I’ve left the best for last, though. As to the problem of her interior, I had a gift of imagination from an old friend: Gustave Eiffel. Or perhaps his idea simply merged with the truth of you, my beloved, and everything I know about your body as a woman in this world. He told me, Build a giant metal corset — but one where the woman’s lungs are fully and freely expanded rather than contracted. There is no more perfect answer.
A corset built not for beauty, but for freedom.
I always leave my encounters with you wanting more — but not from you, love, I did not need to ask you for more. When I say “more,” what I mean is that I created the condition for more, based on everything that was between us, and then I filled the space between us. I created a space in my sculpture workshop where men might be free to be fully men with one another, in a world that makes men opt instead for war and violence and money and wives — those great masculine sublimations, those cultural underpinnings that keep men from exploring and creating their own desire for each other. It was during the construction of the giant woman’s substructure that the idea first seized me. As I watched the metalsmith working so close to the metal — the flight of electric sparks, the delicious flex of his forearms — my imagination locked on two things at once. The first was a phrase you said to me in our youth, and which I’ve held in my body ever after: Hold as still as a statue.
The second was the word liberty. I saw in an instant what I must draw, and I left instantly to draw it. I began first with the shape of winged victory — but I imagined her internally, the iron structure. I then reimagined the image as a metal full-body brace that could hold a man suspended, unable to escape or move, arms spread like wings, legs spread wide enough for entry, body held, neck held, head held in a suspended kind of flight. And what to do while inside the brace would be to hold still. Hold still while Viollet removed his velvet jacket. Hold still while he undressed, the fourteen-inch satin cuffs of his shirt covering his hands falling to the floor. Hold still while my dear assistant with his sinewy willow of a body began to caress me. Hold still while Viollet cupped Jean-Marie’s ass enough to feel him push back, enough to make him reach for my cock. Hold still when Viollet moved to burn the hair around my nipples from my chest with a match, a little at a time, as carefully as an artist, until the hair itself filled with blood and lust.
This construction is far superior to the threesome-facilitating chair I designed. This structure would bring a blush from Daedalus, that perfect sculptor who built the Labyrinth. These wings would not melt in the sun. Were you to be suspended in my winged metal sculpture, your breasts would hang like illuminated globes, your lips would suck open in their reddened splendor, your derrière would open like a mouth.
The leg and ass holsters can be adjusted.
During the day, when workers were working on the pieces of woman for the statue — long hours of arduous physical work — no one asked what was behind the thick velvet curtain I had fashioned exactly as yours in your Rooms, only larger, more monstrous. Just as I never even asked, except once, what was behind that door in your home and place of business — Room 8. I knew from your first stare when I inquired that the door was not for me.
Sometimes, I confess, it feels good just to hang there like that, alone, open to the world. Is that the space of woman? I can feel each limb one at a time. My limbs remembering something like wings or flight? Phantom?
Yours unto death,
My most clever, creative cousin,
Pay attention. I have a story.
A story about severed limbs.
In fact, this is a soldier’s story.
I do not believe I ever sufficiently thanked you for building me my leg. To put this another way: I will spend the rest of my life devoted to you for doing so.
As I write this, I am sitting next to a pond watching swans. A single swan swam right up to the edge of the pond to stare at me — and such a stare! One thinks of swans as beautiful, demure, winged things. But this gaze! My god. As if she knows something of what we have done to the world. I would call it silent rage if not for the indulgent error of that anthropomorphism. It was the stare of that swan that gave me the mind to tell you, at last, exactly what happened the night I lost my leg.
Some history. In the summer of 1863, when I was twenty, a Union burial excavation in Pennsylvania made a discovery of sorts. In addition to the soldiers they expected to find, they unearthed something unexpected: the body of a woman soldier.
Not unexpected to us, of course — we women soldiers, I mean. We were all well aware that hundreds of us were fighting alongside the men, for the same reasons they did: for family, for country, for money, or for that reason no one likes to mention in good company, for freedom. No, not the freedom of a nation, but of an individual. To enter the war as a man was to feel free from the burden and binds of womanhood, freed into being and motion from marriage and sex and domesticity and reproduction. War was a form of useful work in a way breeding and caretaking and cooking and cleaning will never be. We used different names. We altered our marks. We bound our breasts and erased our figures easily without corsets or skirts. We trained with all the other citizen soldiers, away from our hometowns, with scowls and dirt on our faces.
I was not a soldier, rather a field nurse. But my first year as a field nurse was filled with soldiers and their injured bodies.
My dear friend and the bravest soul I ever met — Frances, who was wounded twice serving with the 1st Missouri Light Artillery — was with me when I was shot. The bullet struck me between breast and shoulder as I stood outside in the woods near a field hospital. The blood shot out in a splash — I could see it, and then I could not, and then I passed out. The rest of the story, there on the field, is Frances.
What I remember most about Frances was not her skill with a rifle, which was considerable — she took out the bastard who shot me down — but the curve of her cheekbone when she set her face near the rifle, the way she never flinched or even closed an eye when she took a shot, the way her shoulders — broader than a man’s — barely moved from the kickback. I do believe I have a permanent shoulder bruise from bracing my own rifle butt against my shoulder and taking its pounding. I could shoot well enough, but shooting didn’t like me.
She killed the man who wounded me. She brought me safely back to the field hospital. She made sure I was attended to.
I’ve never met anyone who kissed me more perfectly than she did, her tongue not jammed in bluntly but curious and sly. I’ve never met anyone who came harder than I did with Frances.
Frances returned to the field.
My leg happened later that night.
I had a fever dream. I woke up twisting in my own sweat, with no pants, with a man — a doctor, a soldier, some man wearing the bloodied and filthy white garb of a field doctor — pressing his hand to my mouth and his weight on my frame, trying to shove his cock into me. With my good hand and arm and shoulder, I did what any soldier under attack would do: I clocked him hard to the side of the head. He fell to the floor. It looked to me like I may have broken his jaw. A soft jaw, perhaps, the bone of a man who had turned his softness inward into hate. You’ll regret this, he hissed at me. You’ll regret this for the rest of your life. Then he pulled something from his pocket, which must have been a rag soaked in chloroform. Everything went dark.
When I came to, I was on the operating table, bound at the wrists, gagged at the mouth. Standing over me, a doctor and some young male assistant — a boy who looked to be among the walking wounded, who was probably threatened if he refused to assist. I struggled as much as I could, but I was drugged repeatedly. It must have sounded and looked like an emergency amputation, like a normal procedure in that place filled with moaning and bleeding, with the bodies of mostly men making all manner of noise, some begging for death. Where had the nurses gone? Men and women?