Whent had told me modestly that his apartment was out toward the East River. It turned out to be fronting it. Yet I was pleased to find that the assemblage of buildings, whose modest curved forms seemed to float over the water, mostly left the past unmolested. It seemed to have unshackled itself from modernist severity without quite embracing the glibness that followed and still seemed to predominate in contemporary architectural circles. I had trouble dating the building, which was of course part of the postmodernist’s delight, the confusion of time in the name of space. Was the buildings’ design a recent rejection of Venturian insouciance, or did it embody an earlier, transitional style that simply hadn’t mustered the necessary self-confidence to do so?
I stood gazing out over the river for a moment, its brilliance manufactured by sunlight that, seemingly sharpened by the water, threw wavy crystalline reflections onto my body and into my eyes. Turning away from the glare, I regarded the pale stone skin of Whent’s towers, which shimmered in those same reflections. The entrance was restrained, if curious: a tall vaulted door made in black glass, with a man in a double-breasted suit standing by it. As soon as I passed within, I was swallowed up by a lobby of extravagant proportions, completely filled with light. It streamed in through glass inner walls which, I should have known, locked in another perfect square of grass, inscribed within a larger square of black pebbles and nothing else. A white-haired man came for me from the desk, moving at some speed, holding out his hand and giving me, from the start, a firm and purposeful smile. He took the portfolio and walked me to a glass box that was already open, as if my arrival were not merely expected but timed down to the minute. Inside the elevator, he stood with his back to the light. I stood opposite, though I avoided his face and attended to the green patch outside—or inside. I could see no way of accessing this space, so that it became for me a symbol of unreachable nature. Was that an improvement on the illusions of Central Park? Or was it tragic?
I watched the green patch shrink, and when the doors of the invisible elevator finally opened, which you knew to be occurring mostly by the whoosh of air—we must have been very high up—the green was not much more than an indistinct dot. The man by now was standing outside the elevator, with his hand in front of the door, preventing it from closing, and he was looking back at me with what I could see was a congenitally long face. Smiling must have cost him something. He didn’t offer a smile now—one was enough, apparently—and he didn’t say anything either as he waited for me to lose interest in the grass. Eventually I joined him outside and tried to reclaim the portfolio, but he nodded me off and even patted my shoulder as he carried it on down the corridor. I followed behind on this poorly lit stretch, its thick champagne carpeting oddly dated; perhaps it was some whim of Whent’s. Certainly it deadened our footsteps, so that I had little sense of how fast I was moving, only that the old man was moving faster. After a minute or so, I caught up to him at a set of large engraved doors. Here too, though, he wouldn’t release the portfolio, instead merely raising his thin white eyebrows at me and, fighting appearances, making his face project some modicum of good will, which by this point I was willing to credit.
Yet before we could knock to announce our arrival, Whent was standing there in the gaping hole he’d just made by swinging both doors open, entirely silently. “Perfect,” he said with a grin at me as he took the portfolio directly from the doorman’s hands. His single word ricocheted around the foyer, which unlike the hall was dark hardwood. I hadn’t spoken to him face-to-face in many months now; all our interactions had been via telephone and email, so I found myself momentarily reintegrating his voice with his body.
The doorman’s bearing had shifted. He stood unnaturally upright, and his hangdog expression had stiffened with perplexity. I believe he had meant to have handed back the portfolio to me, the natural completion of the suspension he had earlier brought about. But when his tenant seemed so excited by the sight of it, he relented and turned smoothly for the elevator without so much as a look at me. I searched for his shoulder, to return the friendly tap from a minute ago, but he was already out of reach, on his way back to ground level, where that green dot would return to its true proportions.
“Come and see what you’ve done,” Whent said as he led me across the vast living room, which the sun drenched through skylights that bore through the upper levels and illuminated the mezzanine and ground floor, as did the long windows on the far side of the apartment that opened onto the river. He was dressed far more casually than I had ever seen him in our previous meetings, which had never taken place at his home: loafers without socks, cloaked by a pair of linen trousers that were at least two inches too long and collecting unflatteringly on the floor. Either these had yet to be hemmed, or they had some sort of sentimental value. Their cut didn’t quite seem adapted to his body, and this foreignness was only accentuated by his exquisite shirtsleeves, obviously bespoke, although he’d roughly rolled them back.
I was gratified by the abundant informality, here and everywhere about us: the cups and saucers stained with coffee at the bottom and in a thin line along the rim, about an inch from the top, abandoned and orphaned on several surfaces; all of the international newspapers and magazines, some quite old, judging by the slightest of uneven yellowing across some of the sheets; and the many packets of stapled papers, reports of some kind, judging by the similarity of their design, the long legal-sheet dimensions, though mostly printed in landscape, carrying many graphics with tiny block capitals beneath them. Most of the places one might naturally sit in, not just the various chairs and ottomans and the seemingly endless sofa but also the little nooks and person-sized gaps the entire space seemed to abound in, were occupied by material of this sort, as if he spent a lot of time going from spot to spot. All this reminded me of my own apartment, of bachelorhood, even if he wasn’t strictly a bachelor. But I could also see vacuum lines on a small carpeted space toward the windows, and nothing was dusty or dirty—contrary to my place—which suggested that the cleaning service he retained knew to leave his little stations just as they were, not even touching the coffee cups, for fear of disturbing whatever it was he had going on.
It wasn’t antiseptic minimalism ruling here, nor the juvenile aesthetic that dominated Silicon Valley, but an almost arbitrary collaging of elements that appeared natural rather than designed. For all that, the apartment bowed to one sort of business fashion that seemed not to have a lifespan: it was done almost entirely in shades of white, which smoothed out the hodgepodge of furniture and lent the space the unfortunate neutrality of a gallery. That was one reason for the impression, anyway. For interrupting all that white were, and this really did cheer me as much as it dizzied me, dozens of my drawings and paintings of Claire. Mostly they were pinned up, without any formal mountings, in just the way I would have put them up in my apartment while they were being worked on. Strange that I hadn’t noticed these as I’d entered. It was as if they came into focus all at once, after I’d crossed the living room and was standing closer to the windows overlooking the river.
“Amazing, right? I told you, I live with them.”
I believed him.
“They’ve been up like this for a week now.”
The ground floor walls were punctuated by them in most spots that offered a willing surface. He led me up to the mezzanine as his trousers dragged on the wide stone steps; now the Claires were in even greater concentration. He was still carrying the portfolio, and somewhat greedily, which pleased me. His hunger was real.
“I do most of my thinking up here. Just pacing. These ones must have been up for a month, I think.”
We strolled along the inner perimeter of the half-floor, past various configurations of simple wooden tables and chairs carrying those same standardized reports, down to the last of the surfaces, quite large, with a bottle of whiskey and a couple of glasses atop it. Passing each image—the tiny watercolor of Claire’s toes; a cityscape in which she was only a small dot on the street (I’d drawn this one from the apartment, actually, as she talked with a neighborhood marijuana dealer outside our bodega); a set of tall sumi ink drawings in a Japonisme tone, with sweeps of ink elongating her form, so you couldn’t say whether she’d been drawn or written like an immensely complex calligraphic character—a charge went off in me. And not because they brought back long-buried memories. In fact I recognized each of these moments instantly, as though the pictures themselves were still mine (weren’t they?).
Whent told me nothing of how he’d organized them. I hadn’t asked. I knew, though, that there was nothing random about the sequence. Despite the seeming chaos of the house, Whent was a storied computer programmer; in key respects, he was an impossibly meticulous man, and it was to this fastidiousness that he owed his wealth. The strangest thing was this: my own preferred ordering, evidenced by my felt prediction of which images would arrive next as I walked beside him, an order that correlated neither to chronology nor to the order of sale, tracked his own quite closely, so much so I sensed I could almost anticipate each image to come. It was a feeling like déjà vu, except that I was certain I’d never been here before. What principle, I wondered, lay beneath our shared preference?
Finally we came to the table with the whiskey and the two glasses I’d seen from the far end, shining under a strong and tightly focused lamp. Whent opened the bottle while I sat, though he didn’t pour immediately, just stood above the bottle looking back on the paintings and drawings. He’d only met Claire once, and very briefly, at a show of mine, and then sat through a dinner afterward, which I think he slightly resented, and certainly regretted. This was actually a happy fact; it’s what convinced me, and more important, convinced Claire, that there was nothing perverse in what Whent was doing, hoarding all these pictures of her, even if it was unquestionably odd. He’d liked her, I think, and she thought he was nice enough, if a bit abrasive, considering he was not an artist but a man of business, and of technology in particular, where manners, the real ones she knew so well, could rarely be found. She did accept, though, that his money was essential to us, given the listlessness (in which there was no small measure of pride) of our pursuit of gainful employment. She very much didn’t want to call on her family to support her (or us) and although I might have been willing to call on mine, there probably wasn’t enough of it. Money. Not for New York.
I remember that dinner, a celebration of a group exhibit in which several of Cosquer’s members appeared. It was held at Minetta Tavern. Whent asked Claire not a single question, and in every moment when it wouldn’t have been excruciatingly rude, he avoided her eyes. If she’d been less observant, she would have surely left with the impression of surliness. But she suspected there was a more specific ground for his evasiveness, which didn’t carry over to the rest of us at the table: Karen, for instance, with whom he made the kind of sanguine conversation I had come to expect from him.
Claire was right. He called me the next day to apologize for his poor form. He didn’t want her, in her person, he explained, to interfere with the power he felt the images held. For him, they were something more or less independent of the rest of the world, including her. For me, of course, these pictures were nothing without Claire, the one of flesh and blood; they gave her to me, ratified her, though in ways the natural world might never consider. Emanations, or entanglements, you could call them; neither disembodied forms on canvas nor sensuously embodied truths, whether literal or the kind lying on metaphorical planes, upon which artists frequently assumed it was their business to unfurl higher truths.
Not so for Whent. If Claire had never existed at all, he might have found it all the more worthwhile, though of course—and this is what he didn’t understand—I couldn’t have created these images without her. Physical duplicates could be made of the canvases and surfaces, of course, but as far as I was concerned that would be the equivalent of Lear emerging from the typing of chimps. What my images were for Whent, what they managed to put him in touch with, if that is indeed what he expected from works of art, I didn’t really know. He was, I suppose, surrounding himself only with an idea, or else with the products of my hand, with form, line, color, the constants running through my imagery; or perhaps what he envisioned were my feelings about this woman, which we had never personally discussed. I knew better than to disabuse him. Perhaps he used my imagery only to be put in touch with himself, something I neither sought for myself nor frankly thought possible. Selves were vanishing points, not for touching.
“These ones,” Whent said, after a long silence, pointing out several simple images of Claire, fountain pen drawings coupled with ink wash that showed the influence, most clearly, of Delacroix; they were ethereal yet kinetic, as if an otherworldly force were making itself known, perhaps with the ironic touch of Daumier, each with one or two gestures intensified. “These you remember, I bet.”
“From the winter.”
“The last time you showed, correct? Sandy can’t be thrilled.” He was thumbing the top of the bottle now, somehow still not ready to pour. I was getting thirsty.
“It was, yeah.”
“The last time you sold, too?” He placed one hand on the table and leaned forward, toward me. His wool tie, squared off at the end, somewhat frayed, and a rich blue and yellow—college colors—swept forward with his chest and continued to lead straight down. Behind him, I was startled to see, was a small bar with no more than five or six bottles, in yet another bespoke nook. There were plenty of tumblers, too, all decoratively etched.
I gestured limply at bar, ignoring his question. How many more of these were there, bars you had to come within feet of to recognize as such? I liked Whent more and more.
He looked back over his shoulder without really looking. “Anything you want in particular?” He brandished the bottle already on the table and began to pour a golden drink from it into one of the two tumblers. He sipped it, no more than that.
“How about that one?”
He examined the bottle as if he hadn’t just poured from it, indeed, as if he hadn’t even thought of it in a long time. “Cheapo Johnnie?”
He looked back at me flatly and waited a couple of beats, perhaps for some sign of protest, which didn’t come. Johnnie Red was fine. He went back to grinning, as he had at the door. His teeth shone as he tipped the bottle toward the second glass. “Did you know I despise Blue?” he said with regrettable pride. Nothing could really erase the obscenity of his wealth, or the whole Upper East Side, except its donation or destruction.
He slid the dram toward me and started frowning in thought.
“I bet Alex still gets things from you.”
I nodded. He stood up straight and held his tumbler in front of him, lowered it onto the palm of his other hand and turned it slowly, breaking the light that struck it into waves. I drank sharply from my own glass.
“And Don, too.”
“He has, yeah.”
“Not recently, though.” He flicked the rim of his glass and we listened to it ring. He set it down on the table without drinking from it and sat across from me, with one leg folded over the other. “I didn’t really want to ask you this, but why not. What the fuck is this ‘no shows’ thing about?”
I shook my head indistinctly, by this point having heard this question enough that I no longer feared it. It just tired me. Which doesn’t mean I’d actually dealt with the matter in any way. Who was to blame for my exhaustion, then? I took another sip, a deeper one, right on the border of a swig.
“You’re cooking up something else, beyond this series, right?” He uncrossed his legs and joined me in drinking this time. “I assume? How have you been? I mean, since she...”
I smiled absently while he squirmed with words. “You know,” I said, “there’s this poster for a Ty Segall show I’m working on.” I think Whent thought this was a prelude to an answer, but actually that was all. “A rock band,” I added. Here I enunciated rock with just the same emphasis he’d given the word she just now, though the meaning of the inflection was that he couldn’t be expected to understand such things. “What about Joy Division. I know you know Joy Division. Ian Curtis? The suicide?”
I could see this touch of belligerence didn’t manage to push him off the idea that I wasn’t quite thriving. But he looked aside finally, down at the grainy oxblood portfolio—for the first time, properly, I believe—which unsteadily leant against the table. I thought it would slip to the floor at any moment. He was staring at it as if he could see what was inside already, but only with great concentration. Pity laced his words: “So who represents you now?”
“Sandy still, technically. He hasn’t said he won’t. His wife hasn’t, anyway, if I decide to exhibit again. She’s the one I still talk to now and then.”
“Alice has great taste. Better than his, maybe. Of course she’d represent you. And of course you’re going to show again. Soon.”
I drained the whiskey; he refreshed my glass.
“But for now, right, it’s about commercial things. For now. There is survival. I can still get that, you know.” He laughed and drank.
“I haven’t sorted it all out.”
He shook his head and looked at the portfolio again. “How many are in here?”
“Five or six. All different things. I finished a couple of them this morning.”
He swept the bottle to one side and set the portfolio on the tabletop. I waited for him to open it but he just studied me while ruffling his short brown hair, not far off black. The pity had spread from his voice to his gaze.
“The usual per, then?” he asked matter-of-factly, as if business were something to settle quickly and be done with, to save us both the embarrassment.
“You’re not going to look at them?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I understood and moved things back to money, where they belonged. “And is there a usual?”
“The high usual. Or why not a little more? These are going to have to be some of the last for me, probably. You can see I’m running out of room. You must be sick of making these by now, anyway.” He scratched lightly at the grain of the portfolio’s leather. “It just probably doesn’t make sense anymore, does it? On a human level.” That slow enunciation of she surfaced again. “For your sanity, I mean.” The pity I dreaded was only growing bolder.
“Maybe you should actually look at these before you buy them, if you’re so concerned about my state of mind.”
“They’re beautiful,” he said without any defensiveness or retraction as he tapped on the sheath of drawings. “I can know something like that. But that doesn’t mean you should be making them anymore. That it isn’t time to find something else.” He frowned gently. “But look, these pictures, your art, they’ve treated me so well, you can’t imagine. That’s why I am really hoping you’ll find something—”
“Business is good, then?”
He’d just picked up his drink again, but my insincerity made him sigh hard and set his glass down harder, finished now, it was clear, with my petulance. “Well, have you ever seen it fall off? Long term? Tech?” Now he sounded like a businessman, and he meant to offend, as retaliation. Much of what I knew of him, I knew through the internet, which seemed apt enough. He was the COO of a small but very profitable digital technologies firm, working mostly on problems in and around his abiding fascination and investment—the internet of things—which was something I understood at only the most superficial levels, even after all the talk of it through the last few years. Whent had told me about it once, over small plates and drinks, after perhaps my most successful show, where everything had sold, though not before I’d vanished with him into his white Giulia GTA—a beast of a car that still managed four doors, I suppose for the benefit of his longtime girlfriend’s daughter, though he rarely mentioned either of them.
We ended up in the lounge bar on the thirty-fifth floor of the Mandarin Oriental, overlooking the car-lined spokes of Columbus Circle. There were plenty of more exclusive places in the city, of course; but he just liked it here, he said with a wink.
As far as he was concerned, he would slur later that night, after many rounds of drinks and nibbles that were never, to my knowledge, actually paid for—he must have had a tab—it was all about turning the many into one, on the largest conceivable scale. The world. We speak as if it’s singular: the world. Why not really make it so, where every part of it is operating in concert with every other, relaying signals, like an enormous airport, a single unified functional organism? With the buttons being pushed by us, obviously.
He’d permitted himself more than a few cocktails that night, unusual stuff for him, mostly a man of neat spirits. Before him was some sort of decoction of pomegranate juice and liqueurs, three or four of them swirled together, definitely too many. He was also very clearly intoxicated by my paintings, especially, I think, by their being totally unmarked, not even with Untitled, or just the date of composition; nor was there anything at the show, online, or elsewhere about my vision, articulated in any manner other than through the pieces themselves. I had insisted on this with Alice, and Sandy made the exception. So even acquiring them became complicated, as the buyer had to resort to indicating some notable feature of the works: the one with the large feet, for instance. Whent’s delirious delight in all of this, which was neither knowing nor clever, had made me feel that stealing away with him like this, from my own show, was all right, not an unforgivable faux pas. Something about his peculiar status, too, made it acceptable, at least to me: I hadn’t gone rogue with any of the artists, the ones who subscribed to a Frieze or October conception of art, nor with some naïve everyman, which might have been taken as a delicious stunt, but with a not especially well-known technology entrepreneur. Who also happened to be, as the stereotype would have it, a multimillionaire many times over.
Whent spoke at his most expansive that night, which was especially obvious to me given that, strangely, I’d had hardly anything to drink. Something about exhibiting put me off actual pleasure; I would drink later, I imagined, with Claire, whom I’d left in charge of the show in my stead. Integration was Whent’s drunken leitmotif that night, mechanical integration. And while it was true that there’d been slumps, he said with fermented pomegranate on his breath, looking out over the darkened park and on toward the lights of the Plaza, while there had even been full-scale busts along the way, that was only to be expected. The trajectory was always, always the same, as far back as Babbage and Turing and even further back to Franklin and Edison and Bell and Morse.
“That’s why I can do any of this,” he said to me now before having another sip of cheapo Johnnie, presumably meaning the purchase of my art, or else all of this art; or even just buying in general: the limited edition Alpha Romeo, the obsequious service at the Mandarin that night, the truly grand condominium I had not seen until today.
I was still very much an underground presence. The difference was that now I was an eccentric, too. He’d only come to know of me because his younger sister, Madeleine, a curator with leading-edge taste, had had a mild infatuation, years ago now, with me personally: one that Claire put an end to, politely, of course. My work was still cheap, really, only several thousand per piece, but since I’d stopped showing I’d already heard the pictures had begun their ascent, even if they’d not gone especially high yet. What I really had was youthful cachet, the promise of something important being afoot. Early buyers like Whent got a bigger buzz off of that than the actual cash value of the pieces they took. There was an irrefutable pleasure, as with music fandom, in being there first. Technologists were especially indulgent in this respect. Firstness, after all, was their life’s guiding principle.
“It’s why I’m going to do this,” he said. He got up sharply and took the portfolio, still sealed, into a room just beyond us. Like the bar, it had seemed to appear all of a sudden, as it bore the white-on-white camouflage of the rest of the apartment. I hadn’t noticed the door, since, in addition to the matching tones, the frame merged with the panel, leaving a gap that amounted only to the faintest of lines, so that Whent seemed to be opening the wall itself. He disappeared into that door-shaped darkness, which enveloped him so cleanly and quickly I felt it must be connecting him to another realm. He emerged just as abruptly. The only appreciable differences between the two legs of his journey were that on his way back to me the portfolio’s flap was wagging in the air, its contents disgorged, and that he seemed somehow to carry a more speculative air about him.
“You’re in the same place uptown, right? That’s where the check will go.” Instead of stopping at the table, he went straight past me and perched on the railing that prevented one from spilling off the mezzanine, so that he could look over the ground floor dotted with my Claires, bathing in the reflected light of the East River. His trouser legs were finally off the floor.
He closed his eyes for a moment and sighed before turning back to me. “What I meant before, and you already understand this... You told me you do the same with your work before you sell it. After a while, when they’re set out like this,” he said as he waved his arm over the railing’s edge, “you start to breathe through them, right? Isn’t that what you feel? You do it all the time, I guess. That’s just the life of an artist, in your studio, your home. But the rest of us get an entirely different experience, buying the work, putting it in gilt frames, worrying about whether the lighting system does justice to the textures. Or we set them in the lobbies of our offices, or even just archive them directly, without even looking at them. Isn’t that what Saatchi does?
“But then I think, when you lay them out like this, scatter them around—fuck the lighting per se—I’m sort of living through you. What you see, I see. Not right away necessarily, but at some point. Or not what you see, really—who knows about that, not even you, maybe—but what you’ve cared enough to pay attention to, or to put down with paint or charcoal or whatever. About this girl, for instance.”
He paused and folded his arms in dissatisfaction, seemingly exhausted by his own imprecisions. I felt no interest in helping him out, not out of cruelty, but because any intervention might narrow his meditations, lead him someplace I already knew too well. This way, through silence, he might take me somewhere I had no real notion of.
“I have no idea,” he said, “even now, after all this time with them, what Claire must mean to you. Never mind what she actually is, you know, to herself. I’m not even trying to find that out, though, when I look at them. But I do see... or not see, but sense... currents?”
I nodded equivocally.
“Your concerns,” he clarified, “the way they move, how every one of these pieces changes direction, speed. And it depends on which direction I’ve walked that day, from the kitchen to the living room up to here, and then on to the very top floor.”
He pointed upward, through the wide aperture of the skylight that cut through the two full floors above us. The sheer height of his home was astonishing.
“I don’t know where any of it begins and ends for you,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m just looking at it as paint and ink and paper and cloth.” He looked at me as if I might validate his sentiments with a more decisive movement of my head. But again I only nodded in a way that suggested I didn’t oppose his continuing, and kept looking up expectantly at the railing of the top floor that seemed miles above us. He was irked now.
“You know,” said Whent, “you’ve known from the start that I don’t have a real art background, or even a fake one, like most of the people in this city.” He stood up again and swung around to me, no longer meditative, but declarative instead. I regretted not showing him a little more favor, but what inhibited me, ironically, wasn’t a wish to withhold assent so much as my need to think through his reactions, which left me with no immediate answer for him. “At least, though, at least I actually respond to this stuff. It works on me.”
“I do know that,” I said with some sympathy, but it just seemed to annoy him, as if I could only be condescending to him.
“It’s not always about knowledge. I mean, business is knowledge. And business, yes, is very good. But this, this is all beyond knowledge. A lot of people in my world don’t get that. They don’t get the way these things, each of these things, they don’t stand for themselves, or by themselves.”
I found myself wondering where his girlfriend, Eve, and her daughter were right now. I’d only once seen the three together, at a show of mine at 91st and Amsterdam—Hinton’s gallery—and then I’d not even gotten a chance to speak with them. He’d made no effort to introduce us either. They lived near the gallery, that’s really all he’d said. Eve probably found this apartment unlivable, strewn as it was with all these images of another woman. Who can even begin to speculate about what Jess, the little girl of just seven or eight with the crop of a boy, thought about it, as the daughter of another man?
Whent squeezed his eyes shut with great force. It seemed he’d gotten a bit too philosophical with me, embarrassed himself; or maybe he was only trying to recreate the sort of dark where he had emptied the portfolio, that room in the wall. He nodded me over and I got up and stood next to him at the railing overlooking the living room, sharing his vantage.
What he’d said was true. He wasn’t really naïve. He knew his Velázquez from his El Greco, and he understood precisely why Forrest Best was an abomination. Yet he didn’t purchase work because it was talked about, au courant, or expensive (usually these things went together). He also didn’t merely appreciate art, revel in it; he was genuinely struck by it. I’d seen him at several of my shows, before I’d known anything about him; Madeleine had advised him to come, she was sure he would find something in my work. And I’d noticed him first precisely for the way in which he seemed, amid all the chatter, genuinely affected. If I was right about him, contemplative pleasure was somewhat beside the point. He was instead seeking the prospect of advantage. The advantage he sought, though: what was it? His rich friends, those of his cohort, he told me, were looking for notable work. And this was how he stood out to me. He just wasn’t. When he’d first been introduced to my stuff by Madeleine, he could hardly have known what my work meant to anyone, regardless of whatever she might have told him. Who knows how accurate what she’d said was, anyway, given that she was besotted with me then? Whent might even have thought my work was naïve, at least at first, before he’d spoken with me or Sandy, found out more about who I was, what I was said to represent.
I also knew, I should say, that Whent had one foot in the world of Kunstkammers, whether he understood their significance or not; and that this fact couldn’t help but endear him to me, or at least arouse my curiosity, after I’d learned of it when Madeleine had formally introduced us at a group show I featured in. I was certain that upstairs, on that uppermost floor, was his world of things: his cabinet, as he’d called it. In fact it was my reason for agreeing to meet him here today. I couldn’t help staring upward at the highest railing I could see, not far below the sun itself.
I think Whent came by his cabinet honestly, as an inveterate collector since childhood: comic books, baseball cards, and then, as his knowledge and wealth grew, grander things. It helped him think through technical problems, this microcosmos, and it stoked the same impulse that had interested him in the internet of things, which was really just another kind of cabinet, but writ large. He hoped it would one day cover the entire earth, and even space, the Hubble, the Apollo, all of it. The cabinet, he’d said, could help us figure out what sort of links we wanted in our world. Every symbolic bond could then be made digital, he believed that.
Again I looked up, and I could just make out, at the very edge of my view, what appeared to be a katana blade. “Should we go up?” I said with an enthusiasm I’d yet to evince today.
“Definitely.” His charm had returned, in one word; it let us leave behind whatever unpleasantness had intruded on us. “That’s why I wanted to do this here.”
The mezzanine was like a half-floor, and the third floor took up about a half of that, which seemed to enhance the sense of its being cabinetlike, that all the things it might contain, of which only a blade now reached my eye, might comprise a single world.
We skipped the elevator for the resplendent stairway. I followed Whent up to the second floor, which revealed a high-ceilinged library curiously outfitted like a lounge; and indeed, the spines of the books were immaculate. As we climbed the next flight, twice as long since it carried us up a full floor, I marked our progress by the ancient katana blade’s coming brilliantly into view directly beneath the sun. In fact, this floor gleamed under a plurality of skylights, some of which had screens covering them, perhaps to protect the objects within from the intensity of their rays. A checkerboard of light on the hardwood resulted—and how much shinier his floors were than mine!
Quickly it became clear that, just like the human world and its disappointments, this Kunstkammer, which occupied a room I judged to represent a full half of the floor, was very much under construction. Haphazard might be the best word for it. Yet soon enough the curiosities arrived. Whent led me in reverential silence, letting me form my own sense of the place, as he must have done with my paintings at that first show, which were similarly unburdened of a surrounding discourse.
The first things to appear, including the blade, you would expect in any good cabinet of the past; they showed that Whent, however he may have begun his collection, was more aware of the history than I expected, and meant his Kunstkammer to be more than a metaphor for the originals. We began with taxidermy, natural history long being a mainstay of the form. Even now, every museum that aspired to true comprehensiveness, whether the Prado or the Tate or the Met, included mounted animals. First came the stuffed reptiles: two juvenile alligators—I didn’t bother to ask whether they were crocodiles instead—and a colossal Komodo, army-camouflaged and ten feet long; several lesser lizards and speckled salamanders, some of them only half an inch; and a majestic giant tortoise that gave an impression of unfathomable heft, so that one felt quite sure that even in life this creature had been more or less immobile. There were no snakes, I noticed. But there were less recognizable creatures, whose scaly skin was manifestly natural and yet whose bodily forms seemed quite alien—soft, distorted, like the products of a child’s hand, the kind of thing you could only imagine being dredged up by a submarine from the very bottom of the sea. A display running behind these creatures seemed to be some sort of chintzy kaleidoscopic backdrop one might find at one’s local planetarium, until you realized its shimmering swatches of color were produced by ore blazing in the purest hues. I could only think of my chalks and pastels, and then the larger history of pigment, ground stone suspended in liquid; all the ancient minerals, since the days of Cosquer and before that, had been mined for no other purpose than to depict. There was one here of a very fine texture, like talc, but blisteringly yellow, and right next to it, in great heaps, a brutal blue that seemed to hang a vapor in the air above it, as in a cartoon. Although Whent managed to raise his eyebrows playfully now and then, tracking my interest, I was pleased to find that the cabinet had settled him and he held to his silence.
Not everything came at you from the ground up. Hanging from the twenty-five-foot ceiling (I couldn’t see strings, but how else?) were birds which, in their perverse coloration, struck me as necessarily rare, even if they had once dominated the planet in the time before mankind, or at least before our twelve thousand years of civilization. Whent extended his hands as if to fondle them, though they were out of reach, so the act had the quality of play about it.
The birds themselves, never mind their colors, were arranged as if flying in formation, like a single species with no phenotypic unity, so that they took on different forms: short-beaked, long-footed, multicolored, and so on. It also occurred to me, as Whent’s eyes darted from one to the next with a kind of frenzy you might allow yourself when you were alone, that the formation they were in reminded me more of war planes than anything I remembered from nature; but then, I suppose many of those formations had been taken from birds. Tiny tusks of animals never seen alive by man lay on the ground in a loose pile, the outer edge of which seemed irremediably fuzzy, as if the heap had just been deposited and not finished settling; the same could be said of the other masses of even stranger creatures that seemed to pulse outward from where they sat, as if you could see the potential energy in them.
Natural history didn’t change much, of course. It was in the matter of artifacts, the implicit anthropology they suggested, and more than anything the free hand Whent had taken with the notion of time itself, where things became truly interesting, and his cabinet turned boundlessly generative rather than amounting to a replica of a sixteenth-century object. Although it should be said, there were all the classic items: the ancient armor, the blades one finds at the Met, and the various bowls and pottery I assumed (with no real right) were even more ancient, or else from very different parts of the world—the early history of the Americas, perhaps.
Yet it was not just the history of wonder and curiosity, through natural history, ethnography, and the evolution of technology, that Whent represented here; he captured their futures, too, which is why his cabinet didn’t simply take you up to the present, though that would have been interesting enough, but projected you into a future that was still being imagined, where what would be wondrous and curious could still only be a point of conjecture. For Whent, there was no reason to think marvels ought not to exist as much in the time still to come as they had in the past, and if that was so, why shouldn’t these speculative objects, the sites of a future wonder, not find a place in a fully populated microcosm?
Some of Whent’s more recent curiosities were no longer wondrous or particularly beautiful: a hard drive that appeared to date from the 1970s, judging by its ungainly design, the sure sign of an immature technology. Other wonders you might find at a technology show in San Jose: a stamp-sized phone that folded out, end-over-end, until it could straddle the space between mouth and ear. My host demonstrated this for me without my inquiring; clearly it had his attention. He held it out to my face and I spoke into it.
“It works.”
My words broke the silence we’d been operating in, and from here on words would slowly return to us. Other curios expanded the concept of what could find a home in a Kunstkammer, and what sorts of linkages could be made between things, which was really to Whent’s credit, and probably what made him good with the internet of things: a baseball, for instance, from the 1936 World Series that lore held had been struck 570 feet—that was its wonder. Or a small sheet of metal of a rose tone, whose conductive properties were still unconfirmed and only dimly understood; yet Whent was sure it would change the world. His own firm, Salient, would help make sure of that. Its wondrousness was still to be discovered, which was the most marvelous thing of all.
Next was a large cube, to which Whent almost skipped in excitement; I thought he’d trip over those dangling hems. He seemed to rediscover the pleasures of each item in introducing it to me, the way a teacher reacquaints himself with his subject by inculcating it in his students. He called the cube a graphene aerogel. It was nearly weightless: this was its mystery. I grasped it expecting the usual downward pull of things to greet my hand. Instead it felt like holding nothing at all. If it weren’t for the hard edges of the cube, the way they repelled pressure when I closed my hand around the box and tightened my grip, I would have had no way of knowing, not by touch, anyway, that anything rested upon my palm.
I made to give it back to him, but he asked me to set it down on its display surface, which I scrutinized only now: a square of animal fur that had a color that didn’t seem possible in the mammalian world, a soft blue. The fur itself was long, with filaments that were, taken individually, nearly invisible, like down. But the gel was so slight it could rest on these tips, seemingly suspended in air. In fact, Whent said, it was nine times lighter than air. As for the fur, it belonged, like the tusks, to a species that no longer roamed the earth, and I found it no less intriguing than the gel. Even more fascinating still, perhaps, was the way advanced experimental technologies were being juxtaposed with ancient natural ones in Whent’s cabinet.
The microcosm he’d constructed for himself was undoubtedly strange. Judging by the gaps cutting through the various sub-collections, the many jarring transitions and incongruities we’d passed, it was in a nascent state and would be for a while. Although, historically, it should be remembered that many of the great European collections had the paradoxical blend of unfinishedness and overstuffedness about them. Like the cosmos itself, things were always defying organization and taking on unexpected shapes. I wondered how this conclusion, supposing Whent had come up against it already, figured in his thinking about his business life, the internet of things.
Many of the objects on display were simply too new to have taken on the enchanted feel of the curio, of something from an alien order that we nevertheless manage to comprehend in part, whether the order of the European past or the present state of another region. That said, of course, the world today is really a single place, partly because of Whent’s technological ancestors, and surely this would only become more true in the future if he succeeded in his technological mission. We comprehend previous historical moments precisely because the past is a distance we have traversed, collectively; whereas the orders of the future lay in unknown territory, and so exist beyond an epistemic horizon, making their differences from the present unfathomed and thus eliminating the possibility of determinate wonder.
In Whent’s budding Kunstkammer, obsolescent worldviews, worldviews we could safely regard with dramatic irony and take the measure of, merged by increments with the globalized world of the early twenty-first century. As the distance closed and we entered the frame of our own gaze, the defining contours disappeared from view. If the totems of those superseded orders were represented around us here—and that is precisely what made those artifacts curious, the distance of myth—then, by Whent’s inclusion of objects from the present, the axioms of our own form of life must have been appearing alongside them, even if it wasn’t yet possible to register them as the parochial curiosities they were. It would be left to some future generation to pick out just where our current convictions floated in the air, groundless, and what exactly it meant that at just these points we’d chosen to leave off and let our explanations come to an end, though not at others which might have served equally well. All that being said, there was no doubt, whether it was Whent’s intention or not, that the simple gathering of these objects did give one uncanny intimations of our own mythos.
We strolled along, looking at the most modern of objects, until we seemed to reverse course slightly and come upon a battered leather chair from the eighties or nineties. Where was its wonder? Whent dropped into it with some theater, announcing to me that this was not a marvel, just a regular thing. Here alone was an area with seating that was free of those legal-pad-sized reports I’d seen sprinkled throughout the lower floors.
“I told you I do a lot of thinking out there, with the Claires, right?”
“You do some up here, too, I guess.”
“More and more. And I rearrange things, draw up little maps like these.” From a cabinet sitting astride the chair, he pulled out a stack of loose sheets with structural scribbles on them. “But I’m not sure it’s helped me much. Like, where does this belong, exactly?” He bent down and touched the tarnished top of what looked to me like an elephantine bullet, on the far side of the chair. “What do I put it next to, summon it with and summon with it? I just haven’t figured it out.” He leaned back into the crinkling grip of the chair and ran his hand over the monstrosity like a pet. “That goes for most of what’s up here. But I guess that’s the point, to figure out these unstated connections. To turn them over and over, creating them, snapping them, by tiny shifts.” With that he leaned over the chair’s arm and pushed the bullet forward with both hands. It was an unfilled B61 warhead, he explained. Nuclear.
“But then what about that?” he said before I could come to terms with the B61. He gestured at a long stick near the warhead, up against a stack of unopened boxes—presumably the latest shipment of additions to the cabinet. It was a spear of some sort, I could tell by the arrowhead: a large shard of purple mineral that might well appear in powdered form elsewhere in the space. It was bound with twine to the end of the tapered shaft and glittered wildly in the sunlight.
“Native American?” I asked.
“New Guinean. Should I find an American one, though? You should carve me a replica. While you’re busy—how would you put it?—thinking about things.”
“I might.”
“You’re really not working on something new? Because of her?”
I sat on the floor as there was nowhere else to sit. This place truly wasn’t for show, just for Whent. I had to admire that. “A break’s not so bad, really,” I said. Until something comes to me, something worth making. But money’s the thing no-one’s allowed to stop making, right? So I’m doing more commercial stuff.”
“Album covers?”
“Illustrations, posters, all of it. All through Cosquer.”
“The magazine?”
“It’s a design firm, too, these days.”
“And it pays well?”
“Well enough.”
He shook his head incredulously and lifted himself up with the help of the fat armrests. “If commercial is all you’re going for right now, you should really make it worth your while. So you don’t have to do it for longer than you have to, right? This is the other reason I wanted to see you.”
We started walking again, continuing our trek through a flock of low-flying marine birds racing over hills of ancient currencies no longer tendered, one of them a dull red, another yellow. I was tempted to ask him what was in the unopened boxes I’d seen, but the moment had passed, they were well behind us now. It didn’t much matter. New things continually caught the eye here; it was hard to keep one’s train of thought. But then this was the point, Whent had said: breaking patterns, finding new ones.
Just in front of us was a very early camera. I judged its vintage, as with the disk drive, mostly by its immensity. Probably mid-nineteenth century. It was partly disassembled, its innards spilling out, but neatly, almost into the form of a flat-lay. Perhaps the entire Kunstkammer could be made into a giant flat-lay you walked within, I thought; perhaps that’s what it was already beginning to resemble. But only a bird’s-eye view, from a bird flying substantially higher than any of the specimens here, far higher than the roof itself, could confirm this.
Looking at the mechanics of the camera—Whent had slowed down here because of my apparent interest—looking at the parts of this picture machine, they really seemed, to a twenty-first century eye, oversized to the point of caricature, so much larger than necessary or useful. It lay in an open glass case, next to even more primitive optical equipment, perhaps Enlightenment era. Who assisted Whent in laying out things like this? Could he himself somehow know how to take these things apart? It might well be the thing he enjoyed most, I supposed, given his line of work.
Reluctantly we moved on past an enclosed, temperature-controlled rack of books that ran half the length of the room. Unlike those in his library below, these looked read, indeed, read a hundred times over through the centuries. I wanted badly to examine the titles, but this time Whent kept steadily moving forward with his lips pursed in thought. I relented and followed him to a spot beyond the books, where scores of idols, crucifixes, and other signets lay in heaps that were, like the camera, still being put into meaningful shapes.
“I had a friend, or really a colleague, over here at the house a few weeks back” Whent said. “He’s the one who got me started on all this, actually. Cabinets of wonder, assemblages of things, integrating a cosmos. He was telling me about them a couple of years ago now. It got me thinking, this sort of thing could maybe clarify some things for me. Though there’s a lot left to do. You can see it’s still a mess, maybe it always will be. Now I don’t think James, my friend, has a cabinet himself, but he’s thought a lot about them—about lots of things off the beaten path.”
He stopped at another stairway that led down again. He gestured back at all we’d crossed, including the rows of unmarked, utterly heterogeneous eggs just beside us, and—his fascination with the history of the electron was irrepressible—pieces of radio equipment that must have come in its early days, perhaps the 1910s.
“Most of this isn’t that expensive. You can buy it in large lots at auction. But it all feels so charged to me. Just putting it all together in one room. Can you imagine a world in which all this stuff really was linked? Like we’re linking everything electronic now, turning all things into conduits for electrical action, clothing to cars to kitchen appliances to medical equipment to musical instruments to traffic lights to nuclear arms?”
“Maybe they’re already linked.”
He laughed.
We went down to the mezzanine, to retrieve my portfolio, and then back to the living room, the realm covered in my hand, my drawings.
“Anyway, James was here a little while ago, and he called me again on Wednesday, you know what about? The pictures. He thought it was pretty bizarre, the way I had them up all over the place, but over the course of the evening, I think he felt something happen to him, maybe something like what happens to me. He’s a very curious man. Garrett’s his last name. A businessman, but in the most extended sense of the word. Definitely one up on me. He works in advanced materials, real laboratory stuff. He started in waste storage—well, in biohazard, nuclear. He’s the guy who keeps us safe from all the toxic shit we make, you could put it like that. Ever heard of Antral?”
I had.
“That’s his company. Antral means cavity. A hole-like thing, a place to put stuff, I guess. Makes enough sense for a storage company. Anyway, he’s gone a long way beyond storage. Right now he’s branching out into consumer products, fashion, too. Sports, eyewear, other things...”
I tried to listen as closely as I could but found myself profoundly distracted. So many incarnations of Claire, little portals across to the woman whom my life had been built out of for three years. With each step along the perimeter of the apartment, leading back to the front door, her presence accreted, breaching any particular image and taking on a kind of supersensible density anyone at all could recognize in their experience, even if there was no agreed name for it.
The pictures ran out and we were standing in front of the open door. Had he ever closed it? “The point is,” Whent said, “Antral is changing, and I have to imagine that Garrett’s going to need help making those changes, remaking it, extending it. And if I know him at all—I’ve known him since Berkeley—he’s going to want to do it differently than most. He’s an original, always has been. Trust me. I’m a hack next to him. And I assume, actually, that’s why he wants to talk to you. Something about your drawings, he said.” He smiled at me then with authentic warmth, it almost embarrassed me.
“Anyway, if he does have work for you, if he thinks you could be his guy, basically, I can tell you it would make whatever you’re pulling in now totally irrelevant. Because it wouldn’t be a one-off. Garrett doesn’t do one-offs. It would be an engagement, a relationship, and it could, well, it could grow into who knows what with him, really. Everything has a way of growing, with him. And he won’t let you get too bored while you’re working together. He just won’t. Or he’ll disappear on you. That happens.” He grabbed my arm softly. “To be honest, I hope you don’t know him for too long. Long enough to get yourself straight, but not forever. Right now, though, looking at you, he really is your best bet—if you can keep him interested.”
He waited for a response, but these days I declined to offer such things at once. I’d need time to get my head around what he’d told me, particularly as I found myself again drifting through the haze of my feelings for Claire. I closed up the empty portfolio, lashing it shut, and managed only a vague smile, not half as nice as the one he’d just given me, before turning for the glass box the doorman had long ago disappeared into. I moved slowly, so that there would be no suggestion of upset or offense, and for the second time today, before I was quite out of reach, I felt a hand on my shoulder that was meant to reassure me.