Around three in the morning I awoke to the incessant clacking of my bedroom fan, which was hardly able to shift an atmosphere that by this point had become more of a permeable solid, thick and still, than a vapor. I was in a state between consciousness and something else, I can’t say exactly what except to say it wasn’t wholly unpleasant. I debated for an hour or two, dozing off now and then, about what to do about the smothering conditions, this sense of drowning in air. There was an odd comfort in prolonging my state of indecision, as well as in entertaining the hope, entirely groundless, that things might somehow resolve themselves. When it was finally impossible to persist with such delusions, I got up and opened the two windows in my bedroom and let the Bronx seep in.
I’d arrived on the cusp of dawn, when the voices that leapt in from the street were less threatening, and less compelling, frankly, than in the depths of evening. Together they formed the soft, harmless chorus that often helped me sleep, not unlike the white noise I dialed up whenever someone other than Claire spent the night in my bed; or city workers took something apart in the street; or Tanya, that poor woman, kept up her whimpering.
The neighborhood was most engaging, to me anyway, at its most assertive, whenever it refused co-operation with a local government that had grown intolerant, almost bored, of the depredations associated with poverty—that appeared less keen on leading its residents out of the muck and mire than in helping them reconcile themselves to a life firmly planted in it. The more profound refusal I discovered in my neighbors was the refusal of modernity itself. The workweek and its rhythms, for instance: on a Tuesday, long after midnight, you could still hear people laughing and joking, drinking and screaming, and sometimes, yes, punching and stabbing. Tonight, though, on a Saturday, a time set aside across the world for excess, what surprised me was the gentleness of the thrum, how free it was of the violence and conspiracy I’d come to expect and almost relish. The same clotted air choking me was choking them: their voices, and their feelings along with them, had been pleasingly muzzled.
I fell back into bed with the windows wide open. I’d grown used to sleeping at any time of day as the deadlines had disappeared from my life. Like my neighbors, the rhythms of my days were irregular. And so it was that at six in the morning I settled in for another undefined sleep which, like the last one, would be fitful and only marginally restorative, given the alcohol still in my blood. Every hour or so my repose was riven by a deep craving to rise, to re-enter the cacophony of waking life, but it wasn’t until it was nearly noon that the world, the rapid fire of car horns and tire squeals, became irresistible and drew me out of bed.
My legs buckled as I put weight on them, refusing to hold without conscious coaxing, which only proved how worthless the extra hours of sleep had been. For a while I went around my bedroom in circles, testing my balance and searching for my phone, though what I discovered before all else was that the ache in my legs was perfectly general. Not a muscle of mine had escaped unscathed. It made enough sense, really. For the second night running, things had finished with whiskey, and I could see that the bottle, there on the nightstand without a vessel in sight, was down to its final eighth. I must have taken it to bed with me in a sorry state. In truth, I ought to have been in much rougher shape than I was. Among Theria’s other properties, perhaps it was a prophylactic when it came to hangovers. One more feature we could promote.
My phone had ended up underneath the bed. I bent to grab it and felt the blood rush to my head, bringing me down awkwardly onto all fours. I was relieved, however, to find exactly the thing I was looking for. Not the phone per se, but the notification on it. Garrett had gotten in touch, left a voicemail. I’d been more anxious, I realized, than I’d been prepared to admit to myself the day before. The point of my extended slumber may well have been, among other things, to vanish the time between my signals being beamed out to Garrett and his responses coming in, which so far amounted to a single ambiguous mark of punctuation.
I closed the windows to soften the horns that bleated now with an almost demonic force. They always got that way by noon. In a recorded voice carrying less of the ambivalence that perturbed me, Garrett quickly put an end to my fears: he’d liked my swatches—very much, actually—or if like wasn’t quite right for what he felt, he’d at least understood, or believed he did, what I’d meant to achieve by them. He called them gestures, which I suppose they were, given how little idea I had of what they might lead to or how they might be built upon. I only knew that the look of the drinks, their precise coloration, was the first compelling thing about them. The tones were so elemental, one not far from ocean water in color, the other closer to the sun.
Garrett’s voicemail carried on for an exceptionally long time. I was surprised he hadn’t just waited until he could get me on the phone at a decent hour; he’d called at seven a.m., unreasonable by any standard I could abide, though I understood there were many who saw things differently. Eventually he turned to addressing my drawings of Daphne and Duke, which were more substantive, and therefore more risky, than the swatches, even though they were no less provisional. Once again he judged them correctly to be graphic musings, nothing more. He said, if it wasn’t too presumptuous to put it this way, that they had real intrigue to them, or rather that the subjects of the drawings held real intrigue for whoever had drawn them, which was just the quality he’d been searching for, and which several other artists he’d tried out for his campaign had signally failed to demonstrate. Now he only wondered what else I would end up seeing in these two over time.
I’d not known there were others before me. Just how many he didn’t say. Presumably they too had spent a day watching these videos and... reacting. What had they seen in the tapes? As Garrett’s voice ran on, the old white woman, this time in a tangerine shawl, shuffled through the propped doors of the bodega across the street. She was a regular presence, hunched over the counter with tubes running from her nose to an aqua tank mounted on wheels like a businesswoman’s rolling briefcase. Each time, she would meticulously pick her scratchers from the dozens on offer by some principle I couldn’t discern. As I looked on, several hulking Hispanics with strange designs cut into their cropped hair lined up behind her, chips and sandwiches in hand, quietly waiting their turn, indulging her futile pursuit of riches in a way that was almost touching.
Garrett was pleased, I learned, and relieved, frankly, that I was able to get as far as I had with the drawings just by using my eyes, without relying on a brief or bringing any sort of prefabricated concept to it. He liked to see people take stabs in the dark, without direction. In all his years in business, nothing told him as much about the people he was working with. And for this job, I’d done the best with it, apparently, though he didn’t describe anyone else’s take.
The old woman crawled away from the counter, tank in tow and tickets in hand, with an inexplicable pride written into her expression, even as she merged with the beggars accumulating lately in my streets like the falling leaves of autumn—leaves, it must be said, marked by a hue and vibrancy these men and women of color had long ago lost. I don’t think it was merely my imagination, this surge in numbers. Just in the time the lady had been in the store, one or two more of the unwashed must have joined this tissue of abjection. I wondered what the city was going to do about it, such rampant destitution, and how suddenly the consequences might be felt.
Garrett rounded out his endless message with two questions, posed in elliptical ways that took some time to unfurl: what did I think of the drinks, really? and can we meet for lunch or dinner with Karen and the chief of marketing at Antral?
I’d leave the details to Karen. Arranging things was something she took pleasure in. Why rob her of that? I forwarded the voicemail to her. She’d be happy, I knew, to see I’d passed whatever vague test Garrett had set for me. There would be more checks from him, for all of us, and, given his manifest wealth, the money was going to mean something. Cosquer the magazine, not just the design firm, would be newly flush with cash. I suppose I should have felt lucky, but I was still too foggy for those sorts of feelings. I proceeded to melt off some of my alcohol ache with a scalding shower. First-degree burns were not out of the question, the water was so hot (though the pressure remained laughable). I only just managed to get out before being overwhelmed. Drying off, I peeked at my phone lying on the bed. As expected, Karen had already replied, asking first of all for the drawings and the videos Garrett had mentioned in his voicemail. Remarkably—though exactly how long had I spent in the shower’s swelter?—she’d also already contacted Garrett and set up a place to meet: this very day, if it wasn’t too soon for me. Garrett was eager to get things going, she said. He liked to work like this, without delay. I also knew this just happened to be the way that Karen liked to work, on a timeline that struck most of the artists around her as abrupt and almost punitive, though it did guarantee that issues of magazine came together swiftly.
Had I gotten on the phone with Garrett myself, there would have been a few days to prepare for this meeting. But what was I going to do in that time, besides polish off the last of his whiskey? I wasn’t annoyed with Karen. I admired her ruthlessness toward time itself, the way she controlled it, which was entirely at odds with the outward delicacy of her manner. Even in school, she’d always had a relentlessly methodical dimension to her; yet it never turned her into a careerist, as with so many others who possessed her kind of efficiency. It was simply a personal discipline of hers, an end in itself, not a means to advancement, which she, like me, had a surprising amount of contempt for, at least to the extent permitted by good graces. In college, I recalled, Karen would finish her studio projects weeks before the end of the semester. I had often only begun to draft an idea, mostly in my head, when she was wrapping up some rigorously composed silkscreen or putting the last bit of polish on text art so precise it could have functioned as a billboard. Like Rosenquist she’d learned to paint signs to a professional standard, and even earned money at it in the years following school.
In my first months in the city, when I had nowhere to be except my studio, she’d take me around town showing me her signage, the slant of her serifs, all the ways she could subtly imbue functional placards with other valences. Sometimes I’d even sit on the curb with a bodega sandwich while she worked a job. Our conversations had actually influenced those signs, she insisted, though I don’t know if there was anything to it besides the pleasure we took in each other’s company. What sort of pleasure? It came down to a difference. The first time I’d noticed it was during second-year sculpture. Most everyone was using a broad definition of the medium, so that nearly anything that wasn’t a painting qualified. Karen, though, held herself to a standard I think proved more fruitful in the end: the David standard. She actually paid privately for blue marble. She had those sorts of resources, her father being a secondary figure in a small but influential neoclassical arts movement that had come and gone, but not without making him wealthy, as there was always a market for things that reminded people of Athens. (Naturally this background cemented her bond with Claire, who’d also gone through a productive neoclassical phase.) It looked like a project that would take an eternity to finish, and with little artistic payoff. Myself, I was unimaginatively testing waters that definitively belonged to Frank Stella (a family friend of hers, of course) simply as a way of reinforcing my own sense of discipline, to continue painting even when we were supposed to be sculpting.
Somehow, Karen finished off her very involved piece—a non-plussed man-child a bit larger than Degas’ girl of wax—much earlier than the rest of us, so much so that she was able, in the final weeks, to ponder the marble with the same intensity that she’d begun work on it, and make a decisive change to it as well. It was in this final phase of creation, we all knew, from our own work if not from Vasari and Wölfflin, that art often went from creditable, even excellent, to something rarer, something worth putting your name to. At this late stage of the semester, the rest of us were only beginning to discover the troubles latent in our original intentions; it was the eleventh hour, and we were left scrambling to reform things, to change tack by the time of the final show. Meanwhile, Karen was edging her way toward fresh ideas. Her little boy, whom she’d situated upon the bent branches of a sapling that, being as immature as he was, only just managed to support his weight—to all appearances this marble boy and his delicate situation were already fully realized. There was, it seemed, nothing left to do. Yet a week of unfettered meditation upon it yielded a discovery: the work’s sense of precariousness could be torqued, and Karen did just that in her final pass. The base of the sculpture, the soil in which she’d stood her tree, was a primordial mass that could be pushed one degree further, by turning its irregular folds and ruts into incipient flames, flames that on inspection were actually crawling up the trunk like tendrils, giving the boy uncomfortable intimations. I believe Karen had to work excruciatingly slowly in that final week, individuating each wispy lick of fire without shattering the tree, root and branch, or even the boy himself.
I finished the course with a capable Stella-esque exercise, even adding a wrinkle to his style by bowing the frame so that it bulged from the wall parabolically. It took me half a semester of trial and error to figure this out. Before mounting the canvas, I’d painted a sort of blueprint of a cityscape on it so that as you looked at it hanging on the wall, the planned town, rendered in rigorous linear perspective, seemed to run away from you. The piece stood up well enough amid the student work displayed on the last day of class. Everyone seemed impressed by my jerry-rigged mounting, particularly the way it warped the carefully gridded buildings. You could feel the structure beneath, of course, imagine what it would have looked like had it been mounted flatly. Or, at least, you thought you could. But Cassie Cortell, our instructor who’d built a reputation on works in molded plastic and advanced polymers, found my cantilevered frame to be the most interesting part of the project. It was actually a sculpture, she said, taking it from the wall and setting it on the floor so that it bulged upward. We circled the work, pleased by the potentialities. But then there was Karen’s little boy burning. Here Cassie’s reaction was more muted, more contemplative, and pointedly free of correctives, as Karen’s was the only realized work in sight, and not a study of some kind. I destroyed my piece just days after class. Karen thought I shouldn’t have. Her little boy, I demurred, had driven me to it. Our friendship only took hold after that, when she told me over murky Manhattans in a drab student bar that she agreed with Cassie about what I’d done. Even if it was a bit of a mess, I remember her adding.
I’d learned something about the imagination from Karen, I realized later: it had depths you could only reach by continuous exertion. Bursts—at that point, the only way I knew to work—simply wouldn’t get you there. Surely my Renaissance heroes, whether Pontormo, Rosso, or Mantegna, knew of this, the slow burn of the imagination. Didn’t it stand behind the many series I’d constructed more recently, where the unfurling of time couldn’t have been more central? In a world of overabundances of every kind, the sprinter had to give way to the marathoner.
Yet Karen took no undue pride in her systematicity. And I never adopted the attitude wholeheartedly. The late start, the instinct to dash, to push on heedlessly, invariably manifested at key junctures in nearly everything I did. In those moments Karen would try to suppress her displeasure, but I could see it almost constitutively irked her, in the manner of allergies, a condition she might have inherited from her neoclassical father. Not that she thought my tendencies flowed from sloth, preciousness, whimsy, or some retrograde theory of the muse, all of which she had an unveiled dislike for. This is one reason she’d turned toward printmaking and graphic design in school: the lesser prevalence of such vices in those quarters. What displeased her most was the post-War fad for the entropic, still going strong: a craze for the arbitrary and incomplete, or whatever, really, that signaled the defeat of our apprehensive powers, allowing us to bathe in wistful, knowing regret for what we couldn’t quite manage. This stance had damaged at least a few generations of artists now, Karen and I agreed on that point. It was risky to traffic in accident and instinct, in whatever was unformalizable, as so few could confront those forces, as Beuys and Cage had, without being toppled by them. I might be one who could get away with it, Karen accepted that much. Yet she didn’t see this as a threat to her position or approach, given the particulars of my life. I had, after all, steeped myself in study of all kinds, most of it conducted on my own, with deference only to the primary sources of paintings and copious books. If I now indulged a certain recklessness in my art, in my life, well, I had probably earned the right.
She seemed to accept all of this about me even before I’d said much about it myself, which made her a natural companion in college and beyond. Our intolerance for the axioms of the moment, where failures of various sorts were frequently repackaged as strengths, or at least authenticities, manifested our distance from our own times. Of course, she and I didn’t reject all the same things, not by any means. As much as I recoiled from the epistemic insecurity of my cohort, and all the sloppy pluralisms that followed from it, I had at least as much dislike for the too-convenient pragmatism of the design community, where it was possible these days to make a good living if you’d made your peace with helping multinationals move their merchandise—under the cover, of course, of rejecting the hermeticism of a purely artistic practice. If that was the only kind of optimism manageable today, I’d have to side with the pessimists. This of course made the prospect of working with Garrett a thorny matter, whatever I told myself about him, or however much I bad-mouthed the moribund fine arts. Would I too begin to act in bad faith? Was I already compromised, and would I only discover this later? Worst of all, would I suffer the fate of the greater part of mankind, never discovering my own forfeitures and dying in ignorance of my ignobility?
On this point Karen was more magnanimous: at least designers were usually open about their lack of seriousness. It didn’t take much questioning to bring out a sheepish look from them. And this in itself made them more bearable, she thought, that they didn’t spin their shortcomings as Warholian virtues but acknowledged them for the travesties they were. For the few designers—John, for one—who managed to operate with bona fide negative capability, which was, for her, the sine qua non of significant art, whether they did so in magazines, advertising, or “communications,” she held them to be entirely equal to any of the fine artists she knew, who were themselves mostly one-note provocateurs, conceptualist pretenders, and political ideologues. Actually, she believed, there were only a handful of people worth paying any mind to in any walk of life. Most of everything was dross. When it came to real interest, we agreed, the world was a desert, not an ocean. You had to search out the oases in it if you cared about it all. Severity of this sort didn’t earn us many friends. But it certainly accelerated our friendship, the way isolation can.
Karen had a far less conspicuous way of voicing all of this, so it cost her less socially; her rebuke wasn’t there if you weren’t looking for it, or if you didn’t exercise as much consideration as she did in expressing herself. But it was there all the same; and it was, if anything, aiding her reputation as she made her ascent in the art magazine world. People liked a touch of austerity in their editors and tastemakers, the air of exclusivity it brought.
Personally, I still didn’t believe that any of the most intriguing artists of our time were working in commercial or communications contexts. Not anyone I knew of, at least. Karen mostly bit her tongue on this point, though, as she continued to assign me work. Only later would I come to understand what she was experiencing in secret then: how full-bloodedly—how steadily—she was pushing words to the center of her life, words being a medium dearer to her than I’d known, and expelling all imagery to the consumer sphere, where she sensed more and more it truly belonged.