“And?”

“No such luck,” she grumbled, refilling her bourbon.

“Well, don’t give up hope,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“Yeah, whatever.” She took another large sip. “Anyway, things were pretty difficult but we got by. Gave birth to Tammie, that’s the kid I had inside me when I left my husband. Got a job as a waitress. Moved up to cook, then assistant manager. Crappy little greasy spoon, but what can you do? Some lawyer tracked me down after my father died, and he’d left me a bit of money. So I guess the bastard was good for something, after all.” She held up her glass towards heaven. “I knew I couldn’t raise two kids with what I was making in that restaurant, so I used some of that money to enroll in a night course, accounting. Got decent grades, and was able to get a bad position with a good company.”

“That’s still a long way away from being a gallery owner,” I noted, “and Marianne’s agent.”

“Not as far as you might think. I kept visiting my mom in the hospital and one day I noticed a new patient, a young girl. Attractive, you know, sitting alone at a table. Drawing. She was different from the others. Maybe it was the hair and eyes.”

“Marianne,” I said.

“Bingo,” Jack said. “Except she didn’t have that name back then. She was a Jane Doe who the police had found on the streets. Marianne Engel is just what she asked the doctors to start calling her one day.”

Marianne Engel was not her real name. My surprise at the fact brought a smug look to Jack’s face. It pleased her that there were still things about our mutual friend that she knew and I did not.

“The nurse told me she had been found with no identification, and fingerprints turned up nothing. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell them anything about her past. Maybe her parents were dead or maybe they just abandoned her, who knows? Anyway, after a few visits, I decided to say hello. She was shy, then. When I asked her to show me her drawings, she wouldn’t. But I kept asking and, after a few more visits, she finally did. I was blown away. I’d expected incoherent doodles and all that, but here were fantastic beasts, monsters, and they were so ugly, but they all had something so fragile about them. Something that gave them life in their eyes.”

Jack paused. I looked out through the slots in my plexiglass facemask and, for a moment, I was worried that she was going to add that there was something sympathetic in my eyes, too. But she only took another slug of bourbon and continued speaking. “She said that she wasn’t really a sketch artist. Said she was a sculptor and that these creatures were waiting to be released from the stone.”

“So,” I said, “even as a teenager…”

“Yeah, even as a teenager,” Jack confirmed. “I guess I was kind of fascinated by the idea, but I didn’t know shit about art. Most of the time, I think I still don’t. But I do know this-there’s something unique about her vision. I liked it, and it turns out that so do a lot of other people. But in those days, I just nodded my head, because what the hell was I going to be able to do about it? As the months passed, I kept coming to visit my mom, and Marianne kept showing me drawings, and I don’t know…she just grew on me. I suppose I felt sorry for her. She was so young, and maybe I understood about being trapped someplace that’s no good for you. The asylum was the right place for my mom, no question, but it was the wrong place for Marianne.”

“So what happened?”

“The doctors played around with her meds forever until they found a combination that worked and her condition leveled out. Marianne can function, you know, when she takes her medicine. But she’s always thought that it’s poison against her hearts.” Jack paused. “Yeah, that fantasy is nothing new, either. One time I even got them to take chest X rays to show her that she had only a single heart and she still wouldn’t believe me.”

“But how did-?”

“I’m getting to that, if you’d just shut up.” Jack jabbed her chopsticks at me, a piece of kung pao chicken wedged between them. “After the docs got her all straightened out, they put her in a group home and she ended up getting a job in a cafeteria. Washing dishes, can you believe it? When I heard about it, I paid her a visit and found her elbow deep in dirty water, and all I could think about were those amazing sketches. In the meantime, she’d gotten her first tattoo, one of those Latin sayings on her arm. When I asked why, she said that since she couldn’t afford stone, she might as well use her body as a canvas. All those tattoos she’s got, she got them when she couldn’t carve for some reason. Anyway, I said, Fuck this. If she wants to carve so bad, I’ll help her. So I paid for a course in the evenings, even though all I had was a little money left from my father’s death, and all this when I had a couple of kids at home. Completely stupid, right?”

It was stupid, but I also thought (although I certainly didn’t say it aloud) that it was wonderful. Jack took another of Marianne Engel’s cigarettes-because Jack didn’t smoke, as she’d told me more than once-and continued with her story. Whenever she got to a dramatic part, she poked the cigarette around in the air as if trying to pop invisible balloons.

“The instructor said Marianne was the most gifted student he’d ever had, that she just took to the chisel. When I couldn’t afford to shell out any more cash for lessons, he told Marianne to keep coming anyway. Said that someday he’d be bragging that he was once her teacher. So I made another stupid decision and suggested to Marianne that I should be her agent. She accepted, even after I pointed out that I knew squat about selling artwork. But I knew enough to get her a half-decent set of tools, which I found at an estate sale, just dumb luck, and then some stone. This first block was this horrible, cheap stone that practically crumbled away under her chisel, right, but she gets the gargoyle out anyway and it looks pretty good. So now I have this statue and I have to sell it before we can afford a second block of stone, so I borrow this beat-up old truck to drive around to different galleries with this big statue in the back. Finally I find someone willing to display it but only if they get a bloody outrageous commission, but by this point, we’re totally out of options, and so I say yes. When it finally sells, can you fucking believe this, I actually lose money on it. The whole process takes months and Marianne Engel is getting tattoos the whole time, going crazy without any stone. But eventually we sell another, and another, and then suddenly we have some cash flow and it all works out.”

I was fascinated to hear a history on Marianne Engel that did not include medieval monasteries. It made me realize how completely I had been engrossed in her fairy tales.

“When she really got rolling, the statues just didn’t stop coming. That was the first time I saw how she could get like this, you know? The first time she worked herself into collapse.” Jack cast her eyes up towards Marianne Engel’s room. “She was younger and stronger, and I thought it was just the flame of youth. The passion of first creation. I had no idea it would be like this for-how long now? Going on twenty-something years.”

“She must be doing all right,” I said, “I mean, the house and everything…”

“Yeah, moneywise, sure. Marianne is the best in the world at what she does, and I’m not just saying that. Five years in, we set up the gallery. Ten years, we got her this place. Cash down, not even a mortgage.”

“How did you become her conservator?”

“Just sort of happened along the way,” Jack answered. “No, fuck that, it took a lot of paperwork and endless visits to the courts. But you gotta remember that she doesn’t have a family, at least none that I know of. She never told me anything about her life before we met and, honestly, I don’t know if even she knows.”