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At first, I didn’t set out to create the perfect man. I simply set out to create a man. I had waded into the waters of sculpting and was ready to plunge headfirst. I wanted to sculpt a man. That seemed like the natural next step. (And, though I didn’t realize it at the time, a lonely part of me wanted to sculpt a companion.)
I could never claim to be the artist for whom masterpieces formed before his eyes. My art didn’t come to me in short bursts of inspiration and revelation. I didn’t work in a haze and suddenly, he was finished. He took time. Longer than any piece before or after him. Of course, none of my other pieces were anything like him.
Starting was the hardest part. I was unsure. It began to feel like every step had to be perfect. It’s hard to hide your mistakes after carving them in stone. I sketched him over and over again, though each sketch felt off in a way. Something always felt missing or wrong. But I could also never claim to be the most patient artist. Some of my best pieces came out of haphazard techniques and hoping for the best. That’s what I decided to do with him.
I started with his basic shape. He was tall, much taller than me (though that wasn’t a very high bar). He was lean without being rail-thin, all taut muscles and sharp angles. He was a stark contrast to my broad shoulders and stocky build. Beautiful, in a way that needed no complement such as charm or kindness. I didn’t know about those things yet. The first thing that I knew was that he was beautiful.
The first thing that I knew was your touch. It was when you first began to sculpt, giving me shape and form. I had no eyes with which to see you nor ears with which to listen to you. But I knew your hands, steady and gentle and warm. I knew the care with which you created me.
You began with my hand, which struck me as odd. I thought you would start from the top or the bottom. Instead, you gave me an outstretched hand. Whether I was reaching or offering, I did not know. I trusted that you knew. Every now and then, you fit your hand into mine. Most times, that would be followed with a chisel, smoothing out whatever imperfections you found. Though sometimes you simply held your hand there.
Your touch was my tether to your world. It was the first thing that I knew of your world. The first thing that began to pull me out of the stone.
After his upper body, I began to work downward. For some reason, I knew his head—his face—would be last.
Felicity didn’t understand that.
“What’s the method to this?” she asked, watching me work with a critical eye from the floor of my studio.
I didn’t usually perform for an audience (outside of the bedroom, that is) but Felicity had as much reason to avoid our parents as I did that day. Felicity and our mother had gotten into a real row over the topic of sending Felicity off to school again. I, personally, was all for the idea of shipping my younger sister off. Felicity, on the other hand, was strongly, loudly opposed. She shouted at our mother with such volume that our father left his study to quiet them. I heard him shouting from my bedroom. Later, I found Felicity reading on the floor of a corridor upstairs. She wasn’t exactly hiding, but she wasn’t trying to be found either. I knew that feeling well. In a moment of uncharacteristic kindness, I offered to smuggle her into town and let her take shelter in my studio. Felicity was wary of the offer but ultimately agreed. She didn’t exactly have many options.
My studio was a small flat in town rented for me by my father. After I accidentally repainted a wall in my bedroom, he realized that my artistic aspirations weren’t going anywhere, but he didn’t want them anywhere in his house. So he found a flat in Cheshire where I could spill as much paint and make as much racket as I desired. The distance from my father was an added bonus. Felicity, sitting on the studio floor with a book in her lap, only looking up to offer the occasional critique, must have seen the same benefit.
“Method to what?” I replied without looking away from my statue. I was working on his hips at the time. I was determined not to shape his thighs—or what was between them—with my younger sister in the room.
“Sculpting,” she said. “You were working on the shoulder earlier, now this. Why work from the center outward?”
I paused. “Are you questioning my artistic process, Felicity?”
“Do you have a process?” she retorted.
“Of course I do!” I leaned back to appraise my work. At the moment, he was two arms, a torso, and one hip.
“Then why doesn’t it have a head?”
I hummed thoughtfully. “I don’t know him well enough yet.”
She snorted. “Him?”
“The statue is undeniably a man.”
“I’m sure you’re quite familiar with the male form.”
“I would hope so. I am undeniably a man.”
“He looks nothing like you,” she said flatly.
I couldn’t argue with her then. It was true. My statue had become a collection of the best parts of various lads I had fallen into bed with over the years. He was all of that, yet also more.
“Does he have a name?” Felicity asked.
“Not yet. I need to know him better.”
When I turned to face her, she was giving me an odd look. I knew she didn’t understand what I was going on about. Felicity didn’t have an artistic bone in her body. Even her embroidery was pitiful. Instead of questioning me further, she simply shook her head and muttered something like “artists” before burying her nose in her book again.
You gave me a body before you gave me a face. My body took you months, painstaking months. I was not good with time, but I knew time passed when your studio grew colder and warmer. There were small stretches of time when you would not touch me. Maybe you were distracted by other projects. But you always came back to me.
After my body, my neck, my head, you gave me ears. Ears were nothing momentous. Everyone had ears. But when you began to sculpt them, I heard the softest murmur. That was the first thing that shocked me. I could hear . I had not known what that was like before then, but I knew it instantly. I knew the soft murmur, smooth and clear, was your voice. I knew that I wanted to hear more of it.
Eventually, you carved out my first ear. I began to make out your words. I understood them.
“—tricky bastard, aren’t you?” you were saying. The chisel struck my ear, refining. “Ears shouldn’t be this difficult.” You huffed, your steadying hand falling away from my shoulder. I hated it every time you put distance between us. Your touch returned on my opposite side as you began to work on the other ear. It was harder to hear you on my other side until it was finished.
You spoke to me all the time while working. It seemed like you had been speaking to me long before I was able to hear you since you showed no sign of knowing that I was suddenly able to. I wondered if you spoke to me ever since you began sculpting me. Even when your attention was drawn to a different painting or sketch, you would speak. You spoke like no one else listened to you, so I tried my hardest to. I did not have a choice to hear you or not, but I really tried to listen.
It certainly wasn’t hard. I loved to listen to you. I loved your voice, washing over me like summer rain. Warm and calming and always tripping on a laugh.
I learned things about you. I learned that you had an affinity for boys as well as girls and a father who didn’t approve of that. I learned that you shared a name with your father and you hated it. I learned that you also hated a lad you lived nearby that was always too rough with you when he took you to bed but you always let him take you anyway. I decided that I hated him too. I learned that you were awful at billiards. I learned that you had a younger sister who teased you for the things you wore. You didn’t hate her, though, and neither did I.
I learned that you drank. A lot. I learned that you rarely came to your studio fully sober. I learned that you were rarely ever sober at all.
You often told me about how perfect I was going to be. You were sure of it. After long days and tiresome hours working, you swore it would be worth it because I was going to be perfect. I trusted that you were right, but I didn’t care about being perfect. I just wanted to be yours.
I agonized over his hair for a while. I never committed to a style in any of the sketches I made. By that point, I knew what I wanted out of him. I knew that I wanted to sculpt a perfect man. I had never been so invested in a project before, but I was determined. There was something about that sculpture that I couldn’t shake. I knew that I had to finish him. He was going to be different from anything I had created before, though I couldn’t place why.
For that reason, his hair eluded me.
“I can’t have you looking like Richard Peele,” I mused.
Richard Peele, my lifelong nuisance and periodic bedmate, had unkempt blond hair that he kept cut unfortunately close to his head as if that excused the unkemptness.
I slung my arms lazily around the neck of my statue, studying him. It felt like I had to learn him all over again with each feature that I sculpted. I was still avoiding his face, the biggest mystery of all. His face would show who he was, and I wasn’t sure of that yet.
“Come on,” I whined, “speak to me.”
As always, my statue remained silent. I didn’t expect anything else. Somehow, I had formed a habit of talking to my statue, although I was never one to talk to myself before. Like most things that involved him, I couldn’t explain it. It felt like he listened though. Perhaps that made me pitiful. Perhaps it made me crazy. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure if I cared.
I stared at my statue pleadingly. He stared back. Well, as much as he could stare with no eyes, but the sentiment was conveyed.
That’s when I realized. I had to try something different. My statue had already proven to defy my expectations. As it came down to his defining features, I knew that had to be true. So, I began to form his hair. Wild, tight curls like I had seen on freedmen during a family trip to France. You wouldn’t see anything like it at home, but the lads in Cheshire are the furthest things from perfection.
As his hair began to take shape, I knew I had made the right choice.
I long awaited the day that you gave me eyes. Of course, I didn’t know how badly I wanted it until I had it. I didn’t know what it was like to be unable to see until I could, and I wondered how I ever lasted without knowing your face.
However, it wasn’t pleasing the first time that I saw your face. I remembered it vividly. I remembered the darkness falling away. I remembered being amazed by the light and the colors. I remembered being amazed by you. Until I wasn’t.
I didn’t know what I expected from you, but you were everything and so much more. I took in your fair skin, brown curls falling into your face, pale blue eyes like a winter sky. You weren’t smiling but I noticed a dimple when you quirked your mouth, chipping at a stubborn piece of stone. You were stunningly beautiful. And you were hurt.
Your fair skin was mottled with bruises. Your brown hair was a mess, ruffled like it had been tugged on. Your blue eyes were hollow, deep with a sadness I couldn’t begin to comprehend, not then. The only time that look in your eyes changed was when you looked at me. When you truly looked at me, your eyes glowed with pride. I wanted to savor that look. I wanted you to be pleased with me, pleased with yourself.
When you finished with my eyes, you put a hand on my cheek. “That looks right,” you said. A smile ghosted across your lips, disappearing quicker. “How could anyone resist you with big, kind eyes like that?”
You stepped back, studying me. You mindlessly rubbed at your side, and I wondered if your body was covered in as many bruises as your face was. I had never seen the damage before but I knew without being told that it was your father’s doing. You hated to talk about him, yet I knew from the way that you did. I hated your father more than anyone.
Sinjon laughed, stumbling up the stairs behind me. I shushed him, though I probably wasn’t that much quieter. Neither of us was exactly sober. I wasn’t so drunk that I thought taking Sinjon Westfall back home was a good idea, though. I knew better than to show his face in my father’s house.
Sinjon was a former fling. We met at Eton. Our relationship ended on the best terms that it could, being the reason for both of our expulsions. I never knew what happened to Sinjon after we were expelled. They didn’t exactly give the two of us time to say our goodbyes. I never really wanted to entertain the possibilities. I never expected to see him again, only to run into him in a pub in Cheshire of all places. I didn’t ask why he was there, though, and he didn’t offer. We made thinly-veiled small talk that quickly turned into unveiled flirting. When I mentioned my art, he expressed an interest. I took the opportunity to invite him back to my studio and show him a few things.
We made our way up to my studio, probably waking up everyone living in the flats below. I unlocked the door to let us in and quickly shut it behind us. I tried to reach for Sinjon but he darted out of my grasp with a grin.
“Hold on,” he said, turning to look around the room. “I do actually want to see your work.”
I let out a dramatized groan. Sinjon ignored me. I felt oddly insecure as he surveyed my paintings, though he showed no sign of hating them. He stopped when he saw him .
My statue was almost finished. All that remained was his mouth and to refine a few flaws that remained. I had begun to understand my statue. His outstretched hand was an offering, an invitation, emphasized by his warm, caring eyes. His mouth remained but I knew he was smiling, just a tad. He looked as if you could place your heart in his open palm and know that he would be gentle with it.
I was proud of my statue, but it felt too exposed to let Sinjon just look at him. He wasn’t finished. He wasn’t perfect yet.
“Are you done pretending to be interested in my art?” I asked, leaning back against the door.
Sinjon laughed. “I’m not pretending!” He turned to face me with a smile, meeting my eyes. “It really is impressive. You’re rather talented, Monty.”
He said it so earnestly that I had to look away. That was the thing about Sinjon. He was so nice . Sometimes it was boring, other times it was a pleasant surprise, a warmth that spread to my fingertips. A small part of me wanted to keep studying my art if it meant earning such praise. Instead, I mumbled out a thank you.
“You’re right, though,” Sinjon continued. I looked up again as he crossed the room to me. “I have other things on my mind.” He leaned in to kiss me, pressing my body between his and the door.
Only once did I wish for neither ears nor eyes. One night, you returned to your studio late. I didn’t know why you were back so soon as I was certain it was still the same day. Then you stumbled inside, followed by a boy with eyes only for you, and it all made sense.
You had told me before about your escapades. I knew that you left a string of lovers behind you. I understood why. You were magnetic, drawing everyone in and around you. But you had never brought anyone back to your studio before.
I hated that you had. I hated having him there. I hated being in your studio with you while being entirely deprived of your attention, even being without your mindless chatter. I hated watching you with him, though I didn’t have much of a choice.
In the morning, he woke up before you. I expected him to slip out but he didn’t. He stayed there until you woke up, an arm around your waist. You disentangled yourself when you did and stood to stretch. I hated the way his eyes followed you, smiling.
“It was nice seeing you again, Henry,” he said.
You hummed noncommittally. Though you seemed very interested in him the night before, you would hardly spare him a glance. You started gathering your clothes. He took the cue to do the same.
After dressing, he turned to me, eyeing me with interest. “I would love to see the statue when it’s finished.”
You were bothered by that. When he looked at you again, you smoothed your features into indifference. “Maybe,” you said.
He turned back to me and reached out to touch my hand. I wanted to pull away, but I didn’t have to. “Careful!” you called. Your voice was light but your eyes were serious. “Don’t tamper with an unfinished piece.”
He stepped back, hands raised, and gave you a smile. I didn’t know why it bothered me so much when he did that. You were unaffected. “I’ll give you space to work, then.” He made for the door and kissed you on his way out. You let him, though you didn’t seem to return it, and shut the door behind him.
When he was gone, you turned to me. “God forbid Sinjon stays in Cheshire for very long.”
Sinjon lingered in Cheshire for some time after that. We continued to see each other, though I never took him back to my studio again. It felt strange to have him there. I felt an odd possessiveness over my art—especially my statue. So Sinjon and I found other ways and met in other places. I didn’t feel the same fondness for him that I felt when I was fifteen (though Sinjon seemed determined to rekindle it) but a part of me missed him. That, and I would take Sinjon over Richard Peele any night.
I thought we did a fine job of sneaking around. Most people in Cheshire probably wouldn’t have known who Sinjon was, and I already had my reputation. I didn’t think being spotted with Sinjon by anyone but my father would be much of an issue.
I was wrong.
I was putting what I thought to be the finishing touches on my statue when my father stormed into my studio, shouting. Looking back, it was all a blur. My father was yelling, and suddenly he was swinging, and he kept asking about Sinjon. He kept demanding to know why I had been seen with him and why I was mucking around with lads and why that lad in particular.
It was such a foolish thing to risk so much for. To let a few trysts with Sinjon ruin my life.
I knew what was going to happen seconds before it did. Throughout my father’s tirade, I tried to move away from my projects. Bruises and breakage would heal. I had endured those before. But if my work was damaged, I had little hope of recovering it.
I had little success. My father managed to corner me among my art. With a well-placed swing, he should have sent me to the floor. Instead, he sent me stumbling straight into my statue.
It didn’t hurt when you crashed into me. It didn’t hurt when the full weight of your body pressed against my outstretched hand and broke it off. As soon as it detached, my hand—and a portion of my forearm—were no longer a part of me. It was the same as any other piece that you removed with your chisel. There was no pain, no damage beyond what was removed.
I knew that men were not the same. I knew that you were hurt. I knew that when you finally hit the ground and the side of your head caught my base, there was pain. I knew that when you didn’t get up and lay there, bleeding onto the base and the floor as your father shouted at you to move, there was irreparable damage far beyond what I could see.
I wanted to reach for you and help you up. I wanted to shield you from him. I wanted to rescue you as you had rescued me. But I was still stuck in the stone.
Months went by after my father confronted me about Sinjon. Long, awful months. During my fall, I managed to concuss myself, tear the side of my face, and rupture something in my right ear. I still hadn’t regained hearing in it. I lost hope that I ever would, though my father refused to accept that. It was bad enough that I had an ugly scar from the tear and the stitches. A half-deaf son was a disgrace too far.
To my credit, I never pointed out to him that he was the one that caused it. Though I would have been prouder of my self-control if it wasn’t because being around my father made me so physically ill it was hard to speak.
They were long, awful months.
I drank myself to sleep most nights. I avoided my father as much as I could. I never set foot back in my studio. I couldn’t bring myself to. I couldn’t bring myself to do much of anything.
But one night, I grew restless. I decided to venture into town, never mind that it was well past midnight. My father didn’t bother trying to keep up with where I went anymore. I wasn’t going anywhere with the state I was in. If I did go out one night and didn’t come home, it would be all the better. I had brought enough negative attention to my family as it was.
As I knew they would, my steps led me to my studio. I always wore the key on a chain around my neck. Unlocking the door and stepping inside was stepping into the closest thing to a home I had ever known. My studio was the only thing that was truly mine. It was exactly as I left it all those months ago. My statue stood in the center of the room, damaged and bloodstained. The sight of all the blood— my blood—sent a shudder through me.
I considered leaving it that way. I could have left my studio in that state, closed the door and never opened it again. I could have walked out and kept on walking to the banks of the Thames and finally made good on all those empty promises that seemed much more tempting during those passing months. I could have, but something stopped me. My statue. Something about it called to me. I couldn’t abandon it.
He wasn’t perfect anymore. He was damaged. But he wasn’t quite broken.
I had an idea.
Months went by before I saw you again. There were moments of panic where I feared I would never see you again, but I knew you would come back to me. You always did.
You came back in the middle of the night, looking almost as relieved to see me as I was to see you. I do not know what you saw in me, but something sent you into action. Almost in a frenzy, you began to work. First, you cleaned up the blood and other traces left by your father. I was glad to see them go. Then, you picked up my broken pieces and stared at me for a long time before you got back to work.
I did not understand what you were doing at first. When you returned to your studio with gold flakes and started mixing them into something, I was confused. You didn’t tell me what you were doing, but you kept saying that it would work. I trusted you. It was easy to fall into our old patterns. It was all I had ever known, and I was glad to have it back.
You took the—what I later realized was—lacquer and gold and coated it where my hand had broken off. You pressed my hand back into its place, letting the lacquer connect the broken pieces. You held it there as it dried and I could feel it. I felt the feeling returning to my hand.
But there was something more.
It wasn’t just feeling returning to my hand. There was color. There was life .
You noticed it as I did, stumbling back in surprise. I took a chance and, suddenly, I was stumbling after you. I stepped off the base, standing unsteadily before you. You stared at me, shocked. I looked down at myself. I was no longer the bleached white of the stone you carved me out of. My skin was a warm brown. I took one of my curls between my fingers and saw that they were thick and dark. I let out a surprised laugh. I could laugh.
You finally regained your ability to speak. “Well, that’s never happened before,” you said breathlessly.
I laughed again. That time, it made you smile.”I assure you this is new for me too.”
We both paused, surprised by the sound of my voice. You recovered first. “Um, I’m Monty.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m…”
“Percy,” you said suddenly. “What do you think of Percy?”
I thought that I would take any name you gave me. Instead, I said, “It’s perfect. I’m Percy.” I offered my hand. You smiled, giving me the most wonderful view of your dimples, and took it.