A Head in Cambodia. Nancy Tingley
your eye was drawn to them. He looked like an early Dvaravati sculpture, one of those slender Thai figures with oversized hands. Hard to imagine those hands repairing a fine ceramic piece, in-painting a scarred sculpture, dexterously reconstructing a shattered, delicate Meissen teacup. Harder still to believe he made fine jewelry on the weekends, delicately spun confections, one of which I wore around my neck. He’d made it for me the previous year for my birthday. I felt like a klutz in his presence, as if all thumbs, which I wasn’t, except in comparison.
He softened as he looked at the necklace, which I’d unconsciously touched as I walked into the lab. He looked me up and down. “That’s some skirt,” he said.
“I’m getting that from various sources.” I looked pointedly at his jeans.
Tyler wore a lab coat over a flannel shirt and the scruffiest jeans imaginable, the knees sagging and stained. How he felt that he could criticize my wardrobe was a question I wouldn’t mind asking, but it didn’t seem like the right moment. Arthur Philen had been trying unsuccessfully to alter Tyler’s wardrobe, sending out a series of memos that had begun as a general suggestion regarding a dress code and had become narrower and more pointedly directed at Tyler with each new missive. In response, Tyler had taken to wearing his gardening clothes to work.
We both laughed, and as I came to stand next to him, he gave my shoulders a quick squeeze. “I couldn’t find you. I asked everyone, but no one knew where you were.” A slight exaggeration.
He sighed and braced his meaty hands on the table. “Arthur dragged me upstairs this morning. He’d decided that one of the sculptures in your gallery was leaning, and he wanted me to fix it.”
I tried to think which of my sculptures that might have been. I’d walked through the gallery first thing that morning, checking each piece as I did every morning, part of my job as curator. “Was it leaning?”
“Of course not. So tell me about this.” Tyler pulled on gloves and picked up the head. It looked miniature in his hands. Neither of us spoke, we just admired, for no matter how he turned it, it was gorgeous. I told him what I knew.
“So you’re wanting me to authenticate it?”
“Yes, basically.”
“Well, stone is tricky. You know that. There are some obvious things that I can do. I can compare the stone to the Cambodian sculptures that we have and to those in the museum in San Francisco. Will P.P. allow me to chip a little from the lowest part of the neck?” He turned the head over.
“Yes. I asked him.”
“Better get it in writing.”
“Okay.”
“With that chip and that chipped area, I’ll be able to see the depth and irregularity of the surface. If it’s completely uniform, that would be odd. It would suggest that a chemical has been applied to the surface to make it look discolored, worn, old. But if it does appear that something has been applied, it isn’t so easy to see what that application might be.”
“In Southeast Asia they use fruits, resins sometimes. Rub it in and voila, you’ve got an altered surface.”
“Yeah. We saw that on that bronze you brought in last year.”
“Right.” I’d doubted that bronze from the moment I’d seen it, but asked Tyler to look at it anyway. Every fake was a lesson.
“Bronze is radically different from stone.” He held the head near to his face, pulling down the magnifying visor he always wore, an extension of his body. “I’ll look closely at the cuts, the edges. Try to see the wear, which I’m not seeing at the moment. Or not much.” He lifted his head and turned the visor up again.
I said, “I couldn’t either, though I was looking with my bare eye. Could be a fake. It’s from Southeast Asia, and our starting premise is that anything could be a fake. The modern sculptors are really good.” I slipped on gloves.
“Yes, they’re good, and they’re prolific. Sure is gorgeous.” He raised the sculpture in front of him. “I’d like to meet her in a dark alley.”
“Right.” I didn’t want to think about Tyler’s sexual longings. I reached for the sculpture. “When do you think that you might be able to get to this?”
“When do you need it?”
“Yesterday, of course.”
“I have pieces to get ready for Brian’s upcoming exhibition. I have to prepare for the Qing ceramics we’re borrowing for your exhibition. I have to write up condition reports. The list goes on.”
Every object that comes from the outside, on loan for an exhibition, needs a condition report. “I know, and I wouldn’t be in a hurry, but Arthur walked in while P.P. and I were looking at it.”
Tyler groaned. “A knot?”
“A total knot.”
“Okay. I’ll try to carve out some time tomorrow. I need to go into the city at the end of the week, and when I’m at the Asian I’ll look at their Cambodian sculptures. I’m having lunch with one of their conservators. I’ll ask if he knows of any research that’s been done on Cambodian stone.”
“Thanks so much, Tyler. I really appreciate it.” I’d been looking at the carving of her hair. Now I placed her back on the table and gazed at her face, the full lips, the slightly flared nostrils, and the eyes. She was looking straight at me, and I had the eerie feeling that she was trying to tell me something. Did she want to be reunited with her body, or did she want whoever had carved her to carve her a new body? Don’t worry, I mentally told her. I’ll figure it out.
I sank into her, absorbing her. I ran my gloved finger along her lotus eyelid. She was perfect, and I felt my heart open to her perfection. I felt that frisson of excitement at such beauty and at the mystery before me.
I realized Tyler was watching me and said without looking up, “I won’t. Oh, and by the way, if it is the authentic piece, until recently it had been reattached to the body, so you might look for evidence of adhesive on the break.”
“I saw that look,” he said. “And now you’re blushing.”
“What are you talking about?” I set down the head and snapped the gloves off my fingers, the sound like a series of slingshots.
“Don’t make her any promises, Jenna.”
I laughed, pretending I hadn’t been caught in the act, “What could I possibly promise?”
Tyler’s mouth opened, closed, and he pulled a cardboard box from beneath the table and arranged the head, cocooning it in foam. Then he neatly folded the towel, laid it on the head, and got paper from his desk to write a label. “The receipt. Don’t forget the receipt.”
I waved as I slid through the door.
My cell phone rang as I headed toward Breeze’s office. My mother. I groaned, debated for an instant, and stuck the phone back in my pocket. Not now.
I DON’T need the distraction of the Cambodian head, I thought as I finally settled back at my desk to read through the galleys for the Qing exhibition catalogue. It wasn’t much longer than a brochure, but its production had been a headache. The exhibition had a tight installation schedule because of a Western art show of medieval decorative arts that Arthur had shoehorned into our already overloaded exhibition schedule. He often lost sight of the fact that we were a small museum in a small town with a small staff. Brian, the Western art curator, and I had fought to maintain the schedule we’d carefully crafted, but lost the battle to Arthur’s aggressive self-promotion and Caleb New’s laissez-faire directorial style.
Water under the bridge, I thought. I had to finish my edits today and get them in the overnight mail tomorrow if the catalogue was going to be printed in time for the exhibition opening. As if the exhibition schedule wasn’t tight enough, we’d had a kerfuffle about the printing due to an equipment breakdown, which the Hong Kong printer hadn’t