Real Men

Eloise embodied a bittersweet kind of madness. She was a soft-feathers-stuck-to-honey sort of oddity. She was the kind one would refer to as ‘quirky’ or ‘kooky’ or ‘zany’. She was the kind of girl whom you would go on to describe as ‘girl’ or ‘chick’ even though she was a woman. And although I have no more right to tell the story of Eloise than you do, my friend, let us both admit that she was the one we would whisper about, under our breath, when we sat across the room from her in drawing class. Remember that damned doll?

Eloise was the kind of weird that felt ‘safe’. The kind that could be viewed from a distance and admired. She was a mine shaft, and we rakish looters who plunged bravely into the depths of her identity, tapping the priceless veins of her anecdotes.

“Oh my lord, Darwin, did you see what Crazy-El did in class today?”

“You mean did I smell it!? What on earth did she use to secure the purple glitter to the pages of her journal?”

“I daren’t imagine it. We shouldn’t laugh, she’s a queer sort. Oh, but it does tickle me so.” And so it would go.

You remember.

In hindsight, my friend, we can agree the trouble started with the doll. That wooden ball-jointed Adonis whom Eloise would prop atop her beaten backpack on the seat next to her. We named it Paulus, and quietly narrated the development of their pure love in hushed voices and breathless grunts throughout an entire semester of sweltering autumn heat. When you would pretend to attend the bathroom, only to steal a glance over our muse’s bony shoulder and into her little black book. You’d describe the sketches of Paulus drawn there as ‘erogenous’.

Eloise would wear things like a plum feather-boa and cotton-candy eyeshadow. An olive-green tartan blazer over a toffee-apple ruffled blouse. She’d sport sunflower-yellow nail polish over dangerously short nails which she would chew off in flakes as Teacher droned on about shadow and angle and crosshatch. She had a blunt-cut fringe that wasn’t quite straight. The kind of fringe we would rightly assume she cut herself. In some gloriously candlelit, gold-leafed mirror surrounded by stray cats.

Paulus was plain, at least in the beginning. He was machine-carved out of blonde pine. Forged from off-cuts and scrap pieces, bought no doubt from a cheap furniture company somewhere overseas. He was like thousands of other pocket-sized mannequins shoved into rucksacks, alongside boxes of worn chalk and tacky watercolours. Used once or twice at the bidding of musty art teachers then lost to the shelves of pokey rooms in university share-houses. Draped in charity-shop jewellery and adorned with plastic glue-on eyes or black marker phalluses.

Eloise kept him even after we were introduced to the sensuous experience of life drawing. To the svelte, alabaster contortionist with breasts like scoops of ice-cream and thighs like filets of whitefish. As we would carve her out in great, swollen gashes of charcoal, Eloise would draw Paulus solely. Her little wooden subject, sketched into ever-more beautiful poses. His wedged hand, like a door-stop lost from a child’s dollhouse, reaching out to her; the perspective of such things as much a feat of technical ability as it was a cry for help.

By the time class dispersed for winter break Paulus was grey with palm-grease and scarred with rainbow-coloured lesions and other impurities collected during his tour of duty in the war torn depths of Eloise’s backpack.

Eloise was the kind of crazy we could tell our friends about. When we found ourselves gathered at the pub after class, or descending on house-parties during break, you and I would speculate at length on the psyche of the girl. Even audiences that had never met her would find themselves uttering things like “Classic Eloise,” or, “that’s so like her though.” The girl who would rather fuck a wooden doll than a real man.

It’s not that Eloise wasn’t attractive. She was. Her eyes were grey as evening ice and streaked with bronze. Her lips were like a pair of bruised strawberries sliced in half. She never smiled. Her throat was elegantly protected by drawn shoulders and tucked chin. Her breasts, which were cruelly hidden away behind her tartan fortress, were understood to be more ample than reasonable for a girl of her stature.

When we took Paulus it wasn’t an act of malice. We simply wanted to open her eyes to the realm of possibilities outside of him. So that she could see what she was able to achieve without her little distraction. A mannequin is meant to be a tool, not an emotional crutch. A girl of her age shouldn’t be playing with dolls. It was time for her to grow up.

If the two of them were ever separated it would have been an easy thing. A quick snatch; a snip, and the umbilical cord between them would have been severed. But she took him everywhere she went. When he was not in her bag he was gripped tightly in her fist, the way a more normal girl might grip an erotic organ.

I never told you exactly what happened when I followed Eloise into the bathroom after class on that first day back. When the halls were littered with the fresh, eel-eyed faces of first-year students. While you stood guard and told them the toilet was broken, or occupied, or whatever you spouted with the confidence of a senior resident to make them stay away. Whatever you said to keep the bathroom quiet so that myself and Eloise and Paulus were completely alone.

I’ll never understand why you paid the price alongside me. When all you did was bar the door when she tried to lurch past me and escape. If you think about it from my perspective though, my friend, there was poetry in what she did. Where I took a pair of pliers and wrenched the hands off little Paulus, well, you know an eye-for-an-eye is an old testament trope.

The difference between a wooden doll and a person though is that once the screws fell loose the arms and shoulders followed. I remember them like rain; little wooden pieces clattering to the ground. Like a broken pearl necklace. She didn’t look me in the eye the whole time we were alone together. I really thought we were doing what was best for her. Eloise was the kind of bizarre that didn’t repulse me.

It could have been worse, my friend; at least you were compensated. $20,000 for two hands that simply barred the door. It seems when it came to the judge’s verdict, it was ‘reasonable force’ what she did to me. I guess she had the kind of insanity that could be considered in court. It was like performance art, if only you had seen it. Her greatest masterpiece. I remember it like rain; the blood flowing from my organ, down onto the stained, sticky, sweaty tiles. The scattered wooden pieces like life-boats afloat on a black, pulsing ocean. While I lay there in fits of pain and disbelief, listening to your screams out in the hallway, little Paulus’ disembodied hand reached out to me, and I began to understand what Eloise had seen in him in all her madness: a little wooden man with no means to hurt anyone.