Man meets woman, only she's a living statue. You know, one of those performance artists who stand around on top of milk crates in Harvard Square, dressed in some old time-y cabaret get up. Or a Victorian wedding dress, yellowing lace and moth holes and all. Like a prettier (and silent) Miss Havisham. He comes every day to where's she's standing, starts telling her about his day; about what he thinks she might be like; always leaves before she gets off her pedestal. But always comes back the next day, at about the same time of day. She never looks at him directly, never talks, never moves. She's a perfectly blank slate. Which is maybe why the guy's so interested in her. He's not unaware of this. But inevitably, he falls in love. He doesn't want to. He knows it's ridiculous. He knows it's probably not even love. But that's how it goes. Love can know itself to be a lie, a tainted fiction. It happens anyway.

This is how it happens:

She's in a different costume every day. Or maybe not a different costume--at least, not at first. Maybe just slight differences in makeup. Paler or darker foundation. Fake eyelashes one day, not even mascara the next. A different number of roses in her wedding bouquet. He thinks maybe she's talking to him through her paint. That maybe if he could measure exactly how her shoulder's slanted one day, and then compare it to the next day, that maybe somewhere in the difference, somewhere in the exact number of arc seconds and minutes and degrees is a message. Something addressed only to him. Again, he knows it's ridiculous, but he's losing sight of that, slowly but surely. It keeps him up at night. He thinks about it when he wakes up. Turn off alarm, get in shower, puzzle over living statue lady. Nicks himself shaving.

He tries different things to get her attention. The first day, the first time he sees her, he just walks up to her, looks her up, looks her down. Then he walks away. Next day comes back. He says: Hey, do you talk? Do you ever move? Do you make money doing this, or do you work nights? What are you supposed to be, anyway? What does it mean? No answer. He walks away. Next day, he comes and says: So, when was the wedding? If you're Giant Wedding Day Barbie, where's Ken? She remains perfectly still. He walks around her, slowly. Looking at her from different angles. Her eyes remain focused on the same spot. She doesn't even follow his movement. Not at all. She remains perfectly still. She blinks, once in a while. And you might, just barely, be able to tell that she breathes.

He starts telling her more about himself. --Fucking horrible day at work, he says. And tells her about his day. Somehow this starts turning into a discourse on his theories about what it all means, what she means--what he thinks she's saying by standing there. --It's a commentary on the objectification of women, right? Or maybe it's about the intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday world? Or--I've got it, it's about the return of the repressed; the past coming back to haunt us. But no, she doesn't say anything; she doesn't relate to him. She's there, but above it all. Maybe it's a religious thing. She looks human, but she's larger than life. Glitters. Immune to the passage of time. Raindrops seem to miss her. Not a single pigeon poop on her dress.

He starts telling her about what he imagines might eventually get her to move, get her to acknowledge him. --It's really hot today, he says.

--Everyone's sweating, except you. I imagine all of the sweat pouring down the foreheads and neck-napes and shoulder-blades and backs of everyone in town. The sun doesn't let up, so everybody keeps sweating. It's really humid, so all of the sweat just keeps running down. People get drenched. Girls in white T-shirts who aren't wearing bras are in for a bit of embarrassment. Guys in jeans look like they pissed themselves. And eventually it's pools of sweat on the streets. Rivulets of sweat running down the storm gutters. The sun's still shining hard as ever. Soon there are yellow ripples washing over Brattle Street, watering the browned grass on Cambridge Common, washing dusty gravestones at the Old Cemetery, giving panhandlers long overdue showers, knocking jaywalkers off their feet into hydroplaning cars. There will be commotion, there will be shouts and cries and waving arms. And then perhaps a great silence. Headstones wet and shiny. Somewhere, mulberries ripening. You the only one standing. In a newly still and still salty lake. I think maybe you'd have to move, then. Eventually. You'd get hungry. Have to go home and change your clothes. Imagine the smell. You wouldn't want to stand here forever, believe me.

No answer.

The next day, he comes and says:

--I had a dream about you last night. In my dream, I was eating watermelons. So crisp, red, juicy. And so many seeds. I kept swallowing seeds by mistake. They took root in my belly. Inside the warmth, the humidity. The dark night soil inside me. I came to talk to you, and opened my mouth. And instead of words coming from my mouth, watermelon vines, curling thick, long, and graceful. Leaves that were wide spades, glossy on top and hairy underneath. They reached across the space between us, they curled around you and me, held us both in their embrace. And in your ear, your left ear with the two pearl earrings, they deposited with infinite care a single, tiny, pulsating fruit. I reached over and drew a fingernail across the rind. Cut it open: spread the halves tenderly. Wet pink watermelon flesh. I'm not sure what the dream was about, I guess. I mean, the way I'm telling it to you now, it's about sex, of course. Fucking crude symbolism. But I don't know if that's the dream, or something I added to the dream just now. I really can't tell.

Still nothing.

The next day, he shows up again, and says:

--I've been thinking about hearts. Hearts and language. Bloody words, words in the blood, pumped around constantly. You ever hear of the guy--big strong silent Norse hero type--who went and killed a dragon because his midget foster father told him to? I mean, supposedly it was about the great big treasure that the dragon was hoarding. But really it was because the midget was actually the dragon's brother. He hated him, maybe because his brother had gotten to be this huge fire breathing semi-immortal magical juggernaut, while he'd just grown wrinkled and old and even smaller than he'd been to begin with. So he wanted to kill his brother and eat his heart, just roast it over a fire and gnaw at it. The fact that eating dragon's heart lets you understand the language of all living things must have had a little bit to do with it, too, I guess. But anyway, the hero goes and kills the dragon, like his foster father told him to. And he cuts out the dragon's heart and roasts it over a fire. Like a good little boy, only, you know, not so little. And he doesn't mean to eat any of it, because that was the one thing his father had told him not to do. But he touches the heart as it's roasting, by accident. Burns his thumb. He sucks on his thumb, and he tastes the dragon's blood. And suddenly he can hear everything. He can feel the sap coursing through the tree beside him. Hears creaky sticky vegetable thoughts running through the sap. And on top of the tree, there are birds chirping. Only now he can hear what they're saying, and they're talking about him. About how his foster father just means to kill him. That all the care his father had given him was just so that he'd grow up to be a fucking dragon-killing meat tank. My point being, I'm just standing here in front of you day after day, you know, just talking to you and trying to figure out if maybe you're thinking something or saying something to me in some language that I can't understand and there are birds singing here all around us and I wish I could eat my own heart, maybe, just to know what you're saying. You know? There's a poem by one of those old Italian poets, Petrarch, maybe, or Dante. In which Love appears to him in a dream in the night. And Love holds the poet's beloved, dead in her arms. And reaches into the poet's chest and pulls out his heart. His heart is on fire. Not burning, just surrounded by flame. And that bitch Love takes the heart and eats it. Love swallows the heart and never says a word. Because Love always demands an offering, doesn't she? And you never know why. And nothing is clear, and the poet can't hear shit let alone birds talking, and most likely he's just kind of on the floor curled up in pain, because, hello? Dead sweetie and ripped out heart. Painful.

No answer. He's used to it by now. Just leaves.

But he comes back the next day like always.

And says:

--I read a book. Greek myth this time. Guy by the name of Pygmalion. You probably know the story already, it's probably even part of what you were thinking when you decided to be a statue for a living, but I'm going to tell it anyway. He hated women. I don't know why. Maybe he felt like he'd never gotten affection from his mommy. Didn't like men, either. He'd never been in love. Didn't even know what it was like. Hated love, all the same, despite or because he didn't know what it was. But he took it in his head one day to make a statue of a woman. Even though he hated women. And don't even ask me how he knew what a woman looked like with her clothes off. But maybe he thought in the beginning that it was going to be a satire. A caricature. Sculpt a bimbo, pour everything in the history of his life that had ever gone wrong between him and the human race into the warp and curve of her hips, her breasts, her neck. Like I said, the guy probably had mommy issues. But he was doomed from the start. See, Love had taken offense to his hatred of love. And she was making each stroke of his chisel go ever so slightly aslant. So he's hacking away at this big chunk of marble, and suddenly he's feeling kind of weird. Kind of light headed, maybe. Breathing a little faster than he should be. Crack, he splits off a chip of marble, and he's flushing, blood rushing to his face. Crack. He's concentrating on these shapes like he's never concentrated before. An intensity that has up till this moment always escaped him. Crack. And now he's done with all of the rough hewing; it's the part where he's doing all the fine detail and all the polishing, going over each square millimeter of the statue with a brush, polishing the stone to a mirror smooth finish. So he's sanding down rough stone, turning rough jagged angles into smooth curves. He's a perfectionist, and by this time he knows that he's not making a caricature. This isn't a cartoon. This is his masterpiece. So he's getting the angle of her collarbones just right. He finds a way to carve marble eyebrows and eyelashes that look natural. He's getting the softness in the throat, the sweet straight tendons in the neck. Line of nose and pout of lips. The little hollow part between the nose and the lips: the tain, I've heard it called. Roundness of shoulder and slender arms cool to the touch. He spends a week on her nipples. He spends three days figuring out whether he should make her belly button an innie or an outie. By the time he gets below the waist, he's just done for. He's placing microscopic dimples that mimic sweat pores, he's using a brush to scratch the finish just enough so as to suggest the beginning of stubble on the legs. He's working day and night. He barely sleeps. And he's eating practically nothing, drinking practically nothing, just the bare minimum of food and water that he needs in order to stay conscious, stay mobile. And finally he's done, she's done, and he looks at her, standing there in front of him so pale and lovely, and he knows exactly how many carved hairs there are on her head, how many eyelashes she has. He knows the exact curvature of her spine, the width of her shoulders, the precise circumference of her right ankle, the number of lines in her palms. And fingerprints; he designed one for each finger and each toe, all related but slightly different. And, oh god, he loves her. This image of a woman, which is an image of no one woman, no one who actually exists, but which is also like the distillation of some mysterious essence of Woman, some Platonic ideal. This idol.

The man pauses, catching his breath.

The bride says nothing. It's later than usual. There aren't many people around.

He takes a step towards her, slowly, deliberately. Just one step.

He says:

--So he loves her, even though it's an it and not a her. And probably the absurdness of this does not escape him. It's something he'd made. It's no real woman to return his love. And maybe, he thinks, maybe that was precisely why he was able to finally fall in love, or fall in love with falling in love. It's because there's no hope. He can't even fuck her: she's just a rock. He takes to kissing the statue, talking to it. But beautiful and real as she is to him, of course, she still isn't alive. And it`s killing him. He loves her partly because she isn't alive, see. Like I said, because there's no hope. But also he can't stand it. And he's dying. Literally dying. And he realizes that all of this is because he hated love, that it's because Love hates him. Finally he says, Love, you win. I'm yours and it's a living hell. I'm going to die and maybe get some peace. And, because he really is Love's toy now, he kisses the statue one last time before he lays himself down to die. But Love doesn't want to let him go. As he kisses the statue he feels a sudden warmth in her marble lips. He feel them press against his lips. The marble's melting. She's come to life.

The man steps toward the bride again.

Then another step.

One more.

His face almost touches her stomach.

He's gone husky, he has to snarl just to get the words out. He says:

--I'll melt you.

And presses his face into her. Arms around her thighs. Breathing her in. Still she says nothing. Not a word. Doesn't even move. Neither does he. Like they're both statues now, for a while. Then with a bitter curse, he turns on his heel and walks off into the night.

The next day he comes again. For the last time. Wordlessly, he walks up to her, bends down, and puts a dollar bill in the box in front of her pedestal. And she moves. Her head inclines slightly until she's finally looking at the man. In those clear, untroubled, dark eyes he can still see no hint of recognition, neither light of love nor shadow of sorrow. Her arm unbends with slow, exquisite grace. And with great courtesy and supreme indifference, she gravely--silently--proffers him a single red rose from her bouquet.