Skin's Art

On a warm night, nearly midnight, in the heart of July, Skin Lathrop drives Annmarie's Ford pickup into the plate-glass side of a drive-through hamburger stand, deep in the sprawled suburbs south of San Francisco. Although the accident does not occur at a high rate of speed---because Skin is at that moment pulling out of the drive-through and trying simultaneously, in a complex maneuver, to consume an onion ring---it is complicated by the fact that just 45 minutes before, Skin had piggishly consumed the last of Annmarie's personal stash of reds, which he had discovered concealed in a tiny magnetized box secreted beneath one of the engine mounts. Although Skin tries to pull away from the scene of the accident, he happens instead---due to entirely unavoidable chemical misjudgment---to accelerate directly into the rear of a Volkswagen bus just pulling out onto the highway, thereby immobilizing all vehicles concerned and immediately drawing the attention of a passing highway-patrol car.

Skin reluctantly chews and swallows two thick joints hesitantly entrusted to him by Annmarie, washing the dry choking shreds down with a drink of cold vanilla milk shake, and then he climbs out of the pickup to stand bemusedly amid the thousand shards of thick plate glass that glitter in the fluorescent lighting of the parking lot.

The driver of the VW bus reaches him first. He is tall and thin and blond, with an unsuccessful beard and an anemic-looking girl who follows at some distance. Skin diagnoses him as a college student. "What the hell did you do to my van?" the college boy wants to know, his voice just under control. "I mean, Jesus, (continued on page 142)Skin's Art(continued from page 139) you come driving right up, you smash right into it, the engine's back there."

Skin tries to keep his balance and he examines the back of the VW bus. The girlfriend stands beside the van and peers cautiously at Skin. The high steel bumper of the old Ford appears to have very neatly mashed the thin cover of the engine compartment. Buy American, thinks Skin. He stares at the college boy and tries to think of something to say.

"Hey, you, right there," a fat man in a white costume says as he emerges striding from the drive-through, pointing at Skin. He is apparently the night manager and he is carrying, tightly clenched, a short polished wooden night stick. "You, you better stay right there, don't you move, stay right there."

The highway-patrol car has made a full U turn in the middle of the highway and pulls up to the curb, red lights flashing. Skin sits on the bumper of the Ford and hooks his hair back behind his ears. He looks at the college boy and the night manager, who both now stand before him. At last, very deliberately, he shakes his head. At the moment, it is the most complex motion he can manage.

One cop starts over and his partner remains beside the car, speaking into a microphone. Skin stands carefully as the cop approaches and marshals all of his energies into an impression of normality. He is the first to speak.

"Officer," he says, enunciating with the delicate precision of a logroller, "I want you to understand: This unfortunate incident is entirely---completely---a mechanical malfunction."

• • •

Annmarie, who works four until midnight at an all-night pants store, is still awake when Skin gets back to their small apartment. He shows her the citation, for reckless operation of a motor vehicle and a series of equipment violations so lengthy that they have to be continued on a separate sheet. Although the cops were highly suspicious, Skin at least minimally managed his act and was not given the opportunity to display his reflexes and balance before the watchful eyes of the two patrolmen.

"You idiot," Annmarie says without much excitement. "You total idiot." She is sitting on the couch watching a talk program, her feet propped up on a chair, accentuating the plump bulge of expansive hips and considerable butt encased in her tight Levis. "I swear to God," she says, running a hand through her thick curly black hair. She is two years older than Skin and an inch taller, and they have been living together for six months. Often, to Skin, it seems as if it has been six years. This---time dilation, he thinks of it---he takes as a sign of love.

Annmarie folds her arms and gazes at Skin, the pale side of her face illuminated blue by the electric glow of the television tube. "You did some reds," she says, "huh?"

Skin drops the thin yellow paper of the citation on the floor, sinks into an overstuffed armchair, shrugs. "Yeah," he says, "I guess so."

"You guess so," Annmarie says, "I bet you guess so, where'd you get them?"

"I found 'em," Skin says.

"Where'd you find them?"

"I found them in the goddamned truck," Skin says, "right where you goddamn hid them."

"Ssssssss," Annmarie hisses.

"Listen," Skin says wearily, "don't ever put drugs in the goddamned engine, for Crissake, the heat fucks 'em up and somebody's going to be driving the truck and get stopped and not know they're there, so just don't do it."

Annmarie stares at the television. There is some kind of Government official on now, along with some entertainers, and the politician, in his suit and tie, looks like a drab sparrow beside the spectacularly plumed show people. "You wreck the truck much?"

"Nah," Skin says. "Won't cost us a penny." He tells her that both the van owner and the night manager, on the advice of the highway patrolmen, copied Annmarie's address off the registration of the truck. It is, they both know, as nearly untraceable an address as one can have these days. They left it three months ago, owing two months' rent and $50 on the truck, and have not heard a word since.

Annmarie still stares at the television, shaking her head. "You've got to get a job," she tells Skin finally. "If you're gonna steal my dope, if you're gonna wreck my truck, then you better get a job, make some money."

"But my art," Skin says. "I need time for my art."

"Your art," Annmarie says, "my ass."

She reaches under the chair and picks up a can of beer. "You still got those numbers?" she asks after she drinks.

"Ah," says Skin, unmoving. "Those numbers."

"You picked up some little chickie and went up to Skyline and smoked 'em," Annmarie says, "that's what you did. And then you wrecked my truck."

"I ate 'em," Skin says.

"That's typical," Annmarie says with hearty disgust. "That's really typical." She looks over at Skin. "I bet you feel real good now, huh?"

Skin thinks about it. As a matter of fact, he feels very good. "I feel OK," he says, "considering the headphones are broken."

"I bet you feel real fine now," Annmarie says. "A lot finer than I feel."

Skin stands---quite steadily, all considered---and goes into the bedroom. The ceiling light is burned out, so he switches on Annmarie's big Tijuana gilt-plaster cherub lamp on the dresser. In a hollowed-out copy of Siddhartha that Annmarie has not yet discovered, Skin finds the single joint, rolled in fragrant cinnamon paper, that was given to him by a little girl at a concert at the fairgrounds and that has resided, almost forgotten, in the place that Hesse once occupied. He takes it out to the living room and hands it to Annmarie with a flourish and lights a match.

"Oh," she says, looking up from the television, suddenly smiling, "oh, oh, oh."

"Very good stuff," Skin says.

Annmarie speaks in a blue exhalation of smoke. "I love you," she says.

"I love you," Skin tells her.

She takes another hit. "Can you get me a beer?" she gasps, breath held.

"Sure can," Skin says, and then he gets her another beer, and one for himself, too.

• • •

That night, after the one-o'clock movie is over and there is nothing left to watch but a sermonette and a film of the American flag and then the perpetual electronic snow, Skin and Annmarie make long pounding love on their unframed water bed. The floor beneath is linoleum over concrete slab and the bed is always cold, but because it has been a hot summer, they have not yet noticed.

Sex is a pillar of their relationship. Such a pillar, in fact, Skin thinks the next morning over ice cream and granola, that they are almost certainly going to burst the water bed if he does not frame it. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Annmarie works days as a cashier in a car wash. Today Skin drives her to work so that he can use the truck, and after he leaves Annmarie off, he drives two miles up the hot highway to a large private university.

The university is undergoing a massive expansion program and, in Skin's opinion, is mildly overextended with respect to daytime security. He cruises the cool oak-lined streets, trying with some success to appear collegiate, until he locates a chain-link-fenced construction site that has apparently been temporarily deserted. He circles once and determines that (a) the construction-site gate is not locked, and (b) in one corner there is a nice plastic-covered pile of what appear to be long pine two-by-sixes.

"Thank you, Lord," Skin says reverently when he has completed his reconnaissance.

He has long since learned that when one is liberating the people's property (continued on page 174)Skin's Art(continued from page 142) from the belly of the beast, it does not pay to be shy. He backs the truck up into the bare-dirt construction site, leaves the engine idling and tosses three lengths of two-by-six onto the bed of the pickup. He takes his time and chooses good dry unwarped lumber. A student, a girl with long blonde hair and halter top and the flawless tan of a sun bather, walks by the high fence, carrying a load of summer school books. Hoisting the lumber onto one shoulder, Skin waves with his free hand. She smiles, democratically, her mane golden in the sun, her long neck held straight. Skin suspects that he knows exactly what she needs to make her summer's education complete.

But first things first. The lengths of lumber chosen and loaded into the pickup, Skin eases the truck over the rutted dirt back onto the asphalt and heads out for the highway. His head is clear and he is looking forward to building the frame, and the morning in general seems to be progressing altogether well until Skin pulls up behind a vehicle at the last stop sign on university property. The vehicle ahead is a Volkswagen bus with a smashed rear end that appears horribly familiar to Skin. Although the street before them is clear in both directions, the VW bus does not move.

Without even thinking, Skin puts the truck in reverse and begins to back up very quickly, transmission whining, just as the doors of the bus open and Al, the college boy of the previous night, and the same girlfriend emerge, moving fast. Skin continues to back up, but suddenly there is another car behind him. He stops, cranks the wheel to go around the bus, but by this time the college boy, clad in T-shirt, sneakers and Bermudas, has parked his skinny girlfriend directly in front of the pickup.

"Goddamn," says Skin softly, leaning forward on the steering wheel, suddenly tired to his soul. "Goddamn."

Al is at the open window of the pick-up, one foot on the running board, tall enough so that he must lean over to speak into the cab. "Hey," he says to Skin, "hey, listen to me."

Skin gazes without curiosity at the boy. He has the slightly pale, scrubbed, gymnasium-raised look of a high school basketball star. "Got your bus running OK," Skin says, "huh?"

"Listen," Al says, "we've been trying to find you all morning. That address you gave us is no good. They never heard of you."

Skin smacks his forehead, smiles briefly through the windshield at the blockading girlfriend. She is thin, Skin thinks, but then, these days that is the style. "Jesus," he says, "I'm sorry, man, I keep forgetting to have that registration changed."

Al has clearly been trying to generate some anger, but he is so pleased that there has only been a misunderstanding that his embryonic hostility evaporates like desert dew. "Well," he says, "then------"

"You got pencil and paper?" Skin says briskly. "Let's get this straight right now."

The girlfriend brings a notebook and pen, somewhat shyly, and hands them through the window to Skin as traffic continues to detour around them.

"I'm sorry as hell," Skin says, writing on the first blank page. "You must have figured I was skipping out."

"Well," Al says.

"Forget it," Skin says, still writing. "Come by any afternoon, we'll drink a few beers, figure out how to work the insurance, OK? No reason anybody should get stuck for this. I'm home any afternoon, I'm a sculptor."

Al takes the pen and notebook from Skin the sculptor and gazes briefly at the address. It is, as Skin recalls, the address of a beauty parlor that Annmarie visited two weeks ago to cure a case of the psilocybin-induced blues. It was a nice beauty parlor, though they did little for Annmarie, and it is fully two miles from their apartment. "I'll get an estimate," Al says, "and bring it by, how's that?"

"Good enough," Skin says, "sounds fine with me," and then he gives Al a discreet power salute, winks quickly at his girlfriend, clunks the transmission into first gear and heads out, quite slowly, whistling, for the shimmering, metal-filled highway. Momentarily, he wishes for music and regrets that the truck radio has been stolen. It was the third one to be ripped from beneath the dashboard while the truck was parked in front of the apartment. The next one he plans to padlock, just as securely as possible. These days, Skin knows, it is dog eat dog.

• • •

It is a hot midsummer day in the mid-peninsula and the warmth has settled down on the Bay Area, trapping the air until it grows stale and yellow with use. The small stucco apartment is already unpleasantly warm and it stubbornly refuses to ventilate. Skin goes down the hot street and borrows a garden hose from the front yard of a house and takes it back to the apartment and begins to drain the water bed into the bathtub. The garden hose twists through the apartment and disgorges the water-bed contents into the gray bathtub. Some sort of yeasty-smelling algae has flourished in the darkness of the water bed and now it slides down the bathtub drain in spurts, like chocolate sprinkles.

Skin borrows hammer and saw from the pleasant old alcoholic who manages the apartment house. He uses the last of his allowance from Annmarie to buy a 99-cent six-pack of beer, surreptitiously selects a handful of plated wood screws from the open bins of a nearby hardware store, and then, once again in the apartment, he is ready to begin. He will build a fine frame, for Annmarie, and she will be pleased, he figures, pleased clear out of her head.

He measures off the lengths of lumber with a piece of string, calculating carefully, since he has nothing to spare. He uses two chairs and a cement block as a sawhorse and cuts the boards to size, sawing with an even, steady rhythm, though the manager's crosscut blade is as dull as a butter knife. The light-brown sawdust collects on an old newspaper. At one time, Skin himself had a set of woodworking tools in a gray-metal chest three feet long: planes and chisels and saws, punches and hammers and even an adz. His father, a cabinetmaker who died when Skin was 12, had been assembling the set since Skin was born. Skin sold it, finally, because he never worked with wood anymore, and used part of the money to buy machine tools, but even those he has sold by now. "Tools," he would tell his friends, "just weigh too damn much."

Today he wishes he had those tools: He would miter the corners of the frame and countersink the screws and break the edges of the splintery pine. But Skin knows how to make do and, quite quickly, the frame comes together. Once, maneuvering the half-assembled frame in the small bedroom, he knocks Annmarie's gilt cherub lamp onto the floor, but it fails to break. It is a hideous lamp, in Skin's opinion, and he decides that, as a form of criticism, he will try to knock it over again.

• • •

In the late afternoon. Skin finishes his job on the frame. When the last screw is driven, he opens a bottle of fruit-flavored wine and stands back and admires the project. It is solid, almost perfectly rectangular, quite becoming in its simplicity and highly economical. He arranges it into one corner of the bedroom and lays the flaccid water-bed mattress in the center of the frame. He connects the borrowed garden hose to the bathroom tap and starts the How. The green-plastic mattress settles and writhes briefly under the pressure of the water. Skin sits in one corner and watches the process for a few moments. In five hours, it will be filled and ready for fresh bouncing.

Skin, filled with the glow of work accomplished, of manifest change wrought in the physical world, takes the bottle of fruit wine and settles down in front of the television. In the bedroom, the newly framed mattress slowly swells, and in the living room, Skin the carpenter relaxes with a Ronald Reagan Western. About seven o'clock, he fixes himself several tuna-fish sandwiches and a dish of chocolate ice cream with some of Annmarie's organic cashews on top.

At nine, in the midst of a commercial about pickup trucks, he hears a quiet tapping at the door.

Skin turns off the TV sound and listens more closely and the tapping is repeated. He sets aside the fruit wine and goes to the front door. He opens it about ten inches, blocking its further travel with his booted foot, and looks outside. Beneath the yellow porch light stands the skinny blonde girlfriend of the VW-van owner.

"I'm sorry," Skin says, starting to close the door, "you must have the wrong------"

"No," the girl tells him quietly but insistently, "it's all right. I'm by myself." She smiles, and even against her pale skin her teeth are very bright.

The smile stops Skin momentarily and he pauses the progress of the closing door. "What can I do for you?" he asks very tentatively.

"You could let me in," the girl says.

Skin frowns. All warning systems are flashing wildly. This makes no sense.

"I was driving by," the girl says, "and I saw your truck. I recognized it. And I just wanted to stop and see you."

"Well," Skin says, still in a strictly paranoid mode, thinking fast, "you can see me."

The girl looks through the loot-wide space. "I can't," she says finally, "see all of you."

Skin stares for a moment. He has always had considerable luck with women, even though he is not gifted with killing looks, and so perhaps this girl's behavior is neither altogether impossible nor particularly mysterious. The summer, he knows from long experience, is the season.

The thin college girl is wearing tight jeans and some sort of loosely woven light top, between the weave of which a certain amount of nice skin is visible. "Well?" she says.

"Why don't you come in?" Skin says courteously, and he opens the door wide.

The girl steps into the small apartment. Her thin straight blonde hair just reaches her bony shoulders and she is accompanied by the faint scent of an expensive perfume.

"Listen," Skin says, "about the accident and the address and everything, I just want you to know------"

"We don't have to talk about that," the girl says.

"Pardon?"

"I said we don't have to talk about that." The girl smiles. "I'd rather not take sides. If you get my meaning."

Skin thinks that he gets her meaning exactly. He himself has never encountered a loyalty that would not dissolve in the proper reagent. "Well, sit down," Skin says after a brief pause. "Can I get you a glass of wine?"

She sits and assents and gazes at the silent TV screen as Skin goes into the kitchen and rapidly washes out two jelly-jar glasses that have been moldering on the drainboard for several days. He dries them spotless and carries them out to the living room and pours from the wine bottle. The bottle, he notes with satisfaction, is still nearly half full.

The girl takes one of the jelly glasses with a warm smile and sips. "Oh." she says pleasantly, "it's nice and sweet."

"Sweet," Skin agrees, "nice and sweet." The girl watches him with huge eyes the color of polished amethyst.

"You went out driving the streets looking for me?" Skin says. "How come?"

The girl shrugs, drinks from her jelly glass. "I just wanted to talk to you," she says. "You said you were a sculptor. I was curious to see your work."

"Ah," Skin says, "my work."

"Is this your studio?" the girl asks.

"My studio," Skin says, "this is it."

The girl gazes around approvingly, then looks back at Skin. "My name is Miranda," she says.

"Miranda," Skin repeats slowly, and he stares at her. "Somehow," he says, "you don't look like a Miranda."

"Well," she says, "you don't look like a Skin."

"How do you know my name?"

The girl shrugs. "The manager told me."

"That was nice of him," Skin says. He thinks he will have to speak to the old drunk about this.

"I'm very excited by art right now," Miranda says. "I'm taking art classes this summer. Someday I would like to create, myself."

"Good," says Skin, "very good." He is trying to remember which closet the sculptures are in. He tells everyone that he is a sculptor, and the odd thing, for Skin, at least, is that he really is. Or was, until he sold the woodworking tools and, along with them, the chisels. Since the age of 14, he has carved wood, quite well, and sold a few pieces and kept most for himself. Even now, after traveling and years of total disorganization, he still owns perhaps 20 pounds of redwood and walnut and pine carvings that remind him he was good and that someday he can go back to it and it will make him famous.

"I'll get them," Skin says, and he empties his glass and goes to the bedroom closet. Far in the back, past Annmarie's shoes and suitcases and the clothing that has fallen from the hangers, is a big canvas parcel, tied with rope, that contains the sum of Skin's art. He pulls it out, toppling suitcases and scattering shoes, and drags it through the hall out to a clear spot on the living-room floor and begins to untie it.

"You keep them wrapped up in canvas," the girl notes.

"Yes," Skin says, untying, "in canvas."

"Oh," Miranda says as Skin begins to set out the small sculptures on the worn gray rug. "Oh, my," she says, standing gracefully and walking over to kneel directly beside Skin. "These are just wonderful."

"Well," Skin says, "they're old, you know, I did them a while ago."

"You're good." Miranda says, "you're really good." She gestures at the redwood hawk Skin carved at 14. "May I?"

"Sure," Skin says, "sure," and Miranda picks up the bird, redwood wings set for soaring, tapering neck curved in a gentle turn, the surface polished smooth and oiled deeply.

"It's beautiful," Miranda says, and then, one by one, she examines the other pieces. With each, she comments on the finish or the lines or the precise fluidity of technique. An ocean breaker, a foot wide, carved from dense walnut, amazes her.

"What are you doing now?" she asks Skin at last.

Skin shrugs. "I'm on vacation," he tells her. "For a while."

"You're a remarkable talent," the girl says to him. "You really deserve------"

She breaks off as there is another knock at the door. Skin frowns and shrugs at Miranda and goes to open it. He is eager to hear more from her and, a bit drunk from wine and praise, he opens the door carelessly.

It is Al, the college boy, and behind him, on the small concrete porch, are three huge shadowy figures. Immediately Skin starts to close the door, but already Al has one foot inside. The door stops and Skin sees that Al's feet are no longer sneaker clad. The foot that blocks the door wears a steel-toed work boot.

Skin presses on the door, but a far greater pressure on the other side swings it open easily. Skin steps back quickly and Al steps over the threshold.

"Hi," he says to Skin, unsmiling. "We brought that estimate by."

Al, dressed now in blue jeans and a sweat shirt with cutoff sleeves, walks over to Miranda and runs his hand briefly through her blonde hair. Skin's stomach drops out. He knows that this is serious trouble.

The three other figures enter and immediately the small apartment seems vastly smaller. Skin recognizes instantly what he is faced with: These are college football players, human beings transmogrified by $50,000 worth of special foods and chrome-plated exercise equipment and anabolic steroids and God knows what else; trained up, since childhood, like vines, to grow specifically immense and monstrous. One has biceps the size of Skin's thigh. Another is only slightly taller than Skin but four times as thick. The largest, at least six-five, with small eyes countersunk far into solidly fleshed sockets that emit only a tenuous gleam of intelligence.

"I got three estimates on the van," Al tells Skin casually.

"Listen," Skin says, stepping back, "I don't know------"

"No," Al says, "you listen. The lowest estimate is $157.50. It's a fair price. But then, you weren't where you said you'd be. How about that?"

Skin gestures with both hands, as if it is all simply too great a mystery. He takes another step back. One football player blocks the front door, one guards the telephone and the last is standing behind Al. Amidst them, Al appears reed-thin.

"But forget it," Al says. "We've gotten together now, that's all that counts. Can we settle things right now?"

"Ah," Skin says, beginning to sense that disaster is not immediately forthcoming. "Sure," he says, "absolutely, let's discuss it."

"I need $157.50," Al says.

"Well," Skin says confidently, "I don't have it. Not right now. I can get it for you. Tomorrow. First thing tomorrow."

Al stares at Skin for a moment. "I'm a college student," he says at last, softly. "I have a scholarship, but do you think that a basketball scholarship makes me rich?"

Skin gestures indeterminately. He suspects that it does.

"It doesn't," Al tells him. "I work twenty hours a week to pay for that van."

"Nice van," Skin says, "very nice van."

"So I would like the money tonight," Al says. "Right now, in fact. I think it will be easier for everyone than if we let it slip until tomorrow. Am I making sense?"

Skin understands, with sudden clarity. "Believe me," he says with convincing sincerity, "when I say that I'm broke. If I had the money, I'd give it to you this minute."

Al cuts off further discussion. "Forget the money," he says. "What else do you have?"

The question silences Skin immediately as he ponders its ominous ramifications. Al turns to Miranda, who is still watching the silent TV. "What," he asks her, "does he have?"

Miranda shrugs. "The TV."

Al carefully examines the dented portable. "Twenty-five," he says. "Maybe thirty."

"Wait a minute," Skin says. "Hold on."

"The stereo," Miranda says.

Al steps to one side to view the stereo and is momentarily silent.

"Piece of shit," one of the giants advises from behind him.

"Another twenty-five," Al decides, "absolutely no more. That's fifty so far, maybe fifty-five."

Skin's mouth is slightly open. "Hold it," he says, "listen to me."

No one listens. "What else?" Al asks Miranda.

She shrugs again. "There's the carvings." She points to the impromptu exhibit Skin has arranged on the floor, surrounded by the canvas parceling.

"The carvings," Al says slowly as he moves toward them. "These are very nice," he says and glances back at Miranda for confirmation.

"They're excellent," she says.

"How much for one of these?" Al asks the room in general. "Say down in one of those arty beach towns."

"No," Skin says, starting to move, "no, goddamn it, no, don't touch those sculptures, you goddamned------"

As quick and silent as a cat, one of the giants is standing directly in front of Skin, arms crossed over his chest. His momentum still vibrates the air in the small apartment. Skin stares straight ahead at a point directly below his Adam's apple.

"Hold on," Al says, "don't get excited."

"Fifty apiece," another giant says. "Forty easy."

"Fifty," Miranda says. "Those are very nice."

"Then," Al says in a voice of total reason, "let's talk about the TV and the stereo and two of the carvings. How does that sound?"

"No," Skin says, "absolutely not. I'll have the money for you tomorrow. Ten o'clock tomorrow, I'll have the money for you. You know where I live. You can come and get me if you want. I'll have it for you, I swear to God, listen to me."

Al does not even consider it. "It's easier this way," he says. "It's always better to settle business immediately."

"No," cries Skin, and he moves forward, but immense finger tips push him back and he feels as if his pectorals have been permanently dented.

Al is unplugging the television. Someone else disconnects the stereo. "Choose the two you like best," Al tells Miranda.

She does not look at Skin, kneels again beside the sculptures and, without hesitation, she chooses the redwood hawk and the walnut wave, cradling them in her thin arms as she rises.

"Thieves," Skin says, "you're thieves. I'll call the police."

No one pays him any attention.

"I'll have you busted," Skin says. "I swear to God, this is grand larceny. This is extortion."

Al, in the midst of hoisting the television set, stares at him briefly. "Listen," he says, "how stupid do you think we are? People like you don't call the police. The police call you."

Skin watches wordlessly as they begin to leave the apartment. "I consider the account settled," Al tells Skin on his way out the door. They are over the threshold as quickly and as silently as they had arrived. They shut the door quietly and then Skin does not move for a very long time.

• • •

When Annmarie arrives home from work, she finds Skin sitting in the overstuffed chair, staring silently at the empty space where the television had been.

"What the fuck happened to the TV?" she asks. "What happened to the stereo?"

Skin shakes his head, says nothing.

"What are your goddamn statues doing on the floor? What have you been doing?"

"I------" Skin begins. "We've been robbed.

"Robbed?" Annmarie says. "What the hell do you mean robbed? You mean the TV?"

"The TV," Skin says without expression. "The stereo. My sculptures. Stolen."

"Jesus," Annmarie says, standing in front of Skin, who does not look at her. "Did you call the cops?"

"No," Skin says, "Sit down."

Annmarie sits down and Skin tells her the story. He makes nothing up, he invents no excuses, he tells it exactly as it happened. At first Annmarie is furious, then---at the thought of the loss of their inputs---she is in shock, and then finally she is as sympathetic as a mother.

"The fuckers," she says. "The goddamned college-ass fuckers."

Skin shakes his head numbly. He looks very bad. The only time he has moved in the past four hours has been to disconnect the hose from the water bed.

Annmarie fumbles in her purse. "Here," she says, "take this." She holds out a tiny red capsule of Seconal and Skin swallows it without a word. "Let's go to bed," she says. "We'll talk about it in the morning."

They go into the bedroom, Skin a few silent steps behind Annmarie. The newly framed water bed is as full and perfect as a ripe green fruit. When she sees it, her face grows radiant. "Oh," she says, exaggerating her pleasure, "oh, this is wonderful." She runs one hand over the rough pine frame. "This is just great. You did a wonderful job."

Skin nods automatically, with no enthusiasm.

She drops a Seconal herself and undresses. "Think about it in the morning," she repeats to Skin, "don't worry now. We'll go down to the flea market Sunday and get new stuff, don't worry." Then she undresses Skin and spreads a sheet and a thin blanket over the water-bed mattress.

"Time for bed," she tells Skin, "time for bed." She sits at the edge of the water bed, big breasts wobbling, and reaches up to catch Skin's hand, and then reclines on the buoyant plastic mattress. Skin follows her and together, entwined, they sink into the watery substance of their bed. Their combined weight, so abruptly applied, forces the edges of the mattress against the frame and at one side a long pine splinter punctures the thin plastic membrane. Once torn, the substance splits and tears wide under the pressure of the water, flooding the new frame, filling it almost instantly, the level of water rising fast, and before Skin or Annmarie has time even to mumble good night, as quick as the strike of a snake, the cold fresh water reaches their necks.