I had to call Sadie. I used Mrs Andersen's phone, much to her disgruntlement. I had to enter her apartment to do it. The place smelled like roses and dust and had a scary amount of WWII paraphernalia.
"Don't you give me the stink eye," she said as I tried not to stare at her extensive collection of tank helmets. "I salvaged those fair and square."
"Salvaged?" I said.
"I was a little girl in Europe in the forties. You don't have to be a soldier to steal boots off dead bodies."
I decided not to press her on that claim and instead called Sadie. "Yeah?" she said when she picked up.
"I need some glass," I said.
For a long moment, she didn't say anything, and it's probably to her credit that she didn't immediately start yelling at me. "Yeah?" she said again. "How much?"
I gave her the measurements. "Though I dunno, maybe plexiglass would be better. Actually, yeah. Clear plastic glass. And I need a really big hammer, like a sledgehammer."
"I'll see what I can do," she said.
The receiver in my hand cut into my fingers. I was holding it so tightly I heard it creak.
How is Anton? I wanted to scream. Is he okay?
"Thanks," was all I said.
"No problem," Sadie told me. "Keep it up."
She hung up, and I felt a great weight lift from my chest.
Keep it up.
Okay. I would.
***
Four weeks after I left Anton's house, I assembled my finished piece in Times Square. I didn't have permission or anything like that, but I figured no one was going to stop me, at least not until I was done and everyone had taken their pictures. The paparazzi had been gathering outside my apartment for days after the photos of me loading the biggest part of the finished work into the truck came out. Jake told me blogs were abuzz about it, all the gossip sites, all the gossip mags, all the gossip tv shows. It's amazing who gives a shit about what you do when you're rich and take all your clothes off. Never in a million years had anyone cared so much about my work.
And that was okay. Because in a few hours, pictures of my art would be beamed around the world, bounced back and forth between here and there, until he had to see it. It would reach him without fail. I knew it would.
It was a ninja. Enlisting the help of Sadie and some of our other arty friends, we hopped out of Jake's borrowed truck and spirited the pieces to the middle of the square. I worked under a tarp and I asked bystanders to help me out, like one of those performance artists. People were happy to be drawn into it. Most people had heard about my crazy sculpting, my brokenhearted grief. Jake had given me some of the tabloids I'd appeared in, and much of the story had come out. My mother in particular had taken the opportunity to capitalize on my fame. I suppose that now that my father was broke she had to make good for herself, and she didn't seem to be doing too badly. She'd come to my apartment a few times, but I hadn't wanted to see her, so I hadn't opened the door.
I didn't begrudge her for using my story to break free of my father. It's what I'd always wanted. And besides, it was a pretty good story, all the same. I knew my mother loved money. I knew she needed it. I knew that's why she had stayed with my terrible father.
But I didn't want to be like that. I wouldn't.
It didn't take as long as I thought it would. Those helping me were already taking pictures with their phones from beneath the tarp.
"All right," I said when it was ready. "Let's show this thing to everyone." And they lifted the tarp away.
The clouds had lifted for once, and sunlight fell on my creation.
People raised their cameras and began taking snapshots. As per our understanding, I'd taken Jake with me under the tarp, and he had been able to scope out the best angles for taking his final photographs. I saw him at the front of the crowd, crouching down, snapping his pictures.
The sculpture was big—the biggest I'd ever made—and the plexiglass box glittered and shone from the right angles, obscuring the contents. I knew, though, that when you got close to it you could see the thing trapped inside. I had it memorized, and I closed my eyes and saw it in my mind.
It was a tiger made of water.
I was incredibly proud of it. When I'd first seen Anton, I'd noted that he moved like a predator or like water, smooth and flowing, and I'd tried to capture that essence in my creation. Bit by bit, a huge tiger had taken shape under my pounding and pushing. It crouched in a puddle of clay, its edges blurred and liquid as it emerged from the water. One paw, claws out, reached over its head, raking at the glass box, too small to contain its huge form. I'd painted it in pale grey and black, and its angry eyes glittered gold as its snarling muzzle bared huge fangs as long as my fingers. It stared up at the creature atop its box.
A rabbit. Small, lithe, and ridiculous in the face of those fangs. And yet strong. It clung to the end of a sledgehammer I'd buried in the plexiglass, glueing the bits and pieces of glass that I'd had to saw away to the end of the hammer, suspending other bits from the top of the box with invisible wire.
So there you have it. A tiny rabbit smashing the glass box containing a snarling tiger. Words are pretty shit to describe it, honestly, so just trust me. It lived.
"You're kind of simple," Sadie said as she stood next to me.
I shrugged. "What use is art no one can understand?" I said. "I think this is pretty powerful."
I glanced at her. She was staring at the sculpture, a faraway look in her eye. "So that's how you feel, huh?"
I nodded.
Sadie licked her lips. "It's beautiful, Lis," she said. "I'm not going to pretend to understand your relationship with Anton, but if it makes you make art like that..." She trailed off and shook her head.
I looked back at my piece. Yeah, it is still owned. "It's something," I said. Off in the distance, sirens were blaring. Good old NYPD. Always quick to pepper spray young women making a statement. I looked forward to it. The pictures were taken. I couldn't very well have dumped the sculpture on Anton's doorstep. That would just look desperate.
"You think he'll figure out that you like him?" Sadie asked me as a cop car pulled up by the curb.
"I don't know," I said. "He seems a little dumb in the mooshy feelings department." We watched as the cops got out of the car and began their investigation—namely, asking who was responsible for this. Fingers pointed at me.
"Maybe you should have made him a mixtape," Sadie said. "Maybe you should shut up," I told her, and then I got arrested.
***
Okay, it didn't happen quite that quickly. First, there were lots of questions and lots of pictures snapped by gawking bystanders, but the bottom line is that I ended up in cuffs when I refused to remove the 'illegal installation,' mostly because I didn't know what to do next and getting arrested seemed like a good idea at the time.
Sadie promised to keep my sculpture safe for me.
"You better," I told her as they shoved me in the back of the car. "That's what I pay you for."
She made a face at me as we pulled away.
I got processed and put in a holding cell. My bail was set at five thousand dollars. I figured I was going to be there for a while and settled in, staring at the crude yet incredibly creative graffiti on the walls left behind by my fellow criminals. Some of them had been very good artists.
I was in the middle of scratching out my contribution to the communal artwork—a loving rendition of a butt in a cop hat—when an officer opened my cell.
"You're free to go. You posted bail."
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Really? The only person I could think of who would come get me would be Sadie, or maybe my mom. My mom really wouldn't like the idea of me sitting in jail. It would look bad. Worse than marrying for money or your husband losing all your money. Like, you'd just be formerly rich then. Not a filthy criminal. Having a daughter who was a criminal? Well, then you would be a bad mother.
I got up and followed the officer out of the holding cell. They gave me my shit—not much—and told me my court date, and then they escorted me to the front desk.
Anton stood there.
I stopped and stared. I hadn't seen him in almost a month. We'd been apart for longer than we'd known each other.
He was still beautiful. Still magnetic. But he looked tired. His green eyes were lined, and his face drawn. His fluid dancer's stance was stiff, as though he were in pain.
He watched me, and I watched him for a long moment.
"Felicia," he said. Then he seemed to stop, as though he didn't know what to say next. I'm sorry, or come home, or—anything. He knew he should say something.
Finally, he opened his hands, as though to show me he had no weapons. "Sadie told me you were in jail," he said.
God, he was such a dork.
I ran forward and threw my arms around him, and it felt like waking up.