Thrust: A Novel

Dearest Aurora,

I’ve had to position the hand in Madison Square Park to raise money.

She is beautiful, the isolated limb. The wrist rises to the tops of the trees in the park and above the rooftops. The torch tips are visible for almost a mile around.

I wonder what the casual passerby thinks — someone on his way home from work, some exhausted mother demoralized by worry over how to feed her children. Do they see it as a monstrosity, or does it spark just a bit of imagination? Are they tempted to drop their fatigue and hopelessness for a moment and venture into the park to see what stands there, amid the trees, or do they tell their children to stay away from it, as if it were some ghostly extremity?

This woman must emerge in pieces.

The hand in the trees needs money. Damn this gift from one nation to another without the funding of either.

I know what the papers are saying. They seem confused and act superior. They all snipe that the supposed gift from one country to another has apparently failed to produce a whole entity — that perhaps this is all there is, this giant hand and torch performing without a platform in a city park. Like an amusement park feature. I hate what they’ve written.

I watch the well-to-do stride up to the hand in all their silk and velvet, their parasols and cigars and shined shoes. They carry the look of people who feel obliged to perform some understanding of the object before them. Wealthy people always perform knowingness, whether or not they possess any. Vapid bubbleheads in colorful clothes, they tête-à-tête together as if exchanging brilliant observations. I don’t care. The object itself, even in part, creates mystery and suspense and interest; it is like a spider’s web. It’s not their understanding I want. It’s their attention. I want their lust drawn out by the object. I learned this from you.

You understand this, Aurora: The colossus is not for them. It is for a world that doesn’t exist yet. I want them to want. I want their want to be overwhelming — for them to demand, Give us this statue so that we may say that it is ours, that this vision is our vision. I want their desire to travel like fierce electrical current to those whose money shapes the world.

When Viollet decided upon the nature of the frame — wood-slatted, covered in plaster, that plaster sanded down to a texture that can approximate the curves and lines of a bodily form, carefully crafted wood ridges along the edges, sheets of copper hammered around the molds and structure — I felt giddy. I could see the body before the body even took shape. We have much to figure out still; chief among our questions remains how to get the body to stand. You will want me to say “her body” here, and so I will: we need her body to stand. Upright. Forever. In spite of construction, of its several distinct pieces; in spite of weather and time. In spite of the entire world.

To that end, we have created a system inside the studio involving ropes and metal. (I hope those two words conjure something in your body when you read them.) My beloved assistant Jean-Marie and the artist Monduit realized that we must render her in slices. The base, feet, and dress hem: one slice. The dress, shins, knees, another slice. Her head and shoulders their own slice. To accommodate the engineering and construction, we have assessed the model with strings and measurements, and replicated the entire system using hefty ropes dangling from the ceiling. Can you see them? Will you perhaps come to see them? May I show you how to wrap a body like an animal’s and swing it toward pleasure? Perhaps you have something to show me?

I’ve left the best for last, though. As to the problem of her interior, I had a gift of imagination from an old friend: Gustave Eiffel. Or perhaps his idea simply merged with the truth of you, my beloved, and everything I know about your body as a woman in this world. He told me, Build a giant metal corset — but one where the woman’s lungs are fully and freely expanded rather than contracted. There is no more perfect answer.

A corset built not for beauty, but for freedom.

I always leave my encounters with you wanting more — but not from you, love, I did not need to ask you for more. When I say “more,” what I mean is that I created the condition for more, based on everything that was between us, and then I filled the space between us. I created a space in my sculpture workshop where men might be free to be fully men with one another, in a world that makes men opt instead for war and violence and money and wives — those great masculine sublimations, those cultural underpinnings that keep men from exploring and creating their own desire for each other. It was during the construction of the giant woman’s substructure that the idea first seized me. As I watched the metalsmith working so close to the metal — the flight of electric sparks, the delicious flex of his forearms — my imagination locked on two things at once. The first was a phrase you said to me in our youth, and which I’ve held in my body ever after: Hold as still as a statue.

The second was the word liberty. I saw in an instant what I must draw, and I left instantly to draw it. I began first with the shape of winged victory — but I imagined her internally, the iron structure. I then reimagined the image as a metal full-body brace that could hold a man suspended, unable to escape or move, arms spread like wings, legs spread wide enough for entry, body held, neck held, head held in a suspended kind of flight. And what to do while inside the brace would be to hold still. Hold still while Viollet removed his velvet jacket. Hold still while he undressed, the fourteen-inch satin cuffs of his shirt covering his hands falling to the floor. Hold still while my dear assistant with his sinewy willow of a body began to caress me. Hold still while Viollet cupped Jean-Marie’s ass enough to feel him push back, enough to make him reach for my cock. Hold still when Viollet moved to burn the hair around my nipples from my chest with a match, a little at a time, as carefully as an artist, until the hair itself filled with blood and lust.

This construction is far superior to the threesome-facilitating chair I designed. This structure would bring a blush from Daedalus, that perfect sculptor who built the Labyrinth. These wings would not melt in the sun. Were you to be suspended in my winged metal sculpture, your breasts would hang like illuminated globes, your lips would suck open in their reddened splendor, your derrière would open like a mouth.

The leg and ass holsters can be adjusted.

During the day, when workers were working on the pieces of woman for the statue — long hours of arduous physical work — no one asked what was behind the thick velvet curtain I had fashioned exactly as yours in your Rooms, only larger, more monstrous. Just as I never even asked, except once, what was behind that door in your home and place of business — Room 8. I knew from your first stare when I inquired that the door was not for me.

Sometimes, I confess, it feels good just to hang there like that, alone, open to the world. Is that the space of woman? I can feel each limb one at a time. My limbs remembering something like wings or flight? Phantom?

Yours unto death,

Frédéric