At sunrise light collected quickly in my bedroom, as it always did. I didn’t have blinds. Claire hadn’t wanted any. Even at night, she liked to see lamplights flaring in the street, and she slept best knowing that if she were to wake, as she often did, for many reasons, the world at large would be there to meet her gaze. A window, for her, was an inviolable channel uniting spaces, and thus a core architectural feature of a building, which was not to be interfered with whenever it happened to suit one’s purposes. I’d had to take down the cheap orange cloth that had been hanging from the curtain rods when we’d moved in, so that now they sat on the floor of the closet like the discarded robes of monks.
In half an hour sunlight overcame the bulb that had burned above me through my brief night. The beams falling on my eyelids reignited earlier concerns in me, groggy as I was, and it wasn’t long until curiosity drove me out of bed. I passed by the kitchen into the living room through the heavily built doorway, which was retro-fitted with some sort of bracing around the frame, as were all the others. They gave me the impression, or did until recently, that the whole place might come tumbling down without them. Lately, though, each time I passed through them, I thought only of the Beckers’ doorways underfoot—did they even have the benefit of these curious bolsters?—and the general state of decrepitude that could only be strengthening its hold while I neglected the place. My place.
I squinted my way to the window and crouched down for my first daylight glimpse of the two paint swatches laying on the floor. As my gaze shuttled between them, finding a new rudeness in the gold and blue patches, I slowly looked up to the window, toward the source of this vigor, which penetrated the glass and gilded all the world. Before I could turn back to the paint, I was thrown violently into wakefulness by the realization of what I’d been doing in those manic hours only just past, all without knowing it: the bottles there on the windowsill actually recapitulated the colors at my feet. They weren’t quite the same, of course, given that one pair existed in a fluid medium, and the other on paper. But that was unimportant. They were definitive analogues, effortlessly radiating metonymic force.
Last night’s labor would count as work, I considered while rising to my feet, wide awake—the sort Garrett may well have been hoping for. Who could say? He’d said so little. I rounded up my phone and corralled the patches of paint within the viewfinder, snapping a shot for our new client. I was going to take his project seriously from the start, mainly to keep him writing checks, perhaps eventually addressed to me alone. Which would certainly help. My apartment, after all, was only cheap for what it was. Cheap considering. Considering what? This tatterdemalion ward, where only the police precinct bustled and hummed—and then only arrests and stakeouts and raids, and a mushrooming staff to match. Not long ago, the borough’s top man had called for a law-and-order clean-up, effectively a civilizing effort, as the Post put it, and if the city’s mayor had any misgivings about it, the governor and the president did not. The upside to all this, at least for me? For the cost of a two-bedroom in Fort Greene or Williamsburg, I was able to rent out two entire floors here, even if I had yet to exploit one of them. The level I occupied was, by itself, a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment. The master bedroom was vast, in principle, anyway. Claire and I were forced to abandon it after my columns of books overran it (she’d kept her own in the living room). My collection had been accreting since junior high, and I’d lugged these volumes all over the country ever since, with every month seeming to bring another ten or twenty into the fold. I suppose what I’d amassed was large enough to be referred to without pretension as a library—a couple of thousand volumes, all told, though I was no collector or general bibliophile, and this could be shown easily by how few of the texts I possessed I hadn’t actually read.
In college, gorging on books had made me quick to speak. Now I’d read enough to prefer silence to the hours-long scene-setting it could take merely to prepare the ground for a profitable discussion. Perhaps I expected too much. However it was, I’d found knowledge to be, except in its early stages, not a bridge between people but a wall hiving off the benighted from the lettered. Which camp lost more through this estrangement, though, given the capaciousness of the former? It’s a question I never would have thought to raise back then.
In the circles I moved in—less and less now, but still—this library was quite well-known, not least for its accidental formation: it was once not much more than a bibliography of my reading life. In time, though, friends began donating their own surplus to the lot, mostly out of guilt, I think, so that they could maintain some personal relation to their abandoned volumes rather than leave them in boxes on their stoops to be disappeared by the hands of strangers.
Guilt couldn’t account for Immo’s charity, though no-one had contributed more, something on the order of one hundred volumes, nearly all of them of a medical nature. They’d come in two batches and never again: the first just after he took his M.D., and the second once he’d finished his residency. He knew I’d get something out of them, given my trade, just as he knew he needed to divest himself of these assets as quickly as possible after they’d served his purposes. He was clever, perhaps as naturally keen as anyone I’d met, but he had no wish to be a custodian of knowledge. Quite the reverse: he proudly declaimed that in his apartment you couldn’t find a book if you tried. Why bother? He kept nearly everything he knew in his head, for better or worse. I went on to read most of my friends’ contributions, including at least half of Immo’s archive in anatomy and physiology, far beyond what draftsmen usually troubled to imbibe. But this kind of empirical excess has a way of making itself felt in the work. Immo himself had noted how, even when a picture of mine turned quite abstract, there remained telltale signs of bona fide biological insight, which generally resided in depictions of those peculiarities of the body that cannot be explained by present function or aesthetic unity, only the vagaries of evolution.
Before my books had entirely appropriated the master bedroom, Claire and I even slept next to them, almost within them, shoving them behind the headboard and ceding to them the far reaches of the mattress. No concession ever proved adequate, and eventually we had to evacuate to a bedroom small enough to call a bunker, a place where we could finally be free, or freer anyway. For even in our humbler quarters, it wasn’t long until books began making incursions. Our final bedroom, the middle-sized one, had served as Claire’s workspace, when she wasn’t working from the shared studio she’d retained in East Williamsburg—the very space to which she’d now migrated permanently, of course, so that her spell in the Bronx appeared only a mere detour, a curious aberration, along her path through New York. Before she’d actually moved in, I’d insisted the room be hers, so that she might be inclined to spend more time here, without having to commute to Brooklyn, a gesture that had been received with tenderness and facilitated her ill-fated stay here. Now that those days were past, I ought to have occupied the space to relieve the crampedness of my present arrangements. But all thoughts of doing so were delayed by the role the room now played in my life: it was my home theater—fitting enough, I suppose, in a Bronx palace like this one. Blocking much of the room’s east-facing window was a 102-inch plasma screen that produced overpowering analogue blacks, blacks that registered as zero signal, the perfect absence of light. Claire had acquired it secondhand and used it as the centerpiece of an installation in the days before I knew her well. She’d only described the original project in the sketchiest terms: the screen had been used mostly to display, of all things, a video still—cheap and grainy and entirely below the screen’s performance thresholds—of the IMF chief in the minutes after enforcing a minor clause of the Washington Consensus on a nascent African kleptocracy (Burundi, if I recall).
That’s as much as I ever learned. Claire stopped discussing it with me after realizing I generally took a dim view of art-as-kulturkritik. Perhaps she’d even had the feeling herself, and maybe I’d only helped her see this, that the piece belonged to an earlier phase of her artistic development, when she was just branching out from classical sculpture. This thought might have been too convenient to be true. For even now, when I tried to fathom those elements of her psyche that resisted integration with my own ethos, I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly had appeared on the screen, besides that IMF head. There must have been more than that. Might those pictures have prefigured our parting in some way, had I only known of them in time? But they were gone, and what remained was only this great black face. In her Williamsburg studio, Claire had kept this face hidden against the back wall, storing the screen like this since she had nowhere else to put it. Once she’d moved in here, it was quickly granted a second life: after long days working together in the apartment, separated only by a door, we would screen films on it with gin and tonics or a bottle of red, on a crusted couch I’d inherited from the previous tenants, who may well have gone the same way as the Beckers. Claire took as much warped pride in retaining this bit of furniture—forensics would almost certainly have revealed ghastly deeds committed on it—as any recalcitrant blue blood would. There was no disposing of it, not then.
Whatever knowledge I had of recent cinema, particularly feature-length material, I owed to Claire. I myself had moved directly from a close study of Anger and Brakhage and Thornton in my youth, treating them more or less like painters and poets, directly to cop-buddy movies, so slight was my impression of the narrative worth of cinema. She was a film aficionado, as one, in some sense, was expected to be today, if one was an artist. Half of Artforum was now dedicated to film. I watched Haneke and Dumont and Costa with a skeptical sort of interest, and Claire, to her credit, managed to find a way, often a drunken way, but a way, through the Bill Pullman or Chris Tucker vehicles I favored. After things soured between us—and these radical gaps in pleasure-taking, funny enough on the surface, must play a quietly corrosive role in such eventualities—Claire was suppose to pick up the screen, return it to its home in North Brooklyn. But at some point, probably months ago, or really even earlier, on the day she cleared this room of everything she truly valued, she must have just decided to let go of it.
I had no interest in revisiting the issue by, say, delivering the screen to her. She could only see my efforts as a pathetic pretext to get back in touch, particularly given the low profile she’d kept in the last half-year, how studiously she’d managed to stay out of my sight, even when I was drawn reluctantly into her parts of the city, or into contact with her friends, especially Karen. Claire had become my shadow, the dark matter of my world, unseen but not unfelt. Perhaps she left the screen to me only because she didn’t regard it as hers anymore; memories and eras she meant to shake off might have clung to it, like the IMF project, and me. However difficult I found it to credit, her motives might well have been benevolent. It had been my idea to bring the screen to the Bronx, after all, to watch film with her even though I’d shown so little interest in cinema before. Maybe she thought I’d regained an interest in the medium through the monitor, and she’d rather not disrupt that.
This was the sort of conjecture that could do some good, I knew. So I continued my screening sessions long after she’d gone, often turning to films she would have wanted to show me, the kind she’d dilate on afterward while I would simply listen: features from Slovakia and Iraq and Benin which, for all their craft and color and invention, I had trouble bringing sharply into focus in my mind now. To the global eclecticism she favored, or fell into, depending on how you looked at it, I had from the start of our movie-watching added various American classics, films that seemed to stick with me more easily, if only for being in English, which eliminated the perpetual distraction of subtitles: Double Indemnity, Night Moves, Bigger than Life. These, I knew, were pictures Claire instinctively scanned for buried signals, and therefore always held mixed feelings for, all the more, I suspect, because they were proffered by their makers as critiques of American culture. I received them rather differently, though I agreed that they failed in creating much critical distance from their objects. Instead, they were of the same nature as that which they represented, and so could be valued and enjoyed as such. Given the global stature of America at the time they were produced, during the country’s socio-political zenith, you could say they were quite inadvertently forged in the shape of the entire world, in just the way bits of Habsburg or Mongol or Roman or Mughal culture were, if they were taken from the eras in which those lifeworlds had managed to draw the entire planet into their orbit. This tenor is what I responded to in those films. Their critical aspects interested me mostly for the way they reverberated with what was ultimately a parochial spirit—the American spirit—no matter that it had managed to infect all the world. The world has endured many such infections.
After watching those films, of course, I was the one who had to do most of the talking. Claire would listen skeptically, eventually realizing, once and for all, that explorations of American vice, or imperial vice generally, even when they were absolutely accurate, simply couldn’t engage me, not unless some further conclusion was drawn, something more surprising than that the powerful are prone to misbehave, and that the weak are likely to bear the brunt of this. That’s a lesson at least as old as recorded history, and almost certainly a lot older than that; indeed, the word lesson is too grand for something so prosaic. On the other hand, coming to appreciate the exact manner in which the powerful misbehave in a certain place and time, the specific liberties they thought most worth taking in life? Well, that could be exhilarating. Claire came to despise this in me, I believe, this taste for mishappen particulars over smooth principles.
Things changed for me once she had gone. Boredom crept into my viewing. Most feature cinema came to seem to me psychologically risible, and frequently insufferable, at least for more than half an hour or so. I quickly upped the anesthetics in my nightly routine, switching back from Coen to Owen brothers films, and other debased products in which one could catch a glimpse of oneself, not on the screen per se—the characters and plots were frequently ludicrous—but in the affect that came over you as you watched: the sense of feelings dissipating like storm clouds, an apprehension of selfhood at one’s least mindful. Inevitably, as these films showed me just how flimsy we were—that was their magic—they started to succeed slightly too well. After a while, the screen might as well have gone black, the speakers silent, for all the effect they had on me. Something had to be done. And so I moved on from cinema to the deluxe package, first, to pump the dronelike, allover quality of sports television into my life—ESPN1 and 2 and 3 and 4, FSN 1 and 2, the Tennis Channel, MLB Network, and on and on—and second to interleave my days and nights with reruns of the sitcoms from someone else’s childhood: The King of Queens, Just Shoot Me!, Everybody Loves Raymond, shows I’d never had the chance or misfortune to see the first time around. Today, though, would mark my return to film, for the first time in months.