Outside, in the parking lot, clouds shifted in torqued lattices, throwing down rain and shrouding a moon that was only half there to begin with. Cars roamed around the tiny zone of asphalt shut in uncertainly by wilting chain-link, swinging shafts of light in symmetrical pairs like search teams. I followed these beams with my gaze, hoping they’d find the woman for me, and caught a whiff of cheap tobacco for my trouble. Just under the awning next to the door I found a long row of smokers, all of them lost to their own worlds, tending to a compulsion they’d nourished in themselves over the years. I inspected each of them under the orange lights falling from the lamps high above and lighting up the mist, haloing everyone. Really such scrutiny wasn’t necessary. If that bright wash of hair were here, it would have found me. But I studied them all the same—one of them too long, apparently. Her gaze sharpened in a way that obliged me to ask for a cigarette, masking my true interest, which was, sad to say, strictly visual and entirely indifferent to her concrete existence or anything else she might provide me. People as a rule don’t like being gazed at this way. It is, frankly, slightly frightening; even I could be unnerved when the eyes of certain artists fell upon me. Curiously, people prefer it, when you take notice of them, that you do want something from them: a cigarette, say, even if they have no intention of giving it to you. The reason is simple enough. When you treat them in the usual way—as a means to an end, that is—they have a good idea of how you are going to behave. But when a man stares at you simply for the sake of staring, what is he likely to do next? No-one can say.
I offered to pay for the cigarette. That’s all you had to do, in certain company; you’d instantly win favor, and they would never take you up on your offer. I claimed my smoke and ambled off toward the far edge of the parking lot, looking about first in the dark, and then near the streetlights, hoping without really believing I’d catch sight of Daphne. Escape was apparently her way.
The rain began to strengthen and my hair soon reached saturation: the first trickle of water ran down my scalp and neck. The weather seemed to be accelerating my thoughts. A decision needed to be made. I almost reflexively called a car, but as I rounded the corner I found myself by chance under another awning, a neighborhood bodega’s, with fruits and vegetables still set out, thick columns of avocados and lettuces and asparagus. My feet were aching from the svelte leather soles of my shoes. Every time I wore them this happened; I could feel every pebble beneath me. I was sweating, too, from the heavy fabrics swathing me, particularly my necktie. But I didn’t even consider loosening it. That was a rule my father had given me, and breaking it always struck me as a loss of nerve, a defeat. When you loosened a tie, the garment showed itself to be merely a prop, to be discarded, or worse, left dangling in the sloppiest way, the very instant you didn’t have to have it on. So I always left it on, knotted, in deference to a script that was, after all, of my own (or strictly my father’s) devising, a law unto myself. It would come off only when the rest did, at home.
The show, I realized, had exhausted me. A mere forty-five minutes had left everyone—audience and performers alike—hollowed out, which was, in a way, to Nik’s credit. A lot of people’s nights would have been ruined; after-theater plans would have to be called off. Some might end up mutely sitting around the bar, unable to muster the usual banter. The director, a secret admirer of the theater of cruelty, I sensed, would have been pleased thinking about that. He had a right to be, I suppose.
As I took one last draw from my damp cigarette, tasting the acrid flavor of the filter, it occurred to me that tonight was the first night in a long time my expenses were not my own. There used to be quite a few of these nights, courtesy of Claire. She was the progeny of two old Boston families who’d made their fortunes in shipping and paper. She had access to money in the best of ways, where there was no need to ask for it; where there was, indeed, an expectation that, within reason, you’d call upon your ancestors’ largesse in launching your own life. This was just the style in which Garrett would raise a child, I thought, if he ever had one. It could be how he was already raising Daphne, if Jeff was to be believed. In any case, it certainly wasn’t the world I inhabited, not anymore, now that Claire had gone.
Technically, of course, I came from some money, but on nothing like the same scale. Since my father and mother were far more self-made than Claire’s parents, however, I wasn’t going to see any of that wealth for some time. They found it unseemly to handle things otherwise, and I’d already damaged my name with them to some extent, although this was only conveyed to me in subtle ways, like the growing length of their pauses when I’d speak to them about my economic circumstances. Tonight would be, could be, a blissful return to the days of Claire’s munificence, when I’d been able to defer all shame. Garrett, a man also of the haute bourgeoisie, if only for three generations, rather than Claire’s seven or eight—well, he was going to be paying for everything. Why rush home then? Could there be much wrong in seizing the few spoils to be had, a more comfortable living foremost among them, since I’d broken with a purer artistic path, the abandonment of which I had to believe was also, in some way, behind Claire’s disappearance from my life?
These days I had many skeptics, even if she was the first of them (did she take some pride in that?). Questions loomed wherever I went, questions I’d first seen rising in her eyes; I could feel them now in the gazes not just of friends and acquaintances but strangers, too. In the creative sphere, they came from both directions, from the autonomous and relational artists, but equally from the commercial folks. Remarkably, all of this—and this was the crux of it, what made me so puzzling to others—all of this had been entirely avoidable, unlike for the great bulk of designers, those would-be artists who’d come up short in their original aims, lost their nerve, their self-belief, somewhere or other, and found themselves condemned to the noisome stalls of the marketplace. John was a meaningful exception to this rule, as he practiced commercial art with the ethos of a fine artist. Yet it was just this interrogative spirit I found repellant, involving as it did a general obeisance to critique. He was in essence inverting Warhol. And there was always a sardonic, seen-everything criticality in Warhol and his heirs: Koons, Hirst, Murakami. The joke had long ago grown stale, though; it might never have been particularly fresh.
But what was I doing now with Garrett exactly? If it wasn’t critique, then wasn’t I capitulating to commerce, to advertising and the movement of product, right along with the hacks? I had no explanation, and that seemed to be the one thing that wasn’t tolerated, to be without a story of why you were rubbing shoulders with mercenaries. It was pushing me off the grid vis-à-vis fine art of any kind. All I knew was that I was entering the commercial sphere with the idea that, in this moment, there was no richer artistic soil to work, even if I had no proper idea of what I was going to plant in it. And as long as I was tending this patch of land, I thought, and was made to endure the skepticism that went along with it, there was no reason not to enjoy the perks: like, say, a night with a multi-millionaire’s credit card. And, anyway, didn’t Garrett owe me something for putting Jeff and his insinuations right there beside me in the seats? Surely he could have called him off on this particular night. No: he would have insisted Jeff go, tonight of all nights. He would have paid him double for it. Those long, assessing looks Jeff gave me throughout the play certainly didn’t put me at ease (although his words were another matter), and stealing his scarf hadn’t helped things. It seemed only right to restore my spirits on Garrett’s dime. I could say I was meeting with the other cast members, scouting Daphne in some way. Any excuse would do; he’d never look into it.
The street narrowed and bent around like a question mark; there was even an island further down to serve as its dot. Wind channeled through the road, tilting the trees and the fall of the rain. Looking through the windows of the first of three bars along the curve, I found lots of velvet and leather and dark wood, and few people, which was all the convincing I needed. I took a small table next to a deeply beveled mirror with a frame of tarnished silver. The barman came around and handed me a thick book with page after page of single malts and vintage wines, but I decided to let him do the choosing. He asked if I had any limits in mind, and I could reply honestly for once that I didn’t. I opened a tab; he chose quickly and well: the Corryvreckan. He went looking for the bottle high up on the wall using a simple squeaky footstool—no sliding ladders for him.
My chest stung from the sharp corners of the sketchpad; if I left the book in my pocket much longer it might well saw through the lining. I fished it out and laid it face-down on the table. Soon after, my scotch arrived, and from the first sip it overpowered me in the best way, pushing me out of my own imagination into a plain confrontation with sensation. I typed out a little note to Garrett on my phone then. Somehow I’d missed Daphne, I explained. She’d escaped. She loved to escape, apparently. Did you know this? (I did find your man Jeff, for what it’s worth.) But, I assured him, there was no problem; I’d already gotten what I needed from Daphne for the moment, just from watching her onstage, having again been struck by her capacity to express not herself but the role. Had he seen any of it, Nik’s work? He really ought to.
I sent the email and put away the phone, hoping not to need it again until I called for a car home, barely able to stand, and only just coherent enough to call. I returned to the exquisite liquor idling in the glass and left all further selections, like the first, entirely to the bartender. He seemed an old hand, the kind of man you could tell, just by looking at him, knew his whiskey—perhaps even a bit too well. He brought me a second dram, a boutique rye from Oklahoma I’d never heard of, and in short order a third, a dark, syrupy rum that had the qualities of both a fine whiskey and a cabernet. I was imbibing with the abandon one typically reserves for house liquor (if one insists on doing this kind of drinking) and, it’s true, I was also relishing the wrinkle I was offering the staff and guests tonight, through my own little performance, which fused a quiet, unassailably courteous manner and an immaculate dress sense to an unrepentant and irrepressible lust for drink. I lifted my eyes to the mirror beside me as I worked on the rum, mostly to observe my own image, the impression I was making. I was also, in that same look, hoping to find the bartender’s eye, so that I might appreciate his own developing impression of me, and glimpse his surprise, even mortification, at what I was writing (or drinking) into affairs tonight in his redoubtable establishment.
Yet the only shock I managed to induce was my own. Right on the mirror’s surface, with the streetlamps shining into the bar, backlighting all I could see, I found, added to affairs, that great bundle of blonde hair, sitting atop a girl’s head like some Hellenic helmet. I swallowed hard and ducked, as if I might disappear from sight simply by vanishing from the mirror. At the same time, I brought my glass down with the unintended force of a beer mug pounded at a fraternity party, sending reverberations through the wood, my body, the room at large. The thud and the ringing that ensued also served, though again unintentionally, as a rude and incontrovertible signal to the staff that I would presently be needing another. A second barman, apparently an apprentice, judging by the way he worked under the veteran’s eye, appeared underage, with a face so smooth you had trouble imagining him ever needing to shave, although he was so effete in his manner and build, you knew he’d never desire a beard—this boy came looping around the counter at speed and with some alarm. My chagrin was palpable when he hovered over my table, examining me, trying to puzzle out my loutish gesture. I averted my eyes when he scooped up my empty glass. I’d not meant to take things quite this far, and my nerves only began to settle when I thought of the old British tradition of Lowry, Waugh, and Bacon: boors with the bottle and gentlemen in all other ways. Whatever my intentions, the slamming of the drink comported perfectly with this character I’d been laying the groundwork for tonight, even if that wasn’t actually why I’d slammed it.
Of far greater concern to me than the help’s reaction was whether Daphne had caught sight of all this. Would my apparently vulgar act serve as our unfortunate introduction? And would I now have to make her acquaintance in the fuzzy state of mind I was locked into, seeing as I’d had nothing to eat with my drinks? Each of them was a generous pour, closer to a double than a single, as befitted the manner of the place. Nothing came measured in those little antiseptic steel thimbles you saw at the frou-frou houses of mixology; here it was always down to the bartender’s eye, and his heart, too, his distinctive sense for the appetites of the customer at hand. With me, he’d recognized my need for drinks so strong they numbed the palate.
Daphne couldn’t have been here long, that much I knew. Otherwise I would have seen her as I passed by the bar on my way in. Maybe, though, she’d been in the bathroom, or on the vintage payphone I noted in the corridor leading to it, tucked far off to one side, a tunnel lined with spare furniture to be pulled out on big nights. The mirror’s glare, a product of a large chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling, along with the yellow-orange streetlights just beyond the windows, was forcing me to squint slightly. A mirror hanging this low, I realized, made seeing whatever it reflected, in this case Daphne’s outline, all but unavoidable, when one’s eyes eventually chanced upon it. Actually I’d chosen the table for its proximity to the glass—not to observe people at the bar surreptitiously, though it was an ideal place for that—but to be close to the mirror’s unusually vast face, and the ornate frame surrounding it, which I could see now was genuinely antique.
The boy came scampering back with a fourth drink selected by his mentor. He explained to me with great care, as if managing the slow and inevitable loss of my senses, that it was a young but distinguished Irish whiskey. I nodded at the older man behind the bar and he returned a look of resignation. He’d seen men of my kind too many times; he might even have been one of us. If it weren’t for the fact that we were the ones who kept the bars open, he would have rather seen my chair empty. I held my face in my hands, as if exhausted or despairing, to obscure my identity while my gaze inexorably crept up the mirror’s surface. In this way, looking through my fingers with my head angled toward the mirror, I could see Daphne sitting quite apart from the other patrons, most of whom appeared like older versions of me, my uncommonly dressed-up self, anyway—the Gay Taleses of New York. She was focused on the little plate in front of her, stabbing at it with her fork (tines down, at least) and spearing what I thought was sautéed spinach studded with pine nuts. Every so often, she’d bring the wilted leaves up to her mouth in long dangling strands and push them in with her head cocked to one side. She looked as if she were smiling as she did this, though once she’d completed the maneuver it was clear she was simply famished and not in any frolicking mood. I kept my eyes on her: as long as she was this hungry, this preoccupied, I could get away with staring, which was of course the profoundest way to see, even through a mirror.
There was a second plate in front of her, half-gone, with purple potatoes, or eggplant, or beets on it. On one side of her was an empty glass of water and a margarita she hadn’t touched; the salt rim was still perfectly formed, I could see. She’d simply pulled a motorcycle jacket over that feathery cotton dress from the play, not even bothering to change out of her costume. The dress, which continued to give the impression of nightclothes, was yellow, not white or cream, as I’d thought, and the jacket, unusually, seemed actually to fit, as though it was really hers and not a boyfriend’s.
I lingered over her reflection in the smudged mirror. She’d turned back to her plate of purple without making any inroads on her drink. I set my gaze plainly on her face now, the jaw in particular, sharply defined and projecting forward in a V, giving her a pronounced, almost excessively leonine aspect, which was by turns comely and chilling. Amber eyes lent her a searching, fearsome quality, even when, I suspected, she wasn’t really looking very hard. No, this was simply the natural expression of a face of belligerent intelligence, an almost beastly visage incompatible with classical notions of beauty, female or male, and incapable of the tranquil repose in which women like Claire unthinkingly basked. Still, all told, it was probably a gift. It could hold people at bay. What’s more, it set her apart from the city’s more routine beauties, the legions you saw on every street, stepping out of a bodega in midtown, a subway station in Bed-Stuy, an urgent care unit in the Bronx, so many that you never got the chance to develop a proper appetite for them. With Daphne, though, and the wounded bitterness she wore so well, there weren’t many replicas, precisely because she didn’t form an ideal to which others aspired and were determined to realize—if not with makeup, then by way of the scalpel. Nevertheless, from the way she engaged the barmen, it was clear enough that those claws could be retracted and the meanness in her eyes transmuted into earnest curiosity, all through a simple adjustment of the shape of her mouth, when she would slightly pucker it and cloak herself in a pensive air. The freckled cheeks helped, inscribing a degree of naiveté in her that tempered the wariness of her gaze and would, I was sure, far outlast her youth.
I’d lingered too long, though. Returning my gaze to the narrow bridge of her nose, I discovered her regarding me openly while chewing and licking her teeth in a particular manner I’d always found entrancing, so much so that I’d already painted many pictures in this vein, of men and women masticating in posh restaurants, the food peeking out of their mouths; of professionals sunbathing on hotel roofs or swimming off urbanized coastlines (Rio, Miami); and especially of urbanites gathered under awnings, avoiding heavy rains or unrelieved sunshine like leopards clustered beneath acacias on the savannah. For all I knew so far, Garrett’s project might be able to accommodate such urban pastorals, as I liked to think of them.
Technically, I wasn’t meeting Daphne’s gaze. I was looking between her eyes rather than at them. But how could she tell that, from this distance? I shifted my eyes a bit farther away, to make the distinction clearer, and focused on a spot beside her head. I was careful to keep my face absolutely still, to be as unresponsive to her gaze as possible, so as to suggest that even if my eyes had run into hers, I hadn’t actually registered her presence. Now, it appeared as though I were observing something just behind her, in the street, and she were merely an obstacle to my view. The intensity of my stare was strong enough to get her to swivel her head and follow my gaze—right onto a nondescript tree. She turned back, unconvinced, I’m sure, that such a thing could deserve such attention, and shifted her face right into my sightline to capture my gaze.
But I was ahead of her. I’d pulled my eyes from the mirror and returned them to the bottom of my glass. I took another long and self-conscious drink, I more or less emptied the tumbler, and I wondered if Daphne could tell from where she was that hereafter only pantomime was possible. All the pleasure of that last nip, too, like the pleasure of seeing her sate herself with spinach and beets, was denied me by my new audience.
I set down the glass decisively and snuck a glance in the mirror. She smiled at me. I felt sick—not from the drinks, not yet at least—but from the dawning prospect of having to reverse course tonight and redirect my hedonic energies toward the practical end of making Daphne’s acquaintance. It filled me, could only fill me, with desolation. Because wasn’t getting to know her precisely my obligation? Worse, didn’t I steer right into this by coming to a bar so close to the theater, knowing from the rest of the cast that Daphne tended to disappear after performances to unwind, so that there were good odds that she’d use one of the nearest watering holes to do it? And then, the final recklessness, even after seeing her here: didn’t I dawdle in looking her over so that discovery was inevitable?
My misjudgment would mean, among other things, putting on hold another pleasure I was just getting around to, something else funded by my new benefactor: football. I wanted to go over in my mind the game to come, in the same heedless way I’d been casting my gaze over Daphne. It’d been a long time since I’d seen live football. The Raiders had been playing then, and I’d gone with Ty (of course) but also little Helena, five years my junior. That game was low on points, I recall; it had all turned on a fade route by Michael Crabtree, a receiver I’d last seen play, and who’d spent the early part of his career, with the 49ers. He made that catchand the Raiders went on to win a rather forgettable game—forgettable, though, only if you were a routine spectator, but not for me, and certainly not for Helena, who frequently and wistfully reminded Ty and me about it, this talismanic moment of communion between the three of us, which, naturally, could only serve that function through substantial misremembrance. For one thing, it rained the entire time, though my sister claims not to have noticed.
Beyond my official duties for Garrett, Sunday would involve a modicum of simple fun, the sort of thing that art generally eschewed. The Vegetable Gender had been stimulating, no doubt, but stimulation can be deeply unpleasant. There is nothing fundamentally affirmative written into the notion. Nik’s play existed, I thought, antagonistically: it said no in some fundamental sense. Sports, though, even in its most nakedly brutal forms, like football or ice hockey, says yes. It always does. This is why, in boxing, fighters frequently embrace in the ring afterward, the more tightly and lovingly—even kissing each other sometimes—in proportion to how violent and fraught events had become. Therefore, however low your regard for football as a sport, however dubious all the traumatic brain injuries and off-the-field indiscretions of its stars, it possessed the telltale force of all things through which life genuinely flows. Like advertising, there was no questioning it as a vessel of communal significances, no need for tortuous exegesis to unearth it, as in the more esoteric corners of life—like art. Its primary meaning was established by the very fact of its occurrence. You could be sure it had import, in just the manner of the mass festivals of the ancient world, even if you didn’t fully understand what it was. In the case of modern sports, not just stadium spectators partook, but, through television, so did millions of households around the world, all crowded into the same moment. Sports was what kept network television alive, I knew. It’s why the Superbowl, through its commercial interludes, furnished what was still the most expensive advertising space in the world.
Part of the reason I’d been so relieved not to have found Daphne after exiting the theater was that, on this score, art was entirely different: sooner or later—generally sooner—you would be expected to discuss what you’d witnessed, what you thought you discovered in the experience, in a way you would never be expected to, not with any articulacy or originality, after a football match. You were certainly permitted to talk about the game, but this was purely at your pleasure. And for every fan who followed advanced statistical measures, who had teams in multiple fantasy leagues, who parsed each play with giddy aplomb, there were ten who were content to watch and think nothing of the game afterward other than, perhaps, we won, or just so-and-so beat so-and-so. Wasn’t this the highest response? Silence, or something very near to it? Despite the lip service paid to the idea, silence was almost never acceptable in the aftermath of an artistic production. To appreciate was in some sense to think and talk about the thing experienced, and the better you appreciated, the more elaborately you thought and talked. How else to prove that there really was something to it, except through baroque discussion?
“What’s that?”
Just like that she was upon me, derailing my train of thought. I looked up from my glass to find Daphne’s face close to mine, her breath smelling of triple sec and beets. She was pointing at my little gray notebook, its cardboard covers bent, arced, curved in the shape of my chest. Wouldn’t it be fun, I thought, to finally flick it open and compare the girl in those pages to the one at the bar with me now?
“I didn’t get any of these,” she said as she scooped up a hazelnut and a green olive from the elegant tray the waiter had brought me when I’d first arrived. I’d not touched these nibbles yet, mainly so that I could enjoy the effects of liquor unmitigated by anything that might retard the process of intoxication. Daphne grabbed some almonds and another olive, and I, with a certain grim resignation, followed suit, reaching out to collect small handfuls of each. “You don’t mind, I hope?” she asked.
I shook my head as she fetched a tall mahogany chair, almost a throne, from up against the wall. It didn’t match the rest of the bar’s furniture, yet its grand proportions seemed to me to suit her sense of moment. The seat she’d picked was too heavy for her to lift cleanly, so she dragged it across the hardwood floor, causing a vicious squeaking to fill the room. The bartender immediately surveyed us both, though for whatever reason—probably his familiarity with Daphne—he stopped short of any admonishment. Daphne set the chair at right angles to me and slid onto the green velvet cushion with her legs gently crossed and her dress flaring, displaying a grace in all opposition to the roughness with which she’d just rearranged the scene. From there, together, we rather indelicately plowed through the olives and nuts and cheese, ensuring that I wouldn’t need to speak right away.
“So,” she said, with her mouth still full—some see no deterrent—“did you come here looking for me?” With that, she’d pushed things past the threshold. I steadied myself in the face of the inevitable, and although adrenaline, together with the bar snacks, was sobering me up, I was hardly straight yet. “James said I should be sure to meet you tonight.”
I nodded, my mouth still full of pecans and crumbles of an unknown blue.
“But I had no feeling in me at all by the end of it,” she sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“It exhausts you”—these absurd words, and the sentiment that accompanied them, no less absurd, were conveniently garbled by the chewing I was happily engaged in. Apparently not quite enough: Daphne raised her eyes from a fresh tray of nibbles just deposited by the barman, this one heaping with all the same things, and smiled firmly at me, as if she wouldn’t abide the clichés about actors and their frailties.
“Is that what they said? Well, I was prepared for Jimmy to be upset. He’s always mad at me in little ways. It’s usually my fault, too. So I came here for a drink or two. I was feeling a tiny bit guilty.”
The old man behind the counter swooped in with the margarita Daphne had left untouched at the bar; he seemed to know more about our evening than we did.
“I got a very sweet message from Jimmy earlier,” she said. “He’d just gone ahead and assumed I wouldn’t find you tonight, and it was not at all a problem, he said, there’d be other chances, don’t worry. And so I was off the hook, but still feeling sorry. I thought I’d at least look you up on my phone, maybe find your email address online, or your Twitter, and send you a message or something, apologize. But you don’t have a website, or social media. A couple of photos did come up, from openings around—you know, I’ve actually seen some of your work up close, in galleries. What do you think of that?”
She wasn’t interested in a response, so I offered none.
“And just a second later, right above my phone screen, I don’t know why I looked there, in the mirror, but I saw your face in it. The same face I’d just found online. Second chances!”
Daphne took a sip from her margarita and offered it to me. “Since I stole all your olives?”
I smiled weakly but made no move; the last thing I needed was more booze.
She shrugged and with her next draft fully breached the salt rim. “You’re dressed so perfectly tonight, though. I couldn’t find anything like this online.” She patted my lapel. “But then I saw your little sketchbook, sitting right there, so it had to be you.” She put her hand over my pages. “It’s a sketchbook, right?”
I pulled it closer to me, away from her long, lean fingers, and flattened out the rolled cover with my palm. She was the fifth drink I didn’t need.
“And so... I came over.” She winked at me, a just-for-laughs sort of wink, it didn’t mean much, except that she was going to pass over the fact that we’d actually made eye contact earlier, in the mirror, and that I’d tried then to pretend we hadn’t, was pretending even now. She put her hand, cold and wet from the condensation of her glass, over mine. “So show me.”
I regarded her skeptically, and she shrugged again, removed her hand from mine. “The sketches are really just for me,” I said as I depleted the tray, which was fast becoming dinner.
“And why is that?”
“I drew them in the dark.”
“I was wondering how you’d managed.”
“I haven’t even seen them myself yet.”
“It’s hard enough to act in the dark, you know.”
“That’s what the tall guy seemed to think.”
“Hank? You talked to him?”
“Not really.”
“But he told you I tire easily?”
“One of the others did. The girl, or really, the woman.”
“Alice.”
“But there wasn’t anything malicious about it.”
“Little Alice, without malice.” She thought about it a second, her proto-limerick, before putting her fingers on the edge of the sketchbook and tugging at it. “So we’ll just look at these together then.” The book was still in my grip, my unflinching hand making my misgivings known. “They might be yours, but they are of me, right?”
“Of everything, really.”
“Oh, just let me see one of them. Just the first page, how about that?” Daphne brought the glass to her mouth again, looked at me with those watery amber eyes, and pointed to my empty tumbler: “Don’t you want another of those?”
I turned away from her slightly and made to open the pad.
“No—the last page, I changed my mind,” she said. “And you can’t look at it first.”
She came around behind me and stationed herself over my shoulder; her hands landed on me with unexpected force.
“Oh, that’s not fair,” she said, “don’t do that.”
I’m not sure what she meant. Maybe I sighed, or maybe something changed in my face. Could I even have cringed at her touch?
“Can we get him another of these?” she said to the older bartender, handing him my glass. I didn’t interfere. “Jim would want you to drink with me.” She squeezed my shoulder. “He always does.”
I still hadn’t opened the book, though I’d flipped it over so that the back page would be on top: my only concession to her so far.
“Don’t I have to figure out if we should be working together?” she asked.
“Oh, you’ll get the wrong idea from these.”
“Only a genius could understand them, I guess?”
“Alice did say you might be one.”
“Someone should slap little Alice.” Again she drank. “Have a sip?” She pushed the margarita up to my lips, tilted the glass, and I decided I’d rather open my mouth than have the drink in my lap.
“Good, no?” she teased. “Look, under the circumstances, I won’t judge you—too harshly.”
“I don’t really worry about things like that, Daphne”—which was true, mostly.
“Well, let’s just look,” she insisted, threading her arm under mine from behind and reaching for the sketchbook.
I’d come, of course, expecting a certain amount of wiliness from her, having seen enough of it from other artists. Instead of being rattled by her antics, I simply opened the back cover first, left to right, revealing the reverse side of the final image. The paper was certainly heavy, but my markings, repetitive and circular, had apparently been heavier: shadowy impressions peeked through from the other side. Before we could start to make sense of these faint lines, another drink arrived—a simple corn whiskey, the old man explained, or possibly admonished, I couldn’t tell. Daphne made to pick it up but I snatched it away.
“Can’t I even taste it? I let you have some of mine.”
Actually I’d only been worried she’d try to put this drink to my lips, like the margarita. I handed her the tumbler and she drank without comment. I took it back from her and sampled it, too.
“Well?” she asked.
“I don’t like it.”
I felt her nodding vigorously, her chin bobbing up and down on my shoulder, exulting in the congruence of our sensibilities. “The rest is yours!” she chirped, thrusting her hand onto the blank sheet in front of us and feeling the ridges in the paper made by the marks on the reverse side, as though reading braille. All I could attend to, however, was her heartbeat radiating through my shoulder as she leaned over me.
I relocated her hand and finally flipped the page. I didn’t look at the picture, though. I looked at her face, which was right over my shoulder, as her bouncy hair tickled my cheek. I knew that she, too, had yet to really look at the drawing, though I couldn’t see her eyes, owing to the blonde curtain between us. Probably her eyes weren’t even open. Mine weren’t. There were other things to appreciate just then that had nothing to do with sight.
I continually expected Daphne to shatter the silence that prevailed, but she held to it admirably, which let me actually look at the drawings myself, properly, as if I were alone, rather than pantomiming the act and perceiving only an aggregation of pen strokes, something that could happen when I studied things in company. The scene before us, I recalled, came from very near the end of the performance, just before I’d run out of paper. I’d been dwelling mostly on Jeff at the time, the specter who’d been so near to me in the theater. I’d also been wondering when the show would finish, given how little narrative there was to cling to. The linework in the picture was decisive, as, by this point in the production, I’d adjusted to the dark and could select my strokes more judiciously rather than simply rambling with my pen. In the show, the pyramid of stage-light had been sharply set off from the surrounding dark, so that this black void seemed to have decapitated the giant. It had to be said, the show’s lighting was inspired, very precisely choreographed. Jeff deserved credit, however much he’d disturbed me with his breathing and typing and gnomic whisperings.
In my sketch you could see the pyramid’s base very clearly inscribed on the stage. I wondered if Daphne was seeing this now, if her eyes had opened like mine and she was peering at a single impression of a scene from her play, my impression, extruded onto paper so that you could see, if you cared to, what I’d seen or imagined I had. As your gaze climbed the page, the light fell away, which meant that the uppermost object, Hank’s head—he was rearing up again here, like the Loch Ness Monster—was completely lost to vision. The countenance you did see immediately was Daphne’s; her face was at chest height to him.
I wondered if she was staring at herself right now. Daphne put her finger to her likeness, which was starkly simplified but recognizably hers. There were elementary distortions to it—an imbalance between what was above and below the ears, the chin clearly too narrow—yet without any of the hyperbole of the caricaturist. She began to slide her fingers slowly over the lines, sweeping over the little girl—I’d never learned her name—who appeared here as the most rudimentary of my figures, lying prone at the upper border of the sketch, only her face within the light, and her body receding into darkness. Yet wasn’t all that my embroidery? Hadn’t I lamented the child’s disappearance after the opening scene, her never appearing onstage with the other actors? So then what was this girl doing here in this sketch, besides proving that when I drew, there were times, at least since I’d started drinking Theria, that I wasn’t aware of my pen strokes, so that phantoms like this might find a place, too. Much the same had happened when I’d drawn from The Sort.
Daphne caressed Elias next, starting with his shoes and drifting upward. He was facing away from us and playing the bassoon on a small stool, or rather, in the image before us, he was preparing to play, assembling the pieces from the pile that had in fact appeared at the very end of the performance. The phantom girl of my picture seemed not to like what she was hearing, peevishness being her salient trait. Alice had stared at the child onstage. She’d been counseling the giant as well then, but Hank’s head, then and now, was an unseen entity, rising out of the light, so who could say what he was thinking? Only Daphne could be seen taking any pleasure in the musician’s preparations.
Daphne turned to fingering the light itself, the faint little lines I’d drawn to suggest its direction, and then the firmer hatching I’d used to define its pyramidal form without resorting to contours. “This light,” she said, pushing her face against mine through the blonde curtain. I waited for more, but she left it at that.
“I wouldn’t take too much from all this,” I said somewhat breathily, though without slurring, just before flipping the sketchbook shut. Daphne recoiled. Instantly the heat from her cheek was gone.
“Why not?” she asked as she stood behind me.
“Did you see the sketches I sent James? The ones of your film?”
She nodded uncertainly at first, and then somewhat profanely, before reclaiming her throne beside me.
“Obviously I saw them.” She took a deep drink from her margarita and made eyes at me. “What an imagination you have.”
“The rest of these, though”—I tapped the book—“say a lot less than those.”
“Oh, I don’t know. What you’ve got here are improvisations. What they say just isn’t very clear yet.”
“The film sketches were improvised, too, actually.”
“Those were fantasies, is what those were.” She laughed and drank. “But these ones here, they’re...” She had both her hands on the table, palms down, and flung her head forward, low over the surface. She straightened up and looked at me without guile. “They’re untouched. And I think I like what you see, untouched. Without distortion.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it, hearing Claire’s words inverted like this. How long would it last, this feeling for another life, one that followed me around, always dying, always being born?
“I guess you think that’s a very stupid thing to say.”
“No. That’s great. It is.”
Daphne got up and dropped into her original chair across from me, vacating the throne and leaving its light green plushness shining emptily.
“I mean that,” I said. “I wasn’t—”
She flashed a cutting little smile for which her eyes seemed designed. Her lips barely rose at their corners, so that she could be said to smile mostly because of her posture: she’d cocked her head slightly, kept her eyes nearly closed, and a dimple had formed on one cheek that conveyed only ridicule. Her hand flew at me—I actually covered my face—before I saw it descending onto the sketchpad. I recovered quickly, stabbed at her hand with my own, pinning both her palm and the closed sketchbook beneath it to the worn wood of the tabletop.
“I’ll send you snaps of every sketch,” I said. “I will. But you’ve got to let me get what I need out of them first.” Glaring down at my hand, she pulled harder at the pad, rising slightly from her chair to use her bodyweight for leverage. The pad inched toward her until I used my own weight to stop it, and her. I knew I’d pressed too hard on her hand; it probably hurt. “Later, all right? If you still want to see them. I doubt you will.”
“And why not?” She sounded like she was reciting elocution lessons now. “Tell me.”
For a moment she stopped pulling her hand, left it dead on the table. I loosened my grip, acknowledging her surrender, and she ripped her hand out from under mine with one angled tug, as sharp as a knife, leaving the sketchbook precisely where it was.
“You know, I don’t have to do this at all,” she whispered, leaning just slightly over the table and finishing off her margarita.
“Then why do it?”
“I don’t need to.”
“And do you think I do? Is that what James told you?” The correct answer to the first question was, for several reasons, yes, absolutely yes. But, when goaded, I had to pretend otherwise. My response was sheerest instinct, not a calculation. Maybe I wasn’t even pretending: maybe I didn’t really need Garrett’s project. Telling Daphne as much, then, might have been a declaration of my truest intentions, and the only person I was really needing to deceive was myself. What I mean is that, to carry on at all here, with Garrett and with Daphne, I might have needed the pretense that I was willing to compromise, in light of my dire economic position. Easy enough to say you need the money. But what would I actually do when confronted with the first real compromise? Only then would I know what I needed and what I didn’t. In any case, she looked... intrigued by my rhetoric. (I’d hadn’t only surprised myself, apparently.) I also think she believed me, and it was this fact, if it was a fact, that made me want to believe me, too.
“Did Jimmy ask you to call him James?” she said. She picked up another olive and rolled it onto her tongue before seizing it between her teeth. She gnawed on the pit for a moment and then spit it not onto the little plates they’d provided, nor the empty slots in the tray, nor, as a last resort, her empty margarita glass. No, she spat the pit into my tumbler before bothering to see that it wasn’t totally empty. She replaced the glass just where it’d been, as if I still might drink from it, indeed, as if the last drops might be even more enticing to me with her pit steeping in them.
“I wonder if you’ll graduate all the way to Jim someday. Even just Jimmy.”
“Paul calls him James.”
“Things are complicated with Paul, though, aren’t they?” Daphne looked at me knowingly. “But their drinks are good, right? James’ drinks?” Her tone was suddenly constructive, as if she were moving an interview on to the next question after I’d stumbled over the last one.
“Do you think he’d go for plain old Garrett?” I said. “That’s what I’d really like to call him, the way you would in a fraternity. It’s what I already call him with everyone else.”
She looked tired of me.
“But yeah,” I said, “they’re very good. You’re right.”
“The thing is,” she said, leaning down low to the table, “did you happen to know—I don’t actually owe him anything?” It’d been a feint. She’d modulated right back to that whisper, now fashioned into more of a hiss, an oh-so-quiet one. It was perverse almost, the mutability of her voice, which, when she wasn’t whispering or grumbling, tended to break up in the most appealing way, whenever the moment was charged with pleasure, say, or exasperation. I’d already seen both tonight.
“It hadn’t crossed my mind,” I replied.
“I’m doing it just because, with this project, Jimmy wants to... well, he wants to improvise. You know he picked that up from me, right? From my father? That spirit, I mean. Even from Jeff. You must have met him tonight?”
“Your boyfriend?”
“That’s not who he is.”
“He didn’t seem to like me looking for you.”
“You know he did all the lights?” She looked around and then up at the ceiling , turning her head slowly until her gaze came to rest on the chandelier, as if comparing the bar’s mis-en-scène to the amphitheater’s.
“Light was the most interesting thing about the show, for me anyway.”
“Yes! Even if you’re trying to insult me, it’s actually true,” she said. And you’ve captured light so well right here.” She looked airily toward the sketchbook.
I pushed my lips out in demurral.
“Really, you have. You already see it, don’t you? And that’s—well, that’s the other reason I’m doing this.” She reached across the table and put both her hands on my forearm.
“Why?”
“Do you not believe I could know your work?”
I shrugged.
“I’m the reason he knows about you.”
“I thought he found out about me at—”
“At Roger’s apartment, yes. Maddy. But I took Jimmy the rest of the way. I told him about your reputation.”
“But you didn’t even know what I looked like. You had to search for me on your phone.”
“So? You’re not an actor. I don’t need to see you to know what you’ve done, and what people are saying about you.”
“And what’s that?”
“Don’t be stupid, ” she snarled, pulling away from me. “The point is, he’s smitten with you now. He thinks you’re brilliant.”
“Aren’t I?”
She seemed to prefer arrogance to modesty.
“It’s why he’s giving you so much freedom. Why he’s giving it to me, too. But what does he know about art, right?”
“Well, what’s there to know?”
She simpered. “If there’s nothing to it, well, I guess you won’t mind me just looking through this...” She grabbed at the pad and I snatched the free end of it. “I told you, I need to decide if I really want to work with, what—an ignoramus?”
“From this?”
She regarded me violently, with a predatory glower more death than sex.
“He’s paying you to be a part of it, right? Why don’t you just do it for that? You can’t be making much from shows like this one.”
“Do you understand,” she seethed, “that there isn’t any campaign unless I do it? There is nothing without me. I promise you.”
There were feelings beneath these words that had nothing to do with me, though I couldn’t say if they were directed toward anyone else in particular. Could she have been deliberately working herself up? Was she acting the part—of the actor? To what purpose, though?
Daphne’s whole face was burning and streaked with purple; her cheeks were closing in on crimson. Like a chameleon, she was changing color, blending not with the world outside but the one within. How nice it would have been to watch her blush out of modesty or embarrassment; in another world, perhaps she was. This, though, this wasn’t that. But was it merely a performance? Did it matter? Could there be anything mere about it, so long as it was honest, by which I mean, even if she’d gone elsewhere in her heart to draw these feelings to the surface, if they turned out to apply to me, this person she was only beginning to come to know, or to what I said or implied, wouldn’t her nascent impressions, these bitter, torrid feelings, be absolutely authentic in the only sense that counted, so long as she found them there when she looked at me?
She was actually crying now. Although her mouth was closed, the rest of her was screaming. The skin around her eyes looked bruised and inflamed, as if she’d been struck. The bar staff, holding their distance for now, peered at us in alarm. How much further could she carry this? I’d really not meant for things to unfold this way. I was going to be sober when we met, to prevent just this sort of outcome, which was always on the cards once I or anyone else was four or five drinks in. Whose tongue didn’t sharpen then? Whose patience didn’t lapse? But she’d blindsided me, in several ways. Showing up in the mirror, for one, after I’d thought everything was over, and then speaking so tartly to me. Had all of this happened a year ago, I might have been kinder, even if I’d been drunk. But I wasn’t used to bending much anymore, and such recalcitrance might have been my only consolation these days, for the move I’d made toward the margins, into the Bronx, outside the exhibition system, even outside the relational and public art scenes dripping with laughable emancipatory rhetoric and no less sterile in the end than the white cubes of the world: playing along just wasn’t something I practiced much.
Still, I needed to know: could Daphne have been telling the truth? Could the whole project be called off because of my various indiscretions, paramount among them my refusal to show her these blind sketches? Karen was going to be more than a little troubled by what I’d done, needlessly antagonizing the subject. That’s how she’d see it: a basic lack of mindfulness about our joint interests. But exactly what sort of pull did Daphne truly have with Garrett? She certainly wanted me to believe she could control him, and therefore those beneath him. What, I thought, did I ultimately know of Garrett’s aims, or even his life? Not enough to rule this out. He could speak so vaguely at the critical moment. What questions had I even bothered to ask? I asked less and less of anyone these days.
Daphne stood up sharply. The tears had cut trails down her face, clear paths that stood out against the white paint redolent of mimes. I hadn’t realized until then quite how much stage makeup she still had on. Yet the skin revealed by her tears... it was glorious, like a fresh page. She, though, seemed to have hit some sort of limit. She picked up the black clutch the bartender had brought over, sublimely unobtrusive, the ideal complement for a woman who was already too much. Might she actually walk off?
“Just don’t ask me anything,” I said, relenting. With that, I slid the pad toward her and watched her instantaneously fill with life, interest, greed for the drawings and my concession just as much. This version of Daphne was vastly more appealing than the stoical one, and she knew it. She mouthed to me the words I won’t while sitting down, in complete silence, to peruse the book I’d offered her, while my gaze inadvertently landed on the old barman, who’d been staring at her, at us, at our exchange. He held a cocktail shaker in the air, as if he’d been mid-shake when Daphne’s histrionics brought him to a standstill. Who knows how long he’d been checking on us, surveying all the minor dramas playing out at his tables, gauging contentedness and the value of intervention, whether with drinks and food, or, in the case of the very drunk, counsel and instruction? He seemed to divide his attention so finely and effortlessly; it would take his beardless charge decades to do it so well. Fortunately, Daphne was settling down to examine the sketches, leaving him to return to his cocktails. At the same time, all the other eyes—his patrons had taken an interest—left us, too, as the potential energy locked up in that moment, our moment, evaporated and the clinks of glasses and chit-chat resumed.
Daphne began examining the sketches far more reverentially than I would have expected, given events. She angled the pad toward her as if she were reading a book rather than looking at pictures, which meant that I couldn’t properly see the drawings. I suspect she meant to frustrate me then. Little did she know this was a pastime of mine: seeing obliquely, via the reactions of others. She was keen to keep me curious about her, I knew, so what better way than to place herself between me and my work? Oddly, on this occasion the arrangement grew excruciating for me. She could sense, I was sure, the dark feelings welling up in me, to wit, the gradual transformation of mild amusement into genuine anger. Just what, I wondered, could make her face move like that as her eyes staggered over the page. Usually I had some idea, but in her case I couldn’t say. It was like observing the operations of an extremely fine seismograph without holding the legend to decipher its readings. I asked her for a cigarette—whiskey made me crave tobacco—but she didn’t bother looking up, she was wholly occupied with the sketchbook. I was sure she was relishing my discomfort. I asked again for a smoke, this time more directly, clanking my glass on the table. Neither bartender had been back in some time; they probably thought I’d had plenty to drink. The boy passed by the table and snatched up the glass with the olive pit in it, wisely opting not to offer me another, and (equally wisely) not engaging me at all, except with an apologetic glance. Or a piteous one.
Turning the page of the pad, Daphne finally gave me her cigarettes and shooed me away. I couldn’t recognize the brand. All I found was a logo of almost Randian abstraction: a few intersecting lines, like a failed asterisk, set on an unusually delicate paper packet. It was rice paper, I could see, badly bruised from being stuffed into Daphne’s purse. Handmade, too, looking more closely at it. Artisanal cigarettes. She belonged in this borough.
I stepped outside and smoked two of them down to their ends—they were exceptional, naturally, and filterless to boot—standing under the same yellow-orange streetlights that had glared at me in the mirror, next to the unremarkable tree in which I’d feigned interest. Across the street, the vast parking lot of the auditorium she’d just performed in opened up before me. Really, it was too big for the building. Even if the lot were full, and everyone drove their own car, a third of the seats would have been empty. The faux-classical building itself, designed with grand hopes that had only been partly met—you could see this in the finely wrought friezes that expired halfway down to the ground—seemed very far off now, from where I was, almost an appendage of the parking lot rather than the reverse.
The nicotine managed to settle me, but when I got back to our table the actress was gone. The pad lay open on its fifth or six page. Daphne had gotten no further than that, this page with a picture of her at the edge of the light, performing a soliloquy of which I could hardly recall a thing. Her posture had been more memorable: the stiffness she’d put into her hips as she wheeled around the stage signaled a consternation unreflected in her speech during the play. Her words, in fact, had been benign, half-sensical like so much else, full of rustically inflected Ashberyisms, as if the poet had been writing from the Ozarks rather than Chelsea. Not even her face conveyed the disruption; it was something running up through her legs that hadn’t yet made it to her mind. Evidently this picture had stopped Daphne cold. Or else she’d already gotten bored.
“I got a call.” She was coming back from the corridor leading to the bathrooms.
“And you took it in the ladies’?”
“I had to use it, too. To clean up.” He face was wet and free of makeup now. She looked more drunk than when I’d left her, but also happier, and certainly more interesting, with the real topography of her face available to me for the first time. I wondered what else she might have done in the bathroom. How briefly I had left her, and already she’d changed.
I set the cigarettes on the drawings, but before I could let go of the pack she grabbed my hand with both of hers, crushing it and her cigarettes with it. “Not there!”
I left the smashed cigarettes with her and she eased up on my hand.
“Don’t you have any respect for your pictures? They’re so...”
She looked up at the ceiling, still toying with my hand—I was enjoying it now—searching for a word she didn’t end up finding. She looked right at me again, but this time I had trouble finding her pupils. All I saw was amber. All that wild heightening, achieved with white, had been taken out of her face. Yet enough wildness remained, so much, in fact, I had to wonder whether other unnatural causes, perhaps involving her trip to the bathroom, were involved.
“I’ll get you a car,” I said.
She laughed a detached little laugh at my apparent indifference to her critical judgment, or my defensiveness—probably that’s how she took it. She was too drunk or stoned to see that it was her new state of mind that voided her opinions.
“You’ll like your pictures,” she said. “That’s all I was going to say.”
She shook her head ruefully and squeezed my hand. Then she kissed it. I managed to free myself, but not before she could take one of my fingers into her mouth. I think I felt her tongue. I certainly felt the hardness of her teeth. I might have pulled away sooner if not for that.
“Perfect,” I said.
She nodded and searched the room disinterestedly. “You’ll find us a car?”
“So you like them—the pictures,” I said with a hint of triumph.
She was smiling, looking everywhere else but at me. “I never said that.”