Silver John Bump 5/9/96
rev. 6/6/96

Silver glows under a torch, and the solder runs to the hottest point; I move the flame slowly and the bright bead of solder follows the blue cone in the center, like a red flood. It crosses the cracks and dents of everyday use, the imperfections that hitting into the harsh, hard-edged world causes. The solder covers these under a layer of dark grey material, the file turns this into a matte finish, almost white, and the buffing wheel presses the rough edges, melts the points, rubs and smears the metal against itself. Suddenly the surface is mirror-smooth, if everything goes right, and the tarnished broken metal has a new life.
It's a delicate balance between not enough flame and too much. Solder adheres but refuses to spread, the silver turns grey and hard in the cool flame. Too much oxygen, and the metal burns; too much gas and it blackens. Leave the flame on a spot for a moment, and it turns orange as the copper blooms to the surface; tiny green flames shoot out as the copper vaporizes and burns away. Other solder joints nearby begin to fall apart; a bit of inattention and an earring, a bracelet will fall into components, in a little glowing pile of wasted effort.

We'd argued all day, that day. Yes, no, yes, no, who's on top (metaphorically speaking, of course.) The worst part was: we argued about nothing. It was a specific type of nothing, an active nothing, that we were arguing about, rather than the lack of something. When there is no love left, when the bonds are broken, it's an active nothing. The absence defines what was there before, and we're never sure what our respective emotional Maginot lines were originally for.
We're just friends, kissy kissy kissy.
That's how we unfold ourselves to each other, to our mutual circle of friends, on the rare occasions when we do let anyone see. What I'm trying to understand is: why are we still here? Her, me, we -- three very different personalities, none satisfied. It's that moment of --
Damn. Here it is again.
I just melted the tip. Diamonds are set carefully -- four prongs of metal, carefully cut away inside with a rotary file, down from the top, with the right shape to fit the girdle of the stone. The diamond is pressed into the bearing carefully, and the thin metal prongs are folded over the girdle to hold the stone in place. They're soft, they wear quickly, and retipping a diamond is hard work. Not as hard as emerald; emeralds shatter under the torch, so you have to take them out. Emeralds have water in them, and gossamer wispy veils of imperfection. Diamonds are hard and cold and clear and even when they're glowing bright red, they're still strong.
Cut a tiny bit of solder. Drop it on the blue-speckled white firebrick. Hit it with the thin blue flame and watch until it just begins to ball up, melt into a tiny perfect sphere with lines and whorls jerking across its surface. Touch it with the tip of the titanium solder pick and it adheres. Then: flame on the diamond, carefully, until the worn tip just begins to glow, and touch the tiny solder ball to the hot metal. It drops, flattens, becomes invisible, and as the torch moves away, I always stare at the metal, still mirrorbright for a moment until it freezes to the look of the North Sea: grey and covered with tiny waves.
Jewelry is not necessary, but it is beautiful. For me, the ring is a symbol of perfection, in its shape. For the people I repair rings for, it's usually a symbol of prestige, a proxy of money and all that goes with it. It's not always easy to work with people who have four carat diamond rings; the urge to tickle them up with the oxyacetylene torch is hard to resist. The urge to turn the gas on for several seconds before striking a flame is too strong; I don't try to overcome that one. The explosion and fireball, and subsequent rain of fine black carbon all over the room, that never comes out of clothes, is just too good to be missed. "Do you want to watch me do the repair?" They always say yes, if they have the time. We are hunters. Our brains like to find patterns, to categorize. We cannot help but stare at motion; it triggers some deep part of our brains, that says, "Food, danger." We stare at fires, at the waves on the ocean, at soundless televisions. The lure of the long blue flame, of watching hot metal flow, is irresistable, too.
Her eyes are dark green, yes, emerald green, and her hair is long and blond, and when we argue she throws things.
"You never listen! Why don't you ever listen? I'm trying to --"
"I always listen! That's all I ever do -- communication is a two way street and you're --"
"Two way street," she snarls, "of steamrollers."
Yes, ok, yes, once we thought we were in love, love. We thought we were in love. Sing louder, dammit. Yes, ok, yes, once we thought...
"I, uh, have to go to work now. I'll be back at, um, three." She didn't look at me directly, but her eyes caught at me sideways.
"Ok. I've got some books to read. I'll wait up for you."
She made a short quick movement, her hands moving like tethered birds trying to escape, then she grabbed a pencil, a piece of paper, and sketched a map, brushing her hair away from the paper. Her skin is white, her hair blond; she radiates paleness. Her fingers are long and thin, her palms almost twice as long as they are wide. She wears a different ring on each finger. I made or bought half of them for her, over the last ten years. A week together, another ring, six months apart and screaming at each other across four states, and the circle starts again.
"Left off the interstate at this exit, right at the second stoplight, and go about two miles, until you go past the two stop signs," she said. "It's, uh, it's... right there." "Where all the cars are." "You'll know it when you see it. If you see... If you come."
She left quickly, no hugs, no eye contact.

It wasn't easy to find, out in the middle of nowhere, but her directions were ok. The bouncer looked at my driver's license, looked at me. It's pretty obviously my identification; not too many people look like I do. He nodded and I walked inside.
The room was dark, almost black, large and loud. The music swept in waves through the blue cigarette smoke, as if I could see the curls twitching in time with the beat, and hot eyes bored laser holes through the clouds. A neon pink bikini top on dark brown shoulders almost invisible in the dark -- a floating pair of pink triangles... Nine Inch Nails whumping, "I wanna fuck you like an animal, I wanna feel you from the inside" and she's on the stage, on her knees and her white hair shines as it hangs to cover her calves, her tiny body covered in sweat, her long thin arms stretching above her like twined vines.
Caught in a thought-eddy, I drift with the smoke into the side room, where truckers and loggers with long, thin, wasted bodies and sentient moustaches play pool under the flashing incoherence of soundless televised sports -- baseball, football, motorcycle racing. Under the cool emerald green analysis of the ivory clack room, balls moved in straight lines I envied, like they'd been extruded from the fingers of the long tan arms and bare shoulders of the men and women playing.
A touch of fingers carefully in the small of my back; "I didn't think you'd come." She looks sideways at me for a moment, then away at the wall, where our faces, long and thin and white in the middle of all the dark hair here, stare back. Guys nearby flick their eyes from her, upwards, to my face and back, thinking, "Who is that?" She looks in the conterminous mirrors for only a second, sees my eyes, and looks down at my dirty, cheap sneakers.
"What do you -- what are you thinking about?" she says, quickly, to fill the silence that we both hear.
"You look beautiful."
"That's not what I was asking."
"Yes," I say, sotto voice, "it is, and what I'm saying is that to me you are beautiful."
She looks directly at me, then, and smiles, eyes slitted and lips pulled back -- the same expression she had on her face when she showed me her new, surprise tattoo on her calf.
"I'd better get back," she motions with her hand, and I nod.
"Yeah, do well," I mumble, and I run for the door, slowly.

It's difficult to facet turquoise. The rock is too soft, and it burns easily when it's being ground. So people smooth off the face to an egg-shape, a cabochon stone it's called, and set it with wires or thin strips of metal around its circumference, folded over the edges of the convex surface. Turquoise has a lot of water in it, in the matrix of the mineral itself. Like opal, it cracks easily. When a stone is broken, I replace it by carefully peeling the silver mounting away from it, bending and stretching the thin metal that retains it, and pulling the pieces of stone out. The hole beneath is filled with sawdust, traditionally -- a bedding, a blanket to absorb shocks when the stone is struck. It's not always enough, but replacement is easy. I grind the new stone under water, to keep it cool (burned turquoise turns white) and put new sawdust in the mounting. I fit the turquoise in and carefully rebend and compress the silver over its edge, so it will be held securely. Then I turn and show it, "See? Good as new." Maybe polish the rock a little bit on the felt buffing wheel.
For me, it's always a false sense of accomplishment. This is replacement, not repair; the stone itself, the focus of the piece, has been destroyed, and I usually throw it away, replace it with an imposter. We can't fix stones, not easily; metal bends and melts but stones are different. I hold it up to the sunlight, look at the reflections in the silver, and the nice woman says, "Your eyes are sky blue -- the same color as the stone."
Well, yeah.
I'm a December baby. That's why this is so important to me.

"You stupid, self-absorbed, arrogant, immature --" she stops, because our language doesn't contain the words to express what she wants to say, not because she's run out of things to say.
"Tu quo que."
"And I am SO sick of your dumb classical allusions!"
"So why are we having this conversation?"
"Ok," she says, "Ok. Tell me one thing."
"What."
"Why." I can hear her pick up the phone from the floor, where it fell when she kicked the table. "Why, when you came out that weekend and visited, why did things go so well? Why did we actually get along and have fun for once? What happened?"
Long silence. I hate it when she calls me at work.
"Well," finally, I start, "You let -- we, both of us, let our defenses down. We stopped spending all of our time protecting ourselves from one another and we actually talked."
"Huuuuuuh."
"I HATE it when you say "huh" that way, like you can't believe I just said something so stupid."
"Well, you DID say something dumb. I'm not defensive. YOU'RE the one who's never willing to commit to anything. You're a flake." I can hear her breathing hard as she says this, can imagine her fitfully kicking a tawny linen pullover on the floor, that has a little tag in the back, saying, "This tawny linen pullover was made in Ecuador entirely out of recycled laundry scraps by little old blind lesbian women."
"And I'm likely to -- I'm not going to stick my head in a bear trap eighteen times and enjoy it, am I?" I'm waving my hands at nothing.
"I don't have to listen to this. I'm going over to Steve's." She doesn't hang up the phone, though; she's still listening.
"Yeah, I'm sure you are."
"There are plenty of people who --"
"Is that why" I cut her off, "is that why you can't keep a relationship going with anyone else for more than three weeks?"
There's a huge long massive silence for about two tenths of a second.
"Hell, I'm sorry, Lisa, I didn't mean that." I can hear her crying; my face is hot and my skin is suddenly going all red.
"Look," I say, into the ringing, tingling silence, that has a life all its own, "I'll call you tomorrow night and we'll try this talk again. I'm sorry."
She makes an incoherent quiet sound, a mumbly animal sound.
I put the phone down on the table and walk back to the workbench. I don't feel like working right now, so I go outside and take a walk. It's cloudy.