fault line between love and desire: the crack in a mug that does not survive the heat of the kiln. She knows this, although that clarity wanes like the moon.
She grows familiar with how his fingers move in their unconscious, reflexive smoothing of his hair back in place, saying nothing on windy days when the curls slip and the pale skin beneath betrays him by showing through. She imagines his shame when he finally sees this mauled fringe in his reflection. She still worries that he doesn’t find her attractive, despite her collusion in his own artifice.
She wonders if she could fall in love without her knuckles deep in his curls.
*****
The second time they speak, he begins his attempt in French, perhaps because their first conversation in English had ended so abruptly. After nine months of her contemptuous silence, he tries, once again in the faculty lounge, this time in his mother tongue.
“Ça va?”, he asks.
“Oui. Ça va?”. She is not sure why she acknowledges this man whose studied, cynical nonchalance bored her within moments of their first meeting.
“Comme ci, comme ça”. Mellifluous. He sounds like every Anglophone child’s first language lesson.
“Do French people really say that?”.
“Only when they want to make English girls blush.”
Their eyes meet as she decodes the homophone. She feels something like optimism. Loneliness bleeds away when you’re playing games with other people, even when you know they’re counting cards; the thrill of poker is in what can be lost.
*****
All summer, the intensity of the game grows in jolting shivers, feeling at times so light that meaning bleeds out of it and diffuses into the atmosphere before the eye can fix upon it. At first, their meetings are conducted in daylight, nearly but not quite chaste, made electric by the times he runs a finger along her wrist to examine her watch, or when he sits next to her on the metro, his thigh, the muscle hot and tight, pressing against hers; it is the kind of flirtation she remembers from being fifteen, simultaneously innocent and intentional.
The first time he invites her for coffee, he lets her sit under the umbrella where she can watch the ocean, taking the view of the carpark for himself. She feels, as she always does when he chooses to spend time with her over one of his Tinder dates, special, different. She spoons the foam from her latte into her mouth with the straw and smiles at him.
“If I invited you to a wedding next weekend, would you have anything to wear?”.
“Are you inviting me to a wedding?”.
“No. No. I just mean. All your clothes are so…”, he laughs.
Criticism can be met as either a challenge or an erosion, and this deep into the slow bake of summer vacation, she still thinks she is invincible. But when she goes home, she looks at her wardrobe with doubt.
The first time they meet in the dark, they end the evening, sloppy drunk in a dive bar, drinking beer. He picks up her vape from the table and sucks on it, making a face. “You know, you are so lucky”.
“Why?” She narrows her eyes. She has learned by now to only relax when he talks about himself.
“To be, you know, thirty seven. Single. But to still have your beauty, your figure”.
These are the moments she plays for. Hundreds of validating silver coins spilling out of a slot machine. She is beautiful. She is desirable. She will not die alone. And she’s drunk enough that night to forget that the House always wins.
*****
The bridge between meeting at night and waking next to each other in the morning is deliciously short, but the rules grow ever more complex, and playing for high stakes on campus, once the semester begins, shows her how publicly it is possible to lose.
On the mornings when she is the first to reach the faculty lounge, she keeps her sunglasses on and her headphones in while she makes both of them coffee, feeling the shame of enacting this ritual in front of her silent colleagues and affecting either invisibility or insouciance, despite neither being true. The camouflage of leather sandals and floral dresses behind which she has lurked for so long seems useless now, and so she dresses the part: the don’t-give-a-damn blonde in fitted black pants who vapes in the wrong places and who surely does not care who talks, who sees.
Their first ritual: two cups, set before the coffee machine side by side, a pair. Each morning when she places them down, she puts as much distance between them as possible, because she knows that for those watching, the part stands for the whole, and they have become talked about, spoken of, as a couple.
She knows there is no teamwork in this game they’re playing.
Because like any skilled gamer, the Artist wears a mask. He wears many, and if you do not know how exciting he finds it to hide, how perhaps his only act of creation is in fact deception, and how much of what he plays with concealing is known only to himself and rarely revealed, then you may find yourself trapped between the layers of his disguise, thinking him a truly a ceramicist when he is only a conjurer creating tension between two fears: his and your own.
*****
He makes a video for a competition so saturated with cliché that she looks out of the window of the taxi and tries not to cry.
“After watching that, I like you two percent less.” She isn’t joking. She looks at him to gauge his reaction. He adjusts his mask.
They exit the taxi silently.
Walking through the crowd to the marquees, he looks down at her, dropping the words casually, “You look good”.
She says nothing.
“Everyone is looking at you, the tall, skinny blonde girl, and wondering if you are one of the models.”
Somehow, the compliments her gives her now always seem to shimmer with incredulity. They exist, underwritten, by all the times he told her, cocooned with laughter, that she was gauche. What he is willing to say, what he is willing to make, vibrates and echoes with emptiness.
He works with materials, in various mediums. Digital. Physical. The video, the clay, but she knows suddenly that it’s facsimile, fabulation. He labours theatrically and midwifes his own stillbirths, insisting they’re alive. He invites you to be witness and forces you to be either murderer or fool. It’s checkmate both ways. Two routes to self-loathing and shame. The more she thinks about it, the surer she becomes that she is simply the material he manipulates.
There is no game. There’s nothing to win. She is dancing blindly while he watches, and he does not hand out prizes.
She feels exhausted when she imagines how much he’ll hate her when she sets fire to the whole thing to make sure it’s really dead, and how contemptuous he’ll be when he sees her write her name with the flames. It’s alien to him, who plants crisscrossing dynamite trails silently, a delicate lacework of clandestine intent made beautiful by the mystery of when it will catch, or whether it will burn all the way to the edge. The anticipated light of the explosion, the promise of the violent, guilty climax, leaves him twitching. The sensation of that is something she never quite gets used to.
