THE STARVING ARTIST BY MARIAN TOEWS

November, 2004

         Since her thirtieth birthday, Martha has been gradually seeping back inside her own head. As though the turning over from twenty-nine into this new decade pierced a tiny hole in her basic Self and now she is leaking away. Just as she has become obsessed with ridding her house of clutter, she is discarding whole layers of her personality. What is left pools up into her head, creating a thin soup. She is becoming sparse. She rarely speaks. Her thoughts are pared down, even her emotions are diluted.

         Lately she has taken to eating no more than what is necessary to keep her body functioning. She satisfies her hunger by sipping from a plastic bottle of water, refilled daily from the brita filter. This morning she stepped onto the scale and was only slightly distressed to discover that she has lost eight pounds. Already slender, her five foot two frame quickly shows any weight gain or loss. At forty, she looks ten years younger. Now at one hundred pounds, she weighs less then she did at the age of fifteen.

         Smoothing back her long brunette hair into a ponytail, she studies the delicate bones of her face, the graceful line of her neck. Her heart flutters, as it does so often now. She presses her bird-like hand to her chest to calm the beating. As she drifts from one room to another, she hardly feels the floor beneath her bare feet. Without any weight to press down on the varnished wood, she moves through the house like a phantom. In her imagination she is becoming a wisp of air or a breath of wind. Sunbeams streaming through the uncurtained windows blur her edges, she melts into the light and emerges on the other side of shadow.

         One night when they made love, her husband traced the ridge of her hip bone. His hand moved up to follow the line of each of her ribs. When he touched her delicate collar bone, Martha shivered. Harold’s fingers tightened for a moment, pressing into her throat. She felt her own pulse against his finger tips and recognized herself as a caged bird. A sigh drifted up through her body, trembled on her lips and lingered in the air between them. Harold watched her with concern. Their eyes met and the panic in both of them seemed to freeze the moment, creating an off beat in time.

         “I don’t recognize you.” he’d told her then.

         She creates art, at night, in the room that she has made her own. In the evening after dinner when Harold has gone to bed, she slips out of her clothes and poses for her digital camera set on a tripod. With love songs spinning on the record player, and the heater turned to high, she arranges her body to illustrate the images that sprout daily in her imagination. There is no other sound but the music as she drapes her shoulders in gauzy material and looks seductively over her shoulder. The camera captures this fleeting moment, then she flings the material away to fold herself into her large, antique, velvet covered chair for another shot.

         With the memory card full, she wraps herself in her white chenille robe and drags the chair across to the computer where the latest photographs are loaded and saved. She sits cross-legged, her hair falling across her shoulders and down her narrow back. She sips water as she views the new photos and makes her decision to save or delete.

         The camera is stealing her soul. She can almost feel the growing cavity that is her soul’s nest. It is just below her heart. Each layer taken by the camera, brushes the skin of her heart as it peels away. Perhaps this is why her heart flutters so often.

         The walls of Martha’s room are papered with eyes that look down on her. Her own eyes, depicted again and again in photographs that she printed and glued in place. Her weight loss is beginning to show in the most recent photographs. Her arms appear twig-like, her thighs are twin blades. Posing with her thighs pressed against her chest, her buttocks appear bony and starved, their natural rounded shape lost. For all of this she is still beautiful. Her large expressive eyes have grown darker in contrast to the paleness of her face. Serenity envelopes her, misting an aura around her body as she flows from one pose to the next. And the camera clicks.

         She is thinking of paring away her husband. To be lighter. She is beginning to believe that long term love is not for artists. Ephemeral, fleeting emotion is best, flitting over the heart, perhaps resting there for a moment before lifting off again. Long term love is heavy and demanding. Her love for this man has become a weight that keeps her from flying. His love for her is a cloak, stifling her wish to be naked and free.

         Daily he enters the room with offerings of warm muffins and tea. “Would you like some soup?” he asks, “A sandwich?” Easing down onto the couch, he describes the sandwich he will make for her. The ingredients roll deliciously from his tongue, creating a mouth-watering image that never-the-less, does nothing for her. She offers him a wan smile and shakes her head. He leaves the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

         “I want to make my own way.” She says to him one morning. “To live in my own space. I want to be alone.”

         The pain in his eyes is startling. Somehow she had convinced herself they could come apart easily, without any breakage. She has become so flimsy, she believed she would simply part from him as wet tissue. Tearing without sound or resistence, she was sure she would leave him unscarred, even unaware that she had gone.

         She no longer wears clothing around the house - the elastic and seams in the material leave marks on her skin that mar her photographs. Like a mother who denies herself for the sake of her offspring, she will not allow herself the small comfort of clothing because it does not serve her art. Though she recalls with longing, the sensation of wrapping herself in warm sweaters, she has folded her sweaters away. The day that she did this, she smoothed her palm over the wool in a gesture of farewell. Now in the cold, her nipples are stiff and long as fingers. She shuts the door to her room to keep some heat inside.

         Her room is too small to work in. She craves open space to match the airy sensation of her empty stomach. Furniture and shelves and the objects on them, close in on her. She wants them out. She brings in boxes and bags, fills them with possessions and leaves them outside her door. Her husband finds them there and takes them sadly away. Stores them in the attic with her discarded sweaters. She fills more boxes and bags. Soon her room is empty, save for her computer and her camera, set on its tripod, and her velvet chair.

         She has not made love with Harold in weeks. The final time, she tensed when his semen spurted inside her. Imagined that soup, those fertile seeds, clogging her up and leaching through her skin to fatten her hungry flesh. After, she squatted in the empty tub under the running tap. She splashed herself with water, inserting her fingers to ensure that no trace remained to hinder the passage of pure and simple air.

         As she squatted in the tub, she ran her fingers through her pubic hair, brushed her flat palm over the patch that suddenly appeared too dark and substantial against her pale skin. Taking scissors and her brass shaver, she lathered and snipped, then moved the shaver delicately over the stubble. The hairs swirling down the drain represented freedom. She washed the tender, newly exposed skin with care.

         Her long hair swept down over her face as she crouched there, looking down between her thighs at her pink and glistening vagina. Her hand reached for the scissors and her fingers opened and closed over her head. The hair fell down to cover her feet. She swept the thick pile together and forced it down into the drain. Bending to hold her shorn head beneath the pouring tap, she covered her scalp with soapy lather and removed the stubble with long, thoughtful strokes of her brass shaver.

         When she emerged from the bathroom, Martha passed her husband without a word. His mournful hand reached to touch her naked scalp. His lips parted to cry for the loss of her beautiful hair, but she did not hear him. His fingers continued to grope after her as she slipped inside her room and closed the door. Since that night she performs daily, the ritual of passing her shaver over her scalp and between her legs. She does this late at night when Harold is sleeping. During the daylight hours she remains inside her room. She has not seen her husband since the shaving. For a time he spoke to her through the closed door, urging her to eat. His voice distorted because he pressed his lips so desperately against the crack between the door and its frame. She listened closely, but failed to recognize the man from the sound of his altered voice, and so she tuned him out. The voice became nothing more than muted background sound to accompany the whispered click of her camera.

         She does not notice the sounds of his leaving - the lifting and carrying out of furniture, the heavy drag of boxes across the wooden floor. The final closing of the front door echoes through the empty house. He does not call goodbye. He does not offer the note he had written to be slipped beneath her door. Instead he takes his words with him, folded and tucked into his pocket. He does not wish to waste them.

         Harold is driving away from his home, from his wife. Behind the seat, his possessions pack the contours of the van. He cannot breathe, the boxes and bags suck the air from his lungs, clattering against one another they wrestle as the van bounces over the rutted road. He senses them pressing against his back, crowding him against the steering wheel.

         He does not cry out when the van fails to make the curve in the road. His possessions tumble in on themselves, breaking upon each other. Boxes crush against their companions. Cardboard corners cave in, the skin warped and distorted. He is flying within the confines of the van as it rolls triumphantly across the open grass. A metal body sated on a smorgasbord of cardboard and wooden furniture and china plates and one man whose flesh is violently meshing with the objects his wife rejected. Everything smashing together and coming away again in this final orgasmic celebration of clutter. The van comes to rest on its roof, tires spinning. Like a fat lion in the grass, it lolls in the sun as the contents of its stomach cease their death throes and lie still.

         His blood pours from his wounds. His broken flesh sags beneath the weight of boxes and suffocating bags. They press insistently down, becoming part of him, taking him into themselves, devouring him. His blood assists in the digestion, a thick, congealing wine to be sucked up into cardboard and cloth. He does not struggle.

         In the empty house, Martha poses for the camera. Arranging her emaciated body in the velvet covered chair, she hooks her claw-like hands under her wasted thighs to lift her legs over the chair’s wooden arm rest. Her bones jar painfully against the hard wood. Her bald head lolls on its insufficient stem. She gasps. The sound of her voice is an implosion. A bird cry within a vacuum.

Marian Toews lives and writes on Vancouver Island in B.C. Canada. Her poetry, prose and artwork have appeared in several Canadian literary journals, anthologies and chapbooks. Her completed memoir 'All the Broken People' is recuperating between submission rounds. She is currently working on her first novel - 'Ashes'.