Writing
CHICAGO QUARTERLY REVIEW
THE ARTIST’S ARM
Valerie Hegarty
The artist residency was notable in creative circles for many things: the cabins in the sprawling acreage of meadow and woodland, the solitude and privacy afforded by the landscape, the uninterrupted long hours each day for a creative deep dive, the three hearty meals cooked and served up to the artists who didn’t even need to dial Fresh Direct, cook for ungrateful children, clear or wash dishes. The artists were pampered and treated as if they were important, which was a welcome break from most artists’ reality of eking out work hours while the babies were napping, or the teenagers were out partying, or thankfully when the divorce threw them out so they could sleep on their studio floor.
Most artist residencies provided all these former gifts—to which the artists were immensely grateful—so this residency was of special note for its convivial atmosphere, which, when expounded upon by previous residents, involved a bacchanalian nightlife, with drinks poured beginning at 4:00 p.m. back in the main mansion as artists, writers and composers emerged from upstairs rooms and dirt roads leading out of the woods, everyone excited for some friendly companionship after a full day of solitude working on whatever project had brought them there in the first place.
I was accepted to the artist residency at a difficult time, a time of contrasts; when my sculptures were in high demand by collectors, but also when I was at the height of my addiction. Both activities, sculpting and drinking—more specifically, the twist of the wrist needed for carving and the lift of the wrist needed to press a glass to my lips—stressed my right hand and wrist to a such degree that I wore a beige-colored splint that I bought at Walgreens and kept hidden under the long sleeve of my shirt. I was producing sculptures at a robotic pace to keep up with the demands of my gallery and maybe it was this pressure that drove me to drink in increasingly excessive amounts to the point I found myself blacking out in my studio and waking up hours later to a scene of destruction, where apparently I had smashed all the sculptures I had made during the day.
It was on the third morning of waking up to a studio littered with debris: ceramic shards, smashed plaster, torn wire, shredded paper—all of which I scraped up with my dustpan and threw in the trash—when I literally scraped myself off the floor and got on my laptop to Google AA. There was a meeting close to my studio that very day at noon, and not without some woe-is-me-resignation did I finally drag my sorry ass of a self there to get help.
The meeting was in a church and as I slipped into one of the pews, I stared up at the stained glass ceiling, recalling the church my mother brought us to every Sunday when we were kids. I always loved church, not so much the mass but the feeling of spaciousness with a ceiling that soared into what seemed like the sky since I was young and short and brought up in a mobile home, where once I was full-grown I realized had such a low ceiling that it was easy to reach with my outstretched arm.
The AA meeting started and I listened to a cast of characters that looked like they had taken a break from starring in a Carson McCullers bar fight to drop by in order to describe their drinking escapades while I sobbed in my pew deluged with shame at my addiction. When the meeting microphone somehow was passed into my hands, its slight weight hurt my right wrist, my tendons burning, but I raised the microphone to my lips and to my surprise, they puckered up and confidently announced, “I am an alcoholic.”
I had never said this before, not even to myself in the darkest of nights, and now I was saying it to a crowd of rowdy ex-drinkers that clapped and whistled and slapped my back. After the meeting, as cookies and phone numbers were pressed into my palm, I told the group I was going on a monthlong artist residency the very next day. One of the ex-drunks, named Janet, happened to be a writer and had gone to this very artist residency, and she cringed as she took me aside.
Janet warned me about the drinking, gave me her phone number, and told me to call her every day, saying she would be there for me as a fellow artist and ex-drinker to talk me down when I had cravings for the cocktails that would be served at the mansion in the peacock period room at happy hour.
I entered her phone number into my cell and thanked her profusely and asked her how much money I owed her, to which she laughed and told me that AA was free—well technically they liked if everyone paid two dollars per meeting—but it was not required or necessary and this meeting had someone stealing from the till anyway so better I kept my money until they got an upgrade from the tin can to a piggy bank with a lock.
When I got home I took all my bottles of alcohol and brought them downstairs into my apartment lobby and left them lined up under the mailboxes with a sign that said free from an ex-drinker and when I came downstairs an hour later to get my mail, all the bottles were gone. I felt a little guilty, maybe I had tempted an ex-drinker out of sobriety with the readily accessible booze, or some underaged kid thought it was an early Christmas and grabbed the stash only to later crash their parents’ car when they tried to parallel park, but it was too late now to reverse my actions, I was on a path and I had to keep going.
A few days later, I took a train to the artist residency, with my suitcase packed with supplies—CelluClay, glue, carving tools, paper, canvas, paint- brushes, paint—I would buy the heavier materials in town as I could get plaster and cement from the local hardware store. A perky writer greeted me at the mansion front door and showed me upstairs to my room, previously the writing alcove for a famous writer that had famously died of suicide by swallowing a bottle of pills while away on another residency in Italy. It was a little eerie to be in the room and sleep in her bed but she hadn’t been there for at least one hundred years so any lingering energy I felt was probably from a more recent writer who had toiled at the desk and tormented himself on the couch, and probably fucked in the bed while on the residency himself.
After I dropped a few things in the room, I pulled my teetering trolley-dolly full of supplies down a winding dirt road, following my perky writer guide as she pointed the way to my studio. All the studios were arranged in such a way that you couldn’t view another studio from the windows, giving every artist the impression of being alone in the land- scape, like the residency was offering solitude on steroids.
It was funny to think about how this place was also a breeding ground for drinking and drugs and elicit affairs to the point where I had to sign a release promising not to take any photographs while on the residency due to a past scandal where someone posted a photo on Facebook of a party where multiple people saw their multiple spouses sucking face with unidentified persons, except for the one famous person, who saw their famous writer spouse sucking face with another famous writer’s face, and the backlash was severe, with patrons withdrawing donations that had been needed to fund the restoration of the mansion’s cupola, which now remained closed until further notice.
My guide left by giving me the theme of tonight’s cocktail hour, Cheever cherrutes, and I knew I didn’t need to know what a cherrute was, but I couldn’t help but ask—apparently blue vodka, cherry brandy, and grapefruit juice, garnished with a cherry—and I thought Cheever would never drink that shit, and now neither would I, but suddenly I wanted to, and badly, but I told myself maybe this was one of those blessings of being sober, never being allowed to drink a cherrute. After my guide went over the dinner menu and meal schedule, she wished me a wonderful solitude.
When the door shut behind her, I felt a shudder of utter desolation pass through me as I realized I wouldn’t drink any more alcohol for the rest of my life. I looked longingly at the door, maybe I could just run away, and while I was contemplating my escape, I saw there was a list of artists’ names, written in a column going down the length of the doorway. They were signatures of the artists themselves, who had worked in the studio over the past many years, and midway down the list was the name Janet, the woman in AA who had given me her phone number. This was clearly a sign from God about something. Maybe a sign that God was an artist or a sign that I shouldn’t drink or a sign that God would protect me from drinking or maybe it was just a sign that I should call Janet.
She picked up on the first ring and her voice soothed me, she under- stood the desolation and assured me I was not in this world alone, that I had the whole room of downtrodden ex-drinkers I’d met at the AA meeting on my side and they would protect me like an army of invisible sober warriors and that I should imagine them surrounding me whenever I found myself alone and quivering in an alcohol-free vacuum.
When I hung up the phone, I sat down and marked up a calendar of the list of sculptures I needed to create to fulfill my collectors’ demands along with a handful of group shows in Europe that would all open the next month on the same day. There was no way I could make all this work and my wrist hurt just from writing on the calendar, never mind pouring and carving plaster that I would splotch with color from the many tubes of paint I needed to massage and shake and squeeze. I felt the tears coming, but I imagined there were two burly ex-drinkers on either side of me, propping me up and squeezing the tubes in their meaty fists. Now much calmer, I had a brainstorm and I debated whether to run it by Janet, but I told myself she wouldn’t care as it wasn’t like I was going to drink. So I took the set of carving tools from my suitcase, and working methodically at my desk, I cut off my right arm.
I sat and stared at my right arm as it lay on the table, now disconnected from my body, and I cursed my impulsivity. But it was too late, so the only thing I could think to do was to make a sculpture of an arm that looked as much like my real arm as possible and attach it with packing tape to my right shoulder. The fingers on my sculptural arm looked a little weird, I think the dimensions were off, so I stuffed my hand in my front pocket and reminded myself to keep it there. With my left hand I fanned all my materials out on the studio floor, then went over to the couch that was in the corner and sprawled out on my back, exhausted from the trip and the second day of not drinking, and the effort it had taken to cut off my arm and the anxiety and energy expended to make the fake one. I stared up at the skylight as it started to rain. The thrumming on the glass above me was soothing and I soon fell asleep.
* * *
I heard a gong and I was in a Buddhist temple, where a burly ex-drinker was ringing the gong by using my head, and he was telling me it was AA-approved therapy, and when I woke up, my head was pounding, and a gong was still ringing, but not because of my head. I realized it was the dinner gong, and I hastily got off the couch, tripping over my sculptural arm, which must have fallen off when I was asleep. I stuck it back into my shoulder and stuffed the fingers in my pocket, and unfortunately a few of the fingers broke off, but it didn’t matter as long as I kept my hand in my pocket. Since it was too hard to get it over my head, I tied a sweatshirt around my neck like a cape, hoping the empty sleeves would create enough visual dissonance that the slightly bulging proportions of my fake right arm wouldn’t be noticed.
At the dinner buffet line, it was hard to maneuver ladles and tongs with my left hand, but all the artists and writers and two composers were drunk on the Cheever cherrutes, rendering them friendly and helpful, and a composer that smelled like cherries with red glossy lips spooned chickpeas onto my plate. “I had surgery on my right arm,” I said. “So my fingers are secured in my pockets for stabilization reasons.”
“That happened to me once too,” he said, and even though my made-up surgery could have been up and down my arm, he squeezed my fake arm’s bulging bicep and whistled admiringly. “You’re hard as a rock,” he said. “I need your trainer’s number,” which I took to mean, “I want to fuck you,” which we did after dinner. I insisted on going back to his studio, even though we walked by my studio on the way, while I prayed he didn’t look inside the window and spot my right arm crawling around on the floor, which I thought I saw out of the corner of my eye. Or maybe it was only a snake from the woods.
After the composer passed out, I called Janet and told her about having sex with a man in a cherry-stained shirt and maybe, just maybe, I enjoyed licking the vodka off his blue-stained teeth. She said not to worry, not everything changes overnight, and after we hung up I thought I probably should have told her about cutting off my arm, but it seemed like too much to confess. Especially not while Janet still thought I was worthy of redemption.
I walked back to my studio through the woods, which were pitch-dark and full of goblin eyes flicking about. I walked slower, hoping something would leap out and kill me; I didn’t think I was going to be able to do this, this not-drinking thing. When I got to my studio door, disappointed nothing had attached to my neck and bitten my carotid, I thought to myself, Well at least I won’t open the door to a scene of utter destruction, let’s at least be thankful for that.
I paced around the studio in disbelief, not only was there no destruction, there were five sculptures in progress. Someone had gone to the hardware store and brought back plaster and cement, making cast forms inside hollow tree trunks they must have dragged in from the woods. My first thought was AA was a magical cult, and these ex-drinkers I was imagining with me when I needed help were real people that had shown up and done my work for me. All while I was romping around with the composer, not even worried he’d discover my fake arm since he was so drunk.
As I inspected my studio further, I saw my severed right arm on the couch, hand draped elegantly on the pillow. My arm was covered in paint splotches and plaster dust, a carving tool still dangling from limp fingers, as my arm was soundly asleep. I was too tired and confused to process this, so I headed back into the woods to return to my bedroom in the mansion, and although I was exhausted, I also felt a ray of hope. Just try and kill me, I dare you, I challenged telepathically to the witches and vampires I sensed swirling about my head. It was another day and night I hadn’t had a drink, if you don’t count licking blue vodka off someone else’s teeth, and my sculptures were well underway without any pain; at least the only pain I felt was where my fake arm was scraping against my armpit, but that was easily solved with some cotton balls and more tape.
Before I went to sleep I called Janet and told her I was getting my head on the pillow clean and sober, like she had said, but I left out the part where a few minutes earlier I’d fucked a writer at the mansion who’d rescued me from a bat, having run into the hallway when he heard me screaming because a bat flew into my hair on my return trip from the communal bath. The writer put on his bicycle gloves and helped untangle the bat from my hair, releasing it out his bedroom window.
I was so grateful I agreed to read his writing when he asked, and as I sat on his bed and struggled my way through two pages about him trying to forgive his dead alcoholic mother, I pretended to kiss him out of compassion, but really I couldn’t bear to read anymore about how his mother’s drinking had torn holes in his young boy’s heart, where she latched on with fangs and sucked out his blood. Things don’t change overnight, I told myself, as I padded back down the carpet to my bedroom with both arms over my head.
* * *
At this same residency was another artist named Keith, who I suspected for years was ripping off my work. Even though his medium was different and so was the color scheme, along with his conceptual framework, and his scale, pretty much everything about the work was different, I had this sneaking suspicion he waited to see what I made, and then he made the opposite. His subterfuge was so sophisticated he got double the reviews and sold his work for twice as much money, and to top it off, he was really, really good-looking, which pissed me off the most.
Keith went missing the next day before lunch and no one noticed he was gone until the evening at dinner, when we all sat together and saw there was one empty seat. This was strange as there was nowhere for him to go at night except his studio or the mansion to sleep and eat. Once we started looking around the mansion, the cook found Keith’s brown-bag lunch still sitting in the mansion’s sunroom, and no one recalled if they had seen him leave the communal bath this morning.
Since there was nothing to do anyway, we all gathered in a group and headed through the woods to Keith’s studio. The writer who was writing about his dead alcoholic mother had a headlamp and walked out front; our bodies cast long, eerie shadows through the trees. I already didn’t have a good feeling about Keith but now I was sure something really bad had happened.
This was confirmed by the screaming as the son-of-the-alcoholic- mother writer with the headlamp opened the door and looked down at his feet. “Blood! It’s blood!” Writers and artists were yelling and rushing into Keith’s studio, and by the time I got in there, others were rushing out, following the trail of blood. I was still inside, and if my arm hadn’t been fake and missing fingers, I would have put my hand over my gaping mouth.
Keith made sculptures by first baking cakes in some Easy-Bake Oven contraption, after which he left the cakes exposed to the elements, where they grew mold and mushrooms and filled with holes from worms. When he judged the sculpture “done,” he enclosed the cake in a plexi vitrine labeled with the cake recipe and the date.
Inside his studio, there were freshly baked and frosted cakes smashed and smeared on the floor, while a trail of blood wound through the mess, like some Lord of the Flies birthday party turned sacrifice. I was horrified at how this recalled my destruction of my own work in blackouts. Could I have done this is my sleep? Had I killed Keith and didn’t remember what I’d done?
The police were called and there was much confusion while the cops shone flashlights on the trail of blood, and writers scribbled in notebooks to make sure they got every detail right so they could perhaps use the event for a personal essay later. The two composers were tapping out a rhythm with stones on trees as the cops asked questions, and I’m not sure if this was protocol, but I watched as one of the cops ran his finger through some frosting on the wall and licked it when he thought no one was looking.
After several hours, the area around Keith’s studio was cordoned off and we were led back to the mansion, where everyone retired to the salmon brocade period room to consider hypotheticals. I wrapped my sweatshirt cape tightly around my sculptural arm, terrified I might be the culprit and found out. Someone broke out a bottle of whiskey and the writers passed it around, and the artists opened a bottle of vodka, while the two composers debated whether they wanted to drink Campari or grenache. My skin was crawling watching glints form in everyone’s eyes as their mouths turned to wet slits that latched onto the edges of glasses, sucking like leeches, and I ran out of the room and called Janet.
Janet told me not to get lost in the wreckage of the future, that Mark Twain said once, “The worst things in my life never happened,” and that surely they would find Keith and maybe he cut his finger by accident and was walking to Walgreens for a Band-Aid and would be back before we all knew it and I thought she hadn’t seen the trail of blood, and she didn’t know I used to destroy my own sculptures in blackouts, and she didn’t know about the bat in my hair and fucking a man with the holes in his heart, and how my detached arm slept on the couch, and the magical ex-drinkers that did my work for me.
But a few days later, it turned out Janet was right and Keith was located back in the city. When the police interviewed him, he said he’d cut his finger and left the residency, and when he got back to the city, he decided to completely change his body of work and when I saw him at an artist talk years later and he was asked about this turning point in his work, the color drained from his face and he said he didn’t want to talk about his past work and the interviewer tried a few more times to approach the question from a different angle, but Keith refused to answer.
* * *
The morning after Keith went missing, I went to my studio and was shocked to see all my sculptures were complete, ten sculptures total, which reached as high as the ten-foot ceiling, cast objects in cement piled on top of each other and carved with imagery from my personal repertoire of fruits going to rot, trees stripped of leaves with spidery limbs spreading like veins, painted orange moons and blue fog obscuring and illuminating ants and birds and snails sculpted from clay and painted in high-gloss reds, pinks and yellows. I went to the couch and looked down at my detached right arm, sleeping so soundly that it didn’t even wake when I poked it. My finger felt sticky, so I bent down to look closer and that’s when I saw on the side of my detached right arm was a thick swipe of frosting from one of Keith’s cakes.
Oh my god, I had a sensation of the floor crumbling beneath me, it was my right arm that had hurt Keith and destroyed his work and I was hyperventilating and I doubled over to catch my breath, I needed a drink, I wasn’t not going to drink, I had my head bent down below my knees while I tried to breathe and that’s when I saw the puddle of blood seeping out from under the couch. I told myself everything was fine, it was just some spilled paint. I reached out with my left hand that was trembling uncontrollably as I lifted the couch skirt.
Underneath was a woman lying on her side with her back to me, so I didn’t know who she was, but she was wearing a matching tee to the one I was wearing, with blue and white stripes. She had long, wavy brown hair like mine and in her hair were my silver barrettes. Did she sneak in here to steal my stuff? Did my arm act in self-defense? There was blood matted in her hair and under her head. I was pretty sure she was dead.
I dropped the skirt and looked at my detached arm on the couch. It was smeared with different colors of paint. I touched a splotch of alizarin paint with my forefinger and when I licked it, it tasted like rust. It wasn’t paint. It was blood. My detached arm was lazily flexing fingers, scrunching fingertips into the couch cushion as it started to wake up. I turned and ran, flung open the studio door, but before I ran out, I saw Janet’s name, and once I was outside the door, I started to hyperventilate again and I fell to my knees and called Janet.
I screamed into the receiver, “I need a drink! I need a drink!” Janet told me to breathe and said it was natural to feel like drinking with the anxiety of Keith’s disappearance and the drama from last night. I didn’t tell her the rest, how could I? There was no salvation after this.
When I got off the phone with Janet, I knew what I had to do and my mind was made up. I imagined four ex-mafia ex-drinkers were helping me as I dragged the woman out from under the couch. I wrapped her in a blanket and pulled her into the woods and hid her in the old water tank, where no one would find her, as it was rumored the tank was haunted by the original benefactor’s dead child, and even though everyone laughed at the ghost story, they steered clear just in case.
Once that was done, I went back to the studio and lifted my detached right arm, which had thankfully fallen back to sleep, off the couch and carried it over to my desk. With carving tools, chisels, scissors and X-Actos, I dissected my detached right hand and arm into a hundred small pieces, each of which I put in a brown bag after taking out my lunch. All afternoon, I walked around the residency grounds burying small pieces of my arm in the mud. I pushed the last piece, the tip of my forefinger, into the dirt of the mansion’s herb garden, under my bedroom window. Then I went back to my studio and cleaned up the blood.
I waited anxiously for a writer or artist to be declared missing but at dinner everyone showed up. After a few days with no mention of a missing person from the property, and after Keith was found in the city, I began to relax. It was spring and every day it rained and I had buckets placed around my studio to catch the drips from the leaks. I worked on five more sculptures and it was interesting working with only my left arm, it added an unselfconscious element to my work, and I don’t think I could have achieved it any other way.
As days passed, I had a persistent itch under my sculptural arm and when I took it off one day to scratch, I saw a new arm was growing from the wound where I had cut my old one off. My new arm was shorter and thinner, but every day it grew a little bigger and stronger, to the point where I was using it to sculpt when it reached half size. This worked really well for sculpting fine details because of my new arm’s tiny fingers, but that phase passed and over more days and weeks my right arm continued to grow until it looked like I had never cut my old one off.
The final two weeks of the residency, I managed to make it through the cocktail hours by wearing a visor and carrying a basketball in one hand and a tennis racket in the other. When anyone tried to hand me a drink, I would shrug my shoulders as my hands were full, and respond, “I prefer to play sports.”
* * *
At the end of the residency there was an impromptu basketball game on the deteriorating tennis court behind the mansion where my rain buckets were tied to low branches for nets. It was the writers versus the artists while the two composers refereed with twigs they had carved to whistle B flat. I was never very sporty but my new right arm proved strangely strong and accurate and I easily sunk three-point shots to ecstatic whistles, cheers and slaps on the back.
That night I called Janet and said, “I think I’m going to make it,” and she said, “I knew you would,” and when I shut my eyes to go to sleep, I heard bubbling and noises like suction cups being pulled off wet cement. When I looked out my window from the third floor of the mansion, the grounds were illuminated by the orange full moon. I thought I saw a finger pushing up out of the mud in the herb garden below, and another finger rising out of the mud by the rose garden, and another finger unfurling behind the stream, and two fingers racing rising out of the dirt of a benefactor’s grave, and I rubbed my eyes and shut the window. I thought the night was getting the better of me, and it was true that without the lights and sounds of the city, I was afraid of the dark. I imagined several burly ex-drinkers kneeling in a ring around my bed, with Janet sitting with her back to me, writing at the desk, and I fell back to sleep, lulled by the muffled sounds outside of little fingers pushing aside mud with a gurgle, gurgle, glub.