The Perfect Wife

   “Was I…” you begin, then stop, unsure how to put this.

“What?” Lisa says quietly, and you get the sense that, somehow, she knows what you’re trying to ask.

“Was our marriage in any difficulty? Anything specific, I mean?”

“You mean, did Tim have any reason to kill you?” she says baldly.

Even though it’s exactly what you mean, hearing the words spoken out loud makes it sound so much worse.

After a moment she shrugs. “As you can imagine, I asked myself that question a thousand times after you disappeared. Because there’s one thing I am sure of. Whatever happened that night, it wasn’t a surfing accident.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You and I grew up in the ocean. Sure, you were a risk taker—you might have gone out in bad weather, particularly if the waves were breaking well. But you’d have taken the right board. You’d have taken the gun.”

For a second you have to think what she means. Then it comes to you. The elephant gun. The biggest, heaviest board, originally designed for paddleboarding but used by experienced surfers for stability in the largest waves. Your gun was still in the garage at the beach house.

“What board did I take?”

“Supposedly, your regular shortie—at least, that’s what was missing from your garage. To anyone who didn’t know you, or who didn’t really know surfing, that would have made sense—it was the board you used most often. It just wasn’t right for those conditions.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“Of course. They said it didn’t prove anything. Surfers experiment with different boards sometimes. They seemed disappointed that was all I had.”

“Well, they’re right. About it not being conclusive, I mean.”

“I know you,” Lisa insists. “I know the way you surf.” Her eyes fill with tears again. “You know, I didn’t expect meeting you to be like this. I figured I’d be sitting down with some kind of doll. Something that might look like you, sound like you, that might even parrot things you’d said. I never expected to meet—to meet—”

   “To meet your sister,” you finish.

She nods, swallowing hard. Then she reaches out and puts her hand on yours.

“And that’s why I’m saying, please be careful,” she says softly. “Whatever happened to you before, don’t assume it couldn’t happen again.”

FIFTEEN



   Tim studied DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) for several minutes, walking around to inspect it from every angle. He was always a hard person to read—you never knew what he was thinking until his thoughts burst over you in a cascade of invective or, more rarely, praise.

“This is fucking genius,” he said at last.

We nodded. We thought so, too.

“It’s her best yet,” he added. “It’s totally awesome.”

“I really like the way she’s standing,” someone said. “She’s got so much attitude.”

We all ignored him. The statue’s attitude was completely missing the point.

“Where is she?” Tim demanded, looking around eagerly. “Where’s Abbie?”

We shrugged. We didn’t know.

He pulled out a phone and dialed. “Hey you,” he said, and we were struck by the tenderness in his tone. “Yes, I’m by it now. You look amazing, by the way. No, nobody has yet. Shall I…?”

   He reached out and, gently, squeezed the sculpture’s right shoulder. His fingers left small dimples in the flesh-colored putty.

“Are you sure?” he said, still into the phone. “It seems a shame to.”

Whatever Abbie said, it must have reassured him, because he reached out and squeezed the sculpture’s other shoulder too, harder this time.

“Amazing,” he said again. Then he walked away, still on the phone, so he could talk to her privately.

A few of us followed his lead, laying our hands on the sculpture and squeezing. But despite the instruction in the piece’s title, we held back. A few indentations from the tips of our fingers, a very slight deformation of an arm or elbow, was the most we felt entitled to do.

 

* * *

 

—

So how did it happen, then, that DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) got so thoroughly trashed over the days and weeks that followed? For one thing, it became apparent that people felt less restrained in their remolding when they were alone, or in small groups of two or three. It was less than a day before the first finger marks began to appear in the sculpture’s breasts. The soft modeling putty recorded each one—with a little fingerprint powder, someone joked, Tim could easily identify who among us had been groping his girlfriend. Some clown left a big five-fingered handprint across the left buttock, as clear as the fossil outline of a leaf. But that, too, was soon obliterated by other fingerprints and indentations, sly squeezings and strokes and pinches that left the once smooth surface pocked and pitted as if by cellulite. Someone used the sharp point of a pencil to gouge a long, wavy incision down the back of the right calf that, had it been the real Abbie and not simply her likeness, would have required a trip to the ER. (We knew it was a pencil because he, or possibly she, left it impaled in Abbie’s right foot.) The nipples, perhaps not surprisingly, came in for a lot of attention, and were soon twisted off altogether—one lay discarded nearby, carefully placed on a table, as if the person who’d done it thought maybe it could be repaired. The right breast bulged from the impression of so many kneading fingers that it, too, fell off in the end. On first seeing the piece, some of us had called to mind votive statues, their bronze surfaces worn smooth by prayers and kisses, but it soon became clear that this was something altogether more savage, like those gruesome medieval depictions of martyrs fingering their open wounds. Pretty soon the statue resembled a carcass on which wolves had feasted, a slow-motion explosion of modeling putty and body parts.

   Far from being annoyed by the artwork’s disintegration, Tim seemed fascinated. He came to inspect it at least twice a day, pointing out the latest changes, however small, to whoever happened to be in there. He took no part in the remolding himself, or none we ever saw, but it was as if his fascination egged us on. The sculpture lost both hands—vanished, presumed stolen—and its head began to loll drunkenly. Many people simply tugged a small lump of putty from one part of the body, rolled it into a cylinder between their palms, and stuck it back on somewhere else, so eventually it looked as if the statue were covered with short, fat worms. And finally there was a kind of tipping point, a moment when DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) no longer even resembled a human form, but simply became a big block of malleable graffiti. What had once been the shoulder was fashioned into a rough approximation of a grimacing second head. Someone broke off part of the arm and used it to make a crude penis that jutted for a while from the statue’s crotch—until that, too, fell off, and lay with all the other handfuls and scrapings of Newplast trodden into the floor like lumps of chewed gum. And then the head itself was gone, ripped off and torn in two, as if the unknown perpetrator had tried to peer inside it. Like a Greek Aphrodite, someone said pretentiously of the malformed torso that remained, but we all knew this was quite different from those graceful effigies.