The issue is Lena’s consent. No gallery will stage the exhibition unless she gives me written permission to use the images. So while she lies bloating in a darkened corner of the house in Miami, I stew in New York, thinking of how I can get her to just sign that fucking contract.
In the meantime, I try to convince Melanie about the exhibition potential of the downtown Chicago homeless. Women of talent, women of wealth, what can I do to make
Now this is one seriously damaged fucking creep. You can tell by the conniving content of the emails he’s sending her to get her to sign this fucking contract. These emails also tell me that he seems to have worked out that Sorenson might have been the recipient of his missing photographs. It shows how weak, pathetic, and fundamentally incapable Sorenson is, if she let a loser like that manipulate and dominate her. That bitch is fucking blessed to have come into my orbit. I will empower that flabby ass! But, like the team of surgeons with the Arkansas girls, you gotta rip out a lot of shit as you do the renovation, and if the patient dies on the table, well, at least you gave it your best fucking shot.
39
CONTACT 16
* * *
To:
[email protected];
[email protected] From:
[email protected] Subject: 85 Degrees This Winter
I’m sending you a joint email, as my previous ones have apparently got you two talking to each other. (No need to thank me.) I’m also copying you both into any emails I send the other, so you’re not able to play the stupid, manipulative, and self-deceiving games you’ve both become so adroit at.
First Dad:
Thanks for the first email from you in, like, FOUR YEARS and THREE MONTHS. Glad to know you still care.
1. Sorry Mom’s upset, but surely you must be able to see that she is morbidly obese. Anybody as fat and isolated as she is obviously has mental health/depression and extreme denial issues. You and I are partly to blame; we’ve enabled that depression. In my case it was through collusion. In your case it’s been emotional neglect. Well, I’m done. So how about you manning the fuck up and giving the woman you profess to love a little attention? Even—whisper it—a little affection?
2. Yes, speaking the truth does make me feel good, though it’s a topic of discussion for us alone, and NOT anyone else, including my so-called “worldly artsy friends” who exist solely in your imagination. I should be so lucky. If I had the sort of social network you imagine, I wouldn’t have spent most of my life so utterly fucking miserable.
3. I’m not on drugs—they’ve never been my thing, either when growing up in Potters Prairie or as an art student in Chicago. If you want to find evidence of drug abuse, check out your own medicine cabinet: Mom has been seriously abusing prescription drugs for years.
What I guess I’m trying to say is: FUCK YOU.
Now Mom:
You want to know where you went wrong?
1. Stuffing me full of junk food, making me as fat, depressed, and unhealthy as you are. I was heading for type 2 diabetes, and I’m assuming that you are well into that zone and experiencing the associated health issues. You can still fix it: CHECK YOURSELF BEFORE YOU WRECK YOURSELF!
2. Disapproving of every single friend I had growing up. Even the squeaky-clean “friends” you handpicked for me from the church groups eventually weren’t good enough. Way to make a girl feel as bad as you, bitch!
3. Trying to stop me doing what I was put here to do. Every expert, from that teacher at elementary school to the Art Institute, told you I was a prodigious talent and excelled at art. What was so wrong about letting me paint and draw? Are you fucking kidding me?
4. Trying to stop me leaving PP, MN. It might be your place, but it was never mine. GROW THE FUCK UP AND RESPECT THAT.
5. Trying to guilt-trip me with God. I don’t know if there is a God. I actually hope that for your sake there ISN’T, as He’s going to be really pissed at you come Judgment Day for BUGGING HIM ABOUT EVERY FUCKING TRIVIAL THING IN YOUR LIFE and putting words in His mouth. I’m delighted you have faith—now fuck off and enjoy it (quietly) and don’t use it as an excuse to control/manipulate/feel superior to/bug the living shit out of everybody else.
Miami Beach is lovely and warm at 85 degrees. How the fuck is Otter County?
L x
40
WEST LOOP LENA
SITTING IN A Miami high-rise, lying in my own shit. Feeling my nose and cheekbone throb in pain as I sit naked in this bear pool, washing almost every possible bodily fluid from my face. Movements perfunctory. Oddly not nauseated. Blowing my sore nose softly on a paper towel: still some feces, vomit, and dried blood mixed in with my mucus. The colors, texture, and mess of what I see in these towels creating a pulse of morbid excitement. Strangely wallowing in this ludicrous predicament: the wild, mixed-up, oscillating feelings it produces. Wanting to cry and squeal in pain, and then just laughing at it all. Looking at the contents of my face drip into the pool’s shit-brown lukewarm water. The TV, which I couldn’t bring myself to wreck, playing soundlessly in the corner. My sole stimulus, my only company.
And as an artist, you have to face up to unflattering things about yourself. The shit. At first Barry King’s death shattered me, but all the time there was a phantom exhilaration to it. It put me at the center of a compelling drama.
I’m like an exhibition. A show. A human exhibit: future human, past human. Past Lena, future Lena. The one emerging relentlessly in that glass reflection in the window. But that’s one thing I could always do: I knew how to put on a show.
Like back in Chicago. I got in with the supposedly cool crowd, mainly through Jerry. Olivia and Alex were his acolytes (a very Jerry word), though I brought Amanda and Kim into the scene. We partied a lot but were always on time for our classes, largely at my instigation, even if we often took it to the wire. We would charge through the Art Institute, past the medieval artifacts and exhibits of armor, pushing aside members of the public, to get to our workshops and lectures at the rear of the building.
Then Jerry. Where to begin?
I was at a party in Wicker Park, clutching a bottle of cheap Chilean red in the kitchen, trying to decide whether or not to get drunk. Hoping it would give me the confidence to interact with the normal people there. Now I see how foolish I was to think in that way. It’s more likely that we’re all aliens—at least those worth bothering about are. And each of us is making the mistake of trying to disguise ourselves as human beings.
Of course I’d noticed him earlier, but I was far from alone there. Jerry was in his final year and elevated by many freshmen, as well as the most popular tutors. All those reverential mutterings that whistled through the college grapevine: “Is Jerry coming tonight?” “What’s Jerry working on?” “Does Jerry have any decent shit?” It all seems so ludicrous now.
And then he was staring at me, really staring, as if I were an exotic object of curiosity. Framed in the doorway. Handsome: a strong, lithe figure with a shock of black, bushy hair. His eyes dark pools; I couldn’t look at them. I could feel his bristling confidence and power radiate from across the island counter and I felt myself wilting inside when he came over to me.
Jerry then did something strange. He introduced himself, and as I mumbled “Lena” in reply, he removed my beret, brushed the bangs from my face, and then replaced the hat, securing back my hair. I noticed then that his eyelashes were inordinately long, like a girl’s false ones. — I like to see who I’m talking to, Lena. And these are not the kind of eyes that should be covered, he said with a big smile that disarmed my rage at his presumption. Pathetically, I smiled—that little-girl smile. I was too intoxicated by his presence to even detest myself for it. (Self-loathing would come later.)
We chatted for ages, sipping wine; more and more wine. Then, by intoxication’s strange social alchemy, we were trudging through the white-and-black threadbare streets, past the snow-covered cars that lined the road like giant teeth, back to his place, whic
h was thankfully close by. He lived in the top part of an old house that had been split into two apartments. It was spacious, even luxurious. I thought we’d have sex then, I really wanted to, but instead we just talked and made out and drank coffee. The morning light came up, showing Jerry’s pores and the tight angles of his jawline and cheekbones, and he suggested that we took the El downtown back to my student dorm. He wanted to see my work. I remember the warmth of his body next to mine on that crowded train, and just wanting that journey to last forever.
The train spilled us back onto the frozen, empty, downtown streets. When we got to my student residency, Kim was fortuitously up and dressed. Jerry greeted her politely, and then looked over my series of sketches and drawings, and the couple of pieces I’d got mounted and hung in the meager wall space in the dormitory. — You’re good, he acknowledged, — and, even better, you’re prolific. We have to get people to see this stuff.
He confessed that he’d heard about my talent, and had been checking me out for a while. I was suitably flattered. No, I was totally enraptured. A few nights later, we were back in his apartment, the kitchen, and started making out again. I sensed this was our time, so I slipped down the wall, and we sat with our backs against the cold refrigerator, kissing with an intensity alternating between teasing control and wild abandonment. I broke the spell of rapture to advance the deal, and unzipped his fly, reached in and felt his hardness. He started making a soft whistling sound, like blowing compressed air through his front teeth. It was strange, but then he got me to stand up and step out of my pants. I didn’t need any encouragement. But when I did, he just looked at me, as if locked in some weird stasis. I took charge again, gently pushing him onto the kitchen floor, conscious only fleetingly of the dirt that he seemed to register in faint distaste. — Can we—he started, but I silenced him with another kiss, and unbuckled him, yanking his boxers aside, watching his veiny dick spring free. It thumped flat onto my stomach, so I straddled him with one hand pressed against the old, chunky, cream-colored Kenmore refrigerator.
His wide hand cupped the back of my head and neck, and then we were moving sluggishly, uncomfortably, my knees pressed into the floor, until he shimmied up, leaning against the Kenmore, caressing my ass (still through my panties) with his other hand, and also kissing, then biting, my neck. I kissed his mouth, deeply. His hands were fastened onto my hips, pulling me down onto him, me yanking my panties to the side, and then I felt myself enclose him all at once, and a fire burning somewhere near the base of my spine. Almost immediately, I was contracting hard, fucking him faster, and with force, till his grasp on my hips tightened as he tried to push me up and off him, gasping, but I shouted, — Wait, and felt myself shunting into another space and dimension as Jerry groaned, me pushing with final, determined strength right to where I wanted to be, then, afterward, slowly peeling my spent body from his. As we slumped to the floor I saw that he’d spilled onto the hardwood, over my panties (which were still half on), my thighs, and his own crumpled pants. I watched him slowly bang the back of his head twice against the refrigerator. Then he drew in a deep breath and exhaled in a gurgling, euphoric laugh that warmed me as I curled into his side and fell into a slumber.
I was woken by the biting cold, with no idea whether I’d been out for seconds or an hour, feeling myself bobbing into consciousness from being deeply submerged, a sensation I’d always associate with satisfying sex. Jerry had disentangled from me, and tucked a cushion under my head. He was gone and a window was wide open. Although it was his place, a bolt of panic and shame still gripped me; I recalled my mom’s one attempt at sex education: — Don’t. They’re only after one thing and once they get it they’re off. God made fingers for rings!
These words must have burned deep, as, in mounting dismay, I squinted in the moonlight to find my pants, pulling myself into them. As I straightened out, I realized with great relief that Jerry was still there; I saw him through the kitchen window above the sink, standing out on the fire escape, smoking a cigarette. It was dark but he was dimly lit from the spotlights. His arm was resting on the window ledge, and he was looking out at something in profile. His hair was wrecked, his lips were parted, and his breath billowed out almost as densely in the cold as the blue tobacco smoke. I joined him and noted he was wearing a T-shirt; he hadn’t even put on his sweater or coat. It was as if he were oblivious to the bone-tapping cold. His eyes were shut, those long cow-lashes resting on his cheeks. They opened when I stepped outside. — Hi, he said, drawing me close, then making a motor sound in my ear, — Brrrrrr!
I laughed and looked at him. Snowflakes disintegrated in his hair. I wanted to reach up and touch them but instead we stood face-to-face, me pulling myself closer to him, my hands gripping his T-shirt. I stepped further into his warmth. My chin spiked his chest. I could feel the dumb brutality of the redbrick building, the sticklike winter trees, gray sky, and white streets below us, pressing in on our drama.
Anything seemed possible with Jerry. He bristled and crackled with an intoxicating power. He had the confidence and sense of entitlement I lacked but desperately wanted to access. Over the weeks, I felt some of it starting to rub off on me. I soon stopped thinking of myself as tubby little Lena from Potters Prairie. I was an artist. I was Jerry Whittendean’s girlfriend.
But what was I bringing to the table? I didn’t see it then, because, like almost everyone else, I was so in awe of him. But what I brought was the talent. Jerry’s tragedy was that, to paraphrase him, he was neither good nor prolific. He had passion and ambition, but little skill to back it up. Nor did he possess what all successful artists require more than anything: an engine. That had never been developed, perhaps due to his background of relative privilege: a father in the oil industry, a large house in Connecticut, and a private education. For me there was no such thing as a blank canvas. I couldn’t wait to defile it with my strokes. And I couldn’t wait for Jerry to defile me with his. I couldn’t take my hands off him. And I discovered, to my surprise, that, in love as in art, I was by far the hungrier of the two of us. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it seemed that with Jerry everything was poured into the initial seduction. After that, he grew bored and complacent quicker than I could imagine any other man ever doing.
But my warning bells ought to have started ringing when he announced he was moving his focus from multimedia and concentrating solely on photography. Even his most sycophantic acolytes, like Alex, balked at this. Art school operates on a hierarchy. Painters are number one in terms of prestige and credibility, closely followed by those who choose to pursue sculpture. The multimedia people are harder to classify, as the discipline was then too new and too amorphous to get a proper handle on. But those specializing in photography tended to be a very confused breed. Apart from the central question as to whether photography could be considered art at all, it was the poor relation at the Art Institute of Chicago. Frankly, my high-school facilities back in Potters Prairie, MN, were superior. For half the price of the Art Institute’s fees, you could go to Columbia College, or even rent a photography studio. However, the snappers weren’t quite at the bottom of the pile—that honor went to the viscom students (why would anybody pay so much money to get a degree in graphic design?) — but they were pretty damn close. And Jerry wasn’t a bottom-of-the-pile sort of guy.
While my social life was on the up, his visits to my dorm, where we made love in my single bed, poor Kim often pretending to be asleep, or leaving to shuffle out to Dunkin’ Donuts in the cold, were its undoubted highlight.
There wasn’t an enviable leisure scene in the student accommodation back then. We were isolated from the city, trapped in a downtown, which, at the time, was near dead and occasionally hostile. Considering the number of students there were at various colleges, there was precious little in the way of social facilities catering for us. Basically, you had to make your own entertainment. A lot of my first-year downtime was comprised of standing or sitting around, usually smoking cigarettes outside th
e residencies, on the steps of the Art Institute, or hanging out in Dunkin’s, where we competed with local bums for free donuts. There was practically nowhere else to go for food, and it meant that the weekly red line L trip out of downtown to a Jewel-Osco was a welcome adventure.
Yet the spartan tedium of student life in some way facilitated its creativity. Artists (professors) and students socialized together a lot, and Jerry introduced me to the big hanging-out culture. It made sense as the tutors had the status and the apartments outside of Chicago’s then ghostly downtown, with six-packs of PBR and bottles of vodka in their refrigerators. And it proved useful. You were supposed to take twelve credits per year, and I took twenty-one, probably around eight of them accrued just through hanging out with teachers. And I didn’t have to fuck a single one: I was fucking Jerry, and it was tacitly understood by even the biggest predators that I was his girl.
I glance at the soundless TV. Stephen, the suitor of the twins, is on. I reach for the remote, with an urgency that shames me, and turn it up. He has become a celebrity, this poor boy from Arkansas; he has the status that the East Coast, educated, bohemian Jerry Whittendean sought so desperately. I would once have disdained the crassness of our sick, sensationalizing reality-TV-dominated society. Now I find myself giving thanks for the crass, leveling, bizzaro democracy it confers.