In lieu of a response Jennifer reached into the box and unpacked the penis. She was sure it was the one she’d masturbated with and it gave her a secret thrill to see it now, disembodied, singular, and proud. Max picked it up and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand.
“Now I might be able to do something with that.” Max smiled—he had a fatal love of the double entendre. Jennifer grabbed it back and placed it tenderly beside the other pieces.
“Max, I’m not selling them off individually—I am conjuring up an encounter with the man whose body parts I have re-created. A complete stranger I saw in a magazine photo, a magazine from the other side of the world.” She pulled the page out of her pocket and held it up for him. Pushing his bulk away from the edge of his desk, he snatched it out of her hand and stared at it skeptically.
“You mean to say that all of these body parts belong to that bloke in the background? The one half out of his seat?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, he’s a looker. But he’s not famous or anything, is he? I mean, why him? He’s a totally arbitrary figure.”
“Exactly, and now he’s not. I have begun to immortalize him by taking his image out of the temporal and into the permanent.”
Max pressed the side of his temple with a fat thumb ringed by gold. He usually made a point of having a quick nap in the back room after lunch and already the combination of the young artist’s intensity and the esoteric concept she’d begun to describe was giving him a headache.
“I think I’m following—you are trying to direct events through making art?”
“An encounter with the man I am faithfully reproducing over and over.”
She unwrapped the face and held it up at a
bout the height the man’s face would have been had he been standing in front of them. Max shivered. He was a superstitious man despite a strong mercantile streak and, frankly, the mask’s hyperreal appearance made him feel as if a ghost had just entered the gallery.
With a dramatic flourish Jennifer placed the face next to the other pieces and strolled over to the far wall of the gallery, the white walls broken only by the current exhibition of pastoral watercolors inspired by the artist’s experience in the computer game Second Life.
“I’ll blow up the original magazine photo to full length, then fill the space with as many duplicates of these body parts as I can make before September. They’ll be placed in complete randomness on the floor—in other words, there is to be no meaning or logic to the display.”
Max moved off the desk and stretched out his arms; they seemed to encircle the space he regarded as both sacred and entirely his own—no matter what his artists might assume. “Linking the notion of randomness to coincidence—random events equal coincidence, whereas ‘meaning’ is what we project to understand such things?”
“Exactly, Max, so you’re not as drunk as I thought.”
“Cheeky minx. You know I met my first wife by complete chance. At Narita Airport during a stopover. Her flight had been canceled and they put her on mine. Often I find myself wistfully wondering what would have happened if her flight hadn’t been canceled. I’d be a lot richer now for a start.”
“You would have met her anyway, in another coincidence. It was destined.”
“Fuck, I hope not. Jenny, your theory is total cock, but the public will love it! We’ll need some text and maybe some film footage . . . I dunno—you prowling the streets, waiting for the encounter? Maybe Toby could shoot it; that would bring in the crowds—famous film director helps artist wife find mysterious man/love object?”
“Stop pushing the celebrity couple thing. You know Toby would never agree and besides, I don’t need Toby’s name to push my own.”
“It wouldn’t hurt. Are things okay with you guys?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for ten weeks; he’s doing this movie in Italy.”
“But he rings you, right?”
Avoiding his query, Jennifer dropped her eyes. Through the glass front of the gallery a mother walked past clutching the hand of her child, who looked about eight years old. Catching her eye, he stuck his tongue out at Jennifer before being pulled away. Jennifer did not smile. She’d forgotten about Toby’s absence until then; did her work fulfill her so much?
“Every day,” she answered quietly, not wanting to confess she’d stopped answering Toby’s calls days ago. “We’re fine,” she lied.
The art dealer sighed, then, deciding not to probe her for the real answer, picked up the magazine page and examined it again. “This magazine is over six months old. You really have no idea who the man is?”
“I told you, none whatsoever. But there is an affinity between us now, whether he’s conscious of it or not.”
“This is messing with fate, Jenny. I hope you’re ready for the consequences.”
“And I thought you were a nonbeliever,” Jennifer retorted, smiling for the first time since she’d entered the gallery.
• • •