The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [30]
“That face,” he says. “Only a mother could love that face.” He pauses. “A mother wombat.”
“You think she’s ugly?” Her voice rises. Now she really is hurt. Not just because it’s her work, but because it’s the savage girl’s face, and she’s not sure if she loves that face, but she is conscious of feeling a little maternal about it.
“Her expression is,” he says. “And how you’ve got her hunched over like that. It’s nasty.”
“It’s not nasty. It’s tough.”
“Tough is all right,” he concedes. “But where’s the softness? She’s got to be soft, too. And this dirt. What’s with this dirt?”
“She’s a savage, Chas. That’s the whole idea. You want her to smile and look all glassy and drugged like a centerfold?”
“No,” he says, and then adds under his breath, “not exactly.”
“ ‘Not exactly,’ ” she huffs, hoping for an advantage.
He shakes his head, turns, and looks out the window. In a rare swath of sunlight the buildings bristle, bright and dangerous-looking, all the way down the West Slope. His trendshop, Tomorrow Ltd., occupies a small but prestigious suite of offices. The view from the Black Tower is one of the best there is, partly because of its position at the very peak of the volcano, partly because it’s one of the few places in town from which you can’t see the Black Tower itself.
“This painting, Ursula,” he says, spinning his chair back around to face her. “It’s so . . . real. Even with the airbrush. It’s like she’s right here getting fleas all over my desk.”
“I take it that isn’t a compliment.”
“Contradictions,” he says. “You need contradictions to make an ideal. There are no contradictions here.”
“Contradictions?” Ursula stares unseeing at the picture of the savage girl. She wants to take it and tear it up, childish as that would be.
“You don’t get it,” he repeats.
“I guess not.”
His voice softens. “It’s not your fault. We threw you into the deep end. Look, I’ve been busy courting a big new client, otherwise I’d’ve helped with your training.”
The sudden sympathy, so unexpected, makes Ursula’s eyes begin to tear, to her embarrassment. She always used to think of herself as being tougher than all the other artists she knew. But now that she’s a businesswoman, she seems to be crying all the time.
“Come on,” he says, seeming not to notice her little internal crisis. “Let’s take a field trip.”
He tosses on his jacket and leads her out past the unused reception area to the hallway. There are other people riding the elevator, and neither of them speaks again until they’re out in the street.
“Where are we going?” Ursula asks.
He doesn’t answer. He leads her right on Cook Street, left on Ulner. Women and men, young and old, eye Chas as they walk by. She sees them trying to peg him. At first they look at him and think, A powerful businessman; then they keep looking, and then they think, A perfect example of a powerful businessman. Most are satisfied at this point, but those who look for a few seconds longer—those who, like Ursula, look long enough to ask themselves how someone gets so perfect—begin to suspect he must be a maniac of some kind. His obsessive nature betrays itself in a hundred different ways. Even his robust health seems like a sickness. A build like that on a man in his fifties. He must work out regularly—more than regularly; he must have an utterly inflexible regimen, alternating muscle groups according to the day of the week to provide equal attention to every square inch of his sun-basted, weather-beaten flesh. It’s an image that might even have been sexy if it weren’t accompanied by those other things—the omnipresent creases in his brow, reticulated like a second muscle-bound abdomen on his head; the constant tensing and pulsing of his jaw; those narrowed, razor-blade eyes.
He leads her to a supermarket built into the ground floor of a high-rise apartment building and gestures for her to go in ahead of him. The doors slide open as she walks across the mat and into the store.
“Go ahead,” Chas