Garrett had gotten us a table for four at Sanguina, a Catalan establishment only recently opened near the southwestern edge of Central Park. Though I’d heard of the place and its rustic seafood dishes, I’d never been, which allowed me the excuse of going preternaturally underdressed: black twill pants and a T-shirt that you could say came with my apartment, with the stack of clothes that had been left on the stripped mattress when I’d moved in. Kiver didn’t explain this irregularity, but I knew now they belonged to yet another family he’d turned into the street, so quickly that the bewildered evictees hadn’t even had time to gather all their possessions. The shirts in the pile were genuine pieces of streetwear, as a decades-long process of degeneration had turned their printed designs abstract and unrecognizable. Luxury designers took pains to simulate this threadbare quality but generally failed, since the magic ingredient was something like despair itself. Claire, knowing the provenance of the clothes, didn’t like that I wore them. I certainly didn’t do it to pose as a local. It was just that the privation the original wearers had borne made their garments unfathomably comfortable, as if they were about to dissolve into the air.
Whenever I dressed in these items, I couldn’t suppress the fear that a beggar might ask me to hand them back then and there in the street. With so many homeless roaming around now, the odds of this nightmare encounter materializing weren’t insubstantial. Luck doesn’t last forever. But that didn’t stop me from slipping into those gossamer shirts and trousers, as well as a pair of Pumas that looked of grey suede, the paint had so thoroughly rubbed off them. Neither the shoes nor the clothes had much of a place at a chic spot off of Central Park, of course, but the thought of picking out something more suitable stood little chance against the feelings of ease pervading me.
I met Karen at the restaurant’s bar just before seven that evening, at her request, so that we might have half-an-hour to strategize before Garrett’s arrival. The chef was rising fast in the firmament of restaurateurs, she teased me as we ordered our drinks, well knowing that despite my avowals of indifference, I enjoyed—no, I understood—good food, and not just because of my half-decade in New York. Really my acquaintance with culinary niceties, the more delicate pleasures they conjured, came mostly through my mother, even if she herself wasn’t much of a cook. No, she took a certain progressive pride, I think, in being no more than passable in that department, more or less refusing to improve when by all rights, given the speed with which she picked up everything else, from curation to administration to academe, she should have been better. So it was left to my father to prepare the more significant meals at home, and though he had a rather limited range, mostly involving meat (as you might expect), he was the person we turned to for going-away dinners and birthday lunches. The everyday meals you hardly remembered—attention to such things was frowned on in my home—were my mother’s domain, and the remainder came by way of takeout, the many varieties of regional Chinese cuisine we had a taste for, all of which seemed to be represented in San Francisco in a way I had not discovered anywhere else, not even New York.
My mother’s failings in the kitchen had the curious effect of sharpening her appreciation of food whenever she dined out: deprivation, underuse, enhanced her sensibilities instead of dulling them. She was a born appreciator, really, even before she got her first curator’s gig in San Diego, her hometown, or after her time in the Curatorial Studies program at Bard. One meal was enough to set a benchmark for her, even if it was three years before she tried another version of the dish, however obscure. My parents’ courtship in Los Angeles had actually centered on dining at the finer establishments. This felt like my father’s way of apologizing for being involved in something as venal as corporate law. In truth, notwithstanding his culinary skills—he was good at everything he touched; mastery pleased him—my father was something of an anti-connoisseur, content with round steak and domestic beer—if not a cheese sandwich and V8—for dinner. This unfussiness would make those Michelin-starred dinners all the more special to my mother, when she came to understand, after they’d married, that he preferred to eat simply, without forethought. The meals out, then, really were gifts, indulgences of her sense of taste, while for him they were something closer to trials. Nevertheless, in the name of appreciation, my mother insisted the family make all the main culinary stops in the Bay, starting with the big ones, Chez Panisse, the French Laundry, and ending with pathbreaking places known exclusively to those following haute cuisine. I can remember my father’s mien during these meals: he was engaged only so long as he was looking at one of us, and always crimped by melancholy as we worked our way deeper into the courses. Whenever his eyes lost ours—and I would learn, as an artist, that this is the only time you saw anything much about someone, when he didn’t know you were looking—he seemed to be enveloped by an ordeal, which was often enough that of dining out itself, something he grew increasingly to dislike as he ascended in the legal world and gilded meals like these became de rigueur.
Other times, it was a thorny case that perturbed him, although this was in fact the sort of trouble he welcomed, given his skill in constructing arguments and delivering them, too. He had an unmistakable eloquence about him, even if he spoke slowly, taking his time responding to anyone, no matter how many silences this produced. You wouldn’t have associated him with the silver-tongued sort who dominate law—and that, some say, was the reason he was so persuasive. In his firm of just six partners he was frequently both the brains and the face of the operation, handling strategic matters behind closed doors and rhetorical ones upon the courthouse stage. Strength in the first domain, though, usually obviated all need for the second. A private discussion between parties would take place, at a restaurant like Sanguina, and the case would be settled without going to trial. Those occasions, marking successful negotiations, were probably the only meals he truly savored, and this while barely touching his food. Nothing nourished him like victory.
In this regard, I was firmly my father’s son. I never sought out haute cuisine, abundant as it was in New York, a city in which every nondescript doorway seemed to lead to obscure and exquisite pleasures of the palate. Still, years of fine dining around the Bay under my mother’s guidance had well acquainted me with the practice. Karen didn’t seem especially keen on it, either; but as she came from a family far wealthier than mine, and of longer standing—her father was prosperous much before sculpture personally advantaged him, so to speak—such meals were, for Karen, entirely quotidian. Impromptu lunches might be taken at Eleven Madison (her family had no need of reservations), throwaway breakfasts at Il Buco or Saint Ambroeus. Having come from such a clan, Karen could only react to occasions like tonight with gentle boredom, even if ancient knowledge had a way of peeking through, say, in her overfamiliarity with obscure varietals (Picpouls, Rotgipflers) and gamebirds (chukars, huns).
I didn’t ask her at the bar whether I’d finally get my ortolan, and not because it would have been absurd to ask that at a seafood restaurant. Whenever the two of us ended up at rarefied establishments, which was neither often nor uncommon, I was in the habit of asking her this, the ortolan question; and the less funny it was to her—it must have been dead on arrival tonight—the more humor I found in it, in a purely private way, through aggravating this niggling wound of hers, which was also a flattery of sorts, that the world she came from was so well disposed its denizens could quite intelligibly make torturing little birds into a culinary pastime. But I was tiring of this sort of fun these days, so I didn’t bother with the line now, and she seemed almost disappointed by its failure to appear.
I did wonder why we needed to meet at such an exclusive spot. The venue was suffused with the spirit of a new world recently come to life within a wider one exalted by all—the fringes of the park (well, excluding its north side). A restaurant could maintain this atmosphere of familiar novelty for months, provided it held the right delusions about itself firmly enough to engrain them in those who frequented it.
“Coming here was Garrett’s idea,” Karen declared. “You really thought it was mine?” She made a face as if to vomit.
“Well, it’s hard to tell with you sometimes. The Tallys and their dining clubs.”
She traced the white marble veins with her fingertips and fleered.
“I think he just didn’t know what sort of place we’d want.”
“And you couldn’t steer him to something more our style?”
“Does anyone have any idea what your style is?”
“Yours, then.”
“This isn’t so bad.”
“I thought you’d see it that way.”
She turned away from the shimmering bar to survey the tables and patrons behind us. “Know who that is?” She pointed her chin at someone or other in the crowd. But I was more taken with the bartender returning with our drinks. Why I did this I can’t say, but I sank my old fashioned in three ugly gulps, almost before he could even set Karen’s glass down. He was practiced, though; his grimace lasted but a moment before he offered me replenishments.
Karen shook her head and delicately sipped at the house cava, as if this might nullify the barbarity I’d displayed. “Maybe this is just the sort of place Garrett’s used to,” she speculated. “Try to enjoy it at least?”
We’d come here early not for pleasure but so we could talk things over. This is what she’d claimed, anyway, though so far she’d said nothing about my sketches. Did they displease her somehow? Especially the ones of Daphne? Was there a critique Karen wanted to deliver but couldn’t see an opening for? That didn’t sound much like her to me. In the early stages of a project, she didn’t worry about imagery. And so far there hadn’t even been an assignment from Garrett; I’d just drawn without a thought.
It might be that she had something else to tell me. About Claire, even? (Her name rarely came up between us now.) The truth was that I couldn’t think of one of these women without thinking of the other, given how close they were, which meant that seeing Karen always gave me the eerie sensation of seeing them both. And in fact every time I met with Karen, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the circumstances of our encounter might put me in a light in which I’d rather Claire not see me, given that Karen was surely providing detailed minutes to Claire afterward.
I say this because for a couple of months, after Claire and I parted ways, she’d gone to stay with Karen while looking for her own place. Karen might well have believed I resented her for putting Claire up, facilitating her withdrawal from our life together. Did she believe that? And did I resent her? How difficult it is to settle such questions. What I spent more time puzzling over was this: What exactly passed between the two of them these days? And what was withheld (and to what purpose)? What, for instance, would Karen report back to Claire of tonight—of me? What might she be scanning for, consciously or not, as we prattled on and took our drinks? Equally, what might she keep to herself? Which is to say, where did their interests come apart, as any two persons’ must? These questions were no easier than the others: in listening to Karen, particularly when we were alone, I could never say to what degree the words were hers or Claire’s, though I felt certain they belonged to both. No-one could have said or suggested all the things Karen did to me without drawing on a cache of knowledge possessed only by Claire. Depending on mood and circumstance, this blending of language and intention was a delicious conundrum I could revel in as we spoke, or a practical bind requiring the greatest discretion if I was to prevent communicating more than I wished to.
Soon we were led out to the patio, to a wrought-iron table that struck me as remarkably informal, although on examination I could see it was hand-forged and marked by countless idiosyncrasies, capricious swoops and swivels of metalwork that somehow managed to harmonize into an elegant whole. Outfitting the patio with furniture like this would have come at extravagant expense, never mind that it still made the guests seated around us, at least at a glance, seem overdressed in their cocktail gowns and dark suits.
The staff brought out another drink for me from the bar and Karen and I finally touched glasses. We hadn’t bothered to the first time around, but now without a word we were impelled toward this silent toast by the great park of New York before us, which for the moment stood reduced to a fringe of illuminated green shading into what might have been untrammeled wilderness, for all we could see. The only giveaway of our true locale was the conversation at the next table, where the talk was of the Philharmonic’s upcoming season: apparently, Uchida was going to be presenting Liszt concertos.
The drinks were distinguished, that had to be conceded. I’d ordered an old fashioned mostly to test the bartender, just as you found out whether a chef was worth anything by ordering the omelet. Without the obscurity or confusion that complexity risked introducing, you discovered just how sharp his fundamentals were. In this case, very sharp.
“How’d you manage to watch the videos
so fast, by the way?”
I asked.
“I didn’t finish them. How could I have?” Karen held the flute of cava by the stem, without setting it down.
“Well, then why did—”
“He wanted to meet today, I told you.”
“So what did you have time to see? How’s that?”
“A little bit of each. And the sketches, too.”
“And so?”
“What?” She took another sip and shrugged.
I pushed my second old fashioned away, nearly tipping it over as it scraped against the ironwork, which had purposefully been left raw in spots. Sometimes bluntness was the only way with Karen. “If you weren’t going to tell me anything, or ask me anything, why did you want to meet me early?”
She looked at me a long time, as though I were a cross child; she eyed my relocated drink, plucked it with three fingers and set back in front of me, as if reversing time to the last right moment between us. “I just want to drink with you. How about that?”
“I can’t really believe that.”
“Oh? Well, then, suppose there were something you wanted to tell me, before we dealt with these people?”
“There isn’t.”
“But suppose.”
I supposed. I thought of Claire as I gazed at Karen and came very close to giving her what she asked for. Instead I settled on silence.
“Then you would have had the chance to tell me, wouldn’t you?” Karen raised her glass as she said this, her voice softly sorrowful, her face resigned. She might have wanted me to be the one to mention Claire, to see how I was handling the aftermath. Or perhaps she was hoping I’d talk of something else entirely. But I wasn’t going to oblige.
I lifted my glass wearily and tried very hard to smile. I was failing at this when a black Escalade pulled up about twenty yards beyond Karen, and there in the backseat was Garrett. He spied me before he was even out of the car, waving through the tinted window with an irresistible eagerness. I waved my glass at him, as though we were drinking to his arrival, and Karen turned around to see him. I drank alone.
The driver opened both backseat doors and Garrett stepped out. He was followed by another man, slender and wearing a beautifully tailored houndstooth coat, the sort that tapered smartly at the waist—bespoke without any trace of pageantry. The man quickly rose from the sort of crouch one makes when getting out of high vehicles; his full height was startling. Indeed, his fine suitings couldn’t hide his excessively long legs and generally awkward proportions, congenital faults not to be pinned on his tailor. Garrett, meanwhile, was again outfitted casually, if crisply. Perhaps he’d just come from the office.
The maître d’ quickly put us all together and in moments I was rising to shake hands with my new boss.
“Are we late?” Garrett asked, in a manner I could almost believe was sincere.
“No, we didn’t hit any traffic over from Brooklyn, that’s all,” Karen lied. She still looked shaken from my refusal to engage her hypothetical. I felt a little sorry, I didn’t enjoy disappointing her, but then I felt confused, too. What had she been hoping for from me, exactly?
Garrett and Karen hugged notionally—their bodies barely met—while I faced up to the houndstooth man. There would be no conventional greeting between us, given the oversize magenta folder he cradled in his arms. Besides, he stood at such a distance that a handshake would have been impossible, were he willing to offer one. Still, he was not so far that I couldn’t get a good look at his coat, which was even more refined than I’d thought. I found myself struggling not to stare at the soft lines of his lapels, the gently tapering sleeves, and the intricate patterning of the fabric, all of which put me in mind of my father’s best suits, the ones he would wear before his greatest trials. This man’s coat was so pleasing, in fact, I was almost ready to forgive him his native misproportions. Eventually I tore my gaze away from the garment and looked steadily into his bespectacled eyes, yet he would only look back at me glancingly, never more than a second at a time, as if he didn’t think it right to do so until his boss had formally introduced him.
Bolder than the rest of us, Karen plunged her hand, palm up, into the void separating the three of us from him. He lurched for her hand with a long stride; he even went on to half-embrace her. The two of them, I realized now, might well have spoken earlier in the day, about this meeting.
We found our seats again. The moisture in the air was gone and the night had begun to turn autumn-sharp.
“I never do this right,” Garrett simpered after settling into his chair and catching sight of his colleague. It was as if he’d momentarily forgotten he’d come with anyone and was startled to find a man he knew so well by his side. He rose halfway, reached over and grasped that beautiful houndstooth sleeve. “My chief of marketing, Paul.” Immediately Garrett’s expression registered fresh concern: “Now, is this place okay with you two? I’ve never been before. But Paul tells me it’s worth our time. And I trust him.” Garrett grasped him once more, this time by the shoulder, and perhaps reconsidering this last bit about trust, which was clearly a little much, made a face as if to laugh. But he caught himself and merely shook the shoulder now in his hand. Paul nodded—happy, it seemed, for the show of respect, which seemed to me perfectly genuine. I sensed no condescension or wryness in Garrett’s declaration: it was probably just the truth—he trusted Paul—and he’d been only on the cusp of laughing at himself just now, for being too plain about his feelings in a first meeting, and perhaps also because we might take his words to be a line of some sort, designed to make an impression on us, and he wanted to dispel any notion that he was someone who needed bits.
So far I was finding his Midwesternness no put-on, at least to the degree I grasped the phenomenon, which, to be fair, was a matter for debate, given that my primary source was John, from whom generalizations were made at one’s own risk. In any case, it seemed to me to have a convenient coyness built into it—the Midwestern identity, I mean. Garrett and John both exploited this, insinuating into conversations sentiments you just couldn’t voice, not outright, or else leaving out things you really weren’t supposed to but could if you knew it would be chalked up to a certain characteristic discretion or modesty. For all I knew, this was just the way of the Corn Belt. Every regional identity has its subtleties, and though we don’t select these identities for ourselves, but have them bestowed upon us by birth, each of us learns to find advantage even in the deficits.
Garrett’s bearing, the birthright of Chicagoans, had a gentle religiosity to it, along with a penetrating earnestness that would slash through from time to time. He might look away from you thoughtfully, only to return, for the briefest moment, with a gaze of pure fire and devotion that jarred with his being a man of measurements, not faith. This otherworldliness was also made a tiny bit comical by the manifest influence he commanded these days as a cutting-edge technologist; and his having people like Paul, men in bespoke suits, at his beck and call. His offices alone, whatever rare material they were wrought of, and however much he must have paid to acquire it or synthesize it, radiated the preternatural power that he himself, in his person, was loath to exert in shows of force that would be otiose.
I hadn’t much cared where we were meeting when I’d left my apartment, but now that Garrett had forced me to consider the matter, it would have been false, as night fell, to say I was merely tolerating the rarefied atmosphere. It was as bewitching as ever, especially as I didn’t spend much time sitting outdoors, except on my balcony, when I was more of a secluded observer occasionally taunted from the street for his impunity. “And what is it you’ve got there?” Garrett said, leaning toward me.
“Just an old fashioned. It’s very—what would you say?—crisp.”
“Oh, well, let’s get one of those.” Garrett looked over his shoulder at the other man. “And Paul, what would you want? An old fashioned doesn’t sound right for you.”
An opaque look passed between them, a look free of secrecy but steeped in a long history that couldn’t readily be parsed by outsiders. The question Garrett had posed was the first one asked of Paul; I was curious to hear the man open his mouth. He took his time.
“The martinis here... they’re already famous.” Paul’s voice seemed to waver, as if he didn’t quite believe what he’d said. There was no bass in it. It reminded me of a child’s voice, the kind of child who plays by himself. And in fact he wore a slight scowl upon his lips. A tiny smile arrived belatedly, as if he’d been waiting for reactions to his declaration and found it amusing there were no takers. Yet it didn’t really ease the dourness of his visage; the smile just overlaid it with wryness. Indeed, I would come to find that no matter what else Paul’s face evinced, even profound joy, a note of displeasure remained. Was this just a kind of expressive defect, or did it accurately represent a forever troubled state of mind? I never found out. In any case, there was this face, this scowl, and now this gaze, which conveyed none of the diffidence of his voice and showed that he’d in fact meant just what he’d said about the martinis, that he felt his grounds were firm and his verdict definitive. My father sometimes gave a look of this sort, though he was the sort of man who didn’t really need to. Paul was different, I already knew that much.
The waiter sorted out our drinks, so that I had yet another old fashioned in my hands in the kind of time that suggested here, in this place, any gap between desire and its satisfaction was immediately bridged. These were Michelin ambitions. After Garrett took a deep sip, a single giant cube rattling against his glass, I expected a declaration like Paul’s, about the drinks, to come from him. But he moved on to bigger things.
“We’ve been looking over your drawings,” Garrett said.
Paul set down his dirty martini and opened up his folder, which seemed a richer purple in the light of the candles. Inside were high-resolution printouts of my pictures—the ones I’d sent Garrett as photos—with a thick white border on all sides, each brimming with neat strokes of green ink, the product of a firm, even severe hand.
“Paul has notes for you,” said Garrett. “Lots of them, it looks like. We’ll get to those. The thing is, we’ve known each other a long time now, Paul and I, way before he was doing communications for Antral. And what I know is that even if I don’t always agree with him, he’s got sense. You’ll see. Wonderful taste, too. He knows his art—like our friend Rog does. Frankly, I’d be slightly lost in all of this without him. He’s my guardrail. Do you know that at one point he was enrolled at the School of Visual Art?”
“A long time ago, James,” Paul said.
I knew that SVA had, unusually, an advertising department.
“But it’s really something more than taste he’s got, said Garrett. “Sense is what I call it.” Garrett shrugged at this apparently indisputable truth about his colleague.
I examined Paul in the way that one does when a person present is compared to a joint acquaintance—in this case Whent—and one is somehow expected to verify the similarity simply by looking at him, even though the similarity in question is not a visual one. Paul faced me as I regarded him, knowing he was being inspected in just this futile way; but the gaze he returned was softer than before, less wary, even collegial, perhaps because I was the artist for this nascent campaign. Their artist, that’s how they would have thought of me. Whatever it was, I was being displayed to Paul as much as the reverse.
He left the folder open, the pictures overlapping yet slightly fanned out, and returned to his martini, which he’d so far hardly touched, except for spearing one of the olives into his mouth.
“You’re right, you know,” Garrett said to me. “These drinks are something. But what I want to know is, what’d you think of our drinks?”
“Right!” Karen blurted out, as if she’d been waiting for this turn in the conversation. Though she’d been engaged enough up to now, it was clear she’d been keen to get on with things—perhaps to distance herself from whatever disappointment she’d felt with me earlier. She’d said nothing so far about my pictures, even now that photos of them lay in plain sight. I’d watched her closely—more closely than I did our clients—when Paul first opened the folder, just to gauge her feelings about the images, but she remained frustratingly neutral in her demeanor. Was it too early in the project for her to care much about drafts like these? Or was she waiting to see how Garrett and Paul received the pictures before entering the fray? She was canny when she needed to be. It’s what made her a good steward for Cosquer.
“You’ve tried them too, Karen?” Garrett asked. “Do you drink whiskey much? I mean, straight?”
She took a quick sip of cava, the last of the glass, inverting it sharply and gulping hard, thinking of what to say. “Sometimes,” she began. She shut her eyes tight and let them open slowly. “Sure. Not very much, I guess, but enough to know it was one of a kind, that whiskey of yours.”
Without replying, Garrett turned to me expectantly, his easy manner dissolving into a sterner mood of appraisal as he solicited my own view of the matter. Paul’s gaze also sharpened, though it remained fixed on Karen, the other creative director at the table. He was sizing up her remark, I thought, wondering how suggestible she might be, what exactly wrangling over the campaign with her was going to look like.
Eventually Paul joined Garrett in regarding me, and under the combined weight of their gazes, I began somewhat reluctantly to expound on the whiskey. I did it circuitously. I know that I used the word deep several times in the process. It’s such a vague word, not the kind of thing I would ordinarily permit myself. Yet in this case it was actually truest to my feeling, in that it seemed to me the whiskey originally addressed you only in a whisper. Two drinks had to pass before it spoke to you properly, which meant you could definitely underestimate it if you were too noisy or weren’t listening carefully.
Paul seemed to mouth the word right at this point. Certainly his bearing suggested a new accord. He had subtly grown more animated, forward, though I noted this from the corner of my eye while I studied his boss. It was the first word of mine—underestimate—that induced an appreciable reaction in Garrett, a subtle contraction around the eyes, the ghost of a squint never completed. This was the hallmark of recognition in people who had this response in their repertoire, signaling a pre-verbal, involuntary sort of agreement. Which made it more of a tell than a conscious act of expression. I would have preferred a more definitive indication at that point—after so much silence, I mean—but I assumed Garrett would oblige eventually if I pushed on.
“It’s not the sort of drink you would ever want to mix,” I declared. “I never tried it that way, anyway. I couldn’t see the point.”
“It’s just so light,” Karen said. Her voice had turned dreamier. “Anyone can drink it, I think, even people who don’t really like whiskey.”
“People like you,” Paul said with the flourish that was to be characteristic of him whenever he felt at ease, though the feeling never lasted long.
“I would drink it, yes.”
He nodded softly and folded his hands, waiting for Garrett.
Speaking would have been the normal thing to do at this point, after Karen and I had offered our assessments. Instead Garrett was looking, staring, actually, with that blazing conviction which it would always surprise me to see possessed in such abundance by him. His eyes fixed on the yellow sodium lights along the park’s edge, down toward Columbus Circle, from where we all suddenly heard a din. I followed Garrett’s eyes and even turned around, not really to see what we were already hearing, but in hopes my apparent interest would encourage him to engage us. He wouldn’t be drawn, though. In fact, Garrett hardly noticed me. It was alarming, the force of his curiosity about whatever he was seeing or imagining far down along the sidewalk. It resembled possession. And when I looked at him once more, any recourse to speech he might have made seemed further away, not closer.
Karen joined our collective gaze parkward. There behind us, ambling up Central Park West, talking, or anyway vocalizing, were six men. We couldn’t make them out properly at this distance, yet we could hear them as clearly as we did pedestrians strolling much nearer to us, a clear enough sign we were likely dealing with the not-quite-homeless, that is, the merely poor, who were frequently clamorous, having still in their possession a certain élan that years on the street tended to expunge. Two-thirds of what came from their mouths weren’t words at all, just yelps and screams braiding together fits of violent laughter that nothing in this world could justify, at least not if you understood the world in any way I could imagine.
This kind of brash street poetry was obviously a routine sight in the city, so much so that Karen had no reaction to it at all while she waited, I assumed, for us to get back to business. Somehow, though, Garrett was mesmerized by the scene. On his face a small drama played out, one that I stood no chance of parsing. Hadn’t he lived here for a couple of decades now? How could this still capture his attention? He did, of course, live on Roosevelt Island, which had peculiar demographics, I’d heard, nothing like the rest of the city. It almost wasn’t the city, just a waystation. And before that, Garrett had been living in the center of the Upper East Side, a place which didn’t engender the kind of mixing of life that occurred in showpiece New York, where we were now, where tourists and diplomats and celebrities and criminals and everyone else found themselves in spitting distance of each other. This commingling was only accelerated by the presence of the park, the center of recreation for people from all over the city and the world, even while it sat under the imperious spires of Billionaire’s Row that rose right below it, along Fifty-Seventh Street. The Row had been going up for many years now but never seemed any more finished; as soon as one tower approached completion, two or three other buildings in the area became the converted foundations of new towers, towers which would naturally need to shoot hundreds of feet higher than their forebears, going from ten or twenty stories to seventy or eighty by the time they were done, who knew just when. The skyline was permanently marked, quite beautifully, really, by the agents of this permanent revolution: twisting cranes shuttling massive containers and beams over Fifty-Seventh. During the day you could walk right underneath all this dangling matériel and consider the possibility that capitalism might, in a winningly direct way, take your life, then and there on the pavement. I liked the cranes best at night, though, when you could see only the ghost of movement in them, their skeletal upward thrust recapitulating the buildings on top of which they sat.
Garrett, however, couldn’t have spent much time strolling the city, here or anywhere else: the kind of success he’d had in life simply precluded it. No, he must have passed nearly all his hours in his lab and his home. He really might not have witnessed all that many scenes like the one inching its way toward us.
“I’d keep your whiskey away from ice,” I offered rather lamely, hoping to push things back toward our reasons for meeting. “I don’t see how you could taste it at all that way.” Another punishingly long silence followed. Silence on the patio, anyway. As the gang made its way down the street, we and the rest of the guests outdoors were treated to a parade of epithets and slurs and general ribaldry, chock-full of pronouns missing referents. I suppose it was to Garrett’s credit that he could be as consumed as he was. He’d not turned to avert his eyes from the grotesqueries of urban life. For all I knew, he’d discovered some sort of joy in the profane.
Paul, who’d been looking rather listless until now, interceded in his childish, serious voice: “What about Theria, then?”
Garrett was busy brushing off a waiter who’d sidled up to him asking about our dinner plans, hushing the man with one decisive wave of his hands and a glare as violent as the cackles of the approaching men. I’d never before witnessed someone browbeaten so concisely, but the waiter behaved as if nothing untoward had occurred; as if, in fact, there was and always had been a total accord between him and Garrett. There could be no such thing as indignity in his line of work.
I gave up twisting my neck toward the street and resurrected a manner of observation familiar from my childhood with Ty, gleaning the essentials of the episode from what I saw of it reflected in Garrett’s expression. In such moments, I often left language behind, just like our host, a fact of which Karen was aware. So she answered Paul in my stead: “I didn’t have very much of it, actually. Theria. But I liked that hint of herbs in it. It made me think of green tea, but then not really. Anyway it’s nothing like—and this is the same for the whiskey—nothing like other ‘smart’ drinks, which taste so...”
“Chemical,” Paul said.
“Yes!”
They both turned to me just as I beckoned the same waiter Garrett had dismissed, to get myself another old fashioned. I considered that this might annoy Garrett, to see this man back at the table, but I was rapidly tiring of company, and when this feeling descended upon me I was forced to choose between leaving abruptly or having another drink. So I was doing the polite thing. In any case Garrett appeared entirely invested in the approaching chorus. We’d disappeared for him. Yet Karen forged ahead: “Our partner, though—John—he tried it too and said... well, actually, the most interesting thing he said was that Theria helped him through a hangover.”
Paul smiled deeply for the first time—good news for the bottom line, maybe. I could have said I’d had the same experience as John but I was on the lookout for my next cocktail.
“He painted with it, too,” she said. “He had a long session...” She trailed off and grabbed my leg, desperate for my co-operation.
The persona non grata arrived with my old fashioned and Garrett winked ambiguously at me, amused, I thought, that I’d brought this man back into our orbit and furthermore recommitted us to staying here through my order. He was wrong, of course. I was prepared to finish this drink in one swig, and I nearly did, taking the glass directly from the waiter’s tray and leaving only a sip or two in it by the time I set it down on the table. I didn’t care anymore. Garrett was acting so oddly, why couldn’t I be a little wayward now? The night again seemed viable to me; I’d been granted an extension.
“I watched the videos, actually, while drinking the stuff,” I said finally. “A lot of it.”
Garrett returned to his senses just then, although it may have only been because the miscreants detoured, crossing the street toward the park. He seemed an inch taller as he sat up and pushed aside his drink, which he’d hardly touched after the first sip. Wouldn’t it be strange, and strangely apt, if he didn’t even like drinking?
“Is that right?” Garrett said. “I was hoping you might do that, without my saying anything. That you’d go ahead and just do that.”
“I drank, I think, five or six bottles of it like that.”
“That much?” Paul asked.
“Was that not a good idea?”
He almost laughed.
“I guess the FDA hasn’t gotten around to this yet.”
“No,” Paul said. He speared the second olive from his empty glass and admired it for a while.
No, it wasn’t a good idea? No, the FDA hasn’t looked into it? Or—what I was hoping—No, it’s fine? Nothing could be read off his face, and by the way he twirled his fat green olive, I believe he was enjoying my incomprehension.
“It’s just interesting, that you liked it so much,” he said.
“Well, I almost didn’t notice drinking it. Or even notice drawing while I did.”
“Really? Well, that could be even better in some ways.”
“Do you not care for it?”
“It is unusual, right?” said Paul. “It can take a bit of time to ‘get,’ for some people, is what we’ve found. Most people. But you, well, you didn’t even notice it going down, you’re saying.”
“After the first bottle or two,” I said. “I definitely noticed those two.”
“I see.” He didn’t, but that’s what he said, in a tone that put me in mind of lab coats, instruments.
“I don’t think I really understood any of what happened.”
“But you liked it anyway?”
“I guess so.”
“Exactly,” Garrett interjected. “Not ‘anyway.’ Because.” He seemed pleased, as if this was the thought he was hoping would emerge from me, the proof, in fact, that I was the right person to pursue this project. “But that’s also why the campaign is going to be so important. Not to explain things, really. Not at all. What we need to come across somehow is just, well...”
“That understanding’s not really the point?” Karen ventured.
“That’s it!” He snatched up his neglected old fashioned as if to celebrate our conceptual progress.
“It’s an unusual way to do things,” Paul said with more than a trace of skepticism.
“Well, what about that campaign you told me about?” Garrett rejoined. “For cigarettes. Silk—what was it?”
“Silk Cut,” Karen answered.
Paul confirmed this truth with a reluctant nod.
“Then you know it, Karen?” Garrett continued. “And it was Saatchi, right Paul? The great marketer, the great collector, he made advertisements leading up to the release of a new cigarette—basically just pictures of cloth. No name, no explanation, just rumpled bolts of purple silk, all over town, on giant billboards and façades, on taxicabs, on TV. Right? And when those cigarettes came out by name—Silk Cut—months and months later, that connected the dots for people. And they just sold and sold, didn’t they Paul? Nothing to stop them, people were so happy, so relieved, to have solved the problem, to come out of the dark after so long. And that was all the way back in the eighties. We should be able to get away with even stronger things now. More encompassing things. We could make something Saatchi might even want in his collection.”
“We can try,” Paul offered cautiously. “And we should try, I guess. USPs never really helped much.”
“Unique selling propositions,” Garrett clarified, though in fact I knew this term and much else of the sort from Karen, who by this point was well versed in the history of public imagery of every kind, including advertising. I got her to tell me choice bits now and again; it was part of my compensation package.
“That cloth probably did more for them than ‘superior flavor’ or whatever,” Karen granted.
“Just purple itself probably. What people believe, what they think they see, is less important than you’d guess,” Garrett said. “That’s something I’ve learned from Paul, really. His research down under, with Professor Conley.”
Paul shrugged. What exactly was his relationship to Garrett? He didn’t have an Australian accent about him, that much I could say.
“Well, if you’re looking to throw people off, Theria will do it,” I said without a hint of a smile. “It’s really not like the competition. Red Bull, say, or Bolt24, or Zoa.”
“But is that even competition then?” Paul asked. “We have to think about where the partitions really are in the category, as far as actual buyer behavior goes. What’s a truer rival to it?”
“Gatorade?” Karen offered.
Garrett cringed a little. I’d seen him do this once before when Gatorade came up.
“But that’s very chemical, too,” I said. “Not in the nasty way of Red Bull, but still. What I was saying to myself yesterday was that Theria’s more like good beer. Something earthy, marine. In a way sports drinks obviously aren’t.”
“And what about these ‘wellness’ sodas coming out?” Karen said. “Moment, Recess, all these silly names. But you see them around a fair amount now.”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” Garrett said. “Did you notice any gains?”
“Gains?” I asked.
He smiled at my coyness. “Well, I didn’t really brew this thing for its taste, not first and foremost, though it’s important to me that it’s worthy on that level, too. But if you think about beer, why do people really drink that, most of the time? Don’t they just accept the taste at some point, once they’ve got the routine down, felt the buzz? We’d drink it if it tasted like piss, I think. And lots of people say that it does taste like piss. Same with these pot drinks, right? They are nasty. But that isn’t hurting sales. The difference with ours, of course, is that it’s not meant to—”
“Derange you,” Paul said.
Garrett held his hand out in front of Paul to quiet him. “Theria’s the ‘good’ kind of PED, that’s how I see it. So it is like Gatorade or Red Bull—like they like to think of themselves, anyway. We’re still testing the formula, but I believe, and I hope, the effects are a whole lot more tangible than anything you can get from the others. Gatorade’s refreshing, sure, but so is lemonade.”
I sat back a little and marveled at how long it had taken Garrett to get on form tonight. Until this moment, I’d hardly recognized the man in whose offices I’d been introduced to these concerns.
“It definitely had effects,” I said. “It had to have. Usually I can’t gape at screens for long, not unless I’m only half there and it’s basically wallpaper to me. There are so many movies, good movies, I’ve never finished. An hour in, sitting there becomes unbearable. But yesterday I was rapt for, what, five hours? Either those videos are utterly singular or the drink dialed me in.”
Garrett flagged down our long suffering waiter. The man flew in swiftly, ready to serve once more, this time with dinner menus in hand. Yet Garrett only wanted a couple of bottles of sparkling water for the table. “Well, I’m thinking both of those things are true,” Garrett said. “That’s why I’m using Daphne and Duke. Aren’t they a little bit curious? But I can see why it might be hard for you to tell. Maybe that just means more experiments. We’re all for that.”
“One thing I can say about Theria,” I replied, “that has nothing to do with the videos, is I had no appetite left after drinking it.” Unlike now, of course.
“Interesting,” Paul said. Everything would be ‘interesting’ to a researcher like him, I thought. Despite his fine attire, he had the manner of a lab scientist down pat, more so than Garrett himself, who was a scientist. Paul and his “studies” down under, though... Motivational research, I supposed, or whatever they called it these days. Or could he be some polling man like Gallup? I was already beginning to see it in him: the clinician.
“Anyway, with the two of them—are you finding... prospects?” Garrett asked.
I nudged Karen’s knee beneath the table with my own. I don’t think the others could see this through the delicate metalwork, as it was only an exertion of pressure upon an appendage that was already nearly touching my own.
“What exactly were you hoping for, James?” she asked, understanding me perfectly, my need for deferral, my growing exhaustion. “From them and from us.” Her tone was so gentle she probably did care what he thought, whereas I was of two minds as usual and growing less sympathetic as the night wore on.
Garrett drew breath deeply, as though long occupied by this issue. He seemed pleased she’d asked about them, angling his chair toward her with a scrape and spreading out the photos of my drawings. “Maybe my question wasn’t entirely sincere,” he said. Karen pursed her lips and frowned slightly, as if he might have mistook what she’d said. “What I mean is, to have even come up with these pictures, you must have found something in these people.” Strange, I thought, that Garrett was addressing her and not me. Did he not know I’d composed them unfettered and without any consultation?
“You like the sketches, then?” Karen said with the tentativeness of someone offering words on another’s behalf. Oddly, I had no idea of her own answer to this question.
Garrett immediately looked to Paul. I suppose it was only appropriate that a proxy question got an in-kind reply. Paul straightened himself a little, as though he were about to deliver some vital judgment which until that point was unknown even to Garrett. “This one”—he put his finger firmly on a drawing, the second from him in the fan Garrett had made, pulling it up slightly like the decisive card in a winning hand of poker. Here was a sketch of Daphne in a corkscrew. You see her back, her feet, everything in red chalk, with her face turned toward you. It’s got a romantic feel to it, in a certain way, at least in the context of the film. Adrian, I recalled, is just out of frame in that scene, off to the left, fully clothed—or everything but his shoes. He’s taunting Anne pitilessly, striking her as well from behind. It’s why she’s twisted around toward him here. But the blows seem secondary, for some reason. They are cruelly delivered but perhaps can be taken, sans words, as a kind of foreplay. The words, however, were something other than perverse. No sexual prelude in any possible world relied on them. More than that, it was the precise way they were said, as if spoken to a door, or a stone—that’s why her wince here, in my sketch, carried so much less than torment, anguish; but there is the tenderness of understanding, too, which is also the tenderness of blankness, neither dark nor light, opaque nor clear. A flat revelation. For us, anyway. It’s apparently no affair to her. What I mean is, in one manner of speaking, there is nothing it is like to be her.
Paul tapped Daphne’s face several times with his stir-straw. “There’s a touch of Schiele here, isn’t there?” he said.
“It’s uglier than that, though,” Karen replied. Finally an opinion! But what exactly? A compliment only I could grasp? Or a reservation? Could that be why she’d not managed to say much to me earlier, that she’d planned to bring it up but couldn’t when the moment arrived? Or was she just probing to see what misgivings the others might have, where their lines were, before we undertook the project?
“It’s more plain in its violence,” she expounded. “The scene isn’t really framed as a scandal, or even something sexual.”
Paul weighed her words, touched his forehead. “I guess not. No.” In matters of art, Karen wasn’t easily assailed, even if she was working in a commercial vein. Paul, whose bona fides were as yet untested, beyond some time at SVA, treaded lightly.
“There’s some Goya to it, too. A certain cruelty in the rendering.”
She was right, even if my first thought was Brueghel the Elder. Karen’s snap diagnoses generally hit the mark, and this was no exception: there was something here that went beyond the formal and the expressionistic, and cruelty was one way of describing the result. I didn’t care to think too much further about this, actually. These sketches were mere beginnings, nearly blind ones. And so far I’d not even had direct contact with Duke or Daphne.
“But have you watched the actual scene, from the film?” Garrett said to Karen. He flicked his eyes in my direction: “I think I know the one you’ve drawn here.”
“I didn’t have time,” she said, “but I did watch a little from the beginning of the film. The Thanksgiving meal. It’s not that it’s not true to the film, the sketch, I’m sure it is—”
“Well, I don’t think it is, actually,” Garrett said. “Do you?” he asked me, nominally anyway, before swinging his head toward Paul in the same perfunctory way. “I really think this goes beyond the film. Or beneath it. That’s what I like about it.” Garrett had so far been one to seek agreement, making his contrariness here stand out.
“That’s just it, I guess—” Karen began. Graceful as she was bred to be, she never let manners interfere with saying what she meant, even to clients. She really didn’t seem to mind losing one (or all) of them over it, and she didn’t think contradiction was any reason for upset—this is where she differed from me, perhaps—but simply the best reason to move on politely to something (or someone) else. She could be inviting and disagreeable, too, and she was frequently both, and no less inviting for that fact. “—I’m just wondering,” she continued, “well...” Unusually, her poise was slightly failing her now.
“How will pictures like this work in a
real campaign, though?”
I offered. Karen nodded with a certain relief for not having to be the woman at
the table to raise this perfectly reasonable concern. It was ludicrous, of course,
to think that her less-than-glowing assessment (assuming that’s what it was)
had anything to do with prudishness, but that is probably how it would have
been taken had she gone on to air her doubts explicitly.
“We can do it, of course,” she reassured them, “if this is really what you’re wanting to project.” We all stared at the sketches before us.
“Cruelty?” Garrett growled, and in a single word he put all of us on notice, even Paul. He was suddenly all disbelieving, mesmerizing fire—though hadn’t he made the suggestion himself?
Karen, as always, was the first to recover. “What I want to know, James, seeing these images, seeing that you like them, is what you’re after. With the particular products you’re trying to represent. So that we can think about what we can do for you.”
“I think I see what she means,” Paul interceded. “Look, I didn’t quite mean we could use this as-is, anything quite this extreme. I just meant I admired the unusual way the girl’s mind, her subjectivity, comes out in her body here. It’s compelling. Quite unique.” He looked me squarely in the eye and nodded sharply, as if this were the way he gave compliments—flatly—and I shouldn’t expect effusions in the future.
“Well, I just don’t know about that,” Garrett bristled. “Why can’t we use something this intense?”
“But it’s also a bit repugnant, right,” Paul said. “That’s what Karen means.”
She limited herself to a half-nod of agreement, I think mostly not to offend me unduly. I wondered what she thought of Daphne from my drawings, and of the idea of getting to know her personally, which would be inevitable. Was she dreading the prospect?
“They like it even before they know they do,” Garrett continued, now more calmly. “Anyone knows that.” Were they drawn to the intensity, though, or to the repugnance?
Paul’s face lost a bit of its self-satisfaction at Garrett’s hardening resolve. He probably hadn’t counted on it here, on this particular point. But then came his boss’ little chuckle, laced with annoyance and resignation. Skirmishing must have been a commonplace between these two, involving longstanding disagreements that would probably never quite go away, not least because of how generative they were.
“And how do you want to link the pictures,” Karen pushed on, “or the tone of them, if not these ones exactly, to the products? And to each other?”
“Well,” said Garrett, “that’s why I have you here, right?”
“But there’s only so much we can do until we know what you—”
“I’ve seen his pictures, his gallery work,” he said, pointing baldly at me. “That’s what started all this. He’s got to have told you that much.”
“Right, so...”
“Can you guess, then?” Garrett asked with palpable edge.
“You want profiles of these two,” I intervened. “A series.”
Garrett leaned back with obvious satisfaction.
“I had an inkling,” Karen said, her voice undimmed. “But—well, first, do you have any feelings on what types of media, or format? That would help us think it all through.”
“You’re only drawing these days, right?” he asked me.
“Pretty much.”
“So, mostly drawings then—but they shouldn’t look like drawings. Not like most drawings, I mean.”
“Nothing too scrappy or dashed off,” Paul elaborated. “No Pettibon, or Dzama.”
“I like Pettibon, actually,” Garrett said, correcting any misimpression of his tastes, or perhaps simply showing us he was familiar with such work and wasn’t rejecting it out of ignorance. “There was that wonderful exhibit of his at the New Museum not too far back. Remember? But, no, I don’t want that for this. Otherwise I’d have gotten him on the phone.”
“And the tie-in?” Karen said. “With the products? That’ll help us find a format and style.”
Garrett drained the last of his drink.
“What’s the tale here exactly?” she persisted, though I sensed she was losing patience herself. “With these two people?”
“Technology and nature,” Paul declared.
Garrett waved him off with a glare. “I want him to find out,” Garrett said, nodding toward me. “And don’t even start from anything Paul’s saying, technology or whatever. As far as I’m concerned you’ve already started—from the tapes, the drinks. Just keep going.” He put his palm on the base of the photos where they all overlapped. “That’s what I’ve done for most of my life now. Grope forward. It works. With the right person, anyway. And you’re him. I believe that.”
Paul appeared chastened by Garrett’s heady take; it chafed against his empiricism. He pushed the empty martini glass to one side and folded his hands.
Karen ran her pinky along the contours of Daphne’s corkscrewed spine. “So should I just wing it with the copy?” She even winked at Garrett.
He sat back and smiled a bit wearily, as if the occasion, not necessarily anything Karen had said, was tiring him. It was past nine now, and who knows how much work he had managed to cram into the day already.
“Or did you have thoughts about the words?” she said.
Garrett perked up at this—that’s what it seemed like, anyway, until we discovered, with some chagrin, that his renewed attentiveness had nothing to do with us. His eyes shifted into the distance as his face began to pulse with color: red and blue, broken by flashes of white. I swung around once more toward the street to find two patrol cars pulling up along the curb, both their strobe bars lit but with their sirens cut, so you could still hear the crowd they’d come for—the same crowd we’d been listening to earlier, the men who’d never quite fallen out of earshot, even though they were now across the street, on the edge of a stand of trees, under a streetlamp’s orange penumbra. Though softened somewhat by distance, the tenor of the ruckus had turned guttural, suggestive of descent and decay, and an imminent loss of control. Immediately, it seemed, policemen were closing in.
This kind of scene, with officers bringing the unruly to heel long before anything criminal had occurred, was a quotidian sight these days. No-one paid much mind to the surge in proactive policing, as they called it—no-one but Garrett, it seemed. It hadn’t been the mayor who’d ushered in these measures. He’d actually held out. They flowed instead from the president himself, the law and order mandate he wielded. Naturally crime had gone down with it—how could it not?—but the martial approach made the city, through the new ubiquity of officers, feel psychically insecure: Why should all this be necessary if the criminal element wasn’t very strong indeed?
Karen gave up on holding Garrett’s attention and turned to Paul with her questions about the campaign, the written aspect in particular. But he’d fallen into a state of private reverie, which seemed to be his habit at every lull. Karen’s imploring gaze startled him, and ultimately spurred him to re-engage: “Well... if we were to use images this strong, the copy would really have to soften them.”
I was surprised by her apparent deference toward their wishes. I’d always imagined that the freedom she gave me on assignments had been granted to her from the start by her clients. Clearly not. Even if she was going to end up doing as she pleased with a commission, she didn’t get there by insisting on autonomy. You had to have more guile than that to make even a heterodox studio like Cosquer function.
“You’d want headlines, obviously, but anything beyond that?” she asked. “Sometimes we do longer copy, persuasive stuff, personality stuff, if it works for the client. And there’s the identity work we should get going on, logos and typefaces and the rest.”
Karen’s was the good kind of maturity—not merely capitulation by another name. It’s tricky to tell the two apart, but I knew she had it by the lucrative jobs she’d scrapped. Those ones involved clients who couldn’t fully embrace what we’d delivered. She could have re-done the designs to their expectations, but if she was satisfied with the original, she took the kill fee and pointed them in the direction of a better fit. Even when the client’s taste was abysmal, she unerringly found a match in the design market. Better, instead of identifying a studio that fully comported with the client’s crudity, she would suggest an outfit a half-step finer, that produced work the client, with suitable persuasion, had the aesthetic resources to understand as an improvement on their own taste. With Cosquer, of course, no amount of talk would suffice for this demonstration. The gulf was too great, and I knew this pleased her.
“I think we’d want some of those things, Karen,” Paul said. “Though James was—”
“Now what is going on over there? I mean, exactly what?” Garrett rose from the table this time, keeping his gaze fixed on that same spot behind our heads. There was a new contentiousness to the chorus. Others had joined. At least one voice was coming through a megaphone or the speaker of a cop car.
My neck was burning again from having craned so long. I swung around and caught Karen’s eye. Did we have to keep on looking with him? The swift return of her gaze to the altercation was her answer. And so I twisted once more.
The cops weren’t bothering much with official pretense, preferring to get down to the level of their opponents, at least verbally. There was less and less grammar to this shouting match, the language of both parties melding into a sort of obscene tone poem. Nothing much was being said, genuinely; the words had become blunt-force instruments.
My neck and back had had enough. So I faced Garrett again, and Karen followed me in this. We waited silently, willing him to sit back down. His gaze eventually fell to the table, he fell in his seat, and he began to play with the wedding band (still) on his finger.
What was it that had entranced him? Police aggression? Street provocateurs? Thoughts of his estranged wife? Or something less concrete? None of us, not even Paul, could know. Karen and I nodded at Garrett in a vaguely affirmative way that could mean whatever he needed it to while committing to nothing. It seemed impertinent and probably futile to talk business with the battle developing behind us, with more patrol cars arriving, and more gawkers massing around that troubled cone of light. Garrett, for his part, stared only at his drink now.
“As far as copy, though,” Paul said, “what do you think, James, for general parameters? Even if we don’t necessarily need copy”—here he shot a knowing look at Karen, his advertising counterpart at the table, as if to suggest discretion was essential around the money man.
A new waiter, androgynously bearded with soft downy hair, approached clutching menus. Tiny little cards, really. Most of the dishes must have resided in his head. But before he could distribute the cards and begin his recitation, Garrett drew a squiggle in the air. Dinner was off. Although I may have had questions about Garrett’s antics tonight, the waiter didn’t. With only the tiniest hitch and a small nod, he walked right by us, subtly altering the position of the menus in his hand to suggest, I’m not quite sure how, that they were obviously intended for another table, which he was leaving us presently to find. I expect there was little that could have wrong-footed him or anyone else working at Sanguina. The staff seemed to adapt to any shift in our desires, even the most fleeting of feelings, without a hint of strain. Dispositions so finely honed commanded a premium in the service industry, indeed in any business, or any relationship. No doubt he made far more money than I ever did from my day jobs.
Paul was somewhat less composed than the staff, suppressing a sigh before a smirk crept across his face, one registering both forbearance and delight in our uneasiness. He’d had many years to make sense of Garrett’s antics, or at least to make peace with them. We weren’t so lucky. Garrett pulled out his wallet and turned it over absentmindedly in his hands, fingering the stitching of the black leather, nondescript except for its thickness, rugged beyond all use. “I think we could use copy sometimes, sure,” he said finally, almost matter-of-factly. He turned to Karen. “Headlines, or something more? I looked over the magazine issues you sent me. I thought the text was interesting across the board, not just within the ads, but outside them, too.”
I wondered just what he’d seen of her text art, which was equivalent to asking which issues of the magazine he’d seen. In the earliest days, if I wasn’t simply romanticizing beginnings, Cosquer had been more capricious, as Karen had worked from the premise that formal precision was no obstacle to recondite meanings, which led to an exacting kind of poetic illegibility. Other times she would render the words and letterforms themselves in strenuous ways, with such graphical condensation you could barely tell what you were reading, or in weights so heavy they seemed to positively invade your space as you looked at them. More recently, though, she’d turned toward greater transparency in form and substance. Simple sentences, simply adorned; perhaps it was no coincidence that the magazine itself had become more influential in the design world.
Whatever her motives in making the shift, Karen’s art had grown uneven because of it. Some of the newer pieces were among her very worst, I thought, not transparent so much as blunt, mired deep in the intractable silliness of Holzer, Montgomery, and Sherman, all of whom, it was now apparent, represented empty gestures in the history of art. If Karen’s works were still typographically more sophisticated than her slab-serif-obsessed precursors, these days they could be crude in their social critique and generally too sure of themselves, especially about the significance of their own doubts about society. A good number of her text pieces didn’t justify more than a glance.
The most intriguing strand of Karen’s recent work differed. It ran through the last dozen or so issues of the magazine, unassuming pages of Times New Roman, as if pulled from a twenty-first century version of Yeah. They were effectively slice-of-life anecdotes, each no longer than a thousand words, though the life they concerned was not her own, and they weren’t staged in a place that was recognizably New York. In fact they seemed to occur in many places and many times. They must have been slices of many lives, and I had no real idea what conclusions to draw from them, particularly given their unframed, centerless quality and the vacillation in point of view, first to third and back again. Nor did she quite know what they amounted to, I suspect. Yet lately the magazine seemed to me most worth following for what it would reveal about these textual snapshots, what sort of life their accumulation might point to. Were they fiction or fact? She would look at me shyly when I asked. They are what they are, that’s all she would offer. This or some other pedestrian deflection, and always with an enigmatic shrug. Whatever they were, she was allowing herself more leash here than ever before.
Most of Karen’s art, however, and the most visually impressive portion of it, concerned fairness in a way I found increasingly life-averse. It made me worry Garrett would get the wrong idea about what I was game to do for him. What had taken her down this road? A slip in judgment? I had a hard time believing that. A loss of conviction? It was easier to accept this idea for having had that feeling about my own life, even if things were beginning to turn. Were they turning really, though? Or was that Theria—who knows really what was in it?—putting a glow on things for me? Would this campaign be her new avenue, too? Or did she just need to start drinking the stuff to begin to believe that?
Garrett squeezed his wallet and pulled out a credit card (black, of course) just as the check arrived. “I do think,” he offered, “the stronger the image, the less we need words.” He was testing the proposition on Karen, and she nodded in a way suggesting understanding without endorsement. She did this a lot, actually. I provided many occasions to, apparently.
“Exactly,” I said. “Especially nothing teacherly. Kruger-y. I don’t think anyone feels much of anything now when they see that kind of thing.”
“Well, people have been filling commercial adspace that way for a long time, since the eighties at least,” Paul said. “Not just proper artists, either. Toscani did this kind of critique for Benetton. Fuji did it. Absolut.”
“The liquor of liberation, you mean,” I added.
“It bores people. That much is true. The research is there on that.”
I couldn’t have been more pleased with Paul and his polling. Naturally Karen was less enamored. It sounded like an accusation. “I hadn’t been thinking of anything like that here,” she offered. “I don’t think I really do anything like that, anyway.”
“I know,” I said softly, as if we were alone. But no-one needed a scolding, or a lesson, built right into public space, whether it was through advertising or art. That would be to treat the world like a giant white cube, or a seminar room, glazing it with the same knowing aridity and showy selflaceration. Worse, in the case of businesses like Benetton, they were seeking to cleanse the banal and pernicious aims of market transactions with the purity of a moral sentiment that found no traction in the actual world, a sentiment detached from all consequence, which was more properly called a lie.
We needed to plant something else in the world. I certainly did, and I was sure Garrett agreed with me. Art had shifted so much on people’s tongues over the millennia, in a sort of semantic zigzag, from Greek notions of good craft to medieval ideas of devotion and transubstantiation to Romantic concepts of inner expression down to the reflexive intellection of the present era. I wasn’t terribly concerned if what we were about to undertake didn’t precisely align with today’s usage. Soon enough that usage would give way, too. What would matter, retrospectively, was only whether what we’d done, under whatever banner, was something worth our attention. Or else we would just stretch the concept of art. Wasn’t that always the work that rated highest historically, even if it had to start in scorn and incomprehension?
Karen ignored my sotto voce and moved things ahead, though with a feigned sprightliness in her voice, as she often did to mask her focus. “And the logos?”
Garrett sighed as though he’d long since tired of this question, even avoided it: the troubles it raised, the philosophy it called for. As closely acquainted with the problem as he was, he was also used to pushing it into the shadows: “Did you see those swatches of his?” he said in a bright burst, leaning forward and signing the check. Paul hadn’t brought printouts of these dabs of color, so Garrett simply spread his fingertips to suggest those smears of paint.
“I did,” she said.
“Can a color be a logo?”
“In what form?”
“No form?”
Paul radiated amusement, as though he’d already put this to Garrett and was enjoying Karen’s disbelief at the response: a request for a formless logo. But Paul was wrong about that. If she was at all incredulous, it was only because such a possibility might occur to Garrett. She was impressed. We both were. It boded well.
As soon as Garrett’s wallet went back into his pocket—he stood slightly to maneuver it in; it was tall, European, with nothing Midwestern about it except for its sturdiness, so it had to go in his front pocket before he could sit down again—his expression veered back toward the practical. That odd, wide-eyed tentativeness I associated with him had been flushed. Settling up had done it, as if now, with the bill paid and the meeting effectively adjourned, the time for the sort of speculation he found so useful in his life was over for the night.
“I’ve always tried to make things like nothing else,” he said without much inflection. “So of course I want my marketing to be that way, too. That’s to be expected. But I want you two, and the rest of you, the people at Cosquer... I mean, the magazine you put out is just phenomenal.” He said this as if it irked him to do so, though that feeling must have attached to the fact that he once again was forced down a sidetrack, just when he’d meant to be coming down from loftier heights to the plane of decision. He looked to Paul. Perhaps he could pick things up, wrap up the conversation. Happily for all of us, Paul seconded Garrett with the solemnity he paired with all serious judgment. Having secured Paul’s backing, Garrett continued, as if that alone had been enough to push him past the block. “It makes me feel sure about this project. That’s why I wanted you two: his paintings, your magazine. Whatever your ideas, copy, no copy, we’ll listen. Logos, no logos, odd logos, same thing. And the images themselves—this is what matters most to me—I don’t actually want you guessing what I like. Not too much, anyway, beyond what I’ve said. Let me, let Paul, see what you like, just through what you come back with.”
The bearded waiter collected the check and we were all quickly standing.
“If we like it, too, that’s perfect. I’m betting we will. But if we don’t—I think we will, but if we don’t—I’d like to just leave things there. No second takes. That’s just not going to turn out the way I want it.” He grabbed me by the arm and squeezed. “But you’ll still get your fee.” I suppose he knew I needed the money more than anyone else at the table. I let myself laugh when I looked at him. We both chortled, in fact, not something I much did, and we did it full well knowing.
“So we’ll play it by ear, I guess,” Karen said. “I just want to be sure you’re on board with that.” Everyone nodded. “Really, it’s our favorite way to work—when a client’s open to it.” I could tell by the little movements of her hands as she spoke, the way her gestures subtly accelerated, that Karen was genuinely excited by Garrett’s experimental approach, never mind that Paul seemed to feel somewhat differently.
“Shall we?” Karen said, pointing to the doors leading back into the restaurant. She and I had quickly accepted that drinks were all we had convened over, that there’d never been any thought of eating.
“I’m sorry about dinner,” Garrett said as we walked, resuscitating the truth. “There are just things I should take care of tonight. And Paul, I’m thinking it’d be best if you finished off those projections, for Bobby and Lynn, right now. They’ll need them first thing. Does that ruin your evening?” He was beginning to laugh.
“You’ve ruined so many, though,” Paul returned in a startlingly sweet deadpan as he checked his phone. It jarred me, this lightheartedness that had been absent all night. Instantly it gave Paul fresh proportions. For all I knew, this edgy tenderness might comprise the lion’s share of his character. Why had I thought I’d understood anything about him so quickly? Yet people like Paul had a way of provoking this sort of absurd response, and in so doing had a valuable role to play in life. Something in their disposition, I’m not sure just what, invites you to rush to judgment about the contours of their person; and then, with some relish, they invariably proceed to reveal the utterly ordinary fact that no-one can see anything so quickly as all that, not without the healthiest dose of luck. As we finished up at the table and I looked over Paul through my altered notions of him, I was left to wonder about the many things he and all others of curiously deceptive bearing might gain, if only unconsciously, through misrecognition, and whether I myself was just such a beneficiary.