CHAPTER 25
I don’t need to see Karen K again. The allure has been rinsed from my mind by her own hands. Blind spots shall always remain, I think; that’s how she wants herself to be known, if she wants to be remembered at all. The effect is like a chronic migraine that has lifted: you joggle your head every once in a while to see if you can bring back that knife point’s touch, as memory or reminder of its hold on you.
Manhattan island swells to eight million people on the weekdays, yet you’re liable to run into the sundry character or two that you’ve seen before. We are creatures of habit, long after the need to hunt, and hide from the hunters, has ceased to be critical skills. All morning I have the feeling of being watched as I walk from place to place. I scan across the streets for a bag lady bearing pin eyes and a hound’s stride. None of the neighborhoods where I find myself are the neighborhoods we, Karen K and I, had walked through, when we walked together, alone or with the dogs.
Today has been a long day of interviews for the upcoming gala show at NYgallery (around the corner from the Dia:Chelsea galleries, whose “people” have told Belinda that The Mythos at Twilight is too classically oriented for consideration; perhaps she would like to resubmit transparencies to the curator of the proposed Dia:Beacon — slated for opening around the new millennium), so this suspicion of spy tails has me stymied.
My next appointment is at Piranha Café. The journalist for In Studio magazine waits for me outside the corner storefront, smoking a cigarette. He’s older than me, nearly Dad’s age, with dusty black shoes to match his hair. White, scrub brush whiskers surround his liver-lipped mouth. He introduces himself as Vince Vaccarello (“Call me Vac” he says in a Jersey accent) and says he has a tape recorder set up in back, away from the door and the espresso machine. I reach for the door handle, but he stops me with a question. “You been doing a lot of interviews lately, Minus?” He takes a drag off his cigarette and turns his head to blow the smoke downwind. I see he doesn’t want to waste the cigarette. “Anything with ‘art’ in the title, my manager has me booked,” I tell him. I’ve gotten used to calling Belinda “my manager” in the many weeks since the Beehive exhibit started the phone ringing. One major magazine invited me for a lunch. However, these smaller publications are catch-as-catch-can meetings, which I don’t mind because, right, any publicity is good. “Vac” nods with the journalist’s faked-interest glaze across the eyes. I’ve gotten used to this, too. “If you don’t mind,” I say. “I’ll answer any questions you have, but let’s get on with it. It’s late, it’s cold, and I can use a beer.” He drops his cigarette and blows the smoke into a chill wind coming down from the north end of 2nd Avenue.
Piranha Café has maybe fifteen tables, two- and four-seat bistros, second-hand, with ring stains worked into the laminate, cigarette burns at the edges. Some have folded pieces of napkin stuck under the feet for balance. Most are empty, the others filled with leaning-in or laid-back couples that nurse mismatched big-cup coffees, whose foam and cream drip down the sides of mugs fired in chalky pastels — strawberry and orange and winter wheat. Their talk vibrates the air into subdued tones. Solo drinkers hide themselves behind newspapers, books, or thoughts. Vac has chosen well. It’s warm inside, away from the November chill, despite clear skies and a blazing sun low in its southern zenith and sinking westward quickly. Canned New Age music whispers through hidden speakers. The smokeless room surprises me, which gives over to ground coffee aromas and burnt toasted-cheese. I don’t see beer on tables or any listed on two chalkboard menus hanging on the side wall, next to the bar. Behind the coffee bar are built-in shelves stacked tall with cups, saucers, mugs, float glasses, and flavored syrups. A middle shelf displays glass coffee bean containers, with black and white labels marked by the country of bean origin, inside which hold the various colors of roasted beans. Dark chocolate, mouse hair, sienna, dung, tanned leather, burnt umber — somehow all the colors remind me of the people one finds in places where coffee grows. Skin and tribal markings.
A young man, college-aged, sits on a stool pulled close to the bar, in white sweater and black pants, waiting for an order. A low whistle escapes from his puckered lips. Vac ushers me to a pre-arranged table.
I order mineral water from a teenaged waitress, who shows the attitude like she’d rather be anywhere else. Back here, the walls have framed paintings and photographs of local artists, cityscapes and park views devoid of people, with white cards stuck into the lower-right corners, its title and price written in ink. Vac tells me he’s nearly ready, just needs to find a blank tape. He rummages in his bag. I take the chance to use the toilet before we get started. I spend an extra minute washing my hands, smile into the mirror to check my teeth for remnants of the potato knish I ate at the last coffee shop (23rd and Lexington, two hours ago), read a few graffiti drawings (“Jim Morrison pissed here in 1974” — Below that: “Morrison died in ’72 you dumm fuck” — Below that: “he died in ’71 you dumber FUCK!”).
Back at the table, I listen to the fizz in the glass as I pour my water. Vac is tapping his pencil on the table next to the microphone. When I look at the pencil pacing time, and casually roll my eyes up to his, he stops himself, but can’t hold still long, and begins to rapidly tap his note pad. The pad has numbered questions listed down the page, from which, reading upside down, I catch a few words. The last line has the numeral 12 dug into the paper with dark lead. If he’s to be so noisy, I think, the tape will record sounds of a time bomb sitting in his lap. Or maybe he wants to create the effect of us sitting in a clock shop.
When my eyes linger on the pad, he stops this second round of tapping. I apologize for my own slowness; the urge to look at my watch is powerful, and I hint a beer would be helpful. “It’s just a coffee shop,” he says. Vac is chagrined by another artist booze-hound looking for a free drink. I suggest we get started. Vac makes a tick next to question #7 and reaches to press the record button.
“How do you create your sculptures, Minus?”
I try to suppress a sigh. It’s become automatic, like the faint blink of lighted consciousness. Vac’s muscles harden around his jaw. Finally I know what Hollywood stars feel like at interview junkets. In four days of these dialogues (Belinda’s word), many with city papers and regional magazines, I’ve answered this same question. The problem is that I’ve tried to answer it differently each time, from a new angle, even if only to make a small change. But what can be said differently about something that I want to remain as much a mystery — at least, to myself — as possible? Now that I’ve deconstructed it seven ways to Sunday, I feel drained of inspiration. I’m glad I’d agreed to these interviews only after I finished the final Mythos.
Vac loses patience with me and stabs the recorder’s button to stop the tape. “Let’s try this again,” he mumbles. He rewinds the tape, sets his smile, and asks the question a second time, reading the same words written on his pad. He doesn’t scratch a second tick.
I don’t want to be a pain in the ass for this guy, and taking a drink of water might push me into that category. But I’m thirsty, so I raise the glass, take a swallow, and look over the rim just as the bell above the door jingles its warning of a new customer. Karen K breezes through the door like a leaf blown down the street, and sits at a window table. She folds one leg over the other, and the top leg swings up and down. Her foot holds onto an open-toed shoe that rocks back on the downward swing. She’s wearing jeans and a green sweater, with a black scarf wrapped and tied on her neck. Her hair still sports the boyish Hepburn cut. Her eyebrows flash me, but I ignore her. She can wait. She can leave. I don’t care. Vac draws an emotional breath and reaches for the recorder again. My hand shoots out to stop him.
“I’ve learned to trust what I see, Vac ... all my senses working, but not necessarily together. Whatever might come, I let that steer me. If you allow it to be the other way around, it’s easy to overwork a strong image or motif, and then you’ve ruined the piece. That only gets worse if you take the attitude, ‘Oh, I h
ave to use that right now!’ approach to inspiration. I avoid these pitfalls by focusing on the imagery of my subject, what it evokes, and its ethos. I’ll give you an example. When I was painting in oils, I was fascinated by the diversity I found on Chicago’s streets — I’d just moved into the city from my suburban log cabin [here I give my self-deprecating laugh, but I think the Abe Lincoln allusion is lost on Vac] — how people sat, the looks young couples gave each other, not the lovey-dovey looks but smart, knowing glances laid on each other: of youthful remonstrance or even snark, or otherwise wry, owning, and whimsy. Similar to, but naïvely pushing against, that same mirror held to couples when they’re sixty … or in their eighties. Caillebotte found these people. Rembrandt, too.”
(They all found them, Minus the Artist. Artists always do. That’s why they’re artists. It’s what makes you think, dog walker.)
Vac nods, smiles, doesn’t comment or follow up. “You last had a show as one of the — let me get this name right … ‘the artists three’… okay — how does your upcoming show compare?” He makes a second tick on his pad.
“It doesn’t,” I say. “The spheres were… they– they were– they were otherly. I took shape from the possibility that we have something else beyond our experience, beyond our world. The how of how we perceive our world, as taught from school textbooks verses the difference in the way we think of ourselves. Umm, existentially, I think you can say. Now, ‘The Mythos at Twilight’ is about … it’s our history as defined by the ancients. Certainly not existential. The pantheon of gods and goddesses, given image as flesh-and-bones people, if you will. Updated. Immortals caught in mortal bodies, at what we true mortals think of as near the end.”
(You’re no different than the separation found between Shakespeare’s star-crossed teens and Albee’s Martha and George. Somewhere among the Humberts of society. Wake up, fucknut.)
“Is there a bit of tongue-in-cheek blasphemy going on here?”
“How do you mean?” In fuzzy image behind Vac’s head, Karen shifts in her seat. Is her chair too hard on her ass? Is she bored? Her legs quickly unfurl and flip position without throwing a shoe.
Vac explains his question. “I mean this presidential campaign, winding up with next Tuesday’s election. Lots of religion has been played on both sides. Control is the game, or can become the game, or will become the game. People have taken sides, Mister Orth. As I see your sculptures,” says Vac, in a blunt tone, “some of their implication lean toward word-play and that same ‘ethos’ you mentioned. They’re old, tired, used up. Is there a statement there about modern culture?”
I have an idea of what Vac is after, but he wants something particular, and perhaps peculiar, from me, and has willed himself to answer his own question if I don’t. “Election?” I say. “Hasn’t that gone away yet? I thought I’d felt the change already. People were less gloomy on the Park Avenue bus this morning. Must have been the light traffic.” Vac isn’t playing along with my answer. He gives me the fish eye, so I stay with some truth that sounds rehearsed in my head (while I listen to Vac renew his tapping fetish) – “This isn’t politics, Vac. There’s no political statement implicit in art that trumps the social statement already inherent in this republic. Not unless, of course, you’re on the party payroll. I’m working in human experience, not the future tense of any single society.”
Vac’s jaw performs a jig before he clenches his teeth. The fucker is swallowing a yawn. Across the room, Karen holds a tall glass with a straw in it. Vac checks his laundry list of questions, so I steamroll ahead to make sure the recorder hears me. “Art is always akin to our own experience. We live longer today than we did one hundred years ago, and longer still than one thousand years ago. The faces of the gods match our own, as they surely did when the prime beings of the day met with Fate. The major difference between the eras is technological.”
(A cereal spokesman for the graven image of God. Nice show, numb-skull. Take your statues down to Georgia, where the Baptists rejoice in hell-fire’s damnation of artists’ souls. That’s for all the good of modern technology.)
Vac laughs to himself. “Here’s something our readers would like to learn. Share with us something funny that has happened to you recently, please.”
“Wow,” I say. “I- I’m going to have to…” –my self-described older lover pulled a surprise visit at a private show, only I didn’t recognize her (neither did my girlfriend-slash-fiancé) because she, the so-called lover, appeared like a Shakespearean ghost dressed in Chanel to camouflage her bag lady persona I was used to seeing and you know what I wasn’t even her lover she was just playing a role in a farce but if you want to look over your shoulder– “…let me think for a minute, Vac. Umm….” I take my water glass and watch the mineral bubbles rise, reach the top, and explode. I can almost smell the gas. “Let’s see, it’ll have to be from just a few days ago. I ordered a bagel with the works over at Asa’s, you know, the schmeer, and it’s in my hands and then it’s not, because the weight of everything on top made it topple, like that kids’ game, ‘Don’t Spill the Beans’? Eh? No. Anyway, long story short, I caught it, the bagel, face down. My hands smelled like lox all day. Kind’a funny, because I was around women and — you know how females hate to think that any fish smell is coming from them! Okay, not so funny, because I forgot to tell you, I was on a photo shoot with some magazine. The ah, you know, the guy– the guy with the camera who shoots the– …”
“The photographer,” Vac says.
“–and … yeah, right, the pho- … hey, don’t step on the story, Vac! So he catches it all with some nifty camera work. We had a good laugh, but you had to be there. Anyway it could be a great cover.”
(Click. Click-Click. Whirrrr. Click. Click. Click-Click. Let me write the caption: “Ham-fisted artist, Minus Orth, juggles his breakfast”)
“That’s a funny story, Mister Orth. Okay, next question.” Vac waves his hand above the pad like a magician. “What inspires you most? What keeps you going to the studio every morning?”
I look at the tape player and see the wheels turning.
“That’s still undefined,” I say. He’s asked the best question of the lot, and it’s not even in his crib notes. “Which, in fact, is why I continue to create art. I’m a representational artist, so what I see every day is inspiration enough. I either meet a lot of people, or else I’m caged in my studio. Sometimes I have to think about the ridiculous first, to discover what’s important. Inside-out, upside-down, through the looking glass. It’s not so cliché as the phrases sound, because what you see can’t be told in words. That’s not my medium.”
(Relate art with the nightly news to reach people where they think: on their asses. Hit them with a powerful image to make it stick. Use commercials as sharp sticks poked in their eyes, as necessary. Or up their asses. Don’t tell them this is how it works. They might say, “Oh.”)
Vac picks up on the cliché line. “Are you saying that– is there a– what are you saying?”
“I’m saying the abstraction of art has confused people for nearly a hundred years. They don’t know how to look at it. Perhaps that’s because we have failed to educate them, I mean the artists. Isn’t that the question? People who like art are going to find it, learn about it. People who don’t like art go the other way. It’s those people standing in the middle who need a map. Finding the relevance for them can be difficult, so artists must understand the relevance for themselves, first. The artwork, the final piece, is always a distillation.”
(Play bag lady dress-up. You become a blur on the canvas. You are a blur. You are a blur. You are a blurrrr.)
Vac writes something on his pad.
“Describe yourself in five words, Mr Orth.”
“Worried. Happy. No … YES! Underemployed.”
(Crap. Shit. Feces. Excrement. Waste.)
I get a laugh from Vac’s real self. (He might be an aged Odysseus — why not — who’s taken up a part-time job with Ithaca’s local rag, once the
hullabaloo of his homecoming became old news, and the olive harvests turn over year after year without another Iliadikos expedition.) He supposes that if we had two hours, he could reach me and find something to write about. Then he wouldn’t have to use set questions. This is what I sense in his laugh. I don’t know if it’s real. I can’t know. Talk to me, Vac. I don’t want to know. Life, and art, are better that way.
“Lastly, Mister Orth, do you have any words of advice for aspiring artists?”
“Whatever you do, it has to be art, first. Begin with the possibility of the material, the form, the subject. Make mistakes. It’s only ever about trying. Don’t be afraid to contradict yourself. Whitman said, ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.’ And then let the subjects do for you … what they can do.”
(You should teach. Art students eat those clichés up like puppies devour kibble. All that, and summers off, too!)
“Okay. That’s a wrap! Thanks for your time, Minus. I’m running late myself. I’ll let you get away from this coffee house so you can go have that beer.” He double winks at me. “The mineral water is on me.” Vac lays down exact change, plus a six-percent tip. He’s out the door in a minute flat.
Karen K stands up as Vac lights a cigarette outside the window. A hard wind rattles the door, and pulls at Vac’s hair as though it’s tied to a kite. Cigarette ash gets in his eye, and he stoops to recover his balance. Karen K blocks this image when she stands. The ends of her black scarf flap with the speed of her approach. She places her glass next to Vac’s coins and my effervescent water. She doesn’t sit. I haven’t moved a muscle since Vac shook my hand at his exit line. The waitress sidles over. She doesn’t know if she should pick up the coins, address us, or walk away. She hitches one shoulder as though finally deciding this, or everything, doesn’t much matter, and asks Karen if she wants something. Her glass is empty, its red straw chewed and crimped over the edge, looking like someone’s fat lip. “Ahoy,” Karen says to me. “Got some wind left in your sails for a dance?” She’s tall from my seated perspective, hovering with a softly powdered face and a pair of wire sunglasses hooked into her hair. Overall, it’s an image I hadn’t thought of before.
The waitress looks between us. I wonder if she notices who this older woman is. Of course she doesn’t, not unless she’s a Women’s Studies major at NYU or Hunter College. Karen suggests another round. The waitress twirls her hair around a finger, wondering if she should remind us this isn’t a bar. Karen drives her away with a glance. I want to learn how that’s done.
“You never answered me,” I say. She angles her head. “Were you at the debate?”
“An artist,” she says, “should take everything as a one-off to make each piece of art the only true thing his life needs before death. Cleave it from your soul. Then go get drunk to find the meaning of life, and start all over with a new tenor in your breast.”
“Do you think that’s me?” I ask.
She tips one shoulder. “What you should ask yourself is ‘Who was following whom?’ that day in Central Park.”
I think she says this to confuse me. (Which day?) She needn’t bother trying. I believe only in me, now. Me, and Belinda. The café music changes from a soulful wail to Michael Jackson pop.
“A word, please,” she says.
I nod at the empty chair. She sits, moves her bottom around on it, luxuriating, I imagine, in the warmth Vac has left on the seat. She folds her hands on her knee, crossed left over right. The crease in her jeans points at me like the shaft of an arrow. She asks how the interview went, how the interviews have gone, what interesting questions I’ve been asked. I think how she might already know the answers to these questions, has gotten my schedule through her grapevine, has known where I’ve been and who has talked with me, even the transparencies I’ve chosen to lend the magazines. Indeed, she may well know the number of column inches each writer has been allotted.
“There’s always a bit of the bizarre in an interview,” I tell her. “That’s how I learned to have fun with them, to wait for the outré comment.” I recall how I’ve been asked to explain myself by the interviewers. My answers also must preserve, emote, advance the need (or is it use?) for art. There is also a patina of “edge” and ego and satisfaction at having been noticed; that itself has been a long-time coming, though a deserved wait.
“And why not?” I answer from somewhere in the whitest blue of wonder.
I’m lured to her home, or I go willingly. Or I am intrigued to follow her. Or I have a “need of approval” neurosis. The distinction is hardly important: I’m curious if anything has changed in her four rooms. Reversed throw pillows would be enough. When we step inside, however, I’m disappointed. This is all the same, and I need to get away. It’s here that Karen starts in on me, as soon as she closes the door.
“You are a rube. I was trying to talk myself out of believing that. Fat chance. You can’t convince me otherwise. You won’t even try! The simplest action would do it, but you have no idea what that looks like. Hopeless. Hopeless!”
There is no tea offered. She points at the furniture. We sit on the divan. I’m speechless and like myself this way; she is speaking like a child, a smart child, but one who may just talk herself into silence, or tears. “You make such good art. But one thing needn’t equate with wider connections or an understanding of society –”
Sound has been muffled for weeks, in my world; it’s become easier to squelch. I’ve been walking through a tunnel, dark, quiet but for the echoes made by passing cars, subway doors, children’s voices, chattering old men — it’s lighted end is near enough to show the city in motion, just beyond the round, hazy edges. Karen’s voice, though, comes clearest of anything that I’ve had, or needed, to hear.
“Dear Minus, let’s start somewhere in the middle, shall we? You wanted something from me. God knows what — you still don’t. I gave it to you. Paragon of Virtue, Woman of an Era, the Trickster Troll, or whatever and however you wanted to see me. And I … I grew fond of you. It’s not that I had pined for recognition, or for comfort (from what, I only know through my nightmares). Friendship is only a by-word for interruption and obligation. Do you wonder at my routine, my choices of fashion, my baggage and transportation, my diet?”
“Is this a Hitchcock film I’ve woken up inside?” My voice is loud, by comparison to hers, but needs to be to cut through her voice.
Karen folds her arms. “We all work in our own, mysterious, way,” she says. “I can’t question how that works for you, or why.”
“Why didn’t you just ask?” I say. Her expression, now, defines that for me. She had. I am looking at myself in twenty-five years. Or I am looking at Belinda. Or (and this is the best of my hide-and-seek thoughts) I hadn’t really cared to look in the first place, and this is what I get.
“The product is what makes sense,” she says, “otherwise it’s none of my business. Naturally, though, I can appreciate the whole gestalt thing. Watching you outside the Guggenheim, you should have seen all the little parts coming together. You were a magnet picking up steel crumbs among all the dust and wood through ages and ages of stale thought. The weeks before that day were one kind of revelation for me — I said ‘for,’ not ‘to’ or ‘of’ — and the months since, have been quite another. Watching you agonize, listening to you work it all out. That is art’s prophecy, young man. Someone like myself doesn’t give that away, not for reality’s sake. And there are few left who are like me.”
First she berates me, then she praises me. I don’t get it.
“What’s this all about? I don’t understand. The bag lady outfits. It’s a … trick. All the while you –”
“Such confusion. It’s okay, Minus. You don’t need to know everything. None of us can, even when we ask nicely. You know your gods by now, I should think. The Greeks understood the power their gods held, and freely used. Oh, they hardly believed in them privately, but on the street things were different. In public you must verbally la
y trust to those things that society professes to know. At least, that’s how life used to be. Otherwise you’d get a knife through your fucking eyeball. You see, the mix between the two made for some riotous comedy. Poignancy was the gods’ greatest effect on the mortals. The people could tell the difference between a siren and a muse. We latter moderns are too introspective for our own good. Or the complete opposite, as horrid and obscene a thought as that is. We think we have the answers, or we know we can figure them out. I, on the other hand, think we’re wrong, and are headed toward the abyss. The rare animal is the confused man: you!
“The liberal arts education has been a failure. The leaders of the world have always read classics. That’s a British phrase. It means bathing in the words of ancient writers, those who had already dissected the importance of life a couple thousand years before industry and ‘work’ choked off reason from society.” She raises a finger — into the air, not at me — but I don’t think she means to refer to the gods or some higher power. “You’re on the way up, Minus. About to make your splash across the marquees and banners of print, television, even the radio. Surely you can let a few people ride your coat tails. You know that none of us gets these chances without some help. Just another of the unwritten axioms that makes sense.”
She fits a cigarette into a two-inch holder made from horn. Her mouth is red and moist, cheeks paunchy with over-spilled sass. She lights up and blows smoke from her nose. This is the first time I’ve seen her smoke; she has all the mannerisms of a pro.
“And then there is us,” she says. “We artists, I mean. We have a certain feeling inside us from the beginning. This feeling. That’s all you have to say to people who have it; the rest aren’t part of the tribe, and pity them for that. We have it like some people hear in color or can write sentences as musical scores, or musical scores as audible sentences.” She takes another drag and blows it out, `a la the Forties’ dame. “What you know is far more important than who you know. For all that’s worth, we still need the suits, the accountants, the curators and the librarians, to make it happen.”
She stands up and walks past me on the way to the fireplace. Her sweet perfume mingles with the ascending smoke curling in her slipstream. She leans an elbow against the mantel. I see her as the missing trio of the two pictures in their filigree frames. If it’s true that our personalities are set by age four, what spirited thoughts, and deeply held secrets, already lurked in that little girl whose stern parents stand at attention behind her? Where have her youthful reading and early writing taken the young woman with the long hair and the intelligent eyes? The culmination is who I’m looking at in the flesh.
“So,” she says. “Do you get my drift, or what?”
“Yeah, Karen. I think I do.”
She shakes her head and laughs. “No, no. Not yet, you don’t. You don’t. In a while you’ll hear a voice in your head. It’s not a woman’s voice, but an older man’s voice. Perhaps you’ll hear it as your father’s. I heard mine as my mother’s. She said something – the voice I mean – that gave me a soothing stroke. Ever since, this has made all the difference. Ten years later, ten years after hearing that voice, I went to the Salvation Army thrift shop. I never realized how many people gave. So much stuff. Well, I went there to buy. I picked clothes out at random. Funny, sometimes I closed my eyes and matched, if you can call it that, pants with shirt with boots with jacket with hat. Then I took my first walk as a bag lady.” She finishes her cigarette with a last drag and stubs it out (half-smoked) against the fire screen, and tosses the smoldering butt onto the cold grate. The crinkled white stick has a touch of her red lipstick on one end, and the other end a pin-size orange ember. “I’m still walking, Minus. People won’t notice. I’ll see them. I register everything, everything that I need. It’s what keeps me alive.”
She walks me to the door. With my hand already on the knob, I feel her fingers touch my arm. Her hand is pale, the color of dishwater, her long fingers thin, with a plastic sheen to the skin, the image of a ghostly touch used to frighten children, and old men with bad dreams. When I turn to say goodbye, she leans in and kisses me. The feeling is sensual and disturbing. I’m supposed to accept this gift from her because she is the one I know. Her fingers release my arm and slide up my sides, where her palms run over my ribs and I feel their cold beneath my shirt. Her mouth tastes of burned tobacco, a scorched flavor and deeply bitter. I feel my cock thicken in my pants. Her hand slides up my throat and takes it in a soft grip, those cold fingers like threads of a frayed rope.
“You’ll make a middle-aged woman proud.” Karen K leers at me from up-close. “Happy.” I’m practically pinned against the wall now. One hand presses on my shoulder and the other is around my neck.
“Not that this will make any difference,” I say, but get another of her kisses that quiets me. Her tongue darts through my lips again and again, a serpent, berserk in rape. I turn my head to make it stop. “I’m engaged to Belinda,” I say. She draws back. Her hands grab my upper arms and she squeezes with her nails, attached to me like raptors’ claws.
“What the hell are you talking about?” she asks.
I tell her. The story is short and, I think, makes a touching, romantic scene to the hours we spent together organizing the statues before the private show.
“Marriage?” Karen explodes. “You must be smoking crack! Jesus, Minus, you’re an artist, not a husband.” She looks at me with animus; a jolt runs through my body. “Artists don’t take wives. The artist-wife gets bored. She becomes fat. She loses her beauty, or whatever allure he thought she had. She needs to blame someone for these failures. She becomes vengeful. Fitzgerald is the poster boy for diminished beauty and premature death because of that crazy bitch Zelda.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I yell. “Belinda made all of this happen. She helped make it happen. You said so yourself.”
“You’re not listening,” Karen says. Her voice is aflame with heat enough to suck away the oxygen I need to stay conscious. I fight to keep my lungs from compressing. She speaks so close to me that I feel her breath smooth down the fine hairs on my face. “Here’s the best advice you’ll get, Minus the Artist. Drop her. Do it! Do this now, while you’re on the rise. If you wait, your magic will be gone. Lost. She’ll have you moving to some backwater. People will hate you for all the infidelities that’ll come later if you don’t cut her out now. Do it now, do it, drop her. Do it, do it, do it.”
Her nails dig deeper. I can almost hear the fabric tearing. The muscles in my cheeks flinch. “I need to leave,” I say. My hands grip her wrists and pull them off me, away. “Goodbye, Karen.” Her fingers, still outstretched into claws of a scrapping animal, pull themselves in and close tightly.
“Okay,” she says. She looks at my hands gripping her wrists, my knuckles white. “Can you release me, please, Minus?”
I let go, and the current that has flowed between us breaks. She brings her hands to her sides and steps away from me. Her eyes glimmer in the light-stoked room. Her face is smooth again, the skin around her mouth tight. Its edges then turn up. She says, “You’re a star, Minus. I’m going to make that prediction into a declaration for the New York papers, and then I’ll make it stick in the trades. Book offers will come in. You’ll be known around the world. I think the art world can absorb a coating of reality this far into its fattened, self-absorbed ego trip. I’m thinking of painting a broad canvas — the auctions, the fairs, the prizes, magazines, art schools.” Her hands clasp on themselves; the cook has come alive in her kitchen.
“Don’t be selfish,” I say. “Save some for yourself.”
“The writing shall do that,” she replies. “They will love me.” Her arms fold across her chest, and I believe there is no more she has to say. Either I know everything or else I haven’t been listening, is the implication. With a toss of her chin, I’m excused.
Standing at the elevator, I hear her door shut behind me. The sound strikes my back like soft
rain, or the reassurance of a tombstone dropped into place. Now I can draw breath again.