I’d never really taken sketchpads into the world before. There’d been a few art school exercises dutifully carried out: walking into the town square, more or less, pen in hand, surveying the scene, usually in some particular register. I’d be looking for masses, or gestures, or contours, depending on the day. Whatever our professor asked for. Since that time, I’d done nearly all my drawing under controlled conditions, whether those of a studio, or my apartment, or indeed my bed.
There’s something slightly embarrassing about the artist in public, I think, never mind en plein air, even something a bit tacky. Our stature has fallen to depths unknown in the time before mass culture’s ascendancy; but in the few days after my meeting with Garrett, I came to find it the most natural way to proceed—perhaps the only way. That I was no longer exercised by any substantial artistic project explained some of this. But so did Garrett’s thoughts about the mystery in so much art today, apparently even my own, the separation it created, diminishing one’s feeling for (or with) the world. These notions only reinforced Whent’s, what he’d said about lost causes, lost worlds.
If there’s one virtue to finding yourself in a cul-de-sac, it’s in knowing there is nothing to do but turn around. And so I did, leaving behind a personal world for a broad and nameless public. I started rendering patrons in bars and diners in the Bronx near my apartment. To offset my professional embarrassment—partly stemming from my training, which didn’t smile on the imitation of life, and partly from doing anything as conspicuously aesthetic as drawing in this sort of neighborhood—I used an exceedingly small pad, no larger than an appointment book, so that anyone observing me from a distance would think I was merely working out my schedule for the week, or even lining up my picks for the races, just as they were. I was learning how to compose in medias res, truly, and how to do it without being noticed.
My first efforts were spoiled from the start, congenitally, you could say, simply and directly by the unfamiliar scale. All sorts of tableaux presented themselves to me. There were young families crammed into booths, one too many on either side, so that legs dangled and postures were made curious by the crush. There were stabs of almost abandoned property: long, narrow bars standing virtually empty, except for the bartender and me, deep in the recesses, far from the door-shaped panel of light, the only light, as the windows often had their blinds drawn even during the day, to keep out the heat. And there were what I hesitate to call outdoor cafés, as they had none of the charm that the term would lead you to expect, just dirty plastic chairs which for all their volume seemed to weigh nothing at all, or crooked wire ones that unintentionally rocked. There were also those tableaus I transcribed in the park, the venue least debased, since photosynthesis guaranteed some modicum of upkeep and regeneration.
All these scenes, tiny in the way I got them down, seemed to explode past the borders of the little jotter, and not happily. I was left with images that appeared arbitrarily, fatally, cropped, with the central point of interest left out of frame, or else the frame sliced right through it and forced some other element into the natural position of interest. In this way my true subjects emerged almost of their own accord: a torn packet of sugar next to the sleeve of the young man whose pockmarked face was only implied by his stained and fraying cuff; or the beads of condensation on a glass of water carrying wobbly fingerprints, a glass meant to sit, in the image, beneath the bartender’s face—it was his drink—until it had consumed most of the picture plane, inadvertently putting one in mind of a crime scene.
All these are hallmarks, of course, of the photographic snapshot, effects the realists and impressionists played at long ago, though with ingenuity and verve. So did Velázquez, for that matter. What I’d achieved, well, it was nothing at all. My troubles with scaling meant that much of what belonged to the moment of composition, to what I had in fact seen, became irrecoverable from what I’d drawn, which accounted for only a fraction of my visual field. I overcorrected at first, desperate to preserve reality, to make things now vanished somehow fit. But now my figures found themselves positively crushed by my encroaching strokes piling up and shrinking what little space was available to me in the pad. Even my vanishing points got compressed. Most of these drawings were done at an angle to the subject, in two-point or even three-point perspective, if I sat at one of the barstools and drew someone down low. In one sketch, a child in diapers raised his hand to a molded table surrounded by his three brothers and father, and his father’s girlfriend, to judge the relationship by the distance between the children and the woman. My misplaced points, naturally too close together—a common problem—warped space itself and tortured these children more than they knew. You could say there was something apt about this, even mimetic, but that would be making excuses.
My judgment here wasn’t exactly helped by the drinking I did at the establishments I visited: sometimes four or five whiskeys in a session, a Michter’s one cube, a Sazerac neat, or a house scotch and soda when my throat began to burn. Nor was it aided by my subjects often departing right in the middle of conversations or table service, or taking up new positions in the venue that were inassimilable to the ones they’d first occupied in my picture. These movements fractured perspective. That was Bronx culture to a tee, though, I was learning: a life without segues.
The problems ran deeper than this, actually, down to the substance of my ground, which was stone: limestone dust mixed with some sort of emulsion. Beyond the novelty of these notebook pages, which is what made me buy them in the first place, at a stationery shop selling all sorts of gratuitous materials, they were best adapted to notes of the linguistic variety: script laid down fat and bright. They felt pleasingly spongy as I drove the nib across them. But language was not my concern now. Nor were notes of any kind, linguistic or visual. What I was attempting to draw transcended mere sketchwork; instead it approached portraiture, which turned on a much finer control of space, and on plasticity, which required a delicacy of line and a variation in pressure and angle of attack that stone, even powdered stone, evidently couldn’t accommodate.
The first thing I did to improve my results was switch to a paper that wasn’t mineral—that was actually paper, I mean—though the size of the notebook remained the same, not just for the sake of discretion but because I knew that these peculiar dimensions might force something fresh from me; in fact they had already begun to do that. Slowly I gained facility composing on my replacement support—heavy cotton rag but with a very fine tooth, fine enough for the most minute details to be registered—and with a new instrument to boot: a Nayaka pen with nibs of a suppleness not fabricated in any other country. As the clarity of my forms sharpened and my feel for the miniature scale grew strong, I felt my moroseness lift in some way I cannot yet wholly account for. Alcohol became less necessary for me to work amidst the din of the rabble, who would sometimes, in their mistrust, offer a hard stare back at me, though occasionally the look would soften, if they happened to take pleasure in being seen. (You couldn’t predict which people would.)
By the time I met Karen at Cosquer’s headquarters in Queens, my pictures, assembled briskly yet not without a certain diligence, had the proportional grace of bonsai trees. What was most apparent to me, as I paged through the drawings in a slick café-bar in Long Island City, waiting on my bourbon, was that my Bronx subjects, and by that I mean not just the many customers and bartenders I’d drawn inside those establishments, but equally the neighborhood folk loitering outside in heavy heat, whose movements and even deliberations seem to have been slowed by the mid-afternoon bloom of the sun; folk who were involved in conversations that were often less than benign, and deliberately vague; folks I’d transcribed from indoors in all their brilliant obscurity, whose bodies were partly obscured by the glare—all of these people, indoors and out, never mind the variations, were cut from the same crumpled cloth. How to put it? They gave the distinct impression of freedom; that’s the best I can do.
Yes, there were a few empty and darkened bars I’d drawn in, which I sought out for the peace they offered me. But mostly the places I sketched were teeming right through the afternoon, and with the same customers, day after day throughout the workweek, even if they weren’t buying much. This was one of the first things I’d noticed after I’d moved in. I, of course, was naturally free, not seeking steady employment beyond my art. Otherwise I would never have been in a position to notice them.
In fact, the Bronx seemed to be home to lots of self-employed people: inveterate, unwilling freelancers, you could say, though without the consolations of art. Around here freedom was a disease, an implacable condition foisted upon residents out of a broader social neglect, rather than something won or cherished. Nevertheless, it was freedom; from whatever it issued, and however much it was debased, it could never lose some hint of value, of possibility. This is what brought the people’s patent distress, cultural as much as economic, some element of unity—these invisible whites, Latinos, and blacks—even if they spent much of their time at each other’s throats. And it was really only from my drawings that this became apparent to me. A form of life emerged as my picture-making matured. It wasn’t exactly ballet, as Jacobs had thought. More like MMA.
Equally clear, though, was how much I was still missing, particularly of my subjects’ inner lives, which remained a blur, no matter the focus and empirical richness of the later pictures in my notebook. Or else, if not always quite a blur, in some subjects there was an imposed, false pathos, the kind one sees too often in Rockwell. In other drawings there was a simple blankness, no hint of an inside at all, just Cartesian fauna, black boxes of the heart. Frankly, I was pleased that my pictures at least brought this lack of sight to the surface: a sure sign of a well-functioning instrument. Only more study would let me see just what I was seeing.
I set the sketchbook down and surveyed the bar with an imperiousness I wouldn’t dare in my own borough. This was enough to get the bartender back on his job, pouring my drink. The patrons here were nothing like those in my local drinking spots; nor were they even representative of their own borough of Queens. Long Island City was in fact home of Manhattanites in exile, urbanites who had migrated directly east, whereas most of their kind had headed farther south to Brooklyn. I glanced across the East River from this unfamiliar vantage, and before my eyes could meet mid-town’s phalanx of high-rises, the tallest of which were still under construction right around Central Park—as always, for the Chinese, the Russians, and the Arabs—my gaze struck the southern tip of that other island that was only just becoming properly visible to me: Roosevelt. It was in this region that Garrett had said he lived, not far from the crumbling slate-gray hospital grounds that dominated the topography. I’d briefly looked into it since my first encounter from the tramway. Apparently it was now more or less a museum—an archeological site with heritage status—though what sort of people stop in at derelict hospitals on not-exactly-famous islands? You would need to have booked a rather long trip to New York to have time for it, or you’d have to have a medical bent, and perhaps some resident morbidity as well.
Two condominium complexes had been erected on the edge of the island. As if in deference to the defunct hospital, their tones were dimmer than one might have expected, tipping toward the same stoic shade of blue. Structurally they were wide rather than tall, mimicking their neighbor, though one wondered if the hospital had suffered some kind of collapse to have ended up this way. The condos had no need of height anyway: there was nothing to obstruct the view of Manhattan, which their residents would gaze upon with the longing common to refugees, although these were the economic kind. Like most of Long Island City’s luxury accommodations, these towers had only recently been constructed, now that the pace of Brooklyn’s growth had slowed and Queens was finally, grudgingly, being colonized. Probably the emigrants had even convinced themselves that Manhattan was actually better from a distance, that living within the city was akin to taking front row seats at the cinema: it burned your eyes and stiffened your neck. And while I still knew little about Garrett, I felt certain he wouldn’t accept this sort of rationalization. Nor would he offer another. His concerns were bigger than his place in New York, which is only to say, whatever it is he might have been exiled from, it had to be greater than a mere city.
I’d seen Contra’s white neon sign more than a few times before, dangling low over the bar’s entrance; I nearly clipped my head on it as I came in. The lettering was unusually serifed—something transitional, a Baskerville knockoff—which cut against whatever vintage fussiness neon conjures. I’d only ever regarded the bar’s signage in the evening, when it made sense for it to be illuminated, punching a hole in the thick industrial dark of Queens. This time, though, it was just past noon, yet the neon was still flaring. It must have never gone out.
I’d already stepped off the seven train at Vernon Boulevard when Karen called to say she’d be late meeting me. My trips to LIC always had a single purpose: to connect with Cosquer, generally at the collective’s headquarters a few blocks from Contra. But her delay had given me the chance to visit this bar marked in my memory, not to mention scan through my work of the past week. My iced bourbon finally landed beside me with apologies. I downed it in one go: why shouldn’t my form have been as poor as the barman’s? Fashionable venues anyway tended to bring out the boor in me. My eyes searched the room for someone to disassemble and reconstruct in the sketchbook’s last blank pages, just where my Bronx pictures left off. Eventually I found a thirtyish woman sitting in the wide bay window, dressed in jeans and a wispy pink slub T-shirt, the everydayness of which offset the bits of jewelry subtly dotting her body. Her ears twinkled, just barely, with studs of false modesty: though the diamonds themselves were slight, they glowed with the purity of only the best stones. (Without at all trying, Karen and Claire had trained my eye for this sort of thing.) The woman’s chest carried an abstract slither of a pendant in rose gold, and her hand sported both a single sapphire and what I would have called a wedding band, except that she wore it on her middle finger. Her sandals, which I could see just beneath the table, with their baroque yellow straps and exaggerated arches, were nothing that could really have been bred in Queens. They would have come in right along with the luxury towers now dominating Hunters Point and increasingly much of the territory stretching north up to Dutch Kills, which had once been a purely industrial land of metal reclamation centers and taxi garages.
A heavily bearded waiter who was jaunty all the same had just brought the woman sangria in a silver server. He poured the drink from a rising height, and in the shadows created by the puffy awning outside, the liquid looked almost black, or the color of burnt cherries, as it descended from the lip of the jug. Closer to the glass below, it turned rust-red as it fell into the field of sunlight reaching through the window, a light that also made the lime green tablecloth dazzle. The woman took up the glass, swept it out of this field; the drink turned near-black again by the time it reached her lips. Just before she drank, though, she tipped it slightly away from her, in an air-clink.
She wasn’t alone: a girl at least a decade younger, with only water for a drink, sat across from her, in the corner where the window didn’t reach, and hence in deeper shadow than even the drink. It had taken me a minute to see her, actually, the place was kept quite dark, and what I noticed first were her hands gesticulating over the table, cutting into the light. Although I couldn’t make out her words, the younger one did most of the talking, while the sunlit woman mostly emoted: a soft sigh audible just beneath the clatter of cutlery; an eye roll that was anything but dismissive; a smile that appeared all at once, reaching its peak curvature instantly, with no intermediary stages; and a benevolent look that came over her now and then yet seemed to have nothing to do with anything going on around her.
Her midday freedom, I thought, differed in kind from the one found in the bars of my adopted neighborhood. It flowed from wealth, not poverty. Not unfathomable wealth, otherwise the flight from Manhattan wouldn’t have been necessary, however nice the view might be from here. She could, of course, have had some connection to the arts. It might have been worth something to her to live near MoMA PS1 and the slew of graffiti artists who continually repainted these streets. Yet whatever its precise extent and origin, her freedom had a quality of enforcedness, too. The money that fed it felt extrinsic. She wasn’t the source. It flowed from higher country, from a spouse, or a former one; perhaps this was what displaced the wedding band. Or it was family money, and the girl sitting across from her might well have been a part of it. A not-quite-next generation. Their inner lives appeared easily within my reach, not as in the South Bronx, where they were only smudges or smears on the horizon, mere theoretical spaces that might variously be filled in. And this, I suppose, was simply down to what I was: a bourgeois. However unpleasant the thought, the distance between these two women and me was not very great in the end.
I turned the sketchbook sideways and brought the older one’s face into view across two sheets, with quick, jabbing strokes, leaving the contours open and natural, before I got into the details with the finer hatching, little xs conjuring light and volume, trading the outline drawings of cartoons for the volumetric ambiguity of life itself. I kept at this right until the point she reconvened with the waiter and committed to more sangria (she didn’t take much persuading). I got myself another drink, capped my pen, and studied the picture in progress before looking back at her. Though she was drinking more and listening less than someone genuinely happy in her own skin, she seemed already less foolish, or risible, or trivial, than I’d originally assumed, as a function of my own background: the intellectually minded artist examining the unrepentant bourgeoise. In fact, my picture, to which I returned my eyes, showed that she carried something more than mere vice, qualities I would have passed over if someone had asked me to put this woman into words. The image, though, effortlessly gave the lie to any such verbal reconstruction. That was a brute difference between the modalities of vision and speech. You could choose what you said, but rather less what you saw.
Examining her again in the flesh, I could see the care with which her nails and makeup were done; and it may only have been my depiction of her that was able to alert me to this quality. Not because I’d rendered it in terrific detail. I hadn’t. Yet even in embryo, the drawing illuminated certain of her facets: the articulacy of her clasped hands, the delicate tilt of her head, the unforced expression, the gleaming heft of her hair, worn at just less than shoulder length. All of it pointed toward other facts of the same nature. Looking again at her, you could see, without too much contemplation, that all this was a mark of a certain sort of virtue, even if it sounded slightly ridiculous to say so of this particular woman. Partly this stemmed from her not being made-up in a way that smacked of the salon. There was always a fulsome sheen to that kind of work, an overstatement of life and body. Hers was DIY work of the highest order, the nails finished in a discreet lavender, but with a thick, gel-like polish that gave them a plasticity and shape without undue gloss. Similarly, her face, which you could easily mistake for being free of cosmetics, participated in the most gentle illusionism, the sort that intensifies, by a degree or two, no more, what is already there in plain sight—the sharp cheeks, the whisper of a nose, the extravagant eyes that, I believe, had been left entirely alone—without introducing foreign elements or entering into the sweeping exaggerations, the almost masklike quality, that judging by any stroll down a Manhattan street, so many women, even the ones in Margiela dresses, believed was the essence of being made-up.
There was a sort of quiet bypass of the spectacle in this woman that you had to credit her with, even if it stood in a context that was less than saintly. It wasn’t mere empty-headedness that she signaled with her unfocused gaze, as I’d thought on observing her exchange with the girl—before, that is, I’d actually been moved to compose my picture. I turned from her to the drawing and back again, ricocheting between my representation of her and her representation of her, studying her face in the light of my rendering, as if she were merely a sculpture assembled from my sketch, her neck touched by light and sky, and framed by those industrial buildings beyond the window. Her detached expression struck me as self-protective, a sign that if she were to peer at things any more closely—the blight she saw around her, as this neighborhood had scaled up in cost and people like her had arrived—well, it might hurt her heart.
Escapism didn’t make her good, of course. But it did suggest she was capable of feeling. Why would escape be attractive otherwise? There was a life within her that wasn’t dead yet; there were things she still couldn’t bear to confront in the world. Whereas with many others I knew—well-educated others; they dominated the city now—they’d simply stopped averting their eyes. Not because they were artists who had to look, to do their job; not because they declined bad faith, whatever the difficulties incurred; not even because they were possessed of a compassion that demanded being in touch with others’ pain, but simply because they’d stopped hurting. The sufferings of strangers no longer terrorized or unnerved them. Wasn’t my dear Immo among this sort? Was he obviously superior to her, however much sharper he may have been?
That is what fifteen minutes of sketching gave me of this woman. We would never speak, she and I. But I’d had enough experience of rendering figures, even of people I barely knew, to know that dialogue, while it could certainly embroider my understanding, could never refute what manifested directly in appearances. They weren’t inferences, I mean, the things I perceived, deductions from something outer and visible to something inner and therefore only indirectly known. There was no ghost in this machine. It was possible for me, for anyone, to see the one in the other, without mediation.
Now, doubtless what I saw could be refuted. It was always possible to be wrong; it had to be so, if there was something called being right. But if anything was going to overturn my impressions, only further probing with the eyes, rendering with the hand, would identify it. You would be seeing, then, that you hadn’t really seen—that you’d missed details that set the others in a fresh light—rather than discovering that what was available to vision was somehow insufficient, that appearances were mere appearances. No, I knew it to be true, not a priori but through the act of drawing itself: looking was primitive, unanalyzable, followed its own logic; it yielded a proprietary knowledge, one that couldn’t be reduced to, nor made wholly answerable to, the deliverances of any other faculty of the mind. Any artist knows this, though only some know they do.
The kiss suddenly fell on my cheek, from above. Not the woman’s—Karen’s. I’d been lost in pictures, in the scene, the lines of force between me, the woman in the window, and my drawing. I looked not to Karen first but to my subject. Three drinks in, she was doubled over in her chair, groping the floor for her handbag, her face hovering just above her table, at the height of a now empty glass of sangria, while her young friend finally raised her glass of water after concluding a long soliloquy, looking more content than at any time while delivering it.
“Shall we?” Karen’s soft grayish eyes shone as she gestured to the door she’d come through that was still creeping shut, just before she finished off the last of my second drink, a scotch and soda turned to water now that the ice had melted. “Something came for you, actually,” she said, flashing a half-smile, the smile she gave when she wasn’t trying to, or didn’t even want to—the kind she wore best. She headed back toward the door before I could reply. The woman I’d drawn went out just before Karen did. For a moment I imagined them speaking furtively outside, though I struggled to conceive of just what they would say to one another.
I settled up, and when I finished I found Karen back inside, waiting near the exit. Now she had sunglasses on, clear frames with bug-eyed mirror lenses. Together with the thick dark hair framing her face, the glasses masked her fine-boned features, ensuring that when you looked at her you invariably saw yourself; they played against her delicate build and almost congenital art-prep sense of dress: the pleated skirt, the tights, and the close-fitting top, all in remarkably deep greens.
Perhaps, I thought, she was back inside because it was too balmy out on the sidewalk; or I’d taken too long for her liking; or the woman really had delivered a piece of pernicious gossip. After all, as I came to meet her at the door, Karen was staring intently at the young girl in the corner. At least I thought she was, though of course I couldn’t see her eyes.
The street outside had warmed and brightened. The road was unusually broad for this neighborhood, which was crisscrossed by narrow avenues closer to alleys vexed by bits of dirt and the shrapnel of manufacture: plastic, rubber, wood. This silted air I associated more closely with Dutch Kills to the north—the direction in which we began to stroll—where those gusts of industrial detritus were strongest and you found something close to dust storms throwing about the residue of ethnic enclaves, mostly South American. I’d eaten a few times in the area. It was the only thing I’d done there, always at the request of the sort of people who considered it worthwhile crossing boroughs over food. The meals themselves had been compelling enough, especially the raw aggression of their flavors, which more august establishments tamed, assimilating them to the relatively muted palate of Europeans. But these forlorn environs, coupled with the picture, just across the East River, of the sun-dappled glass towers of Manhattan, coldly throwing Queens’ own reflection back at the borough in the way Karen’s mirrored sunglasses threw mine at me every time she looked over and smiled more fully now, for no discernible reason, tended to compromise those meals for me. Every star needs its dark partner, I suppose.
A sharp breeze threw grit in our faces. I shielded myself with my hands when it was strongest, turning my head away from the wind. Walking close beside her, I could see the furrows at Karen’s temple and narrowed eye beyond it as she squinted behind her sunglasses, dust filtering in the sides, with an expression that was almost wicked. We made our way past taxi depots and warehouses teeming with delivery trucks and uniformed men to Cosquer’s ghetto-chic offices, which were adjacent to Karen’s own personal studio. All of this I associated, correctly, I think, with the general maintenance of Manhattan. Across the midtown tunnel and the Queensboro bridge was where most of these people traveled each day, and it was only their shine boxes that kept Manhattan glowing, head to toe, as it was right now, in broad daylight—hurting my eyes. To the north, in Astoria, the particle-borne abjection would have dissipated, but here in the south, in Long Island City, you could still feel it, notwithstanding the luxury condominiums that had materialized these last few years and glittered now in a kind of mimicry of the city across the river. But imitation only reinforced the gulf between the two locales, particularly with that giant neon-red Pepsi sign fronting those condos. It signaled retail commerce, finance in its most modest form, and even then with a product that was only second-best.
For a few minutes Karen and I didn’t speak; we just winced our way north, until eventually we turned down a side street and the wind vanished, so we could stop furrowing our brows. Along with the usual spray-can tags along the brick walls, frequently at heights that made you wonder about the circumstances of their creation, there were two bona fide murals here, executed, like the rest, in the medium of aerosol paint, on opposite sides of the road. They must have been done in just the last month or two, since my most recent visit to Cosquer. Karen paid them no mind. She’d seen them too many times by now. Graffiti art had become so ensconced in LIC it no longer sparked even a hint of protest from anyone. It was implicitly state-sponsored at this point, which took away much of its barbarous charm. Yet now that I was playing at my own mural, I was more alert to the presence of others in the streets. I would mine them for their secrets, wherever I passed them. So I held both of us up, letting my eyes shoot back and forth across the street. On one side was a mouse that looked to be a cousin of Mickey’s. He pivoted away from us out of discretion, for in his famously four-fingered hands was a sizable bong on which he pulled with a wink. On the other side of the street was this same mouse, his eyes twinkling but half-closed, diving into an aboveground pool. Although I say diving, he seemed to be hovering above it, like that woman’s head had hovered above the table in the bar. On looking more closely I could see that his body carried a faint upward thrust, as if, instead of falling into a poor man’s pool, he might well be taking flight into a sea of blue: the blue of the upper portions of the wall, and then, even higher up, the purer, grander blue of the sky.
The metal door to Cosquer’s offices lay just beyond the diving board. Perfect brown circles marked it in such a geometrically regular way—long rows and columns—they could have been mistaken for stencil work. In fact each dot was a tiny rivet, rusted without being rust colored. It was the kind of aestheticized rot that people who enjoyed generally better conditions in their daily life found not only inoffensive but positively interesting, when in truth it was a prime index of the degradation and neglect facing the people who’d worked and lived here before, out of simple necessity.
Earlier, the dust blowing around had made us keep our mouths closed. Yet even after the wind had gone, we kept them shut. There wasn’t anything odd about this. Between me and Karen, it signified nothing. Or perhaps just one thing: how we’d first known, back in college, that we would end up comrades in some way, this heavy silence in which we could wrap ourselves with ease, in a place where people loved to talk and talk. The quiet was inhabitable for us, a refuge, as it is by the end of the Tractatus—something to be sought out, most of all among one’s peers.
Inside the door, which swung open with a prolonged squeak, there were, quickly, five more doors, built from the same gray metal and tiny rivets, but this time free of rust. Two of these doors stood to our left, with another two on the right. One was Karen’s. Two belonged to other members of Cosquer: John and Lindy. The fourth had once been Rick’s, though he’d since moved his studio closer to his residence. Now it belonged to Brady, a man who didn’t look much like an artist, or anyway not one of this generation. Often he arrived in a suit and tie, entirely without brushes or other paraphernalia. Karen had said his studio was mostly bereft of artistic tools; it was more like a small library. All anyone could say for sure about him was that he was older and evidently conceptual in his approach—if he had an approach at all, and wasn’t actually an imposter.
When Brady was in, he could usually be found with the door flung open, sitting on a blocky sofa not far inside with his fingers on his forehead, studying the thick, austerely bound volumes of a very large set, possibly legal or encyclopedic in nature. No-one had seen him make or perform anything, supposing “making” and “performing” weren’t too passé for him. And since he had no pen or pad in his hands for notes of any kind, we could only wonder what he was looking for in these books, where he was going artistically. He didn’t talk much when anyone drew near to his door, and the few things he said mostly concerned the weather or subway delays, not the books that filled the space, nor what he was doing here exactly; certainly he had no questions for anyone else, and his manner didn’t encourage free exchange. What was clear was that he very much liked to remain in sight of anyone exiting or entering the building. Whole issues of the magazine had been closed with him sitting there in contemplative repose through the early morning hours, reading or just mulling with a tight and thoughtful squint, always avoiding all eye contact with the editors and designers scrambling to finish.
In the last few weeks Karen and the others had begun to wonder whether Brady’s project was a kind of artworld analogue of the Sokal affair, and he was simply waiting to see how long it took the artists working around him to realize he was just a lawyer using the space as a reading den. But they were fearful of saying anything. If it wasn’t true, who could say what sort of offense a man this curious would take? He might have been patiently awaiting a conceptual breakthrough none of us would be able to fathom.
Today, his door was firmly closed. Directly in front of me, a set of double doors led on to the fifth and largest room: Cosquer’s headquarters, which was nearly the size of the four studios combined. The doors were already open; Karen had stopped in before coming to find me. Toward the back of the open plan space, leaning against a printing press I didn’t recognize, one they hadn’t yet finished restoring, apparently, stood a poster-sized version of the album cover I’d drawn. It startled me, to see it in this way, at this scale. Perhaps Karen had wanted to gauge my reaction to its newest embodiment. Printed in cherry red on a mottled cream stock that had the look, as I suppose she knew, of my preferred support, vellum, it was also lettered by hand with Joy Division, superimposed in a darker red, closer to the red of the sangria of the woman in the bar, just along the bottom, in a script redolent of teardrops, evidently a hybrid of blackletter and Antiqua.
“It’s an offset,” Karen said pre-emptively. “I did the lettering myself, just as a trial.”
I looked at it for a while, probing for problems, especially in those letters. I found none.
“Yeah,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows and turned from me, toward the drawing. “But the color?” She faced me again; her mien had softened.
“It looks okay to me.”
Mild words could count as significant praise between us, particularly when it came to the assessment of work. She warmed. I could feel her satisfaction.
“You’re pretty much the only one whose sketches end up almost-finals,” she said. “I think they like it as-is. We should still tinker, though, in case.”
“And what do you think of it?” This was my overture toward a greater openness between us. I often felt Karen preferred a more distant attitude from me, especially lately, after what had happened between me and Claire, her best friend. But there was more to it than this, something more general about my person, which, when exposed, could—what’s the word? She wasn’t the only one to think that I was best left weakly grasped. It might have been the signal difficulty of my life.
She laughed and planted her nails in my forearm, and not so gently. “Does the fine artist care?”
I shook her off and examined the claw marks.
“Oh, don’t pretend it hurt.”
I strode through the office toward the print. I liked to take in pictures from many vantages. I didn’t believe in ideal viewing distances or entirely fixed points of view, whatever an artist’s aims in constructing them. There was a lot to be gained from examining a picture from too close, to see the whole of it clearly. The intensity of color, for instance. I drew back from the picture and considered how well the rich red Karen had chosen counterbalanced the evanescence written into all the ghostly erasures and uncertain linework of that English garage.
“As if I would have sent it to the band’s management, if I didn’t think there was something here.” This was probably as far as Karen would go.
“Something.”
“It’s good,” she said, almost curtly. “And fuck you, okay?”
I flicked the poster with a heavy thud and delivered a vague smile.
“It doesn’t mean you couldn’t see, I don’t know, how cleaning up the contours here with the shelved items might help. What is this, a paint can?” She was pointing at something in the print but I’d already moved on, my gaze drifting up toward the high-set windows, the office’s signal feature.
“It could, yeah.” I was in a concessive mood now. I’d gotten what I’d wanted.
“And I’m thinking about whether the lettering I’ve done is too playful for this particular band.”
“Have you ever actually listened to them, Karen?”
She scowled.
“Black Flag, then?” Whenever I thought about album covers, I couldn’t help but think of Pettibon’s designs. “The Misfits?” How nice it would have been to do something for Danzig now. “Anyway, it’s not that playful.”
Karen’s frown lifted slightly.
“Maybe for a type designer,” she said. “Not really for, well, normal people.”
“People like you?”
She squinted her eyes at the drawing, though not quite as tightly as she had in the dusty wind, and nodded slowly, weighing up the picture, the point about playfulness, and the compliment all at once. Then she seemed to clear it all away—I’d no sense of what she’d concluded on any of those scores—and gripped my arm more gently this time: “Thirsty at all?”
“Weren’t we just at—”
“There’s no way they have this, though.” She held out her index finger, the nail a deep orange, pointing at something behind me.
Bottles stretched across a narrow pine table just inside the double doors, all of them molded from thick glass. Eight of the same size, perhaps twelve-ouncers, carried a blue-green tint. Beside them was a single taller bottle, stopped with a cork and shaped like a Chinese vase, filled with what looked like water struck by sun, even though the four columns of light descending from those large windows didn’t actually meet it. Nothing had a label.
I turned back to Karen.
“All from your Garrett, ” she said, as if deflecting responsibility.
These were the things he’d described to me at his offices. We’d come to no agreement as such, but here it was: a whiskey, what was it, of wheat? And then... some sort of next-gen energy drink, if I’d understood Garrett correctly.
She steered me toward the bottles, away from the Joy Division print. “I was going to talk to you about a lot of things today, things you might like working on, stuff we could use you for. But then this came in the morning.” She lifted up the large vase of a bottle, held it with precisely the delicacy one might use with an ancient artifact only recently recovered. Below on the table was a long blue envelope. “Open it.”
“Looks like you already have.” The edges were torn.
“It was addressed to me.”
Instead of picking up the envelope—she could tell me about its contents when she was ready—I took the whiskey from her hand. I rotated it at an angle, watching the golden syrup reach up to the stopper as I tilted it further back until it was nearly flat.
“And there’s a check already.” She picked up the letter herself with one hand, tapped it on its edge against the table. “Just for thinking about it.”
“I met with him,” I said, still gazing at the bottle, or through it.
“He mentions that. He’s just so vague about what he wants.” She tapped the note again, though less insistently, and left it closed.
“He was vague with me, too.” Finally I set the whiskey down and picked up the envelope. “Not necessarily a bad thing, right?” I nodded toward the blown-up album cover.
“All that freedom, I guess.”
“It could be a nice account.”
“For you especially. He’s really taken with your work, isn’t he?”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
“I think he wants us—you—to figure out what to do with this stuff.”
“Like... a logo? Or what?”
“Probably.” She waved at the letter in my hand. “That’s me guessing, though. He wants you just to play around for now, is what it says.”
“Sample it.”
“And see what comes to mind, yeah.” She rocked the bottle’s stopper back and forth and coyly asked, “Want to try it now?”
I was always charmed by her glee, the way she could go from being so poised and formidable—she didn’t lack for self-belief—to something in the vicinity of girlish. I suppose she felt she could allow herself this luxury, and that’s exactly how she treated it: a frill to be indulged sparingly, in the right company, but only because she knew she had the claws to make you pay. The more brilliant you were—this was just a truth of the metropolis, its logic—the more you could take liberties and license. The most fearsome gesture you could make was to throw your shield to the floor. I can’t say I didn’t employ the same tactic from time to time. We were kin in this respect.
“I’ve had too much already,” I said, though I was a little sorry to disappoint the girl, now that she’d shown herself. “I won’t know what I’m drinking, really.”
“Then what about the other one? What is it, a ‘smart’ drink or something?” She wrapped her hands around the necks of two of the smaller bottles as if she might hurl them like Molotov cocktails.
Smart drink sounded fine to me, though she must have known that no-one used that term anymore. Nootropic was the favored word for a cognitive enhancer. But was that even what this was? The liquid’s origins at Arête made it a sports drink, even though Garrett did say he had hopes its use would spread far beyond athletic circles. Still, if it was meant to help ballplayers in the first instance, wouldn’t its effects need to be more bodily than mental? Or was I underestimating the cerebral aspect of sports?
As for sampling it right now, though, I could only shake my head. The moment I did, the two bottles came crashing together like cymbals; I thought they might shatter. Karen’s face briefly reddened with anger and annoyance, obviously, but also embarrassment. She herself was surprised by the force she’d applied, I think, and hadn’t meant to make quite that impression. She set the bottles down quietly yet appeared no less upset; my recalcitrance, it seemed, had driven her to make a scene, which cost her any leverage with me in persuading me to drink. I just had to make things difficult, she would have thought. In fact my reasoning was simple and sure. I wanted to explore both drinks first in solitude, my habitual testing ground; there’d be time to sample them with her later. Really she should be pleased, I thought, that I was taking an assignment with a modicum of seriousness, to want to explore it. But before I could convey any of this to her, she lit up with a different idea.
“John’s here, though! Isn’t he?”
I shrugged.
“I think his door had a light on under it. He’ll try these with me.” She left to get him, carrying two of the bluish bottles with her.
I was still holding the envelope. I plucked the letter from it and the check fell out, sweeping through the air in descending arcs until it settled at my feet. It was hard to think of the note, though, after crouching down and seeing the size of the number scrawled across the check. Sadly, but not unjustly, it was made out to Cosquer, not to me, so I snatched it up and left it on the large desk against the wall in the corner. Karen’s. It had been a long time since I’d been alone in here, just me among these great heaps of machinery. They’d stood out to me the very first time I’d visited, when Karen showed off the new space to Claire and me—back when the two of us had been deepest in love. Naturally we had other things on our mind; just before Karen’s tour, I’d touched Claire in the industrial unisex bathroom, her little yelps reverberating around us and possibly beyond, I didn’t know or care then. Now there were new machines. There were always new ones. Nothing ever seemed to disappear; a fresh use could be found for anything. The place was always becoming.
The device that had been there from the start, on that first day, and indeed, amidst all the other encroachments, continued to dominate the room, if only barely, like a fading superpower, was the vintage letterpress Cosquer had acquired from another studio. Sitting right at the center of those four corridors of light, it managed, improbably, to reside entirely in shadow. The press was finished in flaking yellow paint, and it remained Cosquer’s prized possession. It functioned with just the range of variation one wanted in an analog instrument: enough to mark each print as an unrepeatable original, allowing its mechanical capacities to preserve rather than dispel auras; but not so much as to damage the sense of uniformity and precision of the letterforms. One couldn’t escape the feeling that each image it produced, though it may have been an original in some sense, was, in another, entirely universal, as the Purists and Suprematists would have it, and therefore part of a broader reproductive system that only increased its power. To both confer and not confer an aura was the feat a device like this accomplished. No-one knew exactly how to replicate its effects on any other machine, even a structurally identical machine from the same manufacturer, which meant that the very same aura that hung over the prints attended the press itself. This one had never been restored, and in a sense it couldn’t be, not without shattering its distinctive qualities. It had come with John, as I recall, in a sort of package deal, as he’d joined Cosquer from another shop that was disintegrating, the usual fate in the design business and not necessarily an inglorious one.
Since there was still no sign of Karen, I wandered deeper into the undivided space, toward the group’s intaglio press, which bathed in the light falling just beyond the letterpress. Its giant rolling wheel seemed to belong to some ancient whaling vessel. It was used for reproducing the engravings and etchings we produced in small batches, and some of us used it for our personal projects, too. I myself never gained much facility with any of the presses, which is why I hesitate to include myself in Cosquer properly: all the core members knew how to use these sorts of things. The rest of us, the illustrators and photographers and copywriters, occupied a peripheral space, though Karen and Rick would dismiss that idea whenever I brought it up.
The light stretched toward the opposite side of the office, which was windowless and lined with state-of-the-art digital printers; despite naming the collective after an underground cave of ancient paintings, no-one here was hostile to the latest technologies. Nearby a small sealed room housed the photographic equipment needed to prepare the various plates: relief, intaglio, lithographic. The litho press, actually—one of the newer additions, which Karen would have used for my album cover—was tucked away in the back, in the murk, and was itself close to a work of sculpture. I’d not bothered to turn on the lights, so that, to appreciate it now, I could only run my hands over those clean edges and decisive slopes of metal, far from the usual collection of cubic forms common to modern versions. I had used it previously to make a number of prints of my own work. Or, rather, I’d had someone use it under my direction—Karen, mostly, but sometimes also Claire, late at night, when the two of us had the studio to ourselves, between other activities I could once tempt her into. I leaned against the machine, tucked myself into it as if playing hide and seek.
These days the magazine’s printing was outsourced, though its design was done from here, mostly from this office and the adjacent studios. Oversize proofs from the most recent issue, marked up in sharpie, some replete with the proprietary logographs of copyeditors, sat in unruly piles on nearly all the white wooden desks, their pages spilling onto the floor. The very tallest stack, naturally, sat on Karen’s desk, as she gave everything the final read and signed off on last-minute changes.
I made my way back to her desk, where I’d placed the check on the pages. My own proof was the one on top. This was my main editorial contribution to the magazine: showing up to mark proofs just as production was closing on the latest issue. Karen liked it, and nearly always insisted I come. That was about the only time anyone could reliably find me here, and indeed, these days it gave me an excuse to see people in an ambient sort of way, without having to talk, only work, whenever my droning television set seemed too slight a source of human nourishment. I suppose this means that however peripheral I fancied myself, my output did occupy a significant portion of the pages of the magazine over its four-year history, particularly at the start. In the very first issues I was even listed as one of two senior editors, although these days I held that most nebulous of titles without official responsibilities: editor-at-large.
I sat at Karen’s desk and put my feet up, right next to the proofs, where she would never have put her own, and I looked back at the bottles near the doorway, arranged like a brigade, the golden general towering on horseback above his sapphire men. Voices began to reach me from the vestibule, John’s and Karen’s, and two or three others as well. Soon they’d arrive in person and spoil my tranquility, which I’d found in combing through the recent past under the mellow influence of alcohol from my time at the bar. So I closed my eyes, awaited the inevitable end, and considered, in the time left to me, just what we’d all achieved here, together, in this room.
In the very early days, before there were any actual plans for a magazine, I’d had a conceptual influence on Cosquer. Shortly after college, there’d been many discussions among our group about the sort of artistic progress that refused to sever or mask its connection with the hand, that insisted on it in the face of digital technologies—but, and this was crucial to all of us, without stooping to unredeemed irregularities and eccentricities or the one-note trumpeting of illegibility that poisoned the eighties and nineties, whether it was Chantry or Carson or Brody or Glaser. Even more obviously, there could be no truck with nostalgia and empty relativities.
This is how Cosquer’s editorial ethos was forged: a precise, careful grounding in the analog that avoided every ideological pitfall we could think of. So, on the one hand, the magazine had no website; on the other, its appearance could not have less resembled a DIY production, given just how crisply constructed it was, in both the what and the how of it. That’s why we could give prominence to certain kinds of painting and drawing over photography without any spurious anti-technological stance. What did it mean, after all, to be against technology per se? A life without fire, and not just metaphorically? A life without wheels? A life, indeed, without language, one of our earliest technologies? No, the question was rather which technologies you picked, and how exactly you chose to deploy them. That was still true. What did you choose to burn?
Our criterion was simple, and general, and probably impossible to apply definitively. Nothing, anyway, was let into the magazine that anesthetized the mind, or distanced us from the world, which is to say, ourselves. It just so happened, really, that these were the common ailments of so much that was mechanically produced. In the beginning, it had been hoped that just the opposite might result. Malevich, Rodchenko, Marinetti, all of them. Avoiding anesthesia: this is what made our issues so short. Readers assumed the brevity stemmed from design and deliberation, but no. It was, in the beginning, simply a matter of not being able to find enough art that could avoid Scylla and Charybdis.
In the first years, my art featured nearly continuously in Cosquer, every couple of months or so. Sometimes it was just a quarter-page painting, sometimes only sketches for work I’d yet to execute in a more finished form. A bit later on, as the magazine began to contemplate advertisements to sustain itself, and indeed began to grow in length—Karen had started the operation out of her own deep pockets, but to keep things running depended on the largesse of printers who were actually family and fellow artists—we, or really I, started to construct advertisements for brands that didn’t exist. First came a logotype for Perilex—what it was exactly didn’t matter; perhaps some sort of drug and probably a dangerous one by the sound of it—followed by The Avocado, a vast emporium dedicated to the sale of the many varieties of the fruit, and then, of course, Prophets, water-walkers for weekend hire.
These were trial runs, provisional answers to the question of what our pages might look like when intercut with ads. With enough ingenuity, we wondered, could we prevent ads from damaging the magazine? Might they even enhance it? The experiment served the marketers, too, letting them see how well their products could be laced through an issue of Cosquer. I, naturally, had no thought of making the magazine financially sustainable, even if I had contributed a few dollars here and there, and more than that, offered my work for free to Karen. Making mock advertisements remained strictly an artistic and social investigation for me, driven mostly by the pleasure of toying with Cosquer’s growing commercial audience. Since the spots were fake, they didn’t have to resemble legitimate examples of the form—the sort intended to increase sales—but, then, they couldn’t be of an entirely different order, either. There were useful limits here, a vocabulary, a grammar, just as there was in painting or in poetry, that had to be respected if you were to be understood at all. Still, I was free to summon associations no modern advertiser would or could want these days: historical allusions, things like the Gold Bond Twins (the company, still going strong, long ago dropped the black babies as their mascot) or Aunt Jemima, or those colonial-era propaganda posters, in bright yellows and reds with the flattened, sketchy figures mostly in outline, like cartoons, illustrating how the European colonies throughout Africa and Asia, while yielding profits for the motherland, also civilized the natives. And they, too—the natives—were products of a sort: glossy, shiny, far more valuable than the raw material used in their construction, just as fine furniture was so much more precious than imported timber. I did a whole series of these ads for Cosquer, actually, using the same colonial visual palette, but in slightly less malignant ways: pitching realty firms, winter coats, and free-range frankfurters.
Given my interests, these pictures were more art than commerce, selling their hypothetical goods and services in the softest ways. So it remained unclear whether effective ads, the kind someone would actually pay to place, could ever mesh with the magazine’s prickly contents. Until, that is, forward-thinking marketers started calling, not only inquiring about placing ads with us, but commissioning us to design them precisely in the manner of our fakes. We were a little stunned, and I might have been disappointed, too, though I shouldn’t have been: it would be some time before I understood what sales ultimately depended on.
The creation of this original batch of ads inaugurated the un-italicized version of Cosquer, the design studio, that is. The first pieces appeared only in our pages, of course, but it wasn’t long before selected art publications and the more adventurous zones of the commercial sphere started to solicit our talents, particularly John’s, as I myself lost interest in the project almost as soon as the ads were built around real companies rather than the creatures of my imagination. In the last year or so, my own artwork had featured less and less in the magazine because, frankly, I was making less and less of it, of any kind. But as my output dwindled, Karen and Rick had taken to consulting me about the overall look of the magazine, which had been decisively reinflected by the creation of those pseudo-ads. I was inexpert in matters of typography, but Karen thought my general compositional instincts would transpose well enough for me to help with the magazine’s redesign. We’d started, for instance, on my recommendation, if you can call it that, with the inclusion of a quite complex table of contents. It was turning out to be about a quarter of the book now, with lengthy exegeses and annotations of the subheads, mini-essays that sometimes made you think it might not be necessary to read the actual text of our features. Karen would allow editors to undercut each other in this way. The sort of reader who’d be flummoxed or turned off by our “free play”—well, we didn’t have many of those.
Perhaps my greatest influence on Cosquer now came at the proof stage. I would show up late at night and invariably find the others working in profound silence, which always struck me as odd for such a collaborative endeavor, but gratifying all the same. I’d come in and sit at my desk, right next to that airtight prep chamber, and, using a set of colored pencils, begin to carve up the proofs that would be lying there waiting for me. My marks were primitive and free-form, unlike those of the others, who had, over time, internalized Chicago’s guidelines for these things, with selected aberrations adapted to the particularities of the magazine. Together they’d built a common language, and all I could understand of it was the delete sign (that little bow) and the carrots of insertion (those little birds). But my marks? Anyone could decipher them. They came from a place of ignorance, which gave them a certain universality. No symbols to be decoded at all, really, just distinctly inelegant pencil lines yoked around anything that seemed off, leashed then to a suggested fix in the margins. Other times I could be far harder to parse, especially when I was singling out things that weren’t strictly mistakes. I might just offer a cryptic assertion between the lines, or a philosophical question that would prove unanswerable in the context of closing a magazine. Generally I provided no alternative in these cases. On some occasions I would do without words and simply circle things—portions of images, the rules used on a page, the column width—or cut up words into their constituent letters with slashes; or else bracket items into unfamiliar groupings. Often, it was unclear what exactly I’d meant to point out—even to me. My edits, in these cases, could only signify, on the most general level, something like Sure about this?—where even the referent of this was ambiguous. Was I trying to draw attention to the heaviness of the rule, or its length? The kerning of a word, or its tracking? I was merely following an impulse to mark, probably, with results that someone else would have to decipher later on, or conclude were more or less meaningless—the fruit of an errant instinct.
I suppose I meant only to raise eyebrows, Karen’s in particular, to see if she saw both a problem and a solution. When I’d first begun proofing, I was sure she’d be annoyed by the vagueness of my approach. And maybe she had been. But she took to it soon enough, and eventually insisted that I mark up the proofs at the close of every issue. This routine had brought us closer than we’d been at any time after art school, those years of stymied flirtations, though there was, of course, the complication of Claire. And so, these days, looking through the magazine, I’d find that some change or other had been made to most of the things I’d flagged, although often enough something different from what I’d inchoately had in mind. Finding out how Karen had responded to my undefined doubts became one of the central pleasures I took in going through finished copies.
Laughter startled me from my thoughts. It was fast replacing the talking I’d been hearing in the distance. I stood up and tentatively approached the doors, which were flanked on one side, opposite the table laden with Garrett’s bottles, by a drawing board. Clipped to it was an ethereal silverpoint on wove paper, one of Karen’s. She herself had produced the last cover of the magazine like this, a delicate abstract with what seemed like thousands of strokes, which made me think of iron filings being torqued by a magnet held out of frame or behind the picture. This one, on the board, was figurative, though it was so unfinished—barely begun, in fact—that I couldn’t be certain even of that.
I swiveled about in the light, still tipsy from the bartender’s heavy pours and my empty stomach. I could hear nothing now, no laughter, no voices. Maybe they’d all left with Brady, shared the nootropic between them and lost interest in design once the beverage had taken effect. I continued to turn slowly, surveying the space, its total effect. There was markedly less paint and ink splattered about this studio than most. This was Karen’s doing. She didn’t like things going to hell, nor did she indulge certain eighteenth-century fantasies about the artist’s temperament, the organic state of filth in which he must operate to thrive—fantasies of a bent that I did occasionally toy with, in an ad hoc way, or sheepishly reach for when feeling in need of some explanation for the unshapeliness of my life. For Karen, a magazine’s being produced here, the precision and teamwork involved in the process, simply wasn’t compatible with a space that had fallen under the sway of waywardness, even if—or, more likely, because—some of Cosquer’s members’ chosen means of printmaking were given to chaos, and not always experimentally.
Whatever chaos there was concentrated itself in the far-right corner of the office, just beyond the workstations. John’s corner. He couldn’t be expected to abide Karen’s prerogatives, and silk-screening, which occupied this part of the space, was mostly his domain. No-one among us did better work in the form. John’s talent, insouciant though he was, earned him a pass, as it always had, as did client demand for his peculiarly slanted style. Dirty screens abounded in loose stacks, seeming always on the cusp of avalanching into nearby territories. Intense streaks and splatters of color from the rollers stained the gray floors, but that was only one source of the bright mess in his corner. He liked to touch up and deface his silkscreens by hand, as evidenced by the many easel and palette knives and tubes of acrylic and oil paint, not to mention the squares of sandpaper and bottles of paint thinner. I couldn’t help but smile a little at this corruption of Karen’s ideal.
“So I guess now you want to screen something,” a voice boomed from behind me. I turned back sharply and there he was, standing in the doorway.