Patina
Lisa P. Sutton
Because Sophie looks like she could be French, the saleswoman does not give up on her. She holds up a wrap dress that might have been popular with Sophie’s mother.
“Dior,” the saleswoman says, but Sophie isn’t listening. The consignment shop is tiny and hot, stuffed with designer clothing so outdated that Sophie can only imagine it coming from dead people, their relatives eager to drop off a closet full of items no one needs or wants.
Sophie shakes her head at the dress. The woman instead holds up a fox stole with tufts of fur missing around the neck and feet. “I’d have nowhere to wear it to,” Sophie says and again shakes her head.
But the woman seems unconvinced. “Where you from, hon?”
“I live nearby,” Sophie says quickly, knowing how unlikely her statement seems. The woman is dark and leathery after a lifetime in the desert, her small shop wedged between the town’s only two restaurants. Sophie’s skin is still pale. When she smiles, soft wrinkles appear at the corners of her eyes and mouth, but otherwise her face is smooth. She’s wearing a linen tunic over light beige slacks—an outfit she chose because it reminded her of Georgia O’Keefe, the only artist she could picture before meeting Connor—and even though the day is half done, the dirt warmed by the sun and swirling in the wind, her clothing is spotless.
Sophie doesn’t offer more and edges toward the door. The woman calls after her, “I get new items in all the time. You come back again.”
“I will,” Sophie says but can’t get away fast enough. Across from the woman’s store, the rest of the town unfolds—a single gas station, a grocery and a hardware store. Since they moved, Sophie hasn’t had more than ten minutes in a room apart from Connor, and she needs her time in town to last longer. She searches for inspiration. Connor has set goals for both of them, and she has less than a week left to fulfill hers. His sculpture looks nearly finished but Sophie has not written one word on the installment of the novel she has promised. She wanders into the grocery store, four cramped aisles stuffed with canned goods and boxes of rice and pasta. In the tiny corner designated for fresh produce, a row of potatoes follows a row of carrots and then three baskets of different colored chiles. Sophie lingers under the florescent lights, checking items for their expiration dates. She buys two cans of tuna and one of olives, and then drives back the twenty miles across the desert to the abandoned airplane hangar she and Connor now share.
She had meant to buy new linens for their unfinished kitchen table, new drinking glasses to augment the four mismatched mugs that held everything from their coffee to their juice to their wine. Connor had filled their moving van with roll after roll of pressed metals, three different sized blow torches, frames and adjustable rigs and pulleys, and pipes and planks that could be assembled into scaffolding. They hadn’t had room for most of their furniture, and Connor said they wouldn’t need it either, and so they had sold what they couldn’t fit, arriving at the dusty hangar with little more than Connor’s sculpting supplies and a few suitcases of clothes. Connor used their spare set of bed sheets to cordon off his studio space from the back of the hangar where they would cook their meals and sleep, and from stacks of discarded plywood he had made a table and two bench seats.
Their hangar used to house developmental fighter planes. Test pilots and engineers and mechanics had lived in a row of barracks out back where a few sheets of rusted corrugated tin still peeked up from the hard, dry ground. As small towns cropped up around the desert, the Air
Force bulldozed the runways and moved the testing grounds to a more remote location. But Connor loved the hangar’s dark, cavernous space, its concrete floors and rollback doors. He worked every day, focused and filled with a new eagerness. Already, the frame of a sculpture the size of a school bus loomed against one wall, draped with blue tarps. He often worked through the night, and Sophie would wake up alone, disoriented by the hangar’s apparent endlessness. She would stare up toward the ceiling but never find it, and it was during those moments in bed on her back that Sophie wondered if only faith kept the contours of their roof just so, held the shape of their lives intact.
After driving back to the hangar late that afternoon, Sophie fixes two plates with the tuna and olives and a box of crackers from their makeshift pantry, but Connor isn’t hungry. He has worked without any real rest since they arrived at the hangar, and although he is sometimes ravenous, devouring an entire chicken or a whole loaf of buttered bread, Sophie has also seen him go days without eating. The rhythm of his work is private, a pace born completely inside his head and not to be tampered with. Sophie puts his plate in their small refrigerator and then tears off a swath of butcher block paper to write him a note in crayon, Tuna in fridge. xo S, which she duct tapes to the bare floor.
She retreats to a corner of the hangar where Connor has built her a trestle desk from an old door. She takes up a legal pad and writes one or two words on each of ten pages before tearing off the pages and crumpling them into balls. On their first date—a set-up by a mutual friend—Connor had seen the ink stains on the first joints of her fingers, and he’d leaned over the table, his whole body long and loose and even then at ease and said, “So you’re a writer.”
The ink stains were from a coloring project she’d done that afternoon with her niece, after her sister had begged her for months to babysit the girl. But Sophie watched a lock of dark blonde hair fall across Connor’s forehead and she leaned right back into him and said, “Yeah, I am.” She had once tried her hand at a line of greeting cards, and had once imagined writing modern proverbs to tuck inside fortune cookies. But to Connor she said she wrote stories and screenplays and the occasional op-ed. Now six months later, she wishes that she’d thought to tell him instead that she wrote poems. Only poems. A poem she could fake. What it takes to write a novel or a screenplay, she has no idea.
Connor had given them both thirty days. At the end of the month, they were each going to reveal their projects to one another. Sophie had done nothing and had already tried to soften the upcoming blow.
“I need to draft a lot,” she’d told him one night while massaging a knot from his shoulder blade. Connor’s body was like an anatomy lesson to her. There was no excess on his frame, and Sophie could feel each bone under her hands, the scapula where it met clavicle, the small rainbow of each rib. She kneaded the planes of his back and said, “Everything’s shit when I start it.”
“I can respect that,” Connor said, rolling over to face her in the dark.
Sophie could make out the contour of his jaw and cheek, but his face remained featureless. “I don’t work well on a deadline,” she said, trying to keep the sound of frustration out of her voice. His patience wore at her, tending her sense of shame. She couldn’t believe that he hadn’t figured her out yet, that he still believed her lie.
“Just try it. Push yourself,” he whispered into her neck. She ran her hands over one of his, the palm and overworked fingers that had cracked from regular use of turpentine and acetone. Her hands felt softer in his, her whole body slighter and more feminine.
She pulled away from him. Connor’s rougher edges reminded her of her father. Her father had been a big man, which was partly why her mother had kept trying to keep him close long after it made any sense to. Her father’s name was William, and you could call him Will or William, but if you called him Willy, you’d get your teeth bashed in, as the foreman on one of his construction jobs once had. Sophie hadn’t called him anything at all since she was in high school. Her mother lived alone now in a part of Reseda that had no place for her. White people lived near the freeways—the 101 south of her, the 118 north of her—but her mother’s apartment straddled Mexican and Korean neighborhoods in the center of the Valley. Street vendors peddled cut up fruit speared with popsicle sticks. On every block, a thrift store and a church jockeyed for space. In the grocery stores, meat and fish went unrefrigerated. Her mother knew only two words of Spanish but used them liberally, trying to get by with gesturing and saying please or thank you for everything.
“Por favor,” she said while pointing to an anemic looking chicken behind a smeared display case the last time Sophie had joined her at the market. Sophie had watched in horror as an employee behind the counter bagged the chicken, a greenish tinged blood running down the pimply legs and thighs.
“Gracias,” her mother then said when she paid. She watched for the total to pop up on the cashier’s screen, her eyes never meeting the cashier’s face once during the transaction.
Sophie carried the groceries and walked her mother home to her apartment, a one-bedroom in a twelve unit “luxury” building where the stucco fell in faded pink chunks to the concrete courtyard in the center. “You should be somewhere you know people,” Sophie said. She stuck the chicken right into the freezer, hoping her mother wouldn’t cook it for their dinner that night.
“I know people. I know everyone around here,” her mother had said, her arms spread wide.
“You know them, you just can’t talk to them,” Sophie said, and immediately thought of Connor, who supposed she was creative and imaginative and resourceful. The Sophie he imagined he knew didn’t actually exist.
“People talk too much.”
“It’s too isolating here, Mom.”
“People can be lonely anywhere,” her mother said and doubled over forward to put her hair up in a high ponytail. “It’s not a crime to be lonely.”
Sophie bent over and pulled her mother’s curtain of hair to one side so she could see her face. “There’s millions of people here in the Valley. It is a crime.”
“You’re too sensitive. You father was right about that much.”
Four days before Connor’s deadline for the installment on her novel, Sophie wakes up moving slow and feeling bruised on the inside. Being inside the hangar listening to the sounds of Connor’s work—the nearly incessant whoosh of a blowtorch, the delicate pounding of a rag-enshrouded ball peen hammer against steel—turns the slowness to something close to paralysis. She fantasizes about just shutting down, telling him everything and limping back to the Valley. But she gets back into the car they share—an El Camino with a rusted undercarriage but with rubber matting over the steel bed floor to protect Connor’s materials in transport—and drives back across the desert into town. She needs a library or a bookstore, but what she finds is a single rack of magazines in front of the checkout counter at the hardware store. She buys one copy of everything they have—two soap opera digests, three women’s magazines, three Hollywood tabloids, and one news magazine.
She’s about to get back into her car when she hears the saleswoman from the consignment shop call after her.
“I’ve got Chanel!” the woman shouts. “Chanel!”
Sophie turns and puts one hand to her forehead to shade her eyes. Even with sunglasses, the glare is blinding. “No thanks.”
“Hon,” the woman says, walking toward her. She’s wearing tight jeans and a man’s oxford shirt tied in a knot at the waist. The creases in her neck are so darkened by the sun that she looks dirty. “Around here, you can fit in or you can stick out, but if you’re gonna stick out, you might as well be beautiful doing it.”
Sophie forces herself to laugh and it comes out in a kind of cackle.
The woman spots the stack of magazines in Sophie’s hand. A soap opera digest is on top. “I’ve watched Days Of Our Lives since 1965. Haven’t missed an episode since they invented the Betamax. Now of course I got Tivo. You watch Days?”
“No,” Sophie says, but as the woman’s brow wrinkles, she adds, “my mom does though.”
“Good woman. It’s a crazy show, but life’s like that too sometimes. What is it you said you do, hon?”
“I didn’t,” Sophie says, and though it comes out sounding meaner than she intended, the woman keeps pressing her with her wrinkled brow and an unflinching stare. “I write,” Sophie says finally.
“You’re a writer, well, I’ll be damned. I never knew writers wore khaki. Seems to me a writer needs more personality than khaki can provide.” She takes Sophie by the elbow. “I’m Randy,” she says as they walk arm in arm toward the shop. “Short for Miranda. I’ve got just the thing for a writer.”
From behind a beaded curtain at the back of the shop, Randy pulls out an embroidered caftan. “Comfortable and dramatic,” she says. “Comes with its own story.”
“I’m not that kind of writer.”
Randy looks disappointed, the frown lines across her brow deepening farther still. “What kind of writer are you, dear?”
“The kind that isn’t writing so well.”
Sophie looks around the shop for something else. On a shelf behind the cash register is a row of mismatched picture frames. Each frame holds a picture of a dog, none a kind that Sophie can identify. “Are those dogs all yours?” Sophie asks.
“Every last mutt. More loyal than a husband and their shit don’t stink as bad,” she says, waiving her left hand to show off its nakedness.
Sophie leans into the counter to get a closer look at the pictures. In shots where the dogs sit upright and attentive, a small picture of a cut out flower has been pasted over the spot where their genitals would be. Sophie can’t stop staring right at the flowers, imagining what’s underneath.
Randy catches her looking. “I could tell you stories about each of them,” she says, pointing at the pictures. “Seems another dog stays with me each time another man goes.”
Sophie thinks of Connor and his nearly finished sculpture, then of the blank legal pads stacked on her desk in the hangar, and the absurdity of a grown woman cutting out small flowers from magazine pages and gluing them over dogs’ genitals. It just might be absurd enough to pretend it’s her own. It just might be a story she can write down. “I’d like that,” she says, buoyed by new hope, and follows Randy to a pair of dented folding chairs outside the front door of her shop.
Randy pulls up a canister of Almond Roca from beneath a plastic side table on the porch and holds it out to Sophie. Sophie takes a candy but squeezes it first to see if it’s gone soft or rancid before she unwraps the foil and eats it.
Randy begins with a summary of her first marriage, a four month affair that began with a pregnancy test and ended with a still birth. “You couldn’t call it a shotgun wedding, hon. There wasn’t time to fire a bullet.”
Sophie nearly chokes on her Almond Roca.
“The funeral though we put off as long as we could,” Randy says, and Sophie feels the mood shift between them. “Never named it either. We’d have buried it in the back yard probably, if the health department hadn’t gotten involved.”
Sophie imagines though that in her story the baby will have a name. She can’t think of how else to manage two feminine pronouns in the scenes where mother and her still born daughter appear together.
“Husband number two,” Randy says, and breathes in slowly and deeply, savoring the moment, “was Fred, the ball-less ball-buster.”
Sophie wants to appear serious and professional, but the laugh she tries to stifle comes out in a snort. “Sorry.”
“I ain’t exaggerating,” Randy says. “Cancer of the testicles.”
Randy’s second marriage involved a lengthy courtship. “I was overcompensating for my first mistake,” Randy says, twirling a lock of her brittle, newly dyed hair. “I don’t need a psychiatrist to explain that to me. No one’s ever as complicated as they like to think they are.”
But Sophie isn’t so sure. She can’t negotiate the Randy who talks openly of her ex-husband’s testicles with the Randy who painstakingly obscures her dogs’ genitals in photographs. She knows only that both impulses are true, and that the absence of either description would leave the character flat, probably unrecognizable. The novel unfolds before her in rhythmical, repetitive patterns—Randy’s initial fixation with each new man devolves into a difficult relationship, then ends with a breath of relief and a hint of redemption when a divorce is finalized. In between men, Randy finds dogs—strays, giveaways, a sob-story in the vet’s back office—that gather and keep her attention, warding off the loneliness of evenings and weekends and holidays. Halfway through Sophie’s visit, the title comes to her: Desert Retrieval. She lingers with Randy over a diet cola, but she has more than enough details to meet Connor’s deadline.
Connor is quiet while he reads. He sits shirtless atop his workbench and turns Sophie’s handwritten pages without a word. When he’s done, he picks up a hammer and nails the first installment of her novel to a cork board littered with his own notes and drawings. Then he kisses her, so deeply that she can feel every part of his body mashed against her, the knots of his pelvic bones pressing her lower rib cage, the long, lean muscles of his thighs teasing hers.
“We’re doing this,” he says when he comes up for air. He stoops to rest his forehead against hers.
“We are?”
“Yes, we are,” Connor says quietly, his confidence so easy that it angers Sophie. He is so self-assured, without having any idea of what’s directly in front of him, that she fantasizes about blurting out everything.
“You’ve got thirty days to deliver the next chapters. I’ll have her finished by then too,” he says, thumbing in the direction of the blue tarps covering a gigantic mass of steel. When Sophie looks at the hulking mass, something in her softens. She has seen the sculpture only in pieces as Connor welds, great big metal shells the width of dinner dishes that Sophie imagines as skin Connor stretches over iron bones. Already, the rolls of metals he has brought with them have begun to oxidize, and Sophie has watched the patina of the steel slowly deepen. She imagines what the sculpture will look like once it’s installed and left to weather, the surface of the steel forever unstable and rusting through, leaving copper-tinged stains on the ground beneath it.
She has never known anyone else who built things only to lose them to the elements. Her father had been proudest of things that lasted, a ‘57 Corvette that he’d restored himself, the Valley high rises which he’d helped build that withstood the Northridge quake. Her mother bought shoes so expensive that she said they’d outlive her. She’d been broke most of Sophie’s life, but she scrimped and saved to buy hand stitched Italian leather that would never crack or tear. Connor rigged up bolts of steel on a tractor and took them outside in the rain to encourage oxidation. Sophie wants his effortless convictions, the parts of him that remain untouched by fear or doubt. She admires in him the capacity to let go of anything at any time, and yet she’s terrified too. Instinctively, she knows Connor will never try to keep her the way her mother had her father, it isn’t in him. Her only chance is to keep him.
She tears the pages of her novel off the bulletin board, newly determined. “I still need these while I’m drafting the story.”
“Writers,” Connor says haughtily, but the smirk on his face is warm and conspiratorial. For the moment at least, he is in this with her.
For their second date, Connor had taken Sophie to the modern art museum downtown. A few paintings looked familiar though Sophie had to read the small, white information cards next to each piece to learn the artists’ names. The rest of the paintings and all of the sculptures and video installations were new to her.
Connor knew each piece by heart. At the admission desk, he had flashed his membership card to get them both in.
“They lose money on me,” he told her after they’d walked beyond the desk. “I come here all the time, usually for the whole day.”
“But don’t worry,” he added and took Sophie’s hand. “I won’t keep you here that long.”
She followed him to his favorite gallery. “That’s my De Kooning,” he said, pointing to a huge canvas awash with large swoops of color.
Sophie sat down on a broad pine bench in front of the De Kooning, her feet flat on the floor and her body ready to settle in and stay awhile. But Connor took her by both hands and pulled her to her feet. “I thought we’d be staying with it for a while,” she said, angling her chin toward the painting.
“I’d need to be alone for that,” Connor said. He dropped her hands and rubbed the back of his neck. “Nothing personal.”
Sophie shrugged and said “of course,” but felt instinctively that it was personal, that she had failed some sort of test.
He took her quickly through the rest of the gallery and then to the small café out front. She ordered tea instead of the coffee she liked because she imagined tea was more sophisticated. Connor ordered black coffee and drank it in three large gulps while it was still steaming. He turned over his empty cup and said, “I could use an IV of this stuff. I can’t give blood because they’d find my veins are filled half with coffee.”
It was a silly thing to say, but Sophie liked it. He was nervous too. “Then we should get you another cup,” she said, and they stayed at the café for the rest of the afternoon.
Sophie’s still in bed when she hears Randy’s voice over Connor’s hammering. “I’ve got Polaroids. I know you writers like pictures of everything.”
Sophie rushes out of bed and throws on an undershirt of Connor’s that’s balled up at the foot of the bed. She goes out a side door so she doesn’t have to retract the big rollback panels of the hangar.
Randy’s standing in front of one of the panels, an overstuffed tote bag over each shoulder. “Didn’t know when I’d next see you at the shop. I got them all organized alphabetically: Al, Carl, Frank, Fred, Gary, the second Gary, Richard. Richard’s pictures could just as soon go under D for Dick, but I figure he deserves to be remembered by his god-given name once in a while,” Randy says, throwing back her head and laughing.
Sophie tugs at Connor’s undershirt, trying to keep herself covered.
“Hon,” Randy says, “where I come from, we throw on pants for company.”
“I wasn’t expecting company,” Sophie says, backing up toward the side door. “Why don’t I meet you in town later this afternoon.”
“No sense in having you drive all the way out when I’m already here.”
Sophie doesn’t want to let Randy inside, but it’s too hot for either of them to stay out much longer. Already, Sophie’s bare feet are burning from the sun-scorched dirt. She puts one hand on the door, easing it open just wide enough to slip through sideways.
Randy catches the door as it’s about to close behind Sophie. “Brought my own coffee too,” Randy says, patting the side of one of her tote bags.
Sophie’s about to point her to the kitchen table when Randy pulls out one of the bench seats and sits down. “Just give me a minute,” Sophie says and walks quickly back to the length of pipe that Connor has hung as a makeshift clothes rack. She takes down a pair of jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, wanting to shield herself in spite of the heat. She throws on both without bothering with undergarments.
When she walks back to the kitchen table, Randy’s no longer there. Sophie’s stomach turns. She finds Randy behind the row of bedsheets cordoning off Connor’s workspace. Connor’s got a blowtorch in one hand, but his safety visor’s turned up.
“I was telling your man here about my shop,” Randy says. “I got some nice single-breasted suits in last week. Practically brand new, just about his size too.”
Connor looks at Sophie. “They’re just about my size, how about that,” he says, grinning.
Randy grins back at him, but she’s no fool. “Come to think of it, you’re not tall enough for them.” She takes a swig from her plastic thermos, and Sophie wonders if it’s holding something more than coffee. “Personally, I never minded a short man, though if you go by some folks, you’d think height alone made a man.”
Connor loses his grin and shuffles his sneakers on the concrete floor, scraping sand and sawdust. He’s not confrontational by nature, but Sophie can see him straining to hold back.
“Connor’s not short,” Sophie says, but Randy ignores her and starts to hum. The tune is familiar but Sophie can’t put a name to it.
“You like musicals?” she says while looking at Connor. “Artist types usually do.”
“Randy just stopped by for coffee,” Sophie says quickly, and then before Randy can pipe up again, adds, “I forgot to mention to you yesterday that we had plans.”
Randy starts to say something, but Sophie slides over to her and puts an arm around her shoulder, squeezing her hard.
“That’s fine,” Connor says, his jaw tight. You girls enjoy your coffee.” He flips his visor back down over his eyes. “I’ll stay out of your way.”
When they’re back at the kitchen table, Randy says to Sophie, “I know a fib when I see one, but that man’s denser than four-day-old shit.”
Sophie turns away from Randy and fills a stove top percolator with water and then coffee grinds. “He’s good to me,” Sophie says.
“Is he? Then why aren’t you good to him? Lying to his face doesn’t exactly put you in the running for the girlfriend of the year award.”
Sophie screws the top of the percolator on slowly.
“You ain’t no writer, are you?”
Sophie shakes her head.
“I knew it when I first saw you,” Randy says, but there’s no venom in her voice anymore. “No self-respecting writer wears khakis.”
Sophie turns off the hot plate and leaves the percolator in the sink. From the pantry, she takes down a bottle of tequila instead.
Randy eyes the bottle first, then Sophie. “Your secret’s safe with me, hon. Makes no difference to me who he thinks you are.”
“Thank you,” Sophie mumbles. She pours a hefty double for each of them in mismatched mugs.
“I’ll bet it makes a difference to you though. A big difference,” Randy says. “You wanna ask me why I left seven husbands?”
Sophie doesn’t ask, but Randy continues anyway. “Not one had a shot in a hell chance of being able to tell you what kind of person I am.”
“Even the ones you were married to for years?”
“Especially them. They had time to spin me into some broad they’d seen on TV or one of their buddies’ wives. I got tired of waiting around for them to get to know the real me. So I’d leave.”
“I don’t want to leave,” Sophie says, and despite everything, she’s sure she means it. She drains her mug in one long swallow.
Randy puts one leathery hand over Sophie’s. “You come by my shop tomorrow. The Polaroids can wait till then.”
Connor is asleep when Sophie gets back from Randy’s shop. He’s lying naked on top of the sheets and bedspread, grease streaked across the hills of his ribs and disappearing in the soft valleys of skin in between. She wants something of him, but isn’t sure what. He’s left the hangar’s doors rolled back and wide open, and though it’s late afternoon, the sunlight radiates inside like heat from a furnace. Sophie slips out of her boots and walks in her socks across the hangar to the sculpture taking over the opposite wall. She holds up a corner of a blue tarp and ducks inside a steel frame. The cavity is like nothing she’s ever experienced before, and she imagines it’s like being inside a whale. She has the sensation that she’s been swallowed alive. She walks into the middle of the cavity and sits down cross legged on the concrete floor, and is comforted by how small and self-contained she feels inside it.
Behind her, the plastic tarp rustles and then Connor is standing next to her. “Belly of the beast,” he says. He cups his hands over his mouth and bellows, the sound reverberating off the steel walls and filling the cavity.
It fills Sophie too, her lips and mouth and the muscles of her jaw going slack with happiness.
Connor reads her face as a frown. “You don’t like it,” he says.
“It’s not something you like” she says, craning her neck upward to look at him. “It’s something you disappear in.”
“You seem all here to me,” he says.
“You don’t understand, I’m saying it’s fantastic.”
“That’s a funny way of saying so.”
“Maybe,” Sophie says, and begins to trace the outline of his bare feet with her forefinger.
He drops down and they both lie back on the concrete.
“Connor,” she says, and then the rest is out of her mouth before she can think to stop herself, “what if I can’t finish that novel?”
“You can.”
She thinks of the dozens of pages she’s lifted from Randy’s life, the seven marriages and divorces, the dogs with their forced modesty, the endless longing and desire sublimated in the searing heat of the desert. It’s enough for any novel, but it doesn’t belong to her and she doesn’t want it to. She turns on her side toward him, willing him to look at her when she tells him, “I can’t.”
But Connor stays on his back and is looking only at the steely top of the beast’s belly as he takes her hand and tells her again that she can.
