CHAPTER 21
It’s charming to have Karen walk with me (me and the big dogs) after our moment in her bathroom a few weeks back. I’m trying not to be schizo over this; confront your fears. Karen throws the stick for Boilermaker, who chases it but neglects to bring it back, which makes Karen snicker. Charming, too, is how Chief’s muddy paws leave prints on her green-smeared smock or musty painter’s pants. She rarely speaks to me in her alley voice anymore.
I am a good man, and I’ve stayed clean. In thought and deed. Have I helped her open onto a new life? Or new-er life? Have I teased out an affinity for me? Sometimes, as we walk, I keep my eyes forward and listen to her voice; while her appearance is blocked from immediate imagery, I separate reason from self-awareness; hers is the voice of boisterous calm, of attitude with its pitch-perfect evidence; and at those moments I feel as though I do stroll alongside celebrity — Karen Kosek: polemicist extraordinaire (Tonight Only! 8 – 10 pm in The Big Apple ballroom). Then I look sideways and find myself beside a wretch, a ghoul, a living nightmare of endless failure. This visual attack is arresting. She is beguiled, or this is me.
The clothes are her routine, something about her that I have come to accept. They act, any way I like to look, to balance the weight between that persona and her intellect. Publicly, they make her both a spectacle and innocuous; a bundle of wonder after my innocence.
My perception on the subject of Karen K, naturally, is of the outsider-now-accepted-into-the-parlor-game. I still have little idea of her purpose for the clothes, nor what she thinks she looks like to the world beyond her B.O. I’ve had to discount the rhetoric she used after being pummeled by the bus-terrorizing punks. This is not to suggest I haven’t tried asking her. She answers me in one of three ways. 1) Change of subject … (“Isn’t it amazing? Of course not — not when a hundred billionaires walk the earth.”). 2) Abuse … (“Look in the mirror, Artist! Garbage men dress better than you on their days off.”). 3) Ignorance … (“I like. She likes. He likes. They like. We like. [… silence …] Like I. Likes she. Likes he. Like they. Like we.”) If these are clues, they’re red herrings. If they are riddles, they lack a syntax.
One day I caught her off guard. She was writing, thinking, writing some more. Next, she stopped to stare across flower beds at a lawn quilted with picnic blankets. We occupied a bench in the English Garden, a stone’s throw from the Harlem Meer. Phalanxes of pastel-clothed tourists rushed by like we were lepers whose leg irons trailed strings of empty tin cans. All at once, Karen K came up for air, and I fired my dart: “Zappa can understand what this is all about.” In a half whisper I heard, “Keep an eye on what I do to your –” But she stopped herself in time, and I didn’t catch the next word. She bit the end of her pencil, a fang tooth buried in its wood-pulp. I’d missed a key ending. Or the start to an extended thought. This was a jump through the barrier of her snow-blind stare, but it was hardly the looking glass moment I had hoped to find myself stepping through. Afterwards, she became more careful with me. And I have kept an eye on what she does to my … (what?)
Since then, I haven’t asked pressing questions of philosophy, or her intent, not even obliquely. Instead, we continue to talk in short sentences, sometimes in monotones, because — I don’t know why; it’s she who started that. This makes me feel like a sailor on a ship, a lone sailor, piloting a two-master with triangular sails. I keep the port-starboard tacking short because my bow is pointed upwind. I sail close to shore, close enough to hear the surf echo against the sails. The experience is not so much eerie as of a dream that gives you fitful sleep: when you wake, you’re glad for the renewed consciousness, but have the feeling that the dream wasn’t over, so you want to sink your head into the pillow, cover half your face with the blanket, and let your mind rest with the hope you can return to the dream where you left off, knowing, in the moment of listening to your breath rasp against the linen, that your best attempt will be in vain.
Let me give examples of such conversations over the last days.
Near the lagoon, after one late-summer rainstorm, dozens of people, couples linked by an arm and groups spread across the path, kept us company along this green ribbon. Many were too fidgety — smoking and talkative and bitchy — to see the beauty that lay before them, and we could tell they itched to get on with their day, away from here. Karen was on to her day. She hadn’t moved in ten minutes, and was otherwise focused on the sky’s reflection in the water, clouds drifting along to mock the speed of our city’s streets.
I said, “Nabokov would’ve loved this park today.”
“There is an abundance of pre-teens running about.”
“He was a lepidopterist, and Dolores was thirteen: a teen. Same age as Juliet Capulet, as it happens.”
Karen panned the scene without moving her head. A girl-scout troop leaned dangerously over the Bow Bridge in their green and yellow uniforms; squadrons of butterflies blitzed the flowerbed’s colorful targets; three unicyclists rolled by in silent concentration, their arms outstretched for balance. Then she said, “Sure. I like the broad backs of the monarchs. Frenetic industry slowed to the beating of enormous perforated wings attached to a glorified worm. Of course we must recall, Romeo was just seventeen to your Humbert’s forty-five.”
So the character had become my Humbert. “Watch the butterflies,” I said.
“Watch your referents.”
“Listen to their beating wings.”
“Hear your mature lover request a glass of wine.” Her aim was to provoke. I am not her lover. She knows I am not her lover. “They’re skittish. Like little girls.”
“Then I’d like to be a butterfly,” I admitted.
A squad of joggers in matching blue tank tops and black stretch shorts passed in a whoosh and slap-paddle footfalls. The lepidoptera flew up in the vortex, caught themselves, and spun around and back down to the flowers, like parachutists in casual descent beneath a cerulean sky.
“A glass of wine does sound refreshing. Boathouse?”
“It’ll have to be taken in to-go cups.” I raised an eyebrow at her orange pants and green shirt, the combat boots, the hounds tooth overcoat hung on her shoulders as on a square hanger (it was seventy-five degrees in the shade, and we weren’t near any). She didn’t flinch at my condescension, but she knew I spoke the truth.
“I’ll race you,” Karen challenged.
“How about a placid stroll?”
Her frown was monumentally admonishing. “You big pussy.” Always said to provoke.
I felt privileged to be with her that day. My plan was to swing by the library’s main branch where, in one of the upstairs salons, Vladimir Nabokov’s notebooks and sketches of his butterfly collection were on exhibition. What a fun field trip, I’d thought, and had invited Belinda that morning. That morning, however, Belinda said she’d just as likely skip the exhibition to work on advertising for The Mythos Project. Through her description of her pre-planned day, I detected her eyes adroit inquiry: Why aren’t you sculpting at the Beehive today? Ten sculptures in seven weeks, and I’m not working hard enough? At least, that’s what I heard by implication. Meanwhile, now, she was talking to a videographer and here I sat. So I decided to make the Nabokov a surprise for Karen. Before that, we would have wine. I sprang off the bench and beat her to the boathouse by thirty yards. Big man!
Another day, at her apartment, she handed me a book of photo essays on Europe’s urban parks. I turned the pages and read her descriptions, her captions, and her commentary.
I was keen on her ideas. “How does sound play into photographs?”
She spoke without looking at me, almost as if she were some no-name government employee getting through the day. “You listen to the people. Your photo subjects. Sometimes to the landscape. Whatever else you have. Everything makes noise when you take time to listen. Think of wind as it moves through winter-frozen branches. That’s about as simple is it comes. You see the sound in the picture before you hear the scene. You must feel the same vibrati
ons come through sculptures.”
This is not the speech of someone who has gone mad. Her sorted madness (I have to call it something) is yet contained; not so her eccentricities. Outwardly, her world appears normal to her, and she lives normally. (I’ve had tea in your kitchen! I can describe what’s in your refrigerator!) Almost, that is. I see another madness in her essays, those that I dug up at the library, studious thoughts on pain, disease, loss, and death. All the parts of life that can drive one into madness, if one’s wheels jump the rails. Her examples have fictitious names (first names only) and paragraph-long extracts. Anecdotes, to which she added, as lyrical and smartly written as anything she’d published before, platitudes of super-coherent statements about the connection between life as the healthy among us know it, and the near-to-death life of those up to their armpits in the end-game. Her conclusions amounted, frequently, to screeds on class warfare, religious politics, gender hatred, and corporate greed. I’d heard it all before, through Reagan’s two terms and the politics of Us vs. Them waged silently, heroically, by the shrinking middle class saddled with taxes to pay for corporate subsidies and loopholes made for the super rich. Only, Karen’s arguments had wit (though not charm).
On this reflection, I see one of her objectives: she is dreaming a better world. No more and no less a dream than her adversaries have done, are doing, will always do and re-do, ad infinitum, until all is knocked down, rolled flat as a cemetery, and the building recommences. “It’s what they do,” she concluded. “It’s what they’ve always wanted. Their influence comes from doing, getting it done. Practice what you preach. Do you want to save babies from abortion? Go out and kill the abortion doctors. Do you want to stop war? Send in the troops. Do you want to help the homeless? Ignore them. And … and, and, and.”
How could I explain to her my perfect understanding of this, her book of essays, nearly twenty years on? She didn’t agree, when I tried. She said, “Look at the text” — and then she said nothing at all.
“I’ve worked long with mood,” I said, later, returning to the subject of using the five senses in art expression. “Countenance, mostly, along with the angle of their heads. They don’t avoid sound. Not exactly … only let me be contradictory here. The noise of thought can be impressive. I’ve always wondered.”
She leaned close to me. In a voice like someone taken off a canvas painted by Bacon, she said, “We are all storytellers. Humans hear something from the world around them that doesn’t have anything to do with their thoughts. It isn’t incumbent to be an artist for anything to sink in and emboss experience onto one’s brain. Art has always told stories. You don’t want me telling you where to find it in your work.”
“But … I’m listening.”
She grabbed my chin in a hand smelling horribly of stale tobacco (I haven’t seen her touch a cigarette, let alone smoke one). “It’s not enough to make people see,” she said. “They want to live another life in the now. Which often enough has little to do with the present. Forget what they say; there is no next time. This is the meaning of art.”
Perfectly chaste thoughts, exchanged over tea and a coffee table book.
Karen writes on tabloid-size foolscap folded into sixteenths, which she makes by hand at her kitchen table. She matches corners on each fold, presses hard on the edge as her thumb runs along the fold to make its spine sharp and thin. These are what I saw her scribbling on in those early days, when she threatened me with Henry’s psychotic sexual wrath. She always writes in pencil. At unmeasured intervals she rotates the pencil in a small blue sharpener. The action, I think, is her subconscious exercise between sprinting thoughts. I don’t dare ask her if she notices.
When she fills one page with her diminutive, looped handwriting (speed printing that combines single letters with cursive couplets and triplets), she turns the page like a book. As this is a sixteenth folio, she must unfold and refold the foolscap every fourth page. When the folio is covered in so many lines of her neat, penciled letters, she stores it in a bookcase shelf, stitched between hundreds of others. When she retrieves a folio from this shelf, she unfolds it completely, out to its tabloid size, spread across the kitchen table, over which she stands and reads. The pages of handwriting make geometric patterns, rectangles resembling artisan ceramic tiles, or an ancient manuscript from a time when writing — hand lettering — was new, special, mystical. Karen must rotate the tabloid to read each of the now disassembled pages. She places her index finger on the bottom of the page, and when done, spins the tabloid or flips it over to find the next page. It helps that she has numbered each page. She moves fluidly, never with the need to hunt, and understands her tile pattern like a cartographer her treasure map.
Another day in the park, we walked side by side, keeping our own silence like a wizened married couple. This lasted forty minutes, after which she told me she would have to get home, and I should go back to the studio (I promptly did, once we’d nodded good-bye). We had met earlier for an hour, on a bench specified by her. She came late, dressed in dirt-streaked orange stretch pants, a man’s suit jacket, and the polished shoes. The silver wig goes unchanged, although she’s found another pee-wee straw hat, after the last was lost in the bus brawl. People stared because we appeared to be together, like twin escapees from an asylum. I wore my own trans-variable costume: jeans and a white T-shirt (clean) with black sneakers and a student’s backpack slung over a shoulder. While she wrote in her folio, I listened to her mumbles, strings of phrases and half sentences (subjects or predicates) given sound so — I think — she could check the rhythm. I guessed that this is what writers do. I don’t know for sure, but the pattern fits. Sculptors don’t talk to themselves, generally, but we do sigh a lot, and cough (to expectorate the organic fumes and rock dust). Then Karen stood and walked off without warning. I followed and followed, and followed, rushing like a poodle to keep up.
When she wasn’t carrying the Duane Reade bags overfilled to the point of stretching the shop logo like cartoon 3-D, her hands stayed in her pockets, one holding a pencil, the other a folio. An endless parade of people watched us — quick muzzy glances, open hostile stares, and lots of whispers; children gawked; new mothers piloting prams turned up their noses; business suits liked to smirk their pink, daily-shaved faces at us, holding the ever present “Get a job!” wise-crack that encouraged our lips to wriggle in pantomime. The faces on these nosey neighbors always strike me comically. Lately I’ve become so interested in them, that a future sculpture cycle came to mind, and I began to sketch heads in my book under the title Urban Faces: Eras of Anxiety.
So there we were, Karen and I, she of the diddle and I of the noodle, writing and sketching, talking and staring quietly. Across from us, and down a hill, workmen set about cleaning up the Wolman Ice Rink for the not-so-distant winter season; they raked leaves and fixed side boards, swept paper trash and garbage from the wooden seats. “I like to see you writing,” I said. Karen laughed her crazy bag-lady snigger. “It’s not a hobby,” she said, her alley voice redundant for such a lazy comment (I was supposed to be above the obvious by now).
I see from the corners of my eyes how she snatches looks at me, at my hands, my face, how I walk and, most unnerving (her eyes stray from direct focus), the way I talk. She’s been lately catching looks over my shoulder at what I’m sketching.
All of this gives me the feeling that her mind is running ahead of my own. She has the annoying habit of stopping on a dime to drop her ass on a bench, hands wrenched from her pockets. All to write a sentence or a full page. Watching her write quickly on one page, or explicitly flipping to another, where she makes a correction to script bridging the left edge with the right, in the minutest print, the thought occurred to me that she had never stopped writing. Her work continues. I feel pride, knowing her as I do. The thought upsets me a little, too.
“I think about past lovers.” My answer is as sincere as I can make it without providing examples; I don’t want to do that. “And I think about prese
nt lovers.”
“You make comparisons.”
“That’s inevitable. Unwise maybe. We are humans.”
“And future lovers.”
“Future lovers?”
“We humans contemplate the future. We brood. We cannot be truly human without knowledge of our past. We live in the present. That changes constantly.”
“Yes. We change.”
“Your idea of me has changed. It’s changing now. Yes. So the future lover is a part of your life now.”
“I like to…. This subject can be incendiary if discussed in the company of one’s present lover.”
“That takes some delicacy.”
“Yes.”
She asks, “Can sculpture represent the truth of human existence?”
“I don’t know. I think so. That’s why I sculpt. I’m trying to find out. I want to find out.”
“You need to find out.”
“No. I doubt if not learning will kill me or harm my feel for art, or my want of the creative impulse to continue, however it can. And it will. Knowing ‘either – or’ helps me when I do it well. When I mistreat the obvious, the subject is incapable of exhausting itself. I can then call that ‘art.’ ”
“It’s timeless.”
“No, again. Not timeless. Art never stops questioning the viewer. Timeless art is something within itself. Period and movement have no arching effect, none that I’ve discovered. Art is made to let viewers see themselves. But if art causes viewers to question their position in life, or society, or the universe, that is merely existential. But it’s not timeless.”
“Do you have something in mind?”
“Yes.”
She waits for my answer. I shake my head, or at least I don’t say anything. Her face is calm. Slowly a flush rises from her neckline. Karen K pulls the sheet up to her chin. She turns away. On her bed, we are quiet. Her ribs rise and fall steadily. Her shoes stick out from the sheet. Where her hand has gripped the edges and folds of material, there remains black smudges of burnt cork. She’s getting worse, I think; or else I’m just noticing more of her. There doesn’t seem to be a difference that I find tangible. The wonder of failure to ask the right questions, or speak of the right ideas, strikes me like a bell clapper. I feel sleepy. Watching her body beneath the sheet helps me close my eyes, finally.
I wake in an hour. My watch shows 9:40 in blue, day-glow bars. It’s the evening before The Mythos Project is to open, for a private showing, to that handful of collectors, critics, gallery owners, curators &etc. Belinda has devised this, after we agreed it was time. Some friends have been invited, and Dad. I leave Karen’s bedroom and close the door behind me. I reach the kitchen and turn on the light to find our teacups left on the table, two oatmeal cookies grown stale on a matching dish between them. The chairs are pulled out halfway. A chaste scene. If Belinda saw this, she would laugh, laughter that masks an inability to understand; the bedroom scene would take away that passion. She thinks I’m at the Beehive, and it’s best not to move that thought into the light. Karen K is my friend. She is amusing, and she is amused. She said tonight that I was like a boy at the seaside, playing in the water with a plastic shark. I asked her why she thought of that image. “Because it’s true,” she said. “That’s how I think of you.”