3 months, it’d been, since they’d met in the New Jersey basement of a mutual friend’s house. He fingered a bass guitar on stage, behind a screaming frontman, and beside a long-haired guitarist. He did not look at the audience, but thrummed, again and again, and soon all Rebecca could hear or feel was the thudding rhythmic bass that undergirded the percussionless band. Each song was reduced to recurring vibrations that pressed and released her temples, that sizzled her chest like a stovetop, that snapped and healed her bones over and over again.
After the show, she took him back to the city, and they sat on the steps outside her apartment and watched the hazy, light-polluted sky like it was a drying smear of paint. When they went inside, he walked between her half-finished paintings, an antelope, a grazing, fragile herbivore, flitting his eyes quickly over each as if one would jump out and tear the flesh from his body. His eyes were wide like a deer’s, and she wanted very badly to eat them, to feel their brown, golden sadness pop like a grape between her teeth. She did not want his heart, she wanted the rest of him, fillets of tender flesh she could sculpt into something different.
She kissed him, and he told her she painted like someone who should be sculpting. He was right, she thought, wondering how he’d been able to tell with his scattered, fearful glancs. Her pre “His Heart” paintings consisted of too-heavy brushstrokes, rushed indentations of color, and too-thin lines like scrapes across the canvas. It felt, often, like she was trying to unearth a painting she imagined existing beneath the canvas as if the brush could draw blood.
When she’d had him, her mind wandered away from his ribs, which raised and fell like fingers as he breathed, poking through his skin as if prehensile. His chest looked like a spider that would, at any moment, crawl away from the rest of him, leaving his head and his body with a bloody gap. The apartment felt small, and she had, suddenly, an image of bass strings twirling together in the shape of a human heart, but with his subtle exhalations filling the room, she couldn’t move. She wanted to rouse him, push him with two hands out her door into the humid New York midnight while he confusedly wiped the sleep from his eyes. She picked at her cuticles until the sun speared through her broken blinds and she began banging pots and pans together, pretending to make breakfast to wake him up.
When he left, she ordered 10 packs of guitar strings online and began sketching in her journals. She found a note on her pillow where he’d sketched her, the only recognizable face in a sea of stick figures, small cartoon hearts surrounding her head. She tore it into strips and lowered them into the milk in her cereal bowl and swallowed their pulp.
The first iteration of “His Heart” was a failure, a hollow, anatomically correct heart she hung from two pillars in her studio. In the midday light, the copper strings sang with light, but it was a hollow, useless recreation. It was an empty, bassless voice strung through a hundred synthesizers until it meant nothing at all.
Once she’d failed, she called him again. He took the train to her, and they walked idly along the Chelsea High Line. Out in the open, he seemed more fragile and exposed than ever. She walked behind him so she could watch the nape of his neck. She held his hand so she could watch his heartbeat through the jugular vein that protruded from the side of his esophagus. She spent the whole day imagining biting into him. She couldn’t understand this desire to unearth something beneath his skin, to freeze each moment by consuming it, but that’s what she wanted. He kissed her on her doorstep and invited her to watch a show of his in a week and left her. The subway entrance down the block swallowed him whole.
She cut her heart down and placed its center in a box and slid it under her bed and tried to stab through canvases with her paintbrush again. She went to Isaac’s show and felt the music move through her and watched his lithe body produce sounds that consumed her. He was so happy to see her that he kissed her right away. She decided, then, that it would be the last time she saw him.
Still, she followed him home.
Still, she slinked through his two-bedroom apartment in rural New Jersey and ran her finger along his dusty windowsills. She tasted the last 4 months of his life that had accrued since he’d last dusted while she sucked her index finger.
“What do you want from me?” he asked that night, pleading like a bluebird pinned beneath a feral cat’s paw.
“I don’t know,” she said. “When I was seven my mother brought my grandmother home from the funeral in an urn. She placed it on an alcove above the fireplace, ash near ash, and I hated being that close to something I could break. Every day I saw it and imagined, with horror, knocking it over with an elbow and everything that was left of her seeping into the carpet and cutting into my hands as I tried to pick it up. It started as an anxiety but every time I imagined it, I started wanting it to happen more. I stopped imagining it as an accident. It was a dream. I wanted to smash it to pieces so badly, I stopped going downstairs for weeks at a time.”
“How’s your art going?” Isaac asked.
“Hollowly,” she said, rolling so her back was to him in bed.
He took this as an invitation and wrapped his arms around her, spooning her. Her heart beat painfully against his sweaty palms and she wanted him off her so badly she might have screamed.
“I won’t break, you know?” he said. She knew he hadn’t understood her.
In the morning she left before he woke.
Two weeks later she found his heart melting on her doorstep and knew he’d been wrong. Whether he’d given it to her willingly, or let it be ripped out of his chest by the specter of her that flitted across the George Washington Bridge at night or told his sister that, in the event of his unsuspecting death at the hands of a transit bus, his heart was to be delivered to one Rebecca Olsen Lyia so she could finally finish “His Heart,” she didn’t know.
She thought for a long time about eating it, searing it with red wine and sage, and finally, finally consuming him.
She had broken her grandmother's urn. She’d taken it to her second-floor bedroom, leaned out the window and thrown it down onto the driveway, and watched as the wind carried everything but the ceramic shards away.
She took his melting heart and cased it in the copper one she’d made. She pressed the wire around the dripping mass of his chest and when her hands were stained red and soaked through she lowered it into resin and froze it forever.
It sits, now, before the viewer in this gallery, a memory, a lacunic moment between heartbeats, between plucked strings, between being the kind of person who is worried about destroying something and the kind of person who wants to destroy something, represented in sculptural form, and beginning this series of increasingly intricate resin-cast sculptures that launched the artist’s career.
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