What the Wax Remembers

The gallery on Geary Street smelled of cold white wine and wet wool. Mara Voss stood near the back, holding a glass she had no intention of drinking from, and counted the exits. Two doors. One fire exit behind a velvet curtain. The artist, a man named Ilan Varga, stood at the center of the room with his hands clasped in front of him, not speaking to anyone.

She had come because her ex-husband’s new office had a blank wall. That was the reason she gave herself, standing there in shoes that pinched at the heel. A petty reason, a small revenge: a wax figure of his former wife, delivered to his glass-and-steel law office, where his new partner would have to walk past it every day. Mara had imagined the crate arriving, the confusion, the phone call she would not answer. The satisfaction felt thin, even in her head.

But the artist interested her more than the revenge. He was tall and narrow-shouldered, with hair the color of wet sand pulled back at the nape. His hands were covered in small scars, dozens of them, thin white lines crisscrossing the knuckles and the pads of his fingers, as if he had spent years handling something that bit back. He did not smile at the guests. When a woman in a green dress asked him about his process, he said, “I work in wax,” and then returned his gaze to the far wall, where one of his figures stood on a plinth.

Mara looked at it. A young man in a coat, mid-step, one hand raised as if hailing a cab. The detail was startling: the crease in the trousers, the hair at the temple, the slight yellowing at the collar of the shirt. It did not look like wax. It looked like a person who had been paused.

She moved closer. The figure’s eyes were open, glass or something else, and they reflected the track lighting in a way that made her think of a fish in a tank. She could see a vein at the temple, a tiny blue thread under the surface. The fingernails had ridges. She reached out, not thinking, and touched the back of the hand.

The wax was warm.

Not room-temperature. Not the heat of the lights. Warm, as if blood ran beneath the surface. She pulled her hand back and looked at her fingertips. They were clean. No residue. But the spot where she had touched looked different, the surface slightly less distinct, as if the ridges of the knuckles had softened.

“You’re not supposed to touch.”

The artist had come up beside her. His voice was low, not angry. He smelled of beeswax and something sharper underneath, a sweet and wrong note she could not place.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted to see if it was real.”

“It is real.” He looked at the figure, then at her. “It’s a commission. He died in a car accident two years ago. His mother wanted him back.”

Mara swallowed. The wine in her glass had gone warm from her hand. “That’s not possible.”

“No,” he said. “But she can stand in the room with him. That was enough for her.”

He turned to face her fully. His eyes were a pale brown, almost amber in the light, and they moved over her face the way a sculptor’s hands might move over a block of clay: measuring, not flattering.

“You have an asymmetrical face,” he said. “The left side is lower. The mouth pulls slightly to the left when you’re deciding something. You’re deciding something now.”

Mara laughed, a short sound that came out wrong. “I’m deciding whether to commission you.”

“No,” he said. “You already decided. You’re deciding whether to tell me the real reason.”

She looked at his hands again. The scars. The way he held them still, no fidgeting, no touching. A man who had learned to keep his hands quiet.

“I want a figure of myself,” she said. “For my ex-husband’s office.”

He did not blink. “That’s the reason you brought with you. What’s the one underneath?”

The question sat between them. She could hear the gallery noise, the clink of glasses, a man laughing too loudly near the door. The wine in her glass had a skin on it now, a faint film.

“I want to see myself the way someone else sees me,” she said. “Just once.”

Ilan Varga tilted his head. The movement was slight, almost polite. “I can do that,” he said. “But you should know: the figures I make are not mirrors. They’re something else.”

“What are they?”

He did not answer. He reached into his pocket and drew out a small card, plain white, with a phone number and an address on Geary Street,