Iron and Ink

I'm Shae Jorgenson, forty-two, and I still call myself a sculptor even in years when the bronze doesn't sell. Tuesday afternoon, winter light coming slantwise through the high windows of the Forge Gallery, and my spine is so rigid it hurts. I told myself all the way over, on the drive across town and then the three blocks on foot from where I parked, that this would be a simple errand. Walk in. Ask for the maquette. Walk out. Ten minutes, maybe less.

The gallery used to be a working shop, back before Jacques Leland bought the building and gutted it. He kept the good bones. Exposed brick, iron brackets holding up the ceiling beams, his own forged hardware on every door. The floor is polished concrete and my boots click on it in a way that sounds too loud for a quiet afternoon with nobody browsing.

And there he is at the anvil, forty-five years old and built like the work he does, hammering a bar of glowing iron over the horn. He wears leather apron and gloves and nothing about the scene has changed in the two years since I last stood in this room. The rhythm of it. The smell of hot metal, that burnt-mineral tang I used to love. He doesn't see me at first, which gives me a moment I don't want. I watch his forearms work and I hate myself a little for watching.

Then he sets the hammer down, quenches the bar in the slack tub with a hiss, and looks up.

"Shae."

"Jacques." I keep my voice flat. "I'm here for my maquette. The bronze study, the one I left when the show came down. I'd like it back."

He pulls off one glove, finger by finger, which is a thing he does when he wants a conversation to go slow. "Funny. You never cared about that piece. You called it a practice sketch."

"It's mine."

"It is. It's in back, boxed." He hangs the glove on a peg. "That's the first thing you've said to me in twenty-six months and it's about a seven-pound piece of bronze."

"It's a simple request."

"It is." He wipes his hands on the apron. "The box is yours, no conditions, and I'll carry it out front myself if you like. Separate from that, I'd like ten minutes in my office. A real conversation. You can say no and still leave with your bronze."

"No."

"Then get the box and go. Nothing hangs on it."

I stand there and do arithmetic I don't like. I have a critique group Thursday, I have clay drying in the studio, and I have no good reason to stay. He knows my schedule is chaos. He always knew my schedule was chaos.

"This is a trick," I say.

"It's a door," he says. "You can walk through it or not. The bronze is yours either way."

The light through the high windows has gone a pale brown. Somewhere in the back a blower hums. I hear myself say "fine" before I've fully decided to, and he nods once and leads me toward the office without touching my elbow, which he would have done two years ago. The not-touching is its own kind of message and I resent how loud it is.

* * *

His office is small and clean. A desk, two chairs, no couch. He has deliberately not bought a couch, I think, and I sit in one of the chairs and put my hands flat on my knees like a woman being interviewed for a grant.

He sits across from me and takes off the other glove.

"Twenty-six months of nothing," he says. "Not an email, not a returned call. You vanished like I'd done something to you."

"You ended it in a parking lot. You said it wasn't working and then you said, and I quote, that you were never going to be the thing somebody needed. That's an odd sentence, Jacques. You said it like it was a virtue."

"It was fear," he says, plain as that. "I said it because it was fear dressed up as a principle, and I've had two years to figure that out. I'm not asking you to fix it. I'm asking why the silence ran one way."

I look at the brick wall over his shoulder because looking at him is a mistake. The silence ran one way because of how the ending worked. Because he decided, and announced, and I was left holding two years of scenes and negotiations and Sunday mornings with nothing to negotiate with. Because the way we were together, the way he took the lead and I handed it over, meant the ending was also handed to me like a completed form.

"You know why," I say.

"I want to hear you say it."

"That's very you. You want the confession on your terms, in your room, on your chair."

He doesn't rise to it. He just waits, the way he used to wait at the anvil for the iron to be ready, and I break before the iron would have.

"I came here today to prove I feel nothing," I say, and it tastes like ash in my mouth, like burnt scale off the forge. "That's the true answer. I made up the errand as an excuse and I dressed it as business and I walked in with my spine straight so you'd look at me and see nothing. And then you were hammering and I watched your arms for a full minute and I felt plenty."

The hum of the blower fills the room. He leans back in the chair.

"Thank you," he says.

"Don't thank me. It wasn't a gift."

"It was, though. It was the first true thing you've said to me since the parking lot." He rubs his thumb along the edge of the desk. "Here's my side of it. I ended it badly because I got scared of how much power I had. Not over you. Over myself, in the dynamic. I liked who I was with you more than I trusted myself to keep being that person. So I cut it off at the root instead of saying any of that."

"That would have been useful information at the time."

"Yes. It would have."

I sit with that. My hands are still flat on my knees and my knees have stopped their small bounce, which they've been doing for two years whenever his name came up. The ash taste is still there but under it there's something else, the old pull, the one I came to disprove.

"The maquette," I say, because I need an exit ramp. "I should take it and go."

"It's yours whenever you want it. We're at about six minutes, though." He checks the clock on the wall, deliberately, because he's a man who knows how to make time feel physical. "I'd like the other four. Tell me one true thing about the last two years."

"You're bargaining now."

"I'm asking now. The box doesn't depend on the answer."

I could give him something cheap. The critique group Thursday. The new kiln. He'd accept it and we'd both know it was filler. Instead I hear myself say the thing I've said to no one, my therapist aside, in two years.

"I haven't shown with anyone since you. I have eleven finished pieces in my studio, and I haven't submitted to a single juried show, because every submission form has a field for gallery representation and yours is the only name my hand knows how to write."

The clock ticks. He doesn't gloat, which somehow makes it worse and better at once.

"The storage room is through there," he says finally, and stands, and offers nothing else. No hand, no touch, no reach for me, and I understand he is holding the line he drew for himself, the one about not grabbing, and that holding it is costing him something visible in his jaw.

I stand too. My legs feel like they belong to a much older woman. The storage room smells of cardboard and cool metal and I find the box with my name in his handwriting, SHAE JORGENSON in block letters, the maquette wrapped in bubble wrap and packed well, better than I would have packed it. He kept it safe for two years. I lift it and the weight of it is nothing like I remembered, lighter, and I carry it out past him standing in the doorway of his office.

"Jacques."

"Still here."

"This doesn't mean anything has changed."

"Understood," he says. "It means you have your bronze back."

I get four steps toward the door before I stop, in the middle of the gallery floor, with the winter light full on me and my own shadow stretched long across the concrete. The maquette sits in my arms like a small hot coal. I know, the way I know the weight of a piece in my hands before I commit to the casting, that I have two options and one of them is a lie.

I turn around. He's watching from the office doorway, arms loose at his sides, waiting to see which way I go, and I open my mouth to say something I haven't planned.

"I want to feel something. One time. No strings attached to it, nothing owed after, nothing changed by it. That's my offer and I'll only make it once."

The words come out of me before I've finished deciding them, which is how he always got me, back when. I hold the maquette tighter and stare at him across the polished concrete and wait for the flare of triumph I'm sure is coming.

It doesn't come. He walks back toward the office, unhurried, and opens a drawer in the desk. When he turns around he's holding something flat and dark in both hands, and my stomach drops before my eyes even resolve it.

A collar. Black leather, plain, the brass buckle worn soft on the edges. I know every inch of that collar. I wore it for most of the time we were together.

"You kept it," I say.

"I kept everything of yours. Not on purpose, at first, and then very much on purpose." He sets it on the desk and doesn't come closer. "The safeword is still iron, if you ever need it. You never used it. I used to wonder if that was trust or stubbornness."

"It was stubbornness."

"It was both." He stands there with his hands at his sides, the leather lying between us like it was another presence in the room. "You don't have to touch it. You can walk out that door with your bronze and your straight spine and I will never bring this up again. That's a real offer, Shae. Not a trap."

I look at the collar. My face is hot and I can feel the flush climbing my neck, and I make myself not