Six months had passed since Claire left, and a full year since I’d shown publicly, whether my visual profiles or any of the smaller things I’d been working on. There remained, as I say, only a few collectors to take my pieces, and at this point my livelihood was staked on them. I’d had a temporary position as an assistant programmer at the new Carrington Center, acquired through Claire’s family connections—prominence in Boston meant influence in New York as well, though not always the reverse—but my contract hadn’t been renewed. They simply let me know one day that the end of the month would be the end of me. I’d been surprised. I shouldn’t have been. The Carrington staged a mix of high-profile art and academic events throughout the year, and my correspondence with various cultural celebrities, the very currency of a place like the Carrington, or Symphony Space, or the 92Y—well, my correspondence over the past year had been judged less than genial. I’d even positively ruined one event on the calendar. The keynote, Martha Nussbaum, wasn’t able to make it in time because I’d not reported a change of schedule to her. Or, more to the point, because I was busy pining after Claire, repeatedly drawing her face on company stationery. Explaining the lapse to my manager, I’d posed the question of whether there wasn’t something fundamentally forgettable about Nussbaum, which got me just as far as one would expect. Nowhere.
Without the job, I had no other means besides my holdover collectors, who numbered just four. I liked to think, of course, that what kept them in my thrall, and, more to the point, what would keep them that way, was the charge running through my work and the growing semiotic space it defined, a plenitude proven inexhaustible precisely by the shortcomings—the mistakes—of the individual pictures. Admittedly, they might have had other reasons for staying on with me. My withdrawal from the usual circles, just when I was beginning to attract real notice—and just before I was commanding serious prices—may well have increased the appeal of my pictures for the savviest collectors. They might have hoped my peculiarly private histories would gain in value as they grew more private still, with any additions to the series no longer finding their way into the light. Given the riches of Manhattan’s buyers, this wouldn’t be a bad bet to place, like buying up penny stocks just for the hell of it. But I tried not to second-guess motives. If you took it far enough, you could find reasons, good ones, for rupturing every bit of intercourse you had with the world. That was fine on an individual level, but globally it could feel catastrophic. One thing I knew, anyway, was that the collector who’d been buying up the Claire series, the series I was most deeply invested in, and thus the one I guarded most carefully, was acquiring for the right reasons. I had no doubt. The man’s name was Roger Whent, and, just as I’d done, he lived intimately with these pieces. I had so much conviction in his interest that, unlike the other buyers, I even let him have a hand in which pieces went into the series.
How many of them were there, officially? Forty, perhaps, even if Whent held only about half. But which forty? Wasn’t the canon always shifting? There must have been two hundred pictures of Claire, at all stages of evolution, laying about my apartment now, never mind the ones Whent had bought or I’d destroyed, and the two or three which I had to assume were still with Claire, as I’d been unable to find them in the stacks scattered everywhere. For a time I produced pictures ever faster after she left, not only, I presume, as a matter of simple nostalgia and of penance, too, but also as a kind of denial, or a way of conjuring and nullifying her departure. It was only natural that some of them ended up as little more than effigies for the fire. Since the spring, you could say I’d found my way into a productive solitude—it would be the kindest way of describing my condition—though I was still unsure what sort of artistic returns I could expect from all these pictures of Claire. A good many, I suspected, would ultimately need to be destroyed, particularly the ones that were going to be of more interest to a psychiatrist than to a man looking to understand something about the world, and not just the sorry state of my mind.
If I’d had any regular visitors, or even the serious prospect of one, I might have already been driven to bring more order to the images, as they occupied not just the living room of the apartment, which had served as my studio since I’d moved in a year ago, but much of the rest of the place, too. As things stood, I’d not seen anyone here in two months but Immo, after a night of drinking. I doubt he could remember anything much about the place, and if he did, well, he was long familiar with my ways; there was nothing worth hiding from him. Even very good friends, though, especially any with a connection to art—John, Lindy, Rick—I’d not allowed here, never mind that my quarters were tantamount to a mansion for a young artist: I had rights to two of the three floors of a townhouse that loomed imperiously over the neighborhood from its position on a hill near the center. There was no way of having someone visit, though, without exposing the abject overgrowth of my art, which I was in no state to tame. The only picture anyone realistically could have come away with was one of psychosis.
For one thing, I’d transformed the massive, south-facing window into a kind of Albertian veil, cloaking it in a grid not of fabric but of grease, from the strokes of a pencil, at a quixotic moment when I’d thought to transfer, as Dürer depicts it, what could be observed through this mesh, in strict linear perspective. In Dürer’s case, there’d been a person on the other side of it. Mine, though, was closer to a landscape than to a portrait. There was the lonely little park beyond the glass, one thrust upon the neighborhood by an earlier generation of city planners hellbent on slum clearance. It was thought more or less uncrossable after dark, but three or four times I’d been intoxicated enough to make the trip—without event, so far as I can remember. How often had I stared out through this lattice thinking I should begin the transposition to canvas, square by square, of that iron gate fronting the greenery that seemed forged in another era? How impressively wrought it was, even if the metalwork had been painted over in a cheap black that flaked profusely, leaving the gate looking worse than if it had simply been left to rust. The foliage at least seemed just right for this park, shrubby and stunted; and cutting through it, just behind the gate, a wide gravel path ran on to an artificial lake in the distance, meeting it at its vanishing point. I’m not sure why I never actually rendered the scene. I did a tonal study of it once, filling in each cell of the paper with values of green. It had made for a pleasant afternoon, mostly in the mixing of paints, creating that abundance of greens. That much I can say. But I threw it out: no-one needed bad Mondrian. Maybe staring through the veil was enough for me; nothing else had to come of it. In light of the rank violence of this warren of streets, or at any rate its chronic unruliness, I can’t discount the sense of security those fine bars on my window gave me—even if they were merely grease.
Today, I was to see Whent. It’s why I’d been going through all these images, reconsidering the faces of a now vanished woman. I slipped the two drawings, the pastel and the charcoal, flaws and all, into the leather portfolio I’d been using since art school. Either or both might find a place in the narrative I understood to run along Whent’s walls; I’d yet to see this display myself, only heard of it from him and others who’d been to his tony triplex on the Upper East Side. What else, though? Sitting just beyond the pile of drawings I’d been examining in yellow-gray light given body by car exhaust was an overstuffed chair whose wrinkled blue vinyl skin stayed pleasingly chilly in all seasons. An apricot cloth sofa in the living room faced north, while a stool occupied the far corner. Generally I liked to stand and draw, at the easel, relying on a painter’s muscle memory, or else sit back in the blue chair and draw in my lap, like a high schooler; but I never worked at the drawing table, which felt too much like abiding a desk job. Accordingly, the table ended up mostly a repository of artistic detritus: at best, after sweeping the debris away, I could examine work there, but never alter it.
Poking out from under the chair was a group portrait—gouache on frosted Mylar—of Claire and her two younger brothers, arms all locked, out on the roof of a gallery. They’d been at an early morning celebration of Claire’s first solo exhibition, which had taken place earlier that night just below, at the Crestle in Chelsea, a rival to Hinton, in fact, though Sandy didn’t see it that way. I don’t think he could quite fathom the idea of rivals; everyone he had any interest in working with, he did work with. He had unusual taste, which meant there weren’t many competitors for his clients, at least in the early days. I missed Sandy sometimes. Not enough to take his calls, but still.
It was probably six in the morning, in the scene here portrayed; the last of the guests had cleared off an hour or two before. Three champagne flutes stood on the ledge behind the siblings at about the height of their chests, showing through the interspace almost symmetrically, as if arranged by a group portraitist. The light had just made its presence known, I recall, but hadn’t had a chance to deepen, so that its main effect on the white rooftop concrete was to brighten it subtly, and then, as the minutes passed, to bring it an off-white note. At the same time, two of the glasses began to glow orange from the mimosas they’d made from bodega juice and last night’s champagne. I stood apart, taking the scene in from the opposite side of the roof.
I remember first rendering the scene not on Mylar but on Bristol board I’d found lying around the gallery, probably from a previous show. I’d applied sanguine heightened with white chalk, all while they drank and talked and occasionally pointed toward me, though it was a common enough practice, my picking up a pen or chalk at social events, that their comments were few and mostly of the once again variety. I abstracted their movements, and their faces too—bleary, just as you’d expect—and I did this not as a workaround but rather because of what the rooftop had given me: perfectly square blocks of concrete, which formed, from where I sat cross-legged on the ground directly opposite the group, a radically foreshortened trapezoidal pavimentum leading back to a single vanishing point. This gridded floor, common in those days before Cimabue, became in my hands the plane of sibling fraternity.
I’d turned the original sketch, later that week, with better rest and stronger light, into the drawing now in front of me. I rubbed my fingers along the Mylar, which kept the undiluted gouache glistening right on the surface, like the page of an illuminated manuscript. The three of them existed there on that grid, in the still flat forms of Giotto, evincing in their geometry the symbolic relations holding between them, rather than the merely sensory relations of perspectiva artificialis, that seismic invention of Brunelleschi and Masaccio. Originally I’d tried to single out Claire through the principles of yet another treatment of space, one I was especially fond of: aerial perspective. Intensity of contrast, sharpness, darkness of edge, all served to pull her forward in the white field of light reflecting off the gallery’s roof. But the effect, even before I’d gotten three-quarters finished with the drawing, was unambiguously wrong. It separated her from kin in a manner uninterestingly at odds with that morning: Claire had been off to one side, as I remember it, with her head leaning lightly against her eldest brother’s arm and with her right hand gripping him by the wrist, as if considering where to lead him. Her expression suggested only minor dissatisfactions, set against the backdrop of a general contentment that was the birthright of all three of these Beacon Hill brahmins and the broader Billings clan. Meanwhile, the two brothers wore a look of tipsy exhaustion. Jeremy, farthest from Claire, was some years younger than the other two. He was still in high school, in fact, yet already, I understood, a man of philosophy. Who could say what that would mean in later life, though? Everyone in his family had had the most catholic of educations. I’d gotten to know the youngest better than Ted over the years, as he was often around their Boston home when I’d gone up to see Claire’s family. Here, in the curious angle of his haughty gaze—not just downward but inward, too—Jeremy showed signs of a burgeoning glumness generated by no-one in particular, merely the fact that proceedings he’d relished just hours, even minutes ago, had carried on slightly too long. Ted, in the middle, was a newly minted lawyer I’d never really come to know. Not that there was much chance of that: though he lived in New York, his residence might as well have been the offices of Debevoise and Plimpton. He did tend to be more forward than Jeremy, and here he trained his eyes, the only pair unmarred by signs of disturbance, directly on me.
The salient feature of this picture was the curious indifference all three figures evinced, in different ways, toward appearances, false meanings, and missed signals—even simply toward me, as the visual transcriber. It was as if what I or anyone else understood of them now, together, was of no concern to them. It seemed like a congenital condition to me, but perhaps that’s just what one assumes of the unimpeachably born. Tracing their represented bodies with my eyes, considering them as one linked form, the picture struck me as a sort of overlapping reverie, really, only in part about Claire’s apparent success in the gallery. The show had been attended by a smattering of young and influential critics and artists, and they’d all seemed genuinely unsure of themselves in the face of her sculptures, struggling for words, even the silver-tongued among them, which was a bit of a first for her, and a quite reliable sign she was on to something. But the Billings reverie comprised more than this. It embraced exactly what they’d become over these past years: a single psychic body, just as their interlinked forms were conjoined by this moment. Seeing this, knowing this, it couldn’t be right to separate them in space.
What I needed was to keep Claire just where she was, on the same plane formed by her brothers, but scale her up the tiniest bit, which would make her precisely the right size symbolically, that is, optically oversize, though by such a small margin you wouldn’t necessarily notice this unless you were a painter yourself. In the end, the picture I arrived at managed to lead the eye to centers of symbolic import without, I thought, implying the wrong sorts of relations. The malleability of proportions, of course, was a known feature of children’s drawings, art brut: empirical rather than linear perspective, which I always left myself open to, departing from Alberti on this point and admitting the Dutch tendency to allow certain sensorial irregularities grounded in the eye’s natural susceptibility to illusion. But the conscious mind, unlike the camera, could afford this, as it had a means of thinking away aberrations. The eye didn’t merely sense. It perceived.
That said, I suspected Whent wouldn’t care for this drawing. Not so much because of its rejection of linear perspective, but because it might come off as pastiche to him. Neither of us had any patience for the glut of imagery squeezing contemporary figures into bombastic Renaissance and ancient molds. Painters like Kehinde Jones wasted whatever talent they had on these wry gags. They were clever for a moment until their work decayed into insufferable kitsch. Nothing could be less amusing. But their worst crime was that these pictures’ mere circulation through the culture tainted the eye, which could lead one to shallow readings of the sort of picture I’d made here. I’d not grafted on or played up any historical features, as Jones and others did. No, the scene itself that day had been subtly built from them. I’d merely recognized as much. It had all come down to the faint light of a half-risen sun, which turned every form it touched abstract and volumeless.
I wasn’t sure if I was interested in debating this with Whent today; I also wasn’t sure I could avoid it. So I slipped the early morning memory into the portfolio, too, and left it for him to judge. There had anyway always been a divergence between my personal sense of the vital elements in the series and his. This had been true for all the series, actually, all my serial buyers, whether the individual pieces were six or forty in number. Perhaps that was to be expected, even indulged. Whent and the others had all politely declined some of my images, and I myself turned against more than a few of these rejects, shredding them or, when I felt less hostile, dropping them just inside the gates of the park to be dissolved by the elements or scavenged and incorporated into the “houses” of the homeless. But then there were some declined pictures I held in even higher regard than the ones my collectors had taken. This particular one, the illumination of the rooftop scene, might end up among that lot. Certainly it wouldn’t end up in the park or on the fire if Whent didn’t stake a claim to it. It would simply become a member of my shadow narrative of Claire, as it seemed to me to say something about her overlapping identities, filial ones, that the rest of the images I’d placed with Whent had not so much denied as simply passed over. Didn’t that guarantee it a certain importance to anyone genuinely engaged with the woman in the pictures?
Yet even if he felt differently on this point, it wouldn’t represent much of a problem for me. As far as I was concerned, he grasped only fragments of the world I’d excavated around Claire. Still, I was eager to see his particular version of it, reconstructed as if from artifacts and then arrayed throughout his home, which, unlike my own, presumably couldn’t have the character of a genuinely private environment. Surely, I thought, this technologist’s triplex was kept in an antiseptic, quasi-modernist state, built to resemble (or even blankly quote) the very sort of venue I’d been backing away from for over a year now: the white cube of the museum, a space without a center or indeed a nature. But what I liked about Whent, why I continued to offer him pictures, was that, whatever I discovered about the condition of his abode—and perhaps he might surprise me on this score—he really did appear to dwell in these images, in the world they brought into being. Given the way I lived among my portion of the world of Claire that was shared out between us, how could I not feel some kinship for him, businessman or not?
Slowly I brought myself to my feet. My thighs ached from spending most of the morning crouched on the floor, crawling about. I took the forsythia pen off the drawing board, the one Claire had carved so carefully it became a sculpture in its own right, and approached the last of the pieces of her I’d started: a contour drawing I’d done in blue ink, dense with cross-hatched lines, that I’d taped over a section of my northern window, where my fire-escape balcony was. Whenever my apartment seemed too filled with light, which was never a bother earlier on—only in the last months—when, passing so much time here alone that light itself felt like an intruder and my eyes craved a lower intensity, even while working—whenever things tended this way, I was in the habit of using drawings as blinds. I peeled it away and pinned the picture to the board on my rickety easel without any definite intentions, not yet, as light passed through the liberated pane, though like certain other of my windows, this one also bore the marks of grease pencil. I struggled to recall when I’d made these marks, the glass had been covered over so long; but as I dabbed at the lines with my finger, it occurred to me that, shortly after signing the lease, I’d used this window for an old-fashioned technical exercise. It’d served as the picture plane onto which I’d traced the scene outside, while standing just in front of it. Looking down at my feet now, I could see the tape marks I’d made for precisely centering the viewer, fixing a point of view on the tire shop, slightly out of place, it had always seemed to me, flanked by soot-cloaked apartments with an underlying color of especially opaque dishwater, such that the soot was modesty-preserving and the best part of their appearance. In front, along the near curb, there was a line of cars that ought to have been bronzed, they lay so immobile. The street between these two planes was subject to minor winds, often in the early hours, which would spin the city dust in circles, collecting cans and candy wrappers in their vortices. Little trees lined both sides of the street, trees that were easily mistaken for shrubs that blocked one’s view of nothing. They leaned back on both sides, away from the street, as if in reaction to the choke of fumes thrown up by traffic, wilting rather delicately over the mineral sidewalks shimmering in the summer so recently passed. My prospect was completed by countless hulking television sets that looked like long-discontinued models bought on clearance. More likely they’d actually been acquired in an earlier era and passed down like family heirlooms. It was still an earlier era here; time moved more slowly in the Bronx. These cathode ray sets cut generous trapezoidal figures in my visual field, and they were all framed within the matrix of apartment windows of the private housing project across the street, lending the otherwise decrepit building such a pleasing geometry, soothing in its uniformity, and imbuing it with a kind of order that raised its dignity, at least superficially, above that of the more arbitrary arrangements of shantytowns.
The notable property of this scene, and of the drawing it left on my window, if tracing could properly be called drawing, was its banality. The only thing elevating my marks above a student exercise concerning the manner in which light intersects a support, and the reason (perhaps) I hadn’t yet wiped the grease pencil from the window, was that so little altered in my neighborhood, week to week and month to month, that even a season later this drawing continued to match the scene outside almost everywhere.
Almost. As I looked out the window I could see only one car just slightly not fitting its outline; a couple of televisions seemed to have been rotated, and a football that had sat on a low rooftop was missing. Months ago I’d watched a middle-aged man with sweat-soaked hair sidearm the ball up there in a rage; presumably it’d been retrieved later by the teen I’d seen on the street in a face-off with him. The man must have commanded some sort of respect in the neighborhood, as the teen and his friends just walked away after trading the usual abuses with him: he was old and stupid and a chink, apparently, while they were scumbags and druggies, by his reckoning.
These little changes, especially the way the seating was sometimes displaced in the windows through the vagaries of kitchen-table talk—residents would be slumped into chairs I’d outlined empty, in the early morning hours—this was all effectively proof of life in a neighborhood that otherwise might have been embalmed. And indeed it was that moribund state, and the depressed prices that followed in its wake, prices that hadn’t changed in years, that gave everything here a certain glaze, as if all were trapped in amber. Still, those prices were what had lured me in. For what I’d been paying in Bushwick to rent an apartment with a separate studio, the Bronx had furnished me with a palace of my own: two whole floors in an ornate Georgian townhouse curiously surrounded by tenements. The house, I understood, had once been the pride of an ambitious developer, and the apartments just across the way, as well as some to either side, also once belonged to him. There had been a couple of decades, back in the fifties and sixties, when his private housing project seemed to be working as intended. He’d certainly grown rich, and his high-rises looked half-decent at the time. He’d been so pleased with his work that he cleared some of the land and built himself a grand townhouse—on a hill he also built. At that point he became a lord, and his neighbors accepted him as such. Eventually, though, the slums came for his buildings and the lower-middle class fled, leaving only the poor with their crack cocaine and ice. For a while he carried on in the midst of a newly menacing ghetto, a proper slumlord now, if still relatively wealthy thanks to government subsidies for good works and the rents he extorted from his serfs. What finally brought him down, in the late 2000s, was simple tax fraud, which was only necessary to sustain his margins, his luxurious residence. Since then, the house had fallen into disrepair and the tenements had been sold off—to another slumlord, of course, who was clever enough not to live among his subjects.
My meticulous drawing, rendered directly on the window pane, was perhaps my only way of coming to grips with the slowdown of time around here, this map of a moment through which the few glacial changes that did occur could be gauged. The piece made a certain kind of infrastructural and economic abandonment visible, one that I was discovering to be less depressing than you might assume.
The picture vanished as I lifted up the window. Recently I’d begun to fresco the walls surrounding it with more and more of the view to be gotten from the iron escape, which I climbed out onto now to breathe some of the invigoratingly dirty air. It smelled faintly of frying oil from the deli below, grease that was almost black. I doubt the staff ever changed it, though the chicken fingers that emerged from the sludge were actually pretty good. I’d been making a similar fresco of the gridded window on the south side, facing the park, even though there was no escape there and I had to poke my head out the window periodically to get a sense of dimensions. Both of these parallel worlds, the tire shop to the north, the park below, slowly encroached on the whiteness of my walls and headed for a collision at some indeterminate future point—perhaps in the spring—on my nearly windowless western wall: oddly, there was just a slice of light coming in near the top, like a prison. What had the developer been avoiding back then?
The fresco, to my mind, was merely a complex doodle. If it came to nothing but patches of paint, separate scenes collaged together, as it probably would, fine. And if it became something more? Maybe the unity just beginning to show itself here would emerge in full, and the image on my walls would come to depict not a series of discrete places, like maps of different towns, but rather a single continuous spatial field containing all these scenes, so that there was nothing arbitrary about the arrangement. On the contrary, it would become a kind of effacement of visual barriers via paint, transparency rendered through opacity. If, through this erasure, I succeeded in turning myself into a plain air painter like Monet, it would all be an unintended extra.
Unlike most of my work, there was no real way to fall short here. I picked away at it between other projects with clearer stakes, whether of a more rarefied sort, like my figurative paintings and drawings, or the more banal kind that was becoming a regular feature of my life in these days of unemployment: my dip into commercial art. The mural offered me a special place of peace, a place without hope, which is nicer than it sounds. My life with Claire might have been better, might still have existed, unbroken, had it been a bit more like this. The same could be said for all the drawings crumpled up in the trash bins around my apartment. I kept an unusual number of them, Immo had pointed out on one of his drunken visits. It was as if, he said, I needed the option of disposing of things within eyeshot at all times. He was being fanciful, as he liked to be around me, flaunting a kind of whimsy, or waywardness, though there was so much waywardness in his life already that whimsy might have been exactly it. Certainly nothing pernicious followed his little conceptual flights.
I’d ignored muraling at art school in favor of canvas and board. Now I ignored it, mostly, in favor of parchment and paper. Only parts of this piece—which I’d begun while Claire was just starting to flirt with exiting the Bronx, and my life—were rendered with any decisiveness of finish, and those only with guidance from John’s friend Connell. That was his last name, but it was more attractive than his first, by his own admission, so that’s what we called him. Because of his skill in frescoing, the priming of the surface, the mixing of paints for it, he was the only other person besides Immo to have come to the apartment these last few months. What Connell reported back to others I didn’t much worry about. He had a sort of circumspection to him, the result of a strict upbringing, which made me feel he wouldn’t enjoy gossiping about me; according to what I’d heard, he might have suffered acutely at the hands of gossip himself, questions about his mental health and the like. His mien was not quite affectless, but his being was steeped in anxiety, the kind that made him smile in an unhappy sort of way while his eyes darted around. He lent his talents to me mostly without comment, which is to say that he simply painted patches of the wall and expected me to take it the rest of the way. The softening of his manner over the weeks, the growing curvature of his mouth as he inspected my progress or touched up things I’d done, was the only acknowledgment of my achievement he offered. And it was plenty. For his own part, Connell had given up art. If he found working with me on the mural worth his time, how could I not be honored? These days he mostly loafed, though he didn’t call it that. He fancied himself a peripatetic philosopher, and intensely guarded an old little notebook he carried around, as though whatever was in it, some secret solution to a problem we didn’t yet know we had, would one day justify all his apparent idleness. His visits, and my gradual improvement in technique, meant that only the most recent bits of the mural, particularly the overgrown ash tree compromising my view of the park’s gate, showed any verve. Parts of the piece had gone up in acrylic. I’d tried tempera, in a nostalgic moment, but I’d prepared the paint poorly and much of that portion of the picture had flaked away. Other areas were skeletal, mere underdrawing I’d abandoned, perhaps owing to some interruption in my life at the time, or a loss of faith or interest in that bit of the world I’d been trying to put before my eyes. Still others amounted to polished drawings rather than painting, rendered in high detail, using powdered graphite—a favorite of mine—applied with stencils and a brush. Finally, in the shrinking white expanse between the two clusters of scenes, north and south, I had executed, on the western wall of my apartment, what was essentially one more drawing exercise. This was a sketch of the long, ragged roots of a tree—a tree upended, I imagined, by an eddy that had turned violent in the small yard behind my house, swirling not merely dust and urban detritus but also the larger structures of life.
Of course, I never actually saw those roots, their irregularly formed masses. And not just because the wall obstructed my view. From ground level, too, I knew there’d been no eddy, no uprooted tree. No, I saw these particular roots, the ones I’d been frescoing in fits and starts, only in my mind’s eye. But where, I often wondered, was the analogy supposed to be between this kind of inner “sight” and ordinary vision, the one that showed them to be variants of a common phenomenon? No-one, really, could give a definitive answer to this. Inner sight might well have been one of those linguistic maneuvers that served only to create a false understanding of the workings of the imagination. It would let you get on with things instead of being drawn into the riddle of the interior, the ways so-called mental imagery at times could seem, as when I was “examining” these roots, highly stable, controlled, regular in its behavior. When I attend to one of these tendrils, now represented on the wall, I can “see” the others in the background, in my peripheral—what? Peripheral imagination? For of course in truth there was something deeply groundless, or constructive, shall we say, about such imagery; there was a spontaneity to it, since there was no inner object that could plausibly regulate, through any relation of causation, the changing imagery given to me, in the way that physical roots, placed in front of my body, could regulate ordinary vision, guiding my sensory states in a predictable way, and therefore answering to the geometry inscribed in perspectiva artificialis. What, though, was the inner geometry of the imagination? Was it specious to assume that the imagination so much as had a geometry, just as it was to think of one’s head as the location of one’s mind?
In any case, this purplish root on my wall was for now an island in a sea of white. If I ever bothered to finish the mural, to integrate the northern and southern faces through the imagery to the west, I might well paint over these glowing, outsize roots of a dead or dying tree and return to my pursuit of transparency, tethering the imagery to what existed directly behind those walls—what you would have seen if they didn’t exist. Gazing at that in-between and undecided space inhabited only by the overturned tree with its roots exposed, wondering what direction I might take, somehow I arrived at a much more pressing and altogether different conclusion: to take two more drawings to Whent’s place. Five pictures, I supposed, would make the trip worth the trouble.
A skull, I knew, had been peering at me for a while now, not from here but from my bedroom. I’d composed it in sanguine on black paper, where the chalk line rarely came up off the support, massing instead in various densities, thickening in circles, representing what I understood to be Claire’s deep self. Peeling the skin off her face with my eyes: that’s what it came down to. I’d done it so many times. But what had her opinion been of this particular picture? The image had been up on my wall for many months now, I knew. It was strange to me that I couldn’t remember her reaction; perhaps she’d had no strong feelings about it, regarded it merely as a routine study, as she did so many of my other drawings, and not seen it as the probing of her spirit I intended almost every time I picked up a pencil or a crayon or a brush around her, whether I was drawing her or not. I held the drawing edgeways, as if searching for some secret in the skull, a reverse Holbein effect. Mostly I was examining the paper, the real star of the piece. Hand-pressed by Karen, it had the soft rainbow sheen of crude oil and was exceedingly loose in its weave, almost like a net or a nest for the skull, which, against expectations, had a lot of life in it. Maybe Claire had liked it.
And what about the picture in blue ink, with the forsythia pen, that stood on my easel now? It was almost phantasmagoric, this blue; traditional ultramarine appeared wan in comparison. The drawing was no more than half-finished, though weeks had gone by since I’d last touched it. Before I’d taped it to the window, I’d stood on a folding chair and pinned the sketch to the wall, I suppose as a deterrent to casual tinkering. It worked. I’d done nothing since then to change Claire’s face, her expression, the words behind or subsumed in the look. What was the old saw about drawing? You’re always finished sooner than you think?
I might also have kept her unfinished portrait mounted like that in the hope that her hard stare would wring a solution from me eventually—to no avail. She seemed less pleased by the day, looking down at me. But finally I think I saw something. Not in the picture itself, which I’d just transferred to the easel. I think I saw something in her, my memory of her—something that felt like the intercession which could finally kill off the itch to re-enter this image. Naturally I’d had to think about Claire all afternoon, recalling her many forms, dwelling on her ways of being present to the eyes, as I sorted and selected which pictures to take with me to Whent’s place; so it wasn’t entirely surprising that a revelation like this might arrive just now. In fact this is how most of them came, through the sheer accretion of moments. On a dozen occasions at least, usually when I caught sight of her features described in blue, that sharp nose especially, I’d felt the impulse to add an ink wash to model her face more completely. Yet I’d never felt that second impulse, something I had learned to wait for. As I thumbed the edge of the drawing in slow circles, listening to the low scrape of skin against the grain while my gaze settled blankly upon those roots on the wall, the familiar restlessness descended on me. But when I regarded her face this time, just skimming its surface and not looking too closely, with my thumb still turning circles, my feelings finally precipitated into action. I swapped the pen for one with a metal nib and a heavier flow of ink and roughly laid in a handful of open contour lines, in a darker blue still quite far from black, just to tighten the drawing slightly, give form to her cheeks and depth to her eyes. I emboldened the left side of Claire’s visage, strengthening the lines with pressure on the nib, and tucking some hatching along the curved plane of her face to suggest a more spatialized sense of incoming light, from the right, where I’d allowed none of these darker tones.
The movements of my hand quieted, my eyes slowed their dance. I let the pen hover over the drawing for some time. But my resolve disintegrated. No matter the angle at which I tipped the instrument, or the vectors along which I flicked my eyes, I felt no drive to deliver ink to the page. I’d done enough, nothing more was wanting. Perhaps Whent would feel the same.
I set the pen down. Claire had lost none of her angularity, perhaps her defining trait in this rendering, though not at all in real life—except for that nose. I’d not softened the angles as I’d imagined I might have, a month ago, when I’d noticed the drawing on the window, its edges diffused by the afternoon sun backlighting it. Instead, with the stronger illumination I’d shunted into the picture itself this time, through shading, her countenance was even starker than before, more severe. The image that had led me to start this picture hardly resembled what I was looking at. Turning over that memory again in my mind, whatever a memory was exactly, the metaphysical substance of my mental image of Claire, she struck me, even in that moment, as softer, less chilly, than she now appeared concretely before me. Well, not concretely, not really. She was only a collection of blue lines here, not the flesh and blood I’d known so well. But I was yielding to the other images I carried of her, some of which I’d been recalling, or, to put it in its truer, passive form, which had visited me as I’d gone about selecting what to take with me.
Drawing and painting can accommodate this composite quality of faces, especially those of the faces we are deeply acquainted with, which always carry a trace of each of our previous encounters with them. It was a welcome enrichment, most of the time, to find second and third faces, or even seventh and eighth faces, buried within the one in front of you, like sedimentary layers through which one might reconstruct the past. Sometimes, in fact, even elements of the surroundings would be pulled in and then seem, once the impression had formed, to belong intrinsically to the person: a certain poverty of light on a warm moonless night that afflicts someone even when seen later, at noon; a face that seems bright even in the dark; and a mouth you thought could probably breathe underwater.
These five—the charcoal, the pastel, the rooftop gouache, the skull, and then the portrait in blue—these would do for Whent, I thought. For the time being I left the forsythia drawing to dry. There were still a couple of hours before I was to meet him, so I turned, with some reluctance, to the other images strewn about my home studio, none of them profiles or portraits. These ones increasingly took up my time, and indeed yielded a growing portion of my rent, now that I’d quietly lost my job. Not that I was especially distraught by the loss. Although I’d started with thirty hours a week, they’d dwindled to ten, diminishing precisely in proportion to my enthusiasm for the position. What a perverse task: administering the arts, bureaucratizing beauty. Certainly my mother was never the same after entering those waters. I’d been warned, I suppose. But ever since Claire left, the working world in general had come to seem impracticable to me. Regimenting time in any serious way, regularly showing up at an office, it was starting to look unfeasible. So, when I was inevitably relieved of those last ten hours at the Carrington, not long after Claire herself had dismissed me—the timing was no accident—I couldn’t help but feel a touch of relief amid my anxiety over this final confirmation of a new economic reality.
For the past months I’d been offsetting my shrinking wages with commercial commissions from Karen and Rick at Cosquer, the graphic design studio they ran. There on my drawing board was the album art for Joy Division’s fortieth anniversary edition of Unknown Pleasures, a straightforward pencil drawing I’d nearly finished, mostly with an eraser. Along with the brief from Rick had come an old Polaroid of the band setting up in their original practice space, before they were much of anything, in the mid-seventies. I hadn’t bothered to read the brief. I usually didn’t. Karen and Rick never seemed to mind, or had anyway come to accept it as my way of working. I’d assumed I was meant to interpret the picture in some way. Sometimes Rick, the group’s principal art director, the one of longest standing, certainly, and in truth one of the few people whose visual and compositional judgment I placed much trust in—he was a painter in the first instance—he would simply send me an email or a text with what he thought might be useful, given my unconventional working methods. A quote, say, or a circumstance.
What had made it possible for me to so much as consider entering the commercial realm was the uncommon latitude this particular studio had earned from its clients in executing its projects. And that was just because Cosquer was much more than a studio. Foremost it was a loose art collective that took its name not from the underground cave in France that housed those primordial paintings, tens of thousands of years old, like Lascaux, but rather from its replica, Cosquer 2—inspired of course by Lascaux 2—that had been built nearby. Far from offering Paleolithic proof of the artistic impulse, Cosquer 2 had been created not by ancient artists but by twentieth-century engineers with a rather workaday purpose: since the entrance to the cave was underwater, and the water was rising, they sought to give viewers—tourists—the mock experience of history being swallowed by the sea. In any case, to justify its long leash, Cosquer, the studio, traded on its designers’ fine art bona fides, the unpredictability that attached to all genuine creation, and more than anything the pristine little art magazine the collective had been putting out in a variety of forms, often pamphlets, for almost four years now. It was here in the pages of this eponymous publication, which functioned as a kind of mutual exhibition space for work that would otherwise never be housed together, that the talents of the group were given a collective form.
Cosquer was Karen’s brainchild, a curatorial project she’d begun on graduating with me. She had as much invested in it as I did in my profiles, perhaps more so, as she was planning to carry it forward while branching off in other directions, like the design work we now undertook. Five or six issues were released yearly, each representing an abrupt transmission: brief yet lushly—exactingly—produced, occasionally on paper Karen and the team had pressed themselves. There was no sense calling it a zine. These little chapbooks, that’s what they most reminded me of, something from Les Figues maybe, covered matters not only in art but in heterodox literature and music. They even contained a few quasi-academic offerings, small rejoinders or interventions in specialized debates, the kind of thing that could put one in mind of Tel Quel, Sollers, Kristeva. The compactness of the issues ensured they got read and were seen as much as devoured; an excess of material, no matter the quality, was an invitation to be ignored.
Quickly and naturally, Cosquer established itself as the de facto outlet for the print-bound endeavors of many of my Cal Arts friends. In fact, it could be said to have kept us together; some of us surely wouldn’t be on speaking terms anymore without it. No doubt the venture would have died without Karen, who was a text artist mostly, and a typographer, and now the creative director (though she never called herself that) and prime mover (I had called her this) of the Cosquer collective. Rick, meanwhile, was an abstract-conceptualist painter of talent and growing reputation with very definite ideas about design; he’d played a vital role in defining the magazine’s look and getting Karen’s twin ambitions of large scope and small scale to mesh in the context of a publication. And so it’d taken hardly any time, really, for Cosquer to start mattering. That’s how I remember it. Its circulation could never have exceeded three thousand copies at any point, and frequently it was much smaller than that, particularly in the early days, but the magazine had a way of landing in the right people’s hands, sometimes several times over, as its elegant micro-editions were passed around both New York and L.A., and even found their way abroad to London and Copenhagen.
It was actually the writers of New York—and by that I don’t mean the kinds reliably reviewed in the Times, or even in the New York Review, but those who were simply not digestible by the usual organs: writers of intractable prose, hybridists of all sorts whose protean output appeared in stranger, more ephemeral publications—it was they who’d been first to gravitate to Cosquer. Probably when they’d seen it in Greenlight or McNally’s next to their own preferred serials, they’d picked it up by accident. The sorts of papers used, the textures of rice and rag and much stranger plants, called out not merely to your eyes but also to your hands, the way papyrus does at the museum, and you find yourself having to resist the urge to touch the mottled fibers. And that tactility was just the start. As you opened an issue, you’d find a portfolio of a subterranean sculptor (one time this was literally true: a Syrian who now spent most of his days in a bomb shelter) who might even still use his bare hands to fashion things; a cluster of aphorisms of unknown authorship—possibly, probably, Karen’s, or others who wanted the freedom to write in anonymity; some illustrations, occasionally mine, for an article ultimately abandoned or edited down to a paragraph or a single narrow column of text, or even just a caption, so the images now stood alone or almost so; and perhaps a short dialogue meant to be read in silence and not performed, if not a straight transcript of a conversation, with um’s and ah’s and typos included.
Even when the issues were dense with images, many were also inscribed with text. Karen’s standing somewhere on the continuum between typographer and poet had much to do with this. Some pages had little boxes containing mini-stories, or mini-arguments, or even mini-profiles, while others sported long stretches of fine print laid out with an intricacy it took a magnifying lens to appreciate. There were, throughout, the boldface names of the art-theoretic world, bold anyway if, having long been steeped in the scene, you knew that world as well as Karen Tally and her clan in Tribeca. It guaranteed the participation of the historians of Columbia and Yale, right there alongside the avant-gardists of Cal Arts and Chicago.
The artists, the ones that actually picked up brushes and pencils, joined the party later, generally on the recommendation of the writers they knew. Only afterward came the men and women of commerce, the designers, the professional communicators, the ideas merchants, attracted initially by the buzz Cosquer generated among purer artists, though their interest was sustained by the magazine’s striking design, which changed radically from issue to issue and for which Rick and Karen were most responsible. There was no website, just pamphlets grown dirty and dog-eared by the time late-comers got to them. Yet this was analog without a hint of nostalgia or primitivist lacquer. Like the replica Cosquer caves, it was analog only because it seemed like nothing else would do.
Once Cosquer got this far—eighteen months in, more or less—the commercial folk started circulating it beyond the hermetic worlds of advanced writing and art. I remember John exulting when Deerhoof, a band he’d thrilled to in his teens, asked the studio to design their reunion album. From there, opportunities bloomed, which not only funded a magazine we were all losing money on (Karen in particular had a certain amount of cash to play with, even if she didn’t like to talk about it) but also began to help a number of the collective’s members survive in the hyper-capitalized New York Bloomberg had bequeathed the world. I myself had abstained until a year ago, when I got my first taste of the financial pressures many of them had been coping with since school. This was more or less how Cosquer became two things: a magazine on the one hand and a design firm on the other, with both aspects carrying the shared name of that cave and its replica. So much did our profile grow, in fact, that institutions like the New Museum came looking for exhibition posters; as did the Whitechapel in London, where Cosquer found a devoted reader- and viewership. Eventually, the large circulation magazines, the kind that paid their designers, made inquiries with Karen and Rick about the illustrators and photographers working for her, including me.
These days, sizable advertising agencies, as well as their corporate clients, political candidates, even cities themselves, came to us for help with their more forward-looking campaigns. Most recently, Cosquer had helped rebrand a transit department for what one would have to say was less, not more, visibility; the previous identity had aged poorly—this was in Philadelphia—as it had been foolishly brash, too loud for the utilitarian service at hand.
Over the past two years, the roles within the organization firmed up and the collective arrived squarely at the intersection of art and commercial design: Cosquer and Cosquer. Given the cachet the latter drew from the former, the requests for work had a gratifying sheepishness about them, for asking for something so crass as marketing material from the makers of such a distinctive and convincing art publication. This usually meant we had carte blanche to offer what we wanted to offer, to refuse all conditions. The few who had quietly tried to impose requirements on us had been equally quietly dropped. While I didn’t take much of an interest in design as such—plenty in disegno, of course, but that was something else—Karen conducted her project with a delicious disregard to the wants of both the commercial and art worlds. She catered instead only to a set of interests you would generally have had to acquire from her—from exposure to the magazine, from immersion in our design commissions—in order to hold at all. She was commercial without a trace of irony or self-deprecation; she was entirely willing to abrade the fine sentiments of the art school crowd and her own family. Naturally I adored her much more than I did Rick, who didn’t thumb his nose at fine art in the same way. He was a believer, a traditionalist, and although he was gifted in design, it was always a sideline for him, a means of supporting his abstract canvases.
The leeway Rick and Karen garnered was frequently inherited by those who worked with them. It was rare that my offerings, even my roughs, were turned down, by clients anyway. A few times, all in the early days, when my contributions were more sporadic, there had been extended silences from Rick or Karen or even John, who would take a leadership role during his “good” periods, when his general deportment was less excessive than usual. My follow-ups would be met with replies that conveniently failed to address the lone question I’d put to them. Karen in particular, for all her willingness to cross people, had an exquisite talent for politesse, and when she felt like deploying it on someone like me, whom she saw no point in irking, she did it without a false note. She might ask me about the work I’d like to see in Cosquer—my non-commercial work—never mind the business underway at Cosquer. Or she might send me an entirely different assignment, with the assurance that this one had my name written on it. What this meant was that not only had she not liked my rough; she’d rather I not try again. I liked to suppose that in doing so she was only heeding the advice of certain legends of design she’d told me about: people of the Carson school, for instance, who felt that if you had to instruct the artist much, the work probably wasn’t worth pursuing. The results would never really sparkle.
Ordinarily, such evasions would have troubled me. And perhaps really they did trouble me. But whenever I got ready to take up the issue with the powers that be at Cosquer, and I was planning on being conspicuously unpleasant—I like to leave an impression—I would study my submission to construct the seemingly airtight case I knew myself to be capable of. (I am a lawyer’s son; that sort of dialectical or sophistic skill is my birthright.) Yet each time I went about it, I found I simply couldn’t summon the conviction to defend what I’d sent them—not in good faith, anyway. And when it came to brushes and pens, good faith was what I had. My work, on reflection, would turn out to be every bit as weak as they’d hinted it was: not merely off-target so much as aimed in the wrong direction. In truth, those three or four pieces weren’t even worth their kill fees. It would have been ignoble of me to collect the cash, as my lack of effort and engagement was transparent. The very thought of such fees was idle, in any case, as I was never offered anything. Still, what one would do, even under circumstances that never arise, says something about who one is, or supposes oneself to be.
Whenever I went to Karen with a surliness corrupting my features, she simply looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to see the sense in her decision; she probably knew just what I meant to bring up, and in the end nothing would come from my lips. She would begin to smile, more and more, until finally I would laugh and she would lower her eyes and snicker, too.
I suppose they all thought of my output as deeply... volatile. Mercurial was Rick’s friendly and rather cerebral epithet. Yet mercurial in a way that was worth working around, searching for a fix, owing partly to longstanding friendships and my connection with the magazine, but also to the fact that I did occasionally produce things with manifest commercial power—we as creatures of this civilization can all feel it in our bones—things that seemed to overwhelm the works of other artists who might also have taken a shot at the brief, but in too effortful a manner. Which is to say, sometimes you can only hit the target when you’re barely aiming at all, and your mind is on other things. That was at the time when Sandy was selling my real work briskly. In those early years, I would only play at design, really more to stay close to Karen: a poster, a hand-lettered logo for some ultra-hip Ridgewood coffee franchise, and, just for fun, a brochure for a dying taxi firm that offered luxury rides in vintage cabs.
Now that my pure projects, my personal, self-directed pieces—as those who are planted on the commercial side of art call work not made-to-order—had slowed to a trickle, commerce was precisely where my interest lay. I was trying to take the assignments more seriously. I’m not sure whether my colleagues understood my comparatively chastened attitude, the noticeable dip in my... volatility. My focus stemmed of course from my need, and presumably a deep-seated sort of grief. What else could explain my equanimity in pursuing such a course? They must have guessed as much, though they had the grace not to inquire. I do know that they began to take more of my work. Generally, too, I could expect an explanation for those pieces that were declined. They understood that the answers mattered more to me now—that I’d be refreshing my email until I got one.
None of this meant my efforts didn’t continue to be oddly executed, and far more erratic than the output of others who had truly embraced the constraints of the marketplace. It didn’t mean, say, that I didn’t still ignore the briefs. After all, that was in some way what these clients were seeking, I reasoned: a certain artistic indifference to commerce that might, paradoxically, though no more paradoxically than prefabricated ripped jeans, help sell the product, by lending it a devil-may-care appeal. Certain types of self-sabotage had that effect, against all expectation. As with this Joy Division cover, I would often simply size up the client for myself, without forethought. I almost never accepted a job without having some personal impression of who had ordered it. This was what allowed me to proceed sans brief, triangulating who they were, whether it was an especially well-known curator, a masterful barista now running a small army of shops in a part of town I’d abandoned, or a band I had intended to see but could not—at the last moment—because my ears had acquired a peculiar sensitivity, one that seemed to track the flagging of my spirits.
So I sat at the drawing table and studied this little work, which I’d done in the stately, magniloquent tones of graphite, the medium which seemed to me to produce the most conceptually subtle qualities in art. I’d simply drawn the space and scene depicted in the battered Polaroid, pretty much as it appeared, but with a greater sense of plasticity, of structured, interacting volumes—the world-involving gestalt of lived experience—which returned to the interspace its permanent charge of possibility, of potential call and response.
I could have just put what I had in front of me in an envelope and sent it to Karen, let her bounce it back to me with the colored index cards she always included in the return package carrying her critique. I could also expect her to pass on any feedback she’d solicited from the band’s representatives, or even from the living members themselves: at this point it was not out of the question for Cosquer to make that happen. Yet perhaps neither party would appreciate the concreteness of my take; they might rue having sent me the Polaroid. An extended back-and-forth might easily ensue over a piece like this, I knew.
I sat down and peered deeply into the four young men in graphite, the slightly unnatural postures, the open mouths of two of them that gave the scene a staged, illustrative appearance. Though the bandmates had nothing of the cartoon about them in their details, you still longed for the thought bubbles I hadn’t provided. Why? I suspected this wasn’t so much an artifact of working from a photo. As I looked carefully at it, I felt it was the “photo session,” if one could call it that, that induced the flattening of personality, of expressive action, in each of the figures. By contrast, owing to the sheer number of hours required to sit for a painting or drawing, a subject had time to settle back into his body, and this was true even if he didn’t really want to settle back or be seen. Inexperienced models always broke after some amount of “posing” in this sense.
It occurred to me, as I continued to wait for the last of the drawings for Whent to dry, how I might move the dialectic with Karen and the clients two or three steps ahead, past its inevitable longueurs. I took up the kneaded eraser, full of my fingerprints in black on gray, and began to evacuate these men, these boys, one by one, into its doughy folds. Eventually all were absorbed. I tested myself for a change of impulse, but I felt not the slightest inclination to stop this holocaust. What was left behind, when the eraser was one shade darker for having consumed them, was a picture of that seminal basement marked only by four gaps, as if touched by flames that ate up all the living matter in the room. Why had I done this, exactly? What sort of improvement had I made, if I’d made one at all? Surely it wasn’t a whim, what I’d just experienced. There’d been a steadiness and continuity to my action, of grave precision, as I’d lifted each figure from the scene.
Joy Division were a group I had once found so full, artistically, in high school, and that’s why the band’s commission was one of the few I felt truly pleased to have sent my way. I almost didn’t require the excuses of poverty and grief to take it on, to reacquaint myself over the past week with all of the albums, and New Order’s as well. The short-lived singer’s vocals, which had the tenor of an even more depressed Jim Morrison, and the epic repetition involved in the band’s best songs, seemed, with the brutish sonic palette that washed away so much nuance, to abide grizzled Platonic forms. By nineteen or twenty, of course, I had spurned not only this music but all the lesser variants of it, or in truth simply forgotten about it. Its gravitational pull had waned, not because the band had changed, but because of the tiny gap that sat at the very center of rock and roll, and pop music in general, which you noticed from the beginning, when you were totally in its thrall. In that early moment, the abnegation it signaled was in fact the basis for attraction; over time, though, even from month to month, the void expanded, and indeed seemed to empty the music from the inside out. There was something exhaustible about the music, I felt, and those years between sixteen and twenty-five effectively transformed it into a nullity. That was its final state, its telos, its logos, too, this massless thing, so that even when performed live, the music, in my ears, tended toward the Xeroxed, tinny quality of an mp3. At this rate, I thought, by forty the music would vanish altogether for me. I wouldn’t hear a thing.
So, when I first opened the envelope from Rick, who was himself, I should say, a rock aficionado and a lover of sound in general, I found the photo of Joy Division inside, this band that had delivered to me a jarring lesson about evaporating art forms, and I recoiled. I read the top line of Rick’s note. Something about a cover for the remaster of Unknown Pleasures, an album that was actually going to be a double album, including unreleased demos and early songs. I’d been hearing about this already from acolytes like Rick and John, even Hasan, my dapper friend who spent his days in a neurological lab, not a studio, but here was proof at last and it stoked something in me. Joy Division had at least this going for them: they were ideal in helping you understand the disappearing ink in which pop music was written. They celebrated nullity. And rightly so, as just before the whole enterprise slipped beyond the horizon into nonexistence, it was something absolutely worth witnessing. Listening to the band again had shown me that emptiness even more sharply, though it no longer repelled me. It struck me as the perfection of a primitive form.
After I’d finished the drawing, my nostalgia passed, as it almost always did, and it was then, the very same day, that I felt the first tentative impulse toward erasure. I tried it out on the bass player standing just to the side of the dime-store instrument his mother had probably bought him for Christmas. His fingers were intertwined with the tuning pegs. I disappeared two-thirds of him, from the thighs up, though when I came to that fidgeting hand, I reversed course and reinstated the young man, line by line. Today, though, I found I had no desire to stop erasing until they were all gone, leaving only their instruments as stand-ins for each of them. In Curtis’ case, only a microphone lay on the ground, next to a yellow bucket on which the cord loosely hung. I was taking the band back to a scene before there was much of a band at all, just the hint of one, when the space the musicians occupied had been merely a basement with a bunch of gear awaiting them. Rock was anyway of such a nature that bands, after their vital early work, tended to get erased. Why not literalize a bit here, depict the void in embryo?
I was about to pick up the pencil and close up all those ghostly gaps I’d created in the piece—leaving them was never a thought; that would have been gauche—but a second wave of this negating impulse struck me. So I dabbed away the instruments, too, with the eraser molded into a point; or rather, it was as if I were redrawing them in white, against a white background, drawing them out of rather than into existence, which was the pleasure of working in white, of all negative drawing, and I stopped only when all that remained was shelving, an oil stain from where a car might have usually been parked, a few fluorescent lights, and, against the back wall, near the door that swept your eye into the house, some tins of varnish or paint, a microwave oven, and a collection of saws of varying lengths hanging from the walls.
The picture was riddled with white gaps. I thought of Rauschenberg’s erasure drawings, defined by pentimenti exclusively, and this gave my pencil an urgent purpose. I filled in all the holes with those portions of the basement that the figures and the instruments had obscured, or might have, as I invented what must have been behind them. I did this steadily but without fuss, certainly more quickly than I’d done the original drawing. When I finished, a trace of band-shaped pentimenti could be picked up, a subtle disjunction between the past and present of the piece, and also the past and future of the band, at least if you were looking for it. And if you weren’t? Karen, with ignorant eyes, could tell me what she saw.
I brushed off the drawing, all the gray crumbs from the erasing, and held the image under the lamp’s hard white light. “Unknown pleasures,” I said aloud. It surprised me to think I hadn’t even considered the title, nor even the songs, in any detail. But perhaps I’d taken out the instruments just because the pleasures were genuinely unknown, not only to Joy Division’s fans but to the members as well. This was merely a garage now, a garage that would prove important to them as the site of discovery, though it didn’t yet know its own future. Melancholy had always seemed to me to reside in graphite, so eminently erasable: a melancholy of impermanence that suggested just this sort of looping back, not merely to the beginning but to a time before the beginning. Which was, I considered, precisely what it would be for the band to undergo a renaissance in our amnesiac era of digitized and dispersed pop, where they were virtual unknowns. We might as well have been before the beginning, before anyone knew anything of Joy Division, in a world in which others somehow believed they’d invented the band’s iconic palette themselves.
I wondered whether I should add the album title, perhaps inscribe it right into the depicted scene, as in those Saenredam pictures, like the one with the memorial for his father, etched, inverted no less, on a foreground tile of a church. Perhaps Unknown Pleasures could go in the window of the dusty microwave, like a wash me sign. I would leave it for Karen to decide. I might even suggest she leave the title off the cover, perhaps just the band’s name on the spine would do. It could definitely work, this picture: this could be the end of it. Or it could go through several more variations. Or the band, a group of old men now, might end up looking further afield, for someone a bit more serious about accounting for the album title, say.
In the end, it was only a sketch. At Cosquer we often sorted out many of the details later, as suited our less-than-professional ways. Beyond that, as I say, my fondness for the rock idiom had faded, so the extra-monetary stakes were small. And in any case it wasn’t very clear how much I was likely to make from this project, supposing we even won it. I’d known Karen and Rick a long time and they were not in the habit of shorting their illustrators and contributors. But this was a speculative project, and there was no way of knowing who else was working on it.
Even if the thing went nowhere, though, drawing this picture and then undrawing it just as carefully had given me something to do, now that I was doing less of everything else. There were certainly projects lying around my apartment I had a far greater investment in. I was midway through a set of illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, for a new collected works that wasn’t being executed on spec and would bring me some useful money, courtesy of all those dutiful high-school teachers who’d buy the book for their courses. There were also artistic motivations, obviously. Think of the precedents in book illustration, or just Poe illustration, which Manet had taken up with such skill. I’d spent the previous few weeks re-reading Poe’s shorter works, including one that particularly gripped me, ever since I’d read it in junior high in a bowdlerized edition: ‘The Gold Bug.’ Over the past week I’d been rendering Jim, the doltish Negro, in all sorts of ways: up in the tree, at an extreme angle, where you could barely see him looking for the spider; standing at the base of the tree, bearing the narrator’s scorn; and many besides. What sort of picture might convey the absolute violence of the unbowdlerized text, without papering over the incidental (though retrospectively essential) antagonisms of the work? I was still figuring this out. Beyond the Poe, there was also the cover art for the catalog of the fiftieth anniversary of a Dallas museum that had been bequeathed to that grotesque sprawl of a city by an energy baron. How frequently anniversaries drove the commissioned designs and redesigns we worked on, even when they failed to mark any sort of turning point in the development of the institution. A round number was all the reason you needed, apparently. This project was part of a larger initiative Cosquer had undertaken to reconstruct the museum’s identity, including an updated logotype to be woven into the institution’s physical and virtual presence; hand-lettered signage throughout the museum; and a series of limited-edition posters, with nods to Mucha and Chéret.
Now, though, all this would have to wait. Karen had texted me about Joy Division just yesterday, wanting something today or close to it. So here it was. My eraser had made it possible, and perhaps succeeded in conveying a little bit of my menace, too. Rick, being the music man among us—well, he might have a problem with this one. He might find it impertinent. He was generally coming to find me that way, I thought, just as I came to doubt his own direction. But we’d see, soon enough, and at all events, whatever money there was to be had from this piece was still quite a way off; the album wasn’t due for release until June. My proximal financial hopes were pinned, really, on Whent’s attitude toward the pictures now tucked in my portfolio. It could mean three months of peace. It could mean even more, depending on how many of the drawings he took, and for how much. I lightly pressed my hand against the blue ink picture, stroking Claire’s face, dabbing my fingers over her eyes and feeling only the tiniest damp. She was ready to leave.