CRACKING COLLARBONE JONES

 Brook Bhagat

When I saw it, we had been in bed for days in my little rented room in Poona, just up the road from the ashram. We’d miss morning meditation, miss afternoon meditation, miss the parties, and then run out to eat at a 30-rupee thali kitchen before they closed. The lilies I’d given you the first night had dropped their petals on the cement shelf by the bed, leaving naked stems in the wine bottle vase. I was awake, watching you as you slept.

*          *          *          *          *

I first saw Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in an oversized hardcover I was supposed to be reshelving at my work-study job in the art history library. It captivated me: the aching angle of her marble neck, hidden beneath frozen robes; her mouth, falling open; her eyes, rolling back in the ether of god-pleasure-pain. I made mine of clay, no model, just my desperation fleshing out a man in the same posture, on the same line between worlds: not Jesus, but long-haired, bearded. Not Buddha, but with generous, tender earlobes. It was a bust, shoulders and collarbone to crown. In my head, I called him Collarbone Jones for his gaunt clavicle, wrenching forward as his head fell back in rapture.

            He was the embodiment of what I was looking for in India. I had no words for it, but that invisible desire was so important that I saw no point in making any other plans for my life after Vassar. When anyone asked what I intended to do after graduation, all I could do was mumble, “work somewhere and save up to go to India.” If a “why” followed, I’d shrug or say I didn’t know, but that was a lie. I knew what I was looking for: that ecstasy, that look on the face of Saint Teresa.

            I couldn’t talk about it, but I had to define it, if only for myself. I had a hateful doubt, a dark inkling that it did not exist. That I was chasing pipe-dreams, that the stories of old Zen masters from Eastern Religion class and library books that looked like no one had ever checked them out but me were just fairy tales. That I was destined to come home from India as empty as when I left, home to a slow death of jobs and apartments and minutes flapping by. Sculpting my desire made India all or nothing—I would find it or I wouldn’t. Putting a face on what I was after meant it was possible to fail, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

            A numb pointlessness had permeated my life, a dullness. My passionate ambitions for writing and art and New York looked stupid now, useless. What would great literary success buy? A covering for the hollow bitterness that gnawed at me like a cancer, like frostbite in my gut? I found myself with nothing to say to my friends, nothing to do but go through the motions, drifting to classes on campus and drifting back to my apartment like a ghost. From my mattress on the floor, I started each morning looking out the window. If it was sunny, I might go to class. If it was cloudy, I went back to sleep. It’s cloudy a lot in New York.

            As a senior art student, I had my own key to the sculpture studio. I made nothing else that last spring, dragging Collarbone Jones out over the whole semester. I skipped sculpture class half the time, working on him at night. I’d go around two in the morning, and if the glass walls of the studio were dark, that meant I was alone.

            Inside with the fluorescent lights on, I always began the same way: Wheel him slowly to the center of the room, away from the crowd of sculptures in the corner. He rested on a three-legged wooden stand, high enough to put us face to face. Take off the thick, once-clear plastic, now muddy gray with slip. Walk around him, touch his cold cheek. Drag my fingers over the rivulets of wavy hair. Spray down the face, the back, the shoulders. Decide what to tackle: more definition for the hair? Fix the Cupid’s bow? Make the lips cracked, or smooth? More hurt in the brow, drawn up in the middle, or more bliss?

            Then, I’d fetch my favorite tools and sponges, stashed on the far counter, under a pile of forgotten smocks. Over endless nights and hours, I learned new ways to get what I wanted. Half-dried clay, pressed on the jaw and ripped off, made a rough beard. The eyes would remain empty, but I could build eyelids, half-closed like the saint’s, if they were thin enough. I held them on, blowing on them until they dried enough to stick.

            He was also alive, of course. He was everything I wanted to dare to believe in. With him, alone at night in the studio, I could feel things again: I cried pulling up the lines of the forehead, cried holding open the mouth. I kissed his hard clay lips once, savoring the fine grit on my tongue.

            One night, going to refill my coffee can of water, I tripped on the spindly leg of the sculpture stand and it flipped in a second, no way to catch it. I see it now in slow motion: how I screamed, like seeing someone get hit by a car. How I rushed to him, kneeling, how I couldn’t breathe—but he was okay, he was okay. He had landed on his right cheekbone, almost unharmed. How I sat back on the cold marble floor, shaking. He was okay.

            I couldn’t get the cheeks to match again, though. No matter how I built and blended, the right side remained flatter after the accident.

            One day, he had to be finished. The semester was ending, the show was coming. I didn’t eat the day he went off to the kiln for fear that he would crack, and he did—a magnificent hairline fracture wandering back from the corner of the mouth, a thin line branching straight down from the corner of the eye like a tear. I loved him more for breaking.

*          *          *          *          *

A year later, watching you sleep on the other side of the world, I touched your cheek.

            Your eyes opened. “What’s wrong?”

            “What happened here?”

            “A motorcycle accident a long time ago. What is it?”

            I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before: the full lips, the nose, the beard, the long eyes, no longer hollow. “It’s you.”

Brook Bhagat’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and humor have appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror Magazine, Harbinger Asylum, Little India, Rat's Ass Review, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and other journals and anthologies, and she is the 2020 winner of A Story in 100 Words’ nature writing contest. She and her husband Gaurav created Blue Planet Journal, which she edits and writes for. She holds an MFA from Lindenwood University, is an assistant professor of English at a community college, and is writing a novel. Her poetry collection, Only Flying, is due out Nov. 16, 2021 from Unsolicited Press. See more at brook-bhagat.com or reach her on Twitter at @BrookBhagat.