Meg Elison
Free Art
The Little Free Art Gallery was exactly the kind of thing you’d expect in a suburb like Takoma Park. Every other block already had a Little Free Library, and this was a corner between two big new apartment building for young professionals who wanted to live near enough to work in DC but far enough out to be in a good school district. With the scent of money flowing from every door, these people could afford to be smug about what they gave away.
I saw the box when I was picking up Emily from school. She was part of a gifted program in the well-funded junior high that had accepted her, even though we lived twelve miles outside of the district. Every day I drove across the weird winding roads of Maryland to collect my kid, since the bus would get her in the morning from the hub but wouldn’t bring her home. The box caught my eye as I was waiting for her to cross the street. It was taller than most little free libraries and more ornately painted. “Makes sense,” I muttered, keeping an eye on traffic. “Since it’s an art box and not a book box.”
Emily climbed into the car and her phone connected to Bluetooth, blaring some YouTube video she’d been watching. I didn’t think any more about the box; it was raining and I had to fight my way back across town. There was no time that day to wonder about it or anything else. Weeks later, when the cherry trees were snowing pink, I saw it again. Emily was running late and had texted to ask me to wait fifteen minutes. What was I going to do? I could wait. I sent back a thumbs-up. Since it was warm and blossoming outside, I got out of the car.
The box was there on the opposite corner. It was dark blue with concentric rings of gold petals painted all over the back and sides. The front was plexiglass, and at first I saw only what I’d expected to see: an ugly ashtray and a terrible unframed watercolor of some child’s mother, complete with forehead wrinkles that even in a doting child’s portrait looked like they’d been done with an ice pick. As I was clucking my tongue and shaking my head, the way we do when we see bad art, something in the corner caught my eye.
It was a tiny sculpture—small enough to fit in the palm of my hand––of a naked fat man riding on a turtle. Through the plexiglass it had an unreal quality, as if it were a projection instead of a real object.
The sign above the door said take one leave one, so the rules were the same as they were for books. I opened it and snatched up the little naked man and his mount. The turtle was exquisite, with an intricate and lifelike pattern to his shell and that same timeless resignation in his face that all turtles, from the giants at the zoo to the doomed tinies at the pet store, seem to share. The little folds at his knees, the wrinkles at his neck—every detail was so perfectly real. I could almost smell the reptile odor off him.
The man was round with fat swagger, big of belly, and curly of beard. His face: like Seth Rogen’s father if he’d been a Greek god, but genial and good-humored and more handsome than his son the star. He seemed triumphant, with his little uncircumcised member laid gently against the turtle’s shell. His hands sat on his hips, and he was master of all he surveyed, with an absurd nobility that I couldn’t drag my eyes away from. The whole thing was carved from a single chunk of marble. The stone itself was good stuff, delicate veins and perfectly smoothed curves, making the fine work appear strangely natural. The veins in the stone looked like venation in the man’s chest and back, and they made up part of the turtle’s pattern. It reminded me of a picky seamstress executing the crucial cut for a dress pattern that lines up torso and sleeve exactly.
It was perfect. It was lifelike. It was arresting.
I picked it up and loved the heft of it in my hand. The marble had taken on the cool of the spring air and it was luminous when the sun hit it. “Probably getting excited over some mass-produced tchotchke off of Amazon,” I said in the tone of voice I use to remind myself that I’ll never own a house and no deal is as good as it looks. But even as I said it, it didn’t feel right. There was too much attention to detail.
I took it home and tried positioning it in different spots on my desk, in my eyeline and out of it. But it wasn’t a paperweight. It was too distracting, so oddly beautiful it stood out from everything else. It ended up on the bookshelf behind me. I did some Pinterest bullshit, turning a stack of books on its side and matching the height to the fat man’s gaze. I didn’t realize it was in view until someone pointed him out on Zoom.
“I think Kara was right about the original spreadsheet,” Amit was saying, clearing the screen of what he had been presenting and looking for the older version of the file. My camera was on and nobody had anything to look at. Maggie spotted him.
“Wow, nice naked man riding a turtle,” she said with a laugh in her voice. “Did you carve that?”
I turned around as if there were an actual man behind me. “Oh,” I said. “I forgot to blur my background. No, I picked him up last week. Isn’t he cute?”
“His gaze is so piercing,” Maggie said. “He reminds me of a bunch of the statues I saw in Florence.”
“Oooh, look at me, I’m Maggie,” Don said in a mock-sultry voice. “My husband is a lawyer for American Airlines and I got to go to Europe on vacation to look at a bunch of dudes with their dicks out in church.” Don was giggling madly.
“Die jealous,” Maggie said cheerfully. “I’ve seen more dicks in Europe than you’ve seen in Chicago, and that’s saying something.”
“Why are we talking about dicks?” Amit stopped looking for the file and peered at my background, pushing his glasses up. “Oh, I see him. You know, the dick isn’t the first thing I notice. Look at the face on that turtle! Like Morla the Ancient One. You know? From NeverEnding Story? ‘We don’t even care whether or not we care . . .’” Amit did an alarmingly good impression of the fussy old turtle from the eighties fantasy movie.
I looked over my shoulder as he spoke, imagining the voice coming from my little marble statue. “Yeah, I see it. The statue does have sort of a fantasy feel to it. I don’t know why but I had to have it.”
“Whatever you paid for it, I support you,” Maggie said. “It’s so well done.” “Actually,” I told them, “It was free. There’s a little free art gallery by Emily’s school.”
“La di da,” Don said. “That whole neighborhood is ridiculous.”
“Yeah, but you can’t beat the garage sales of the rich,” I said, reaching for my cold coffee.
Amit got us back on track, and we said no more about my statue.
I couldn’t get the turtle jockey out of my mind though. Anytime I looked at that shelf, no matter what I was after, he pulled my focus. It was the same feeling I get when I realize someone is watching me, when my eyes just snap to that point, what millions of years of evolution have told me to notice. I couldn’t ignore him if I tried.
The next time I got stuck waiting, it was because Emily let her phone die. I searched the streams of faces going by, looking for her. Two waves of kids trudged off the sidewalk and found their parents in SUVs. The traffic thinned out. Still I waited. After a while, I got out of the car. I was doing that careful work I learned in therapy: to not be angry with her. She’s a kid. She doesn’t understand why we have to keep a schedule the way we do. If you’re angry when she gets in the car, she won’t learn to charge her phone from that. She’ll just learn to dread reunion. Breathing deeply and moving past my annoyance, I opened up the Little Free Art Gallery. Inside, there was only one piece aside from the old ugly ashtray. In that same marble again, there he stood. David. Contrapposto and gorgeously muscled. Naked and unashamed, his sling thrown over his shoulder. Just like the man on the turtle, the veins in the marble seemed to lie exactly right, suggesting brachial arteries and the shadows of biceps. His profile was exquisitely rendered and devastating to behold. He was in my hands before I thought about it, and I was pawing him obscenely, feeling every contour.
Taller by a little than a Ken doll, this statue had the weight that Oscar winners always mention as they hoist up their man-shaped prize. His base was a small circle, and like the turtle it bore no signature or maker’s mark of any kind. I swaddled David in my jacket with the kind of care I’d have shown a foundling baby I’d discovered in the park.
Once I had him back in the car, I reached into a wadded old Trader Joe’s bag and pulled out my offering for the Little Free Art Gallery: a wooden life-size carving of a banana from my last year in school. It was silly, an approximation of a fruit I’d done because the wood had this curve to it that just said “Cavendish” from every angle. It wasn’t the David, but it was something I could leave behind. I imagined it sitting on someone’s windowsill, the wood growing warm in the sun. Maybe it would still be there the next time I opened the door, alongside the lumpy clay ashtray that never moved. But maybe not.
Emily made a face when I unwrapped David at home (after I didn’t yell, after I was patient and kind and just plugged her phone into the car). “Mom, that’s a lot of naked guys in the house.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being naked,” I admonished her. “You yourself were born naked, you know.”
“I guess,” she said. “It’s just a lot of penis all of a sudden.”
“It’s not sudden,” I reminded her. I sprinted to my desk and picked up my 3D printed David who was about half the height of the new one. “Davey has been on top of my inbox for over a year now.”
“Yeah, but look,” she said, snatching up both statues to compare them.
I held back my impulse to tell her to be careful. The plastic printed David had cost me a dollar at a craft fair, and the better David had been free. And since it was free, it could only be a cheap reproduction from a casual collector’s garage. It couldn’t be worth anything. But marble is brittle, it can chip, part of my mind nagged on. Be careful.
Emily was careful, as always. It was her thing. Kid played piano and painted Warhammer miniatures on the weekends. She knew delicate work when she saw it. Her grip was sure, and her gaze was sharp. “Printed Davey here is smooth. Just a lump to suggest his biz. Even his buttcrack is a little less defined. Whereas this guy,” she switched her attention to the marble man, “Every detail, but especially the dick, just so detailed. Like his knuckles have little wrinkles and all. His dick has veins.”
“That’s just the marble,” I told her.
“His butthole has hair,” she said, dripping with assured sarcasm, as only teenagers can bring forth when they’re sure they’re right.
“I’ll give you that he’s a lot. But isn’t he beautiful? He just slew a giant. Let him have his moment.”
She sighed and put them both down. “I hope that when I have the greatest moment of my life, I’m wearing pants at least.”
I laughed a little. I thought about putting the new David on top of my inbox and pitching his 3D printed understudy. But I feared he might topple off. I rearranged another shelf worth of books, this one higher than the turtle man. I moved my carved wooden birds, the only pieces of my own I had displayed in my house, and centered David. My house isn’t the Vatican, but I did him as many honors as I could, and, adjusted for scale, it’s not that far off.
In the middle of the night, when I needed a glass of water or I heard a noise, I would walk by them both and see their staring, open eyes. Even poorly lit by the glow of digital clocks, they both commanded such attention. My birds clumped together like dowdy mourners. It was as if the marbles drew all available light, leaving everything else in darkness.
I obsessed over David and the turtle man. If there had been any information on them, I would have pursued those clues relentlessly, but they were blank. I tried searching the websites of local sculptors and shared studio spaces to see if anyone advertised this kind of work. No one did. I checked the free gallery again and again, yet nothing else appeared.
The cherry trees lost their pink petals in the heat as we came to the end of the school year. I was looking forward to Emily being home, but dreaded having to keep her on some kind of schedule—not just letting her play Warhammer every free moment. The last few days of the term were half-days and one of them found me parked there again, right beside the Little Free Art Gallery. I glanced over, expecting nothing, and saw a man unwrapping a brown paper bundle, preparing to put a sculpture inside.
I knew it was him. There’s always something of a self-portrait in someone’s art. I might not have been able to spot it if I hadn’t once been an artist myself. There he was: the fat man on the turtle and David. Long and muscular, with hair that fell in waves around his face, he looked like a guy who moves pool tables for a living, but with old Levi’s that showed marble dust and chisel marks.
I slammed the car door behind me and ran. “Hey! Hey! Wait a second, hey!”
He had turned to leave. My voice turned him back. “Yes?” His accent was slight but announced itself at once, like an expensive perfume.
“You’re the sculptor, right? You did the David?”
He smiled and I saw that the outer corner of his front tooth was chipped. The effect was charming; it matched the slight bend in his nose that looked like a poorly-healed break from long ago.
“I am.”
I stopped. I didn’t have a plan. I was the dog that caught the car. “They’re uh. They’re really good.” Critics have metaphors at the ready, but fellow artists say it with plain pleasure or outright envy. “Where did you study?”
“In Europe,” he said, crossing his long arms over his chest. They hung there like tools on a peg board. The rest of his body arranged itself to hang negligently, not quite open to me but not turning away.
When you don’t know what to say, you talk technique. “Where are you getting these chunks of marble?”
He shrugged a little. “Outlet over in PG county. They sell broken remnants from countertop jobs. Can’t afford anything big, but . . .”
“Yeah,” I said. “It can’t be cheap.”
I wanted to say something meaningful about how good the work was, how mesmerizing. But just then she caught my eye.
I’d never seen a winged Nike intact. Every version I’d encountered in museums and textbooks was banged up, headless and armless, only her wings to show her triumph. This small statue seemed big as Samothrace, big as Rome somehow, though she was only about a foot tall. She didn’t fit in the gallery, so he had left the doors open. I worried my banana would still be there, but it was gone. Even the ashtray was gone. She stood alone.
Nike was painted in a bright blue gown with wings like an eagle’s, leafed in gold. The veins in the marble showed only in her face. Her expression made me think of a predator drunk on the blood of its prey. Triumph is too small a word, and it’s one of the biggest ones we have. I saw in that face every time I’d ever won an argument or found money in the street. She was every correct answer, every three pointer that sinks right at the buzzer. She blazed. I resisted the urge to fall to my knees before her.
“Behold Victoria,” he said, his voice bemused.
“Oh, don’t call her that,” I said, choking on my own spit. “She’s Nike!” He glanced over at me. “You don’t look Greek.”
“And you don’t look like an English royalist,” I shot back.
“That is what she’s called in Italian.” His gold eyebrows lifted like he was making a small joke.
“Oh, so that’s your accent. When did you move here?”
“Time is not real,” he said in a tone so dismissive I didn’t know how to argue.
I stared at him, trying to fit what I wanted to know into a question you can ask a stranger. “Did you study sculpture there?”
“I did,” he said. “A long time ago. Someone told me to come here, that the opportunity to become famous would be much better.”
“What, like sculpting on TikTok?” I grinned at him, but my smile faded quickly. He was not rueful. He was not going to blame capitalism. I could see in his face that he was done, or close to it.
“Yes,” he said. “It was a bit like that. But they did not tell me that there are no patrons here. That I must work two other jobs to be able to eat while I make my little gods. The fable I heard about this place did not mention that I would be a slave to debt.”
“Man, somebody lied to you,” I said, trying to bring the vibe back around to a more comfortable subject. “But you’re so talented. I’m surprised you haven’t caught on to something that pays well.”
He dropped his arms and I saw how broad and calloused his hands were. “You see a lot of job listings for marble cutters on Craigslist?”
“No, but if you’re good at this, there’s surely no limit to what you could do. You could probably learn . . . Photoshop.” The absurdity of what I was saying caught up to me as I was speaking. Why was I telling this dude to get a job when he could make things like the winged Nike in the plywood box behind me? Why should a guy who can do that try to do anything else? “At least you can make something that will outlive you,” I offered.
He laughed harder. “By a lot.”
He wouldn’t look right at me. He seemed to be hiding. Veiling his expressions. Why wouldn’t he? We were strangers. He didn’t owe me the truth. I think about that, still.
“We don’t even make headstones anymore,” he said glumly. “I checked. This is the wrong place for me. When I price her for what she is worth, people laugh at me. All I can do is give her away.” He shrugged.
I wanted her. And I couldn’t pay him what she was worth. I wanted to take her home and let her amaze me with her scarlet lips and her fierce, joyous gaze.
“Listen, uh. What’s your name?” “Mike.” His eyes were very far away.
“Mike. Can I tag your Instagram or something? To at least show people how good you are?”
“Who is the patron of Instagram? Zuckerberg? He’s no Lorenzo the Magnificent.”
I laughed. “No, he’s not magnificent at all. And he’ll probably never see it. But people who have a little money and good taste will. You never know what might catch on.”
He sighed. I watched the muscles in his neck rise and fall. He was a beautiful man. “I am tired of trying to catch on. Go viral. Marone.” He pointed to Nike. “She is my last work in this debtor’s prison. I am going home. My strange travels have ended. I want to spend the summer in a nice villa with a merchant prince who has oceans of wine and will buy me blocks of marble the size of ships.”
“Is… is that how things work in Italy? Back… where you’re from?”
He turned his faraway eyes back to me, and only then did I see it. He was foreign, but in a way that I’d never perceived in a human being before. If I had asked him to drive my car, I doubt he could have done it. He simply did not belong. When our eyes met, he knew I’d seen it.
There was no way to sum things up, no way to say goodbye. He didn’t look back at Nike before leaving. He just loped across the intersection when it wasn’t his turn and disappeared.
Those three statues are still in my house, and they will be until I die. I sometimes work at small copies, always in wood, never with the kind of delicacy Mike produced magically in stone. People joke that my place looks like I looted the Vatican of Munchkinland, that the marbles are incongruous with the rest of the décor. Where did they come from, anyway?
I’m never sure what to say. I know where I think they came from. But that’s not a story I can tell. I like to look into the face of winged Nike, goddess of vic- tory, and wonder what it means, as an artist, to win.