John approached me carrying not the sports drink but the bottle of whiskey, uncorking it with a muffled pop and handing the stopper to Karen, who began squeezing it steadily like a stress-relief toy. Unusually, John was clear of paint, and in fact free of color altogether, just crisp black trousers (wool, by the looks of it) and an exceedingly cheap white T-shirt riven with grainy, grayish striations, as if to make some sort of point by way of the disjunction. From his neatness, I knew that today was one of his thinking days, as he liked to call them. He might, I thought, get along after all with Brady, for whom every day was just so. A day for strategy—that would be another way to put it. I can’t exactly say that John was a friend of mine anymore, not without elaborate qualification. He was certainly a figure in my life, though, and I in his. He was the first person in college I came to respect, even before Karen—indeed, the first I came to admire, and perhaps to envy, if I permitted myself that feeling. So many other artists, then and now, seemed to me not worth attending to very seriously; there was nothing to be had from such scrutiny. But John, who tended to induce a mild and not infrequently agreeable state of confoundment in those who fell into his orbit, seemed always worth the trouble (and he could be plenty). Not that you got progressively closer to him over time, necessarily, or came to some firmer, even approbative sense of his compass. But you couldn’t say you didn’t get anything out of the looking. There is an instinct in all of us, I think, to sift out such people from the rest when entering social milieus, for the value we implicitly know them to carry, which we may wring simply by involving ourselves—whatever we finally think of them. John and I quickly figured each other to be just this sort of person. It was a kinship that brought us together swiftly and naturally; it also prevented us from remaining close for long.
“I was just looking your silkscreens over,” I said.
“The mess.” He rushed past me, deeper into the space, as if he were merely talking to me on the phone, bottle still in hand. His gait had a deliberate urgency to it, and he made his eyes slightly wild, as distinct from their being made wild by circumstances. Always the actor. His gifts, it had to be said, were the least assailable of anyone’s in our year, even my own. He was an out-and-out prodigy, really, with the tightest grip on light that I’d seen then or since: Titian to my Raphael, he liked to joke. I’d never seen even a quick watercolor or pastel of his that faltered tonally, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to work just two or three colors together—a few sticks of chalk, that’s all it came down to—with such casual grace that you imagined you were seeing more than a dozen. Even in his prints, the format he concentrated on these days, the way he welded tones together could startle you, no matter that the lineation of the print was routine. As for his compositional sense, he seemed to find, time and again, unconventional pathways for the eye which nevertheless remained convincing. And then his brushwork: his strokes carried a preternatural decisiveness, even when they only amounted to vague dabs, or when they were so finely applied they seemed to paint themselves out of existence.
John went straight for the clean-up sink adjoining his masses of silkscreens and scratchboards (a slightly newer medium, for him—but even in black and white, he was proving himself effective) while Karen followed behind him. He flipped over three of the cheap little glasses that he used to clean his brushes. He’d discovered this secondary function for them, as makeshift tumblers, during the regular gatherings he’d introduced to Cosquer headquarters, somewhat against Karen’s wishes, and often when she wasn’t around. Lately he enjoyed toggling between the glasses’ functions with only a careless rinse, whenever we needed to reinvigorate ourselves after a day of unprofitable work. You could taste the thinner in them then, but we were usually too weary to protest. I could see flecks of paint clinging to three of the glasses now as John set them onto the rolling side-table, one after the other, each one landing with a tiny thud.
“But not too much,” Karen said. “It’s really for him.” She was gesturing indistinctly at me with a fist that had closed around the cork. John brandished the bottle with two hands, hovering over the dirty vessels, his knees and elbows bent like an athlete’s. An aggressive mirth radiated from him; any demurral from me might make him flood the glasses, if that’s the way it had to be.
He was decisive, shall we say. We were used to this. Only a semester or two of art school had passed before he’d drawn conclusions and settled on a representational direction: total abstraction was “frictionless” (I got that word from him). He liked to say this especially to abstractionists like Rick, who became our common scapegoat. He and Lindy both. But John’s mimetic bent—here was the rub—was of a studiously inhuman variety, as in non-human, or human only by careful and complex abduction. He redacted the purposive aspect from each depicted thing, an engine, a bullhorn, a chain-link fence, the way Diderot’s Encyclopédie did in its own manner, each of its diagrammatic pages isolating objects of interest from their broader context and finally exploding them into their components, all in the name of understanding. Much of John’s work from school formed a sort of addendum to that book, except that his images—not multi-stage diagrams or illustrations but fully rendered paintings—operated in reverse, so that they suggested not how artifacts and objects could be made intelligible by their place in human life or the world at large, but how we could understand ourselves through our place in the lives of objects, or technologies, the way each generation molded itself from the materials and inventions provided by the last one. He was blasé about the decades-long resurgence of figuration and narrative in painting. This was merely an “unproductive retaliation,” he would tell me while we worked side-by-side in our third year, in adjoining open-plan studio spaces in a converted parking garage not far from the apartment we shared. I relished those times, even now. The presence of other artists generally diminished my capacity to work; often I found it impossible to proceed, and when I managed to get something done, the results could be timid. John, though, was never a dissipating force. The manner in which he worked on a canvas or a print somehow managed to be both reckless and fastidious; every glimpse I caught of him at work re-established in my mind the possibility of this combination. It propelled me, seeing that.
“Is it really just for him?” John asked, throwing a glance my way.
“Not just,” said Karen.
“So then!” As he laughed, his brown curls, just short of unruly, bounced around his bearded face. He was pouring the third slug before Karen could tell him I wasn’t having any.
“I don’t believe that,” he said, looking up at me and raising his eyebrows improbably high.
I nodded ruefully to confirm his fears. He froze for a moment, and not for effect. The whiskey ran halfway up the tumbler before his face dropped and his hair came down like a plush curtain. He’d been so much more clean-cut in school, with none of the beard or lazy curls about him. But after graduation he’d gone abroad, to Ningxia and Outer Mongolia, rough-and-tumble places in keeping with his “frontier” childhood in Rapid City, studying forms of art he’d only scratched the surface of in our classes. Twenty months later he came back to the States with a lot more hair and Constructivist leanings, not of the International variety, when the spirit of the movement had died and all that was left was a form, a style, but something closer to Malevich’s and Rodchenko’s original sense of it. Suprematism. Is this what exposure to Communism, even the bastardized form it took in modern China, inevitably produced? The human body finally began appearing in his work. But by this point, he’d lost whatever interest he’d had in being a gallery artist. (You could say I was only following his lead out of the museums; he’d been the pioneer.) Which meant that the figures in his canvases were going to be public figures, the kind that sat on billboards and transit posters and magazine pages. Figures of consumption.
“Well, then, we’ll just have to make do,” John continued with an air of pragmatism. Still holding the whiskey bottle in one hand—he seemed unwilling to separate from it, even for a moment—he gulped down a finger of whiskey from the first glass and slapped the empty tumbler on the side-table, which sent it rolling into Karen’s hip. The dram didn’t make him flinch, not even a tiny bit, no tensing of the mouth or cheeks at all, which was curious for a whiskey of any proof. It also showed the slamming of the tumbler to be mere theater, not an expression of any sort of distress. He was, always and still, an awareness artist, even when he wasn’t making art. What I mean is that he was always sending a message. There were particular notions he wanted to project in any exchange and any artwork. Things he wanted you to know, or at least questions he wanted you to ask: a state of being that his work, or simply his behavior, as now, implored you to inhabit. He needed to change your mind; that was the whole point.
“Why do you have to drink it like that?” Karen pushed the table away from her. “What are you going to find out about it that way?” How quickly her voice could relapse into the chiding tones of the exceptionally well-off. I heard her aunts and her mother in her now. I heard all of Claire’s relations, too, and everyone else in the city brought up far above the fray, who therefore couldn’t help but register small breaches that the rest of us either never noticed to begin with, or more typically had long ago accepted as par for the course. Something in them instinctively resisted.
John skipped over her question and went straight to the verdict: “Phenomenal.” He was going to make this declaration, this decree, almost, no matter what it tasted like, of course. He circled back to Karen’s concern: What could he learn about the drink by bolting it down? “Everything, really. Most of this stuff gets drunk like that—in field conditions.”
I watched his face as closely as I might a sitter’s, looking for the slightest modulations. And slowly I could see that the drink, whatever its nature, began to work on him, breaking up his routine and wringing sincerity from his glib appraisal. He gave a little scowl, puckered his lips; his forehead turned into four wavy lines as the drink defied his expectations. He picked up the other two glasses, this time more respectfully—apparently the whiskey had taught him it wasn’t to be trifled with—and gave one to Karen. He reached to touch glasses but she’d already taken hers to her mouth. He shook the remaining glass, the one he’d overfilled, vaguely at me; this was, after all, to have been mine. Finding no change in my inclinations, he followed suit and drank, but delicately this time, just a sip, taken with enough concentration to get him to set the bottle down.
The drinkers’ faces mirrored one another’s. Both were lightly tensed, with their eyes narrowed, in that peculiar form of dispassionate concentration that wouldn’t go away, however discredited it might officially have been in artistic circles: appreciation. This is how the aesthetic attitude got worn, willingly or not. Had people made this face in the tenth century? The fifteenth? Or did the sort of enchantment, the rapture, that Renaissance aristocrats like Alberti wrote of involve a different quality of attention, one in which self-awareness didn’t feature so prominently, if at all, and one didn’t study the work so much as put oneself in its hands, the response then either following or not, of its own accord, without intense contemplation or scrutiny? Distinct as the two of them might have been, one the reluctant lady, the other the joyous raff, their reactions began from this same point of aesthetic submergence, although they did follow separate paths back to the surface. Karen’s eyes closed fully and her lips twisted to the side. She made a soft fist with one hand before stretching her fingers widely and puffing out her cheeks, which glowed with a touch of pink to them, almost hiding her freckles. She nodded several times and ran her hand through her hair before finally reopening her eyes, though even then they were downcast.
John’s eyes never closed; they only seemed to narrow infinitely as his gaze bore into the drink from above. He held the glass with both hands and tapped it rhythmically with a middle finger, as if isolating the liquid’s pulse, its frequency of vibration. He smacked his lips quietly, introducing air into his mouth, before his expression turned grave, almost bitter. It was a look he’d never worn before China. His laughter, ever since, was forever mixed with something darker, his mood never quite the same. From it, you would have thought he’d served in some theater of operations out there, and not been freely traveling. Yet at least three or four times during his travels East, he’d faced censorship of his projects, partly because they took place outside gallery doors. In one case, the last of them, when he began to produce replica money with minute alterations he assumed would be taken harmlessly, he was deemed to have attempted not quite a criminal act, but probably a trial run of one. There was a period of detention, but the investigation didn’t take long. Soon after, he was given a ticket back to the United States. He was lucky to have got off so easy, I thought, given it was his fourth indiscretion in the country. He didn’t see it that way. He had plans for a more extensive trip abroad, but these depended on using China as a base camp, which was now impossible. He returned an angrier, more critical artist. At least he had real reasons, unlike the rest of us who only had to deal with the lesser oppressions of liberal democratic life.
It was natural enough, I suppose, that ever since then he’d wanted to inculcate the sort of communal awareness that might, for instance, persuade the reigning powers not to throw a person out for creating manifestly phony money, particularly when the intentions had hardly been hostile. He was too smart to think his work might have exactly determinable effects, that it could function as a specifiable corrective, but he did believe some sort of definite improvement was in the offing, which was something new for him. It was a path I didn’t follow him down; I’d never had time for self-conscious interrogation.
“I like it,” John reaffirmed. “I don’t know much about whiskey, though. Think that’s a problem?”
Having surfaced from their reveries, one after the other, Karen and John approached me slowly, unsteadily, as if reacclimating to ordinary consciousness. He was fibbing about his ignorance. Karen may have been less aware of his intimacy with such things—with American spirits in particular. Or else the charade was just his way of acknowledging that Garrett’s spirit had so far left him mystified. “Good thing this is your project,” he said to me.
“It comes on so slowly, doesn’t it?” she said. “It’s still coming on. And it gets...”
“Difficult,” John said.
“But really quietly, right? I don’t know what it’s like.”
“What proof is it?”
Karen and I shrugged at the question. Garrett had kept this information to himself.
“So please,” he implored, looking sharply at me, "will you try it now?” He rocked the glass that was still in hand, and still quite full. “We need a finer sensibility, a real artist’s sensibility, you know?”
“I will, yeah. Tonight.”
“Oh, will you ever just let us have a fucking moment? Jesus.” He winked and laughed, which softened his words just enough.
“Never,” she giggled. “He’s so good at that.”
“I can’t even think about booze right now. I put in time at Contra today.”
“But you didn’t even finish your drink then,” she said. “I had to.”
“Did you think it was my first? You kept me waiting a while.”
She didn’t apologize.
John sipped a little more whiskey as he walked to the table near the doors. He set the glass down and sucked in his lips “Well, then, what about this one?” he called to us. He picked up two of the smaller bottles, one in each hand, and held them out in front of him by their necks. “No alcohol here?” He pulled one of the bottles back toward him and inspected the bluish fluid. “What is it, though?”
We crossed the room and joined him. Karen gazed into one of the bottles on the table, but less intensely than he did, because of what Garrett’s letter failed to disclose, and what she therefore knew could not yet be known.
“In the letter, Garrett only calls it ‘the reviver.’”
John’s head snapped toward me the moment the word came from Karen’s lips. “Like a skincare product,” he whispered while looking at me significantly.
Karen sipped the whiskey again. “This is good, though, right? It doesn’t have the burn you expect. Maybe that’s all that’s strange about it.” Although her reasons might have been different, she, like John, was quite attuned to qualities of fine drink—to a fault, actually. After all the downtown soirées of her childhood, where she casually met artists of the moment mixing with the vanguard of her father’s generation, all mingling together in her family’s townhouse, she could be unpleasantly fussy about wine or cocktails when she was in the mood to be a connoisseur or just a thorn in your side, wallowing in the mode of rejection. At other times, always funny to see, she could quickly down a drink without the least fanfare, as she had with what had remained of my scotch and soda at the bar. She didn’t drink much straight liquor, naturally enough, so I wasn’t sure how useful she could be to me parsing this one. There were, of course, whiskies that didn’t bite, but she wouldn’t necessarily know that. She would, I imagined, be valuable as a representative of the clientele Garrett was hoping to secure for his product: well-educated, well-heeled, cocooned from life’s gross pains. Just the sort prepared to explore something as minor as a boutique spirit.
John was trying to hold my attention with his eyes, and I could see he was no less nonplussed. The word reviver ought to have triggered some response from me, he appeared to think. At least a derisory laugh at Garrett’s nomenclature. “I think it would properly be called a revivifier, though.”
“Maybe, yeah,” Karen said. “Or revitalizer. But then that would be cosmetic—”
“Do you actually care about this?” I said, more sharply than I’d meant to, though I found myself shaking my head as well. It might have been my first unkindness of the day.
They shot a look at each other that seemed private and incredulous. I suppose qua collective rather than art publication, we were now in the business of framing products, which in part meant naming products, and naming them aptly. John and Karen’s mute exchange was the first hint, though, of another Weltanschauung that excluded me, in which I featured only as an object of talk, not a party to it. Perhaps it was the look that separated authentic members of the group from interlopers—or simply remnants of the past. It was a goad.
“You truly give a shit about the name?” I pressed. “This minute, I mean.” I was actually queasy now from what I’d drunk on an empty stomach; inebriation, or nausea, its close cousin, had gone from a convenient excuse to something like the truth. I was beginning to grow into the sharpness I’d shown them. My impatience with so much as being here, away from my apartment, was now in full flower.
There was a beat or two of silence before John turned to me.
“So how exactly is the whole drawing thing going for you?”
Karen blanched, proving the punch in his words. I hadn’t addressed the matter of my change of direction directly with John over the months, as I hadn’t spoken to any Cosquer people much about my personal work. Immo probably knew more about it than them. Except for Karen: she knew. I wonder how she’d described matters. Or was it Claire who’d poisoned things?
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything come of the new phase besides these pissy moods. Have you, Karen?”
I regarded them both and began to pace, letting the moment of confrontation open up before us, stretching it however much I chose, a full minute if I cared to. It wouldn’t be so unusual. Once I’d been provoked, I could be a demon. They both knew that much. While my contempt for John built in my blood, with each step I took, back and forth, back and forth, I found that what came to me, quite unhelpfully, were the likenesses between us. He and I were, after all, the finest draftsmen to graduate our class. But the affinities that rose before my mind extended far beyond our skill with a pencil and our exit from the galleries, which may, for all I knew, have nourished my disgust with him now.
Did we not, for one, both reject détournement in its many guises? The conclusion that had emerged from our drunken discussions over the years—we could both get on a tear with our drinking, at a pace that others couldn’t follow, we’d be screaming over our group by the end—the conclusion we’d arrived at was that there was simply no way you could commandeer consumer images or tropes after they’d already made their way into the world. Whatever defacement or redirection you attempted would be welcomed by ad execs and actually written into follow-up campaigns. You were essentially working for Coke when you defaced their ads, serving up new possibilities for monetization. Hadn’t the lucrative sales of products like baggy, faux hand-me-down designer trousers proven this point a long while back? Hadn’t Bernbach’s cheekiness, the occasional grace note of self-hate that flared in his indelible copy, done the same even earlier, in the fifties? Holzer’s typographical signature now moved fashionable merchandise. Graffiti art was the same. Recuperation always triumphed.
John had found hope in bypassing the impotence of Situationism for Constructivism. You could create something durably radical, like the old Bolshevik signage, advertisements, and indeed propaganda posters, if you actually produced the original image or consumer object, and built in whatever misgivings you had right from the start, when there was still a chance of shaping first impressions, guiding the formation of meaning. Not that he didn’t have his misgivings about the legacy of Constructivism. Those tropes, the foundation of the Swiss style, couldn’t have been more exhausted for him. Typographically, he preferred symmetry and blackletter whenever advertisers would tolerate the diminishment in legibility, and otherwise classical serifs, especially the all-caps style of the Roman alphabet. The Romans could never have known their elegant script would come be understood as the equivalent of SCREAMING, whether on street corner hoardings, hailing you as you walked and imploring you to buy something, anything, or more recently in the overheated language of social media, shrill in the extreme.
Spiritually, though, John was basically Bolshevist, a would-be social engineer more than an artificer. His output now had pretty much nothing to do with the galleries, except for Cosquer itself. Unlike Rick, who was still wrapped up in painting canvases and saw his work for the magazine only as a side project, even though it was taking the lion’s share of his time, John had come to understand his commercial projects for Cosquer as his primary mode of artistic activity. He wasn’t especially worried about how much money they brought in, so long as they could serve as a vehicle for his art; whereas for Rick the whole point was the money. The possibilities of ambivalent advertising fascinated John, the kind of graphic work that won its place in the public square through its connection with commerce, yet performed this function with a double edge, raising in viewers profound and legible doubts, perhaps stronger than any that Rodchenko and the photomontagists could have imagined. For instance: far behind them both now—Karen and John had their eyes lowered and were mumbling unintelligibly to each other; it was as if they were outside in the foyer again, separated from me by a concrete wall—back behind them, by the desk in John’s corner, there were a few scratchboards he’d just finished, lying near the silkscreens. They’d been designed for a major cable news program and podcast, set to début this fall, in which the two irreverent hosts—a respected political-scientist-turned-pundit, along with a “pure” media personality whose credentials for weighing in on the news were unclear, except that he had a lot of opinions and business interests—were depicted as a pair of grotesques, rendered with John’s prodigious imagination into a composition that was viscerally discomfiting. One appeared as white on black, the other the reverse, and the “pure” media persona as a beautiful ghoul. The copy for the ad was still in the works. Karen hadn’t settled on anything yet. All I knew was that it was destined to go up on a forty-foot billboard off of Bryant Park. It was worth a lot of money to the firm, which met Rick’s goals of generating income, and Karen’s of funding the magazine. But this was John’s baby—his art. What was he actually achieving on this front? John’s original proposal had been flat and simple: Your Dream Team. Jaded, aggressive marketing for a news program, of course; but since the media itself had changed so much from the time when news readers like Cronkite or Rather incarnated the transmission of knowledge, we were growing more comfortable in acknowledging the news’ bedevilment by bias and even bad faith. This was Bernbach times ten. Increasingly, advertisers realized campaigns with this sort of internal contradiction at their heart were actually desirable, since it was authenticity that appeared to be most valued among consumers—even honest fakery—and because ads that held instabilities at their core, that refused to resolve, to fully make sense even, tended to be more memorable. I couldn’t help wondering: if John was an engineer, was this the kind of engineer he was? What sort of amelioration could be achieved by this sort of work, if as a society we’d already abandoned the euphemisms and were positively reveling in subjectivity these days, whether of the Antifa or Breitbart varieties? The darkness John was trying to conjure was part of the product—even a news product.
In the last few minutes, as I’d paced back and forth, more or less meditating, Karen had come to the edge of interjecting. I could see her chewing on words, silently moving her lips. But in the end she said nothing. She was shaking her head in real distress, distress over the stalemate, the way things had quickly unraveled. The way I was allowing them to. John, though, was entirely game, patiently awaiting my rejoinder.
“How is Claire these days, John?” I was betting she’d been the one to relay my artistic woes to John, not Karen.
He stared at me a long while, with blue irises of unusual ferocity, manufacturing his own pregnant pause, as I had just done. I was giving him every chance to up the stakes here, if that’s what he wanted. He could tell me he’d just fucked Claire this morning; that would be good. The seconds dragged on. Karen seemed near tears now, though I’d hoped my words would bring her some calm. It had been a long while since I’d seen her cry, and back then it had been for personal reasons. Perhaps this was personal, too, more than I knew. Such things were all that could threaten her usual pragmatism. Fifteen seconds of silence had passed, really a very long time, though only half as long as I’d left it, it felt like. Finally John broke the stare we were locked in, rubbed his eyes, scratched his beard with two hands. He smiled softly, not with mockery, except maybe of the self-directed sort. Karen was wiping her eyes with the palm of her hand, though only pre-emptively. I could see no tears.
He’d folded. John was a contentious man, deeply untroubled by the prospect of conflict—one of his most admirable traits. That he decided to abort this escalating scrimmage was a mark of friendship. I felt sorry, and I tried to honor the friendship too, now, by bringing us back to the matter at hand.
“I don’t think Garrett wants us to know what’s in the drink, not at this point. We’re supposed to just drink blind.”
“Well, then,” said Karen, “why don’t we?” Her voice, ordinarily clear and bell-like, had thickened with resentment. She finished off her whiskey.
John pinned the top of a bottle of the “reviver” to the edge of the table and brought his other hand, the open palm of it, down with a force that rattled the table and launched the bottlecap toward me. His Midwestern graces still being with him, he leaned over to fill Karen’s glass but she covered it with her hand. “It’ll mix with the whiskey,” she said. She held up the tumbler and rocked it to show the trace of whiskey left, a little splash that washed up on the side of the glass.
John could only shake his head, probably at the entire scene, the whole day. He mouthed something to himself, I think it wasn’t nice, and pulled the bottle back to guzzle from it as though he were brutally thirsty. For several seconds he looked up out of those high windows, searching for what to say, to think.
“Sour”—that was all, the violence was gone from him.
“In a good way?” Karen asked.
He was still looking up. “Sour like... buttermilk.”
“No!”
“Do you not enjoy fresh buttermilk?”
She hesitated as he played at the line between them, town and country.
“Okay, it’s not like buttermilk. But definitely—”
Before he could continue his game, she took the bottle and swigged from it, just as he had, except that she spilled the drink on herself, down her shirt. She hadn’t spent a lot of time swigging in her life; it wouldn’t have gone over well at home. But John brought this out of her, out of almost everyone but me.
Once the drink met her lips, she looked skeptically at John. “Oh, it’s not sour. It’s got an edge, but that’s different. What’s the right word for it? Salty? Is that possible?”
“But do you like it?” I said.
“Will you please try the fucking thing?” John said. Our truce was coming undone already, though the scream was less angry than deranged. Who knows what had gone on in his life, or earlier that day or that week? He could be hugely sensitive to the minor vicissitudes of life. He reclaimed the bottle from her, walked the few steps left to me, and thrust it in my face. The motion threw a long lash of liquid onto my shirt and neck. I didn’t flinch. He didn’t apologize.
Karen didn’t see us approaching the precipice. She had turned around and was still weighing my question. “I don’t know if I like it, exactly. I think I could like it. Same with the other one, the whiskey. They’re nothing alike, except for that.”
“It’s going to take something pretty special to sell this one, I’ll tell you that.” John stole another swig and again formed that exhilarated grimace.
“You seem to like it just fine,” I said.
“But I like everything.” He drank a little more. “And what am I supposed to be feeling, anyway?” he snarled. “What’s this stuff supposed to do, besides be pretty and blue? Do you have any idea?”
“It’s not just his problem, John, really,” she said. “It could be the sort of project that carries the entire shop. We could just be thinking about this and the magazine for a while, if things work out.”
“I think Garrett’s going to give us a lot of space with this, John,” I added. “I wouldn’t worry—”
“From the guy who won’t touch the stuff. Just forget it.”
I set less kindly eyes on him. I was going to have to test his seriousness.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he barked. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was inebriated, there was so much substance to his life. Another pause ensued. This is how so many conversations unfolded between us: silence broke them to pieces. As Karen twisted her hair around her fingers, John took several gulps from the bottle and nearly finished it off.
Eventually, ultimately, he cracked the grin I’d long known. “Like I can’t fuck with you.”
“John’s only jealous this commission isn’t his,” said Karen, as if I needed consoling, and as if he weren’t even there. She let go of her hair and grabbed my hand as I regarded him, though more gently now, more quizzically. I felt drunk, the more since seeing him. He had that sort of effect on anyone he crossed paths with, and only occasionally in a good way.
I had to remind myself that there was no deep rift here between us. He leaned toward me, very close, for reasons only he understood, and I slapped his face sharply. It had to have stung. Like a baseball player hit by a pitch, he didn’t rub out the pain. We laughed a little, even Karen. This was all it took to put us back together.
“Rick should try these, too,” she said. “Before we really talk about it, anyway.”
John rummaged around at his desk and found a plastic grocery bag still lined with a brown paper one. He settled the whiskey and the other bottles in it and carefully crimped the paper to hold them in place. Then he held the plastic handles out to me and nodded. This was a small form of penance for the trouble he’d given me—today’s or any other day’s, I couldn’t tell.
“And are you done with the design for the taxi ads?” Karen asked him. Her tone was flat and no longer sociable. Before I’d even gone, she’d returned to business. There was only so long she could hold out.
“That’s what today’s about,” he said, reconnecting with their common enterprise, what went on here in all the hours I wasn’t around. I took the bag from him, heavy with bottles that managed to peal despite his best efforts. Clanking glass and crinkling plastic—this would be my inevitable accompaniment on the long ride home by way of several trains.
“I’m trying to figure out where the copy will go,” John said. “Or if we even need any. I think we’re using too much of it these days. In the magazine, too.”
Karen had drifted toward her desk and had already displaced the stack of proofs, but these words turned her around.
“You can’t mean that.”
“You want words everywhere, Karen.”
“They are everywhere.”
He wasn’t wrong. The proliferation of copy, of prose, in everything relating to Cosquer, was stark. Ever more pages had turned to text, including some penned by Karen, so that every month the magazine seemed to get less visual, less poetic. She was, I thought, inexorably turning from text artist to poet to prose writer. That’s the arc I’d noticed in her since we’d all moved to the city. She was a writer at this point, though she wouldn’t admit it. What visual art had she put together in the last year? What she did, besides write, was edit the magazine and run the design firm. It’s why she was okay with her own trajectory, in fact, because unlike the typical designer, who quietly set aside the matter of fine art, she was only relinquishing one art to segue into another.
John turned back to me. He looked pleased now; his blue eyes shined. “You’re going to see this thing all over the city in a few months. HBO’s paying for it, for that new series about rural life, which—did you see the screener?—it’s just obscene. They understand nothing.” He’d been born in South Dakota, in a town even smaller than Rapid City, and knew more than a little about life between the coasts. This only added to his authority and allure, this zone of experience that was his possession alone, unknown to the rest of us, who hailed from the usual cosmopolises: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York. This proprietary history was his to mold and use as he wished, including running down others who made any claim to speak of flyover country. (Garrett, I thought, benefitted from something like this, too.) One thing I appreciated about John, for instance, was something he’d told me was a regional trait: seething at will. Apparently his mother had it in spades (she was also bad with alcohol, which wouldn’t have helped). But he’d said this quality could also be found all over the Dakotas. Someday I wanted to go there and find out how much slander, or anyway myth, there was to his tales of home, how much perversity he cast the entire region with only to explain away his own deficits. “Basically,” he said, “I’ve done these Rockwellish portraits of the leads of the show—corn-fed American virtue and all that. But they look sort of sinister: KKK types rendered, well, phantasmagorically, I guess. It’s hard to explain, the effect isn’t obvious. But it’s powerful. I really don’t think we need any copy, Karen,” he said over his shoulder. She’d already heard this speech, I could see. “Actually,” he started up with new intensity, “the pieces are in my studio right now.” He went to retrieve them; I think he was trying to prove a point to Karen with my backing, if I did indeed approve of what he showed me. My judgment, though not deriving from a deep grounding in the world of commerce, appeared to carry some clout around here. But it was more than that. He simply wanted to see what I thought of the pieces, never mind their value to Cosquer. There weren’t many people whose opinion he cared about.
Really, I should have shown more interest in his work. I was a part of this group, if not quite as wholeheartedly as he was. It was this partial remove that excluded me from that conspiratorial look he’d earlier shared with Karen. In truth, I was interested in his work, in anything he did. It was all worth knowing about. I’d lost interest in plenty of artists, but not in him.
My nausea seemed unbounded. It had already peaked, I thought, but now I found it building again; presumably it wouldn’t relent without the aid of sleep or food. I’d missed not just lunch but breakfast, which I was anyway in the habit of skipping. It took me several hours each morning, after waking, to find the prospect of pushing plant and animal matter into my mouth less than repellant. It would be best, I knew, to head home now, take some air; to eat and nap, or vice versa; and then, finally, to turn to these bottles, or even just stare at them a while in the light, before imbibing as John had been imploring me to do. I’d had as much continuous social contact as I could comfortably handle. My sociability had always been less than typical, when measured in minutes and hours, at least since the early years of high school. I’ve always preferred concentrated stretches of communion, exchanges that taxed all parties owing to their stakes, to the lighter, longer interactions that life serves up in far greater abundance, and which I quietly ride out, seeing whether something worth mulling might be pulled from them so that the time is not entirely lost. Still, there was no question that my tolerance for any form of contact, rich or poor, had been far greater before Claire had gone—before silent appraisal became my natural modality. In the last months, most of the time I felt, whenever I thought back to her, those two-and-a-half years together, that she was a burden well-shed, an obstacle finally cleared from my path. A path to where, though? And if I couldn’t say, in what sense did I know her to be in my way?
John hadn’t committed a real transgression today. Yet I was within my rights to be mildly offended, even if I didn’t actually feel so (there is, in fact, an ethics of feeling), particularly if I were as drunk as I’d let on (though I think I might have been), because it would have been only too easy for someone to misread his playfulness—if that’s what it was—as a slantwise affront. All the more so given my reputation, mostly justified, as a belligerent drinker, someone quick to anger, to destroy things, even to dare other people to destroy things: especially connections. So I capitalized, grabbed his arm, and said simply, “I’ve got to get home,” with a touch of a scowl, as though, even if I were not exactly angry with him, I’d been distressed enough by his actions that I couldn’t be expected to be in a mood to indulge him further.
For an instant, he seemed to be poised between several responses. Karen and I could both see this, by the way his face turned protean, almost liquid. More than an instant: it must have been a full three seconds, four, five—which, when it comes to the effects our words wring from the people around us, especially when what we have to say is not what they would like to hear, can be a very long time. This was doubly true for John, for whom words like irascible and mercurial were invented.
But my gambit, which came down to the precise way I held my face, the sense of both friendship and duress I signaled with it, won the day. He grabbed me by my arm in return. “Okay, yeah,” he said. “I’ll scan it and you can tell me about it later. But,” he added, “sober up and try this stuff.”
“Yes, please,” Karen called out plaintively from her desk, though without looking up. She was leaning closely over the papers on the desk and had pulled her hair back, which she did, I knew, when the problem she faced was difficult. John joined her and huddled over her shoulder, inspecting the cause of distress, whatever it was.
“When you finish yours,” I said, pointing at the open bottle on the table with blue at the bottom, though no-one was attending to me any longer, “you’ll tell me how you feel?”