CHAPTER 16
With a pull of his finger, Henry invites me into The Parkview’s lobby, while he glares at my three panting guests. Ms Cowper, Rasputin, and Napoleon snarl diminutively and tug at their leads wrapped in my hands. They look as if they’re dancing in places, a cha-cha; or they look like they’re running on hot sand.
Sweat runs down from Henry’s temples in the tepid morning air. An hour ago, the thermometer read eighty-four degrees. I step into the air-conditioned foyer with Rasputin leading his mutt-mates at my feet, their eyes aglitter with possibilities for adventure, tongues lick-lick-licking their spotted mouths. The pups are well trained, I have no fear they’ll be good, and they heel at the slightest tug on the leads. I hold these high to keep their heads up, even if they’d rather graze on the plush green carpet in the foyer like three baby goats. Ms Cowper and Napoleon sneeze; Rasputin lifts his hind leg, but only to scratch his ear.
“This better be for real,” says Henry, keeping notice of the dogs’ subtle movements. His voice is business casual, even soothing, as though he has reassured himself of something about me that he doesn’t like, but will wait to see how an advantage can be found. The house Dick is nowhere in sight. Henry says, “Keep those dogs from barking, if you’d please. I’ll call upstairs.” The solicitous doorman shall confirm a guest’s announced invitation. I sense he wants me to be wrong in the smallest way, so he can hurt me with his size-fourteen hands.
We follow Henry to the front desk, behind which he’s retreated to dial his phone. He speaks, listens; twice he looks at me, once with raised eyebrows while the voice from the receiver bids attention. I don’t hear anything, not even the tinkle of canned speech. Henry has molded the earpiece against the side of his head, as though that end of phone has swallowed his ear. His final reply is as folded and crisp as a linen napkin.
“The lady asks that you wait on her in the park. She says you’ll know where.”
“I do, Henry. Thank you.”
Two gold teeth shine from between his lips. He’s telling me that nothing should go wrong with my liaison with Karen K. “She may be awhile, Mr Orth. You might consider getting your little friends back home. Ms Kosek doesn’t much like pets.”
“Pets, no — that was my guess, too. But everyone likes dogs,” I say, as if to disagree would be an ungodly act.
I’ve been training Napoleon to balance on his hind legs for treats. He’s not doing well. He either doesn’t know enough to listen, and thinks the bait treats are his by right, or else he chooses not to hear me. Do animals, like partners in a long marriage, have selective hearing? Pets are smarter than we caregivers will spare to imagine. Napoleon much rather likes to leap for his treats. If I hold a liver chip low, he stretches up and bites my fingers. Too high, and he leaps with a dog’s sense of balance that, unlike a cat’s, sends him backwards to land all akimbo and with a thud, which startles him into defensive action. He barks at his embarrassment and is itching for a fight. This is only funny the first time. A repeat makes me feel like I’m picking on a little kid.
The worst of it yet is when I use Mrs Cowper to demonstrate for Napoleon what I want him to do. Mrs Cowper dances for her treats like a ballerina; she even does a grand battement à la seconde when I lead her sideways. Napoleon won’t have any demonstrations, though, and takes Mrs Cowper’s prowess as an insult, for which he attacks her when she’s most vulnerable. Of course, the adage “beware a woman scorned” (in this case, tackled) serves doubly powerful in the animal kingdom. The evidence backs up my claim. Mrs Cowper recovers in a flash and, in retaliation, attacks little Napoleon’s nut sack. This might just be the funniest moment in dogdom.
While I work with Napoleon I keep an eye on the path. Soon enough, Karen K comes along. I’d hoped for a surprise, perhaps a stylish dress to match the voice she treated me to yesterday. Her want is to appear cloaked in stench, however, disregarding the matching couture of someone who writes so eloquently of beauty. She walks hunched over, with a heavy pretense of listing left. Could this be her newfound sense of beauty? Her gnarled features poke from beneath that silver wig (my early credulity had disallowed the curls being fake, only rearranged for effect), red nose and pebble-dull eyes. Only a crooked cane would polish a witching effigy.
Rembrandt’s sketch asserts its power on my memory. When looked at for only a small while, I find it easy to see burgmeister settle into the background, elevating the grotesqueness of the gutter woman who clumsily assumes central imagery. Is it vulgarity in an age of refinement that makes us scrutinize? As in life, so in art, people want beauty to surround them, and only beauty. Rembrandt defied those rules and earned criticism for it. He responded with an etching that showed a dog shitting in the street. What fun!
I wonder if her coarse language will spew like the contents of a sump. So be it. I’ll accept these conditions. People are seldom what you make them into — through want or hope, or even the process that transmutes life into art.
Napoleon jumps at a liver chip I hold inches beyond his snapping chops. Only he doesn’t reach with his body, but hops on trampoline legs. Three weeks’ training, kaput. The fault lies not in the dog, but in myself. Karen stops ten feet from us and digs her hands into her pockets.
The British philologist, R.W. Mantel Pursewarden, writing about the silence that comes when you meet the person you’ve sought through strenuous journey, asked the question, “Is it the disbelief of the find that spurs this phenomenon?” I’d rather hope it’s the end of the hunt that leaves us mute. Glory — large or small, washed in meager mental triumphs — is short-lived, and its appearance is often all we need (and, sometimes, more). It was Freud, the old fraud, who said we remember our failures far longer, and with deeper feeling, than our successes. I disagree and have art living on three continents as proof. Although I’ve not tallied the two, my charitable feelings on “self” veil quite successfully the rude, misshapen lumps of loss. Likewise, it has been said by someone less known, “Beware of whom you’ve put on a pedestal, as they usually turn out to be unusual bastards.”
“I thought I told you ‘between’ your doggie dates,” says Karen. She has used her own voice.
“I considered that a suggestion, not a rule,” I say with bright appeal.
Napoleon fights with my hand. I relent and toss him his treat before tying his lead to the bench leg. Karen edges nearer and Napoleon leans forward to sniff the multi-colored stink bag. I put out a palm to block him and hedge him backwards, beneath the bench, where he breathes hot breath on my hand but settles next to his sleeping companions.
“I would have liked a more urban reality to match your voice,” I say. I offer the seat next to me, and as alternative the bench further down. It’s the dance of legislation. She looks up the path, then back down from where she’d come. She sits next to me. My surprise at her closeness becomes evident (my chest tightens while my knees come together) because she sits up and studies me. I see the same hat, same painter’s pants, a nattered cord jacket with shined buttonholes. What must Henry think? Or her neighbors and, thus, the building association? The puzzle that is Karen K’s life is expanding by hundreds of pieces.
“Did you win?” she asks.
I look down at the dogs, at my hands. I realize she’s referring to the sculpture symposium. “You know it’s not … it’s never a true competition.”
“Says who?” she snaps. Her mercurial eye traps me in the tangle of indecision. “Minus the Artist, we play games with ourselves all the time. An act betoken of our peril. It’s our way of gauging the world. Naturally so, but.... When we do this, we divvy the moments as wins and losses.” She picks lint from between the dried paint splashes on her pants, rolls it between her fingers, and drops the ball to the ground. “Well then?”
“I won,” I reply. “But they didn’t give me my prize.” It’s not so lazy an answer as I’d thought it could be.
She pulls out her pencil and that bunch of tightly pressed notebook paper, opens to somewhere at the back, where I see
pencil marks on the verso page. She quickly writes a few words, or a whole sentence, and then she stuffs the pages into a different pocket. She belches loudly and blows the gaseous effluent through a waving hand in front of her mouth. Part of the act, I think; she won’t want the public to see a bum as anything but what they need to see. Is Karen playing with perception? Does she measure her wins and losses at the end of each day? I want to know these answers without having to ask questions. The lint picking has told me something important.
We look at each other from the side, through half-closed eyes that transfer careful interest. The fold of her lids, the unusual sideways squint from which she watches, imparts that she wonders if I want a friend. No! I don’t need that. And if she believes I do, she’ll bolt. I have to declare myself as out of the ordinary — like herself — because she’s seen ordinary, and has stripped every piece within her reach of its veneer, tint, enamel, words, images; what have you. Because our meeting is a man-woman encounter, there is a special consideration: leave no doubt that the mating ritual is not the purpose. On this, I must trust my intuition. 1. No strapping guy at his fittest age (looks & physique) would dare sully his reputation to hit on a bag lady; 2. Our age difference (twenty-six years) must be enough to shy her away from that idea.
The change we seek must be subtle. She wants something, otherwise why is she here? She could have stopped after my Guggenheim rant; and why not (from her perspective); I’d gotten something, while she stood spectator. I see the change like this: art relationships are important, but hardly essential, and how you get to them (and how they fail) tells a lot about yourself. I no longer fall into the trap where you demonize your art lover after the romance has disintegrated. To look within yourself is where real discovery can happen. Karen K’s medium, I must remember, has always been words. She makes them dance to a repertoire of ideas linked to images. And this is what we settle on. It comes suddenly, easily.
Her voice flows from beneath the cap and wig and I inhale her words and their essence. The subjects are general, for a time. Who’s to know where and when voice establishes a path? Charting a course is like reading star charts without a legend. There is only one constant between people: practice.
Over the yawns of my dogs I say, “Your trepidation leaves me at a loss.”
“In jeopardy?”
“Maybe … doubtfully though. Either way — I’m confused.”
“I thought the distinction clear enough.”
“That’s a joke.”
She leers. “Truth.”
“Opinion.”
“Supposition! Based on evidence observed and evaluated. This isn’t the first time we’ve met.”
I start. “By whose –” But she holds up a mealy hand that stops me.
I wonder how quickly she gets herself to look so awful. She couldn’t have gone to bed in those clothes, not living at such an address. (If she’s truly one of those people who collects newspapers until every room is overstuffed and cockroach infested, never taking her garbage out, toilets running over to drain shit-water through the neighbor’s ceiling below, Henry would be obliged to frog-march her out of The Parkview. Christmas bonus be damned!) Wearing grime cannot be as easy as its opposite; a woman puts on make-up with purposeful steps to highlight her beauty and to mask the flaws. The ugly I see beside me stuns the senses, of the sort from a crippled genus: traumatic and disgusting, disquieting. Who is this wretch? I may not, after all, use this woman as a model for my Mythos. She fails me, she debases the concept, and collapses as a classical figure because she fails as a human of consequence. She represents the ones of us who’ve quit, the “given up” of society lore. My Mythos may be old and ugly by comparison to their youthful, celebrated, mythic selves in god-image character and proportion, but they will not have lost themselves. Beside me Karen is their antithesis. And I am sickened. Her kind of ugly tries to adumbrate my newfound language to identify beauty.
But what am I saying? These are contradictions to art’s intent, to my edict; to Rembrandt’s gutter woman. She has her own beauty; she plays her role. Karen must have, too. I need to control my thoughts. The air is close beneath the trees. People stare at the dogs, but only at us in passing.
“Think of five lives,” Karen says. “Supine women. Colors mix. Select cotton is prepared for this canvas — but not another. The moment is alive and the problem elegant in your evaluation. Now solve the riddle.”
“Lop off their heads,” I suggest, for which she tries a cruel smile. We’ve spoken in code. I don’t have its key, and must grope through the dark while hoping that light comes up before my time is up. “You’re flirting,” I say.
“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to ask at all,” she replies.
“Truly. Honest injun … I’m not that kind of boy.”
She had not asked what I meant by your trepidation.
Karen K says, “I have no idea what artists’ groups talk about these days. I hope they discuss art and not some theoretical hash. Marxist interpretation is possibly the worst, though Deconstructionists haven’t done anything for art but confuse the public (particularly the ones who listen fervently) and nearly as often confuse themselves. This must be the case for the artist, too — confusion; maybe simple fear — since their work the last two decades has been the reflection of eviscerated dreams. Certainly they’ve confounded the masses, who seem already to have had difficulty finding their television remotes and the ability to assuage their hyper-transient boredom, not to mention their sugar-wired children. Enough!
“Do artists even get together anymore? I mean to drink and talk art — the biggies and how they were influenced (or not) by color, technique, form, vision — not that co-op talk of commissions and sales. Café night-owling was its own art form at one time. An era stretching generations! Pushkin met with fellow poets in St Petersburg for spirited recitations and readings. Parisian painters used the Cafés Guerbois and Taranne as watering holes, public places where they could thumb their noses at the arrondissement bureaucrats. Even Greenwich Village had its moment in the moonglow. I think American artistic good-fellowship went as hard as an old man’s prostate after so much money flowed into the scene. Jealousy kills the cat, not curiosity. Tell me SOHO is not a cesspool of greed and I’ll kick you in the balls, Minus.”
I have a response. “Is it really selling out to earn real money for one’s work? After toiling in obscurity for years, a morsel or two that fills the bank account, for at least a while, helps. Perhaps it replenishes one’s imagery. Something must. That’s about all an artist can dream of without getting the cerebral slap. You know that I’m not talking about ‘these days’ either. Funny, I said the opposite thing at some artists’ roundtable. ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.’ ”
Karen stares; she knows whom I’ve quoted. I wonder if she has suddenly thought of herself in its context. And then she says, “There hasn’t been anything unique since surrealism. Not anything that says something about life. Artists have a fear that rivals will steal their ideas. Which they do.” Her hands jump in her lap like frogs as she talks. It’s a habit that annoys me. “All the YBA’s work is strictly manufactured, no inspiration of artistic form; no beauty there whatsoever. Social realism marketed as art! As if anyone wants that shit in their home. Museums have wasted millions to bring along a movement the critics praise but can’t say why they praise it without bringing up psychology. Where the fuck is the beauty in that? Originality is a shallow pond, Minus, not an ocean. A shallow pond during a heat wave. By the way, that still means something. My opinion.”
“You didn’t like the literati schmooze scene, did you?” I ask. A yawn ripples her lips, but she holds it back. So I prod her. “The hobnobbing, the acolytes dressed in Hollywood or City couture. I mean, you never saw merit in that bit of artist-gathering.” The subtlety of her attentiveness-boredom threshold — finger gestures or sighs, tics and chewed yawns — makes my pores gush sweat with the regularity of my pulse beats.
/> “Failure and success don’t apply,” she says. “The enigma becomes the art. Question: Is it worth creating? Yes or no! Question: Is it worth looking at? Yes or No. Not making just one piece, but pairs and triplets. Octuplets! Art that you can look at for five seconds or five minutes in complete separation from the world moving at a dead run — and a day later, you look again to find something new in the work or from the metaphor it holds, something that imagines reality and truth for you. No matter its falseness against your experience or brainwashed beliefs. One wins out. You can guess which.”
If this is what I’ve wanted, why I’ve pursued Karen, then it has come in a gush.
“That’s always been my purpose,” I say. “The ideas, the art –”
“Then perfect that,” she commands. “Your work matters more than you.”
“I’ve got –” I stop myself, take a break for thought, and get myself in line. “I’m looking for an original form. If it isn’t original, it has at least got to be new.”
“You’ve already found it. I saw.” She sees me hesitate and pounces. “Do you know what that is?”
I continue as though this news hasn’t fazed me. We both know it has. “Nothing we can find anywhere today. Or, if we do, it’s already in the museums, gathering dust. Maybe from two thousand years ago.”
She shakes her head; apparently I’m not getting it. She says, “Primal is good only if you sell it to niggers on hunner-sikky-fid street.”
I wonder how Peter N would see Karen K in this … performance. He might disregard her out of self-respect for his race. He might laugh. (I once asked Pete to describe his ideal woman. He said, “I need to learn signing for the relationship to last.” That’s good, I told him; so much the Bad-Boy-Bastard. He replied, “Thanks for showing up before the laugh track came on.” At least you’re willing to do some work for the woman, I suggested. “A lot more than many men would,” he admitted. “Or could.”) Otherwise Peter would (could) trade barbs with Karen until they both fell off their chairs, in love or for respect, then leave with the promise to never see each other again.
“Not that kind of primal,” I say. “The myth figures … they’re unique because they aren’t stylized to be the gods that people take them for.”
She chuckles low and lets it build to a laugh. Through the middle rumble of her own humor she prunes the noise. “I heard a sense of purpose in your epiphany that most people cannot grasp as a concept. It’s not that they’re dumb, don’t get me wrong, they simply don’t think this way. Never even thought to try. And that’s the crime. The few of us who can, and do, through practice or our innate sense of beauty, we understand the near-slave conditions under which artists live to realize a single masterwork. Not all artists. Only the best.”
“Have you ever…?”
“Never. My vision has been only, and ever, seeing clearly what the author and artist have attempted. Practically speaking, I failed true-talent searches. That represents my lone link between ninety-nine percent of human beings. As a fre –” she catches her voice and looks far afield, down the path. I don’t follow her gaze, and instead look at her face, where, on it, her eyes have sunk into their sockets. In a moment she recovers. “A friend once told me,” she says in a shallow tone, “that I could barely find my house keys. We were in college. She was right. That’s when I began to take advantage of myself and write.
“The non-possible, that which should never be achieved if you hope to keep desire’s flame lit in your imagination, artists must possess this, and so create from what is available. This becomes the non-possible achievement. Past, present, and the look ahead. Picasso’s Stare, I once called it. The last time it showed itself was Picasso. At any rate, he had it still at his death, and he outlived a few others who nearly copied it — but no more remain … of course, this is only an aside.
“Once the vision is made art, where all its beauty has been extracted from your mind, the non-possible is achieved. Then you lose it forever. It’s necessary for you to lose it. You do not want to try and keep it, or search for that stare again.” Her eyes have closed, her hands now folded across her too-small corduroy jacket into which she’s stuffed herself, like over-enthusiastic taxidermy. “Otherwise you cannot find another — the next more beautiful non-possible.”
She opens her eyes as a sudden burst of noise from bicycle brakes frames her last sentence. The squeal wakens the dogs, who begin to bark. I whirl and kneel on the rough asphalt to corral them in my arms. When they’ve calmed down, I turn and find Karen gone. A scribbled page of notepaper torn from a diary sits on the bench. Her writing is small, with a curlicue loop on the top of the first letter. Call again.
We meet three times this first week. Four times the next, then twice the following. Description is hardly easy; this is an attempt to replace the paints back into the flattened tubes of a thousand colors slathered on the palette. Our talk is just that — the weather, potholes, flowers, tourists, crime, bathroom gadgets, the history of Egyptian math, paper mills, fast food versus road kill, Harlequin romances, hand lotion, the errata of dreams — all are associative talk to stimulate the next subject or, somehow, one loops onto a previously thought we’d determined was exhausted. Sometimes I doodle in notebooks while we talk; Karen writes with her pencil on the folded paper sheets. She never lets me read her scribbles; I don’t show her my doodles. Twice she grabbed the book from my hand for a look. I don’t dare return the joke. The trees and grass grow around us; people scurry to work, to market, to dates and trysts, to piss behind bushes; we see them in register, take note for later retrieval; clouds move from west to east; the Earth rotates on its axis; the planet moves a little further along on its orbit toward the next solstice.
Karen is a work facilitator, I realize, demanding “more and better” (I have this feeling it’s mostly of herself, but....) — demanding I understand what my work leads to. “Stick to that with no diversion,” she said. She presses me to know more about my project at its foundation: the elemental story, the history of each Mythos, and the esoteric details any artist should possess. I tell her how I’ve found the myth figures in the faces of everyday people.
“Poseidon stared at me from across the room, standing in the balcony doors. Scruffy-haired, wild, with rheumy eyes — but only one is blood-red — it doesn’t matter that my Poseidon was a woman. She stood halfway outdoors, holding a cigarette into the breath of the exhaling house. And … these are not always the faces of the old; or under certain conditions and movement, a walk, a stance, the rabid gesticulation of anger. When they frown, cry, argue, sleep, faint, laugh, yawn, fart, cough, and etcetera, each is the exaggeration of his or her own likeness. I notice how people yawn one day and the next, and then I remember last week’s yawn. It matches; but no two people are alike. Who are these people? Do they know? Maybe never in their life, but I have to know.
“I asked myself one day, ‘Why aren’t these people gods? Beneath mortal flesh, at the moment of … what? … at that instant, they reveal their selves.’ I had just caught a laugh, a delightfully childish cackle by Thetis on reminding herself of her folly by dipping Achilles into the River Styx while just clasping his heel. It was a rueful sound behind all its strength, laced with the irony to befit a demi-god’s death.”
Karen scribbles something in her bundle of paper sheets.
Another day.
“What about children?” I ask. Her gesture chides the very thought.
“Forget them,” she says. “They have no reasoning worthy of the artist’s notice. That the boy pointed out the emperor’s nudity does not prove children have some unadulterated perception. They merely state the obvious. If your art is obvious, give that up and go work on Wall Street, or at the fucking fish market. One of those madhouses can make you that pile of American-Dream money. Which is all to say that you’ll only always earn cab fare, Minus the Artist, until you make people discover you through how and what your sculptures tell them about themselves. Be thirty years ahead of your tim
e, right now, and people will want to anoint you.”
(Cab fare is Karen’s phrase for making a comfy living: “Cabs ain’t cheap,” she tells me another day. “If you don’t ride subways and buses to get around, you belong to the robust elite that value time and space over the American Church of the Almighty Dollar.”)
Sometimes I think I’m in over my head with her; other times it’s me, the jester, caught peering seedily at the court attendees he’s supposed to imitate without their knowledge.
Meanwhile, I’ve been sculpting at the Beehive. Four Mythos carved in plaster stand completed. Another three are in subtle apotheosis to their reanimation from the sketches. The Mythos Project grows steadily, and excites me to the anxiety that what I do each day is knowingly the best I’ll ever do. But I stop myself before the image of death casts itself as dream. My Mythos surround me in the honeycomb, their faces slowly multiply, watch me at work, waiting for when I’ll admit another member to their ranks, eyes alert even if their faces sometimes hold the forlorn droop of a funereal friend.
Belinda has photographed the sculptures from three angles, and has had slides made, along with twelve-by-eighteen prints mounted on black foam core. Her work is indelible to my second sight of the finished statues. I stare at these prints and, on nights I return late, after showering away the day’s plaster stuck in my hair and under my nails, I project the slides onto the living room wall, where I make an image larger or smaller. I have felt for their size and resolved to the best dimensions. Sometimes I walk into the light and set my body in the position of the figure, where the image becomes tattooed on my skin. “Beautiful,” Belinda says; her voice is a whisper in my ear. When the projector has cooled and a wine bottle stands empty, the thought occurs to me that weeks have passed where I’ve not been with Belinda more than a couple hours during any day.
At night, though, yes, always there’s Belinda at night, in bed and while we sleep, when the streets gurgle digestively through their subterranean intestines. I won’t forsake her, not for anyone, or thing, or prize. Nor shall I stay away long without that tacit approval gathered from a phone call with the promise, “Work is going well, strong — I can’t leave it.” She must believe I have a lover. A dog’s mother? An artist fuck-friend? Vendy — because she knows what Vee is like?
I don’t know if she really believes this, but it is a subconscious emotion that teases out the thought. An anti-confession won’t placate, only obscure. The payoff on success comes after hard work grabs its due share of your life, Belinda tells me. So there’s nothing to confess — neither the sculpting time nor Karen’s visits. I think she has convinced herself of this. In a few months, I make a promise to her, we’ll be able to shave time from work for ourselves again. “More for Karen K, too,” I think, and Belinda is unaware of this thought, and Karen insouciant.
Zeppo is happily envious of my activity and creation. I’ve invited him to look at some sculptures, ask questions, and most of all have something to say. He shows his gameness by testing me. “The Greek myth figures — your Mythos — they were gods, most of them immortal. They didn’t age, Minus. Look at all the art passed down to us.”
This isn’t an attack on my subject, per se, nor my method; he wants to understand my artistic hallucination that began this cycle. While Peter N is a practical painter of the mind’s interior, Zeppo is a theorist who paints. It’s this extraordinary perception that I appreciate in him. We’re sitting in my honeycomb, he on the stool and me in a club chair I’ve recently brought in on which I can relax and think. Zeppo has taken off his painter’s cap, which has left his hair flattened on the top and sides, and bushy below the ears. His gray stubble is four days old and could sand orphans from a cast.
I answer him using the phrases of a miniature homily. “The gods were torn from the breasts of people, struck from the altars of worship. In worship they don’t change, but in history they can become anything we humans devise, for our use or to deceive ourselves into believing. Art history, to name one, is well supplied by these impulses. This passage of time, this one, draws out the metaphor: Mythics in their Twilight. Mythos.”
“Apollo carrying a set of golf clubs?”
“A bit like Poseidon’s pool floaty — but I might scratch that prop. Too contemporary. I’ll find another. Yes, okay, kitschy, some. But, no. I’ll leave all that to Taos drop-ins and Sedona lesbians. ”
“Minus! Remember what Peter said about wearing the elitism halo? You’ve just pulled yours down to make a cowl.” He scratches the side of his head. “My original question stands: Why return to the classics?”
“The point is to bring their experience, the gods, forward, but along with that comes their knowledge and experience. I won’t hold to any conclusion that everything has been done in art that can be done. Art does not need to be strange and weird to continue. If that’s the command from galleries and critics, then they have plenty to choose from. If you’ve been to any mod-art museum, lately, you’ll find the least populated galleries are those with monochrome paintings, lighted ‘trash-heap’ sculptures, and installation pieces. The artists producing these don’t know what they are, how it works as art — it refuses narrative, and only yells if there is a voice at all — or what it says about life.”
“That’s always been the important element,” Zeppo says. “I agree with you. It’s only the ‘how to’ that has evolved, not ‘what if.’ Okay, okay, you’ll argue art has devolved into the obscure, the esoteric. I don’t get this. Nothing says art has to make sense with our reality, or match that reality. Each of us has a different reality, regardless of our shared experience and the ordinary things we see every day, accepted like the time we read on a watch’s face.”
I look around at the sixteen maquettes of the Mythos seated across the table like an audience, as if they can help speak for me. Someday they shall, in their way. These are the faces of hope, tinged yellow by 60-watt bulbs into a murky despair. They didn’t lack confidence. Their indecision for value truncated the effort. I walk over to three figurines, and uncover them: Narcissus at his pool of water, now at rest, his back against a tree stump, eyes to the sky, a squint so slight that his jaw line is slack, cheeks rigid with the sense of sun-stretched age, like Hellenic ox leather — and the wryest smile of contentment you can find anywhere among the aged class; Aphrodite’s breasts are now less full, fallen with time and inertia, a shift covering her quietly gained Mother Earth figure, the sign of sedentary pondering over blissful youth — legs like dinner-table posts, toes knuckled — she eats grapes with the flourish of the happy glutton; and Zeus yet sits on his throne, now a mere pile of sticks, laughing like an idiot, but the knowing idiocy of dreams realized, and spent, upon whose memory he has slumbered restfully for millennia. Beside him, stacked in a basket, lie his thunderbolts, tarnished with age and pitted by acid rain.
“Who says gods must stay young, or youthful, or powerful, or beautiful? That was all for the poets and painters’ daydreams and jealousy plots. Art should be unusual, it must take hold of us, tease us to look closer. Scene and color and movement and stillness — no, wait; let me talk — when I say ‘unusual’ I don’t mean to say, or invite, the weird or simply odd.”
“For me,” Zeppo says, “the ‘unusual’ in art is a visual exercise. I like to see those images not ordinary to our experience. Is aging unusual? No. Call it a collective experience, for the moment. We’re bombarded by ordinary objects every day; it’s the collective boredom that makes the experience real. People want what’s new. Are aging gods unusual? You think so. I can see how you make that work in your Mythos as the unusual. But are they new?” He lifts his hands, uncertainty in the gesture.
“Listen,” I say. “We want to find ourselves in another place and time, and in fields of dreams, whenever possible. Movies are made this way, and books, too. So why not art? To say ‘It’s been done!’ is no answer. Some of us people-watch, some bird-watch, some read books and write in journals. What are all of these? The ways we make th
e world into a sensory system. That’s my feeling of it. If you give me painted squares on a canvas, or a twisted piece of metal welded atop a pedestal, or string hung from a ceiling into the shape of a triangle that you can walk through, it’s these ideas and objects that have given us the phenomena of spending a mere three seconds to look at art. That’s partly because we’re made self-conscious when we don’t know what to do with it.”
“It’s that very un-ordinariness, or not-as-usual, that makes bewitching possible, Minus. If any of us is nevermore bewitched, the essence of being human has become tainted.”
“Scratches on the cave wall bewitch us still, Zepp, for the simple reason – among so many others – that we ask ‘Why had they bothered?’ ”
“If you haven’t already got it, you’ll never get it.”
“Seems I’ve heard those words not long ago,” I say. “Give me a minute and I’ll recap that. On second thought….” I leave this and move on. “Although, da Vinci finished only a half dozen paintings his whole life. I think I’ve got time.”
“Look at his paintings, stupid. Most sort of suck. He did show others how art could be done. Is that genius?”
“Joyce wrote four books in twenty years.”
“Two are nearly unreadable because he was more concerned with wordplay and purple prose than giving the world a story. Dostoyevsky before him, and Woolf after, did the hard work that made sense out of stream of consciousness. Shit, fella, if these are your emulatives, you’d best stick to dog walking. Am I taking you away from something important?”
“At least I’m no longer ‘dildo face’ or ‘fuck-nut,’ ” I think (with glee).
“We’re talking,” I say. “That’s something. I’ve got the afternoon. Maybe you haven’t had lunch. How about … you pick the place.”
She takes me to Fairway Foods, on 72nd Street and Broadway, where I’m given worse looks than the bag lady I follow around and whom I let pay the bill because she nudges me aside, pays with a handful of coins she holds with skin so soiled it might have been a ten-button glove. Her nails remain acutely manicured, though unpainted today. We go back to the park and make sandwiches. She sees on my face that I had thought she would take me to her apartment. Her thin lips say, “Not a chance.”
Amsterdam Avenue crawls with daylight shoppers, off-the-path tourists, truant teens learning how to smoke cigarettes (poorly), and city workers dressed in orange jumpsuits. Neither of us understands why these people are outside now, in this heat. It’s another heat wave day. Birds keep quiet in the trees, sparing their energy. Karen has said she believes in the Spanish siesta, though not the Italian or French varieties (!?), because the Spanish sleep through the heat while “the wops and frogs” sleep through their work.
At one-thirty, we dodge softened bubble gum buttons sticking to the soles of the shoes on the otherwise careless. Karen’s Tourette’s-mimed hand gestures castigate passers-by. We step into a small café with books on shelves and ceramic sugar bowls on tables. The flint-eyed waitress frowns heavily at me (I’m to blame for escorting the skell), but holds her tongue. Her nose she can’t control, which wrinkles under the assault. I take a surreptitious sniff while Karen scans the menu with her face pressed close to the plastic covering, and detect only a sourness in the air around our table. I must be used to her dumpster odors, I realize, though I wouldn’t have guessed this possible. Coffee is not a siesta drink, so she orders us Campari over ice. I don’t know why. I accept my drink as though I’m a connoisseur. Pressed into a window seat, Karen shakes her silver curls, which glint like sea foam. While resting the bulbed glass on her lower lip, she asks me a direct question. My grin, watery from the Campari taken in this heat and on an empty stomach, reveals my youth.
“Sculpture helps me to understand the subject.”
“A horse’s head?”
“Yes, a horse’s head. Also the eyes, the nose. Ears, mane, and hide. The skull.”
Our conversations continually meander through time. I haven’t thought of the equine figurines since getting back into the studio.
“Those are important,” she says.
“Yes. They are important.”
“Animals. Objects. Geometric shapes.” She taps the table with her nails. “People?”
“Sure. People.”
“Love? Matching people or — its pursuit. And sex?”
“You won’t catch me fitting round pegs into round holes. That’s not my art.”
“You want to understand the physical space of the subject.”
“When I sculpt now, I have a naked skeleton over which plaster takes hold. It’s wet material, heavy and tacky and slow to dry. Slow enough. Nevertheless, I must work quickly. Plaster is smooth, or sometimes pocked and veiny, like a map that charts rivers. Lots of things come through my mind that aren’t physical.”
“What kind of things? Temporal?”
“All kinds. Yes. I try to catch one or two only. No more than that. No time. The rest are out of focus. But they are whole. Then I stop one, or two. Static but vague. The possible shows itself. I ask myself, What is it, though? For example, what I know — or if I know — about the relationship between this static object and Love. Or Beauty. Or Death.”
“How about a person?”
“Sure, that. Dead people work well for this — like Richter’s newsprint photo paintings, and Brady’s war photos. Both of these are good examples, don’t you agree?” She stares through this question. I wait, but she doesn’t comment on the book that made her famous. She also knows I’ve used these names deliberately. Their use is too obvious, maybe. Any use of her past might be too much of one thing or another.
I relent, admitting, “It doesn’t have to be a person.”
She says, “It can be a stick.” She peers into her glass, rattles the melting cubes to make a melody against the side.
“Just a stick?”
“Not any stick. A person is more dynamic.”
“A person can be more dynamic,” I say. “A stick falling from a tall tree, caught in the winds of a hail storm, is more dynamic than a person sitting in a chair contemplating the death of a lover. Or her polished shoes.”
She says, “I see what you mean.”
Right. “Why Karen K?” and “What does Minus want?” Third person narrative is my only defense, sometimes — for all the torment I spend under her delusions of self-as-bag-lady.
“A connection with the past!” I almost yell. Some nearby boys in blue glance our way; we’re a mere distraction, but worth a look to make sure. “The golden age of criticism means something to me.”
“You’re about two-hundred fifty years too late,” she says. “The names Johnson and Hazlitt should ring a bell.”
“So you’ve got something on them: I call it Art’s Second Sight. Hemingway called it –”
“Don’t dredge up his spirit. ‘Shit detector’ is machismo bullshit. He should have used the gun before he gave his Nobel speech. That would have been his ultimate shit detector.”
“Maybe you should have written fiction and not become a self-stylized ivory tower scion of counter-thought … that … or … whose probity –”
“Jesus Mary. Give that a break,” she says. “Next thing, you’ll be quoting Jacques Derrida to me, and then those cops’ll give us a good New York beating because I’ll climb across this table and scratch your fucking eyes out. Understand, plaster-caster, criticism is not the same thing as pulling down the walls to search for termites in the middle of a snowstorm. Now that’s allegory for you!”
Too much time spent with stone and soot and myself. That’s my first excuse. And other, more lunatic, artists. Of course there’s my girl, the adorable Cornhusker, who’s escaped flatland for a Kubrickesque concrete paradise. I should see (or know by now) if Belinda has forgotten about asking me to marry her. Strange though, how I say this to myself in that way; she never asked such a thing, only made a plea for me to ask her.
It’s in the record.
Sometime in July our talk progresses through a cloudy foreground onto a hazy horizon: books & titles; flowers & color; dirt, clay, sand & watercolors; photographs & faces & monochromatic shades. This next item is for the expectation of the unforeseen (but not, suddenly, the summation of momentum, or the beginning of a new phase).
We are in her apartment, drinking coffee she has made in an old metal percolator, a 1960’s model with a glass bulb top (before the drip-coffee revolution), its black electrical plug fit snugly in the pot’s ass (my images have been influenced by her vulgarity). We hear a faint gurgle at our voices’ interlude, and the water turns from copper to umber.
China cups make small bell sounds with each lift and replacement in the saucer’s round cavity. I keep my cup close to my mouth because inside her apartment, with the windows closed, the stink flows off her clothes and comes at me in waves. It serves me with the nausea of a mountain road car race. I’m not used to this after all, I think in pensive reflection. Only the bitter aroma of the brew that flows up my nostrils keeps me from retching. She took her shoes off at the door and is in bare feet; pale skin with blue veins like rivers seen from the air, and pink toenail polish.
Lying on the table between the cups is an open copy of Sculpture Review. Her reportage of May’s symposium is titled “Sweet Labor’s Sweat” — I found my name in the third and the second to last paragraphs. Something about “the sawdust of minerals like felled trees break around your feet” and helping entertain the crowd. The nexus of her essay is lowbrow culture and high art trapped in the equivalent of a snow globe. Something bought while you wait your turn to board the Statue of Liberty ferry cruise.
Karen asks, “Do you want to make love to me?”
It’s a between-sips suggestion. Lipstick bleeds over the edges of her mouth. Heavy blue eyeshadow sticks to her eyebrows like finger-painted clouds. Burnt cork has been scored across her skin, which has exposed the striations of middle age. Her eyelids sit half closed, squeezing the black pupils that crowd the pale brown of her irises. I think of accident-scene photos and third-rate portrait artists.
“Why do you ask?” I say.
“I’m sexually alert this month,” she replies. “In fact, these past three months. Nothing’s come my way, though.”
I look at the effect of her outfit on this ornate kitchen. Brown slime has marred the back of her chair; some has dripped onto the marble floor. Her bare feet have touched it and left prints on the polished tiles.
“I want someone,” she says. “So I’ve been aware of who I meet.”
“You’re looking around.”
“I’m not a whore, Minus, nor a prostitute. My awareness is about being ready for those who show interest. I’ve been in this state all month. Correction, I said three months. That’s right.”
“And … How is that for you?”
“Nothing’s come my way.”
“Perhaps it’s your fashion statement.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“I bet I would be at that,” I think. To wit: a short walk through Times Square reveals shops that sell — like some anthropological thesis — the myriad proclivities humans display toward sex. Perversity, you ask? Nay, nay, says I: the simple activation of adult prurience.
“Why isn’t M.O. whittling today? If not interested in me, then why the rejection?”
“I haven’t rejected you,” I say. “I don’t want to know you that way.” My eyes travel along the table, the magazine again, her byline in bold and, next to the open pages, my sculpture of the hand she took as a (what?) souvenir on that cool afternoon. It sits on a varnished wooden block. She’s had it fired. Its red ceramic finish matches the place mats on her stone-sanded oak table.
She reaches to adjust her wig. Re-settling herself in the padded chair, she awaits my thoughts to replace the lame reply by which I’ve tried to distract her from her real goal. She waits a long time, a stance for which she shows patience, between which she stirs her coffee without touching the spoon against the sides of the cup, watching the whorls screw in on themselves, and finally pulls the spoon out to see the eddy spiral like a crippled toy top. Through all of this, she hasn’t looked at me.
“No,” I say. “No way.” My eyes calmly wait for her reaction. When she only raises one eyelid, a singular deed of exceptional control given her explosive temperament, I explain to her my devotion to one woman, without going into unneeded details. Would she be so cavalier about her explanation for the bag lady dress? Not on her life, I think. In finality, I add, “I’m in love with Belinda. I should introduce the two of you.”
Her hand, those manicured fingers, delicate and filthy like antique ivory piano keys gone through a war and somehow survived, toss aside my rejection and its suggested replacement. For a long while, the tepid liquid inside our china cups await the vibration of our speech.