I didn’t draw that morning, though I sharpened up certain pictures to bring out what I’d seen the night before. I fell asleep doing this, and in the afternoon, when I woke feeling relatively refreshed, I got a note from someone I’d not thought I’d hear from directly for a while, if ever. Paul. There wasn’t much of a greeting to this email; he launched right into the details. One of the reasons, he began, for keeping the campaign so open-ended, was that nearly anything Antral rolled out over the next year could be folded into it without trouble. Well, one of these fold-ins was now on deck. The optical division Garrett had walked me through at headquarters had apparently made great progress. (That walkthrough might have been less off-the-cuff than it seemed.) The first prototype frames and lenses—Obscura was the brand’s working name—had been shipped by the fabricators, and some were already en route to me. More were going to Karen. See what you can do, he signed off. Within an hour, a perspiring Central American (I was guessing here) showed up with two hulking boxes, both of which he stacked right inside my door. Just how many pairs of glasses had they sent me?
I’d actually been expecting to hear from Garrett that day, not Paul. Before letting myself drift off in the morning, I’d made sure to tell him that, as luck would have it, I’d managed to find Daphne the night before. Something in the way Daphne had talked about Garrett suggested to me I should do this. If she really was like a niece to him, I couldn’t say what he would think about what I’d done last night. I’d not pushed matters; she had. I couldn’t believe just how little talking had occurred. She’d stripped and stood in my bedroom, just beyond the light. I merely followed suit.
Each time I took her that night—and that’s the way it seemed to me; in the last instant she would make you the aggressor—each time, images from The Sort filled my head. I felt myself press her body into distinctive postures reminiscent of those pictures, or anyway my pictures (the film was more discreet). I’d suggest a shape with my hands and she would invariably finish the job, so that I was surprised by just how I was taking her. These were ways she seemed to intend more than I, yet each put her in a pose classically associated with weakness, submission. Most memorably, she’d even gotten me somehow to full-nelson her, as if I were an arresting officer, holding her at bay. It—I—forced her head down unnaturally, making her witness her own penetration. Silently, though. It made me quiet, too. All you could hear were the springs in the bed and our skin slapping together.
I hadn’t touched anyone properly since Claire, who was a quite different animal to Daphne, more tender but somehow also more sordid in bed, with a surprisingly foul mouth. I’d made out with a few girls here and there since she’d left, at parties of Immo’s and John’s, frequently with girls new to the city who seemed to crave authentic New York experiences via strange men like me. More lately I’d realized I’d mostly been intimate with them to prevent their fantasies from deflating. I was doing it for New York, you could say, defending its sex and myth, and it felt every bit the chore it sounds like.
Daphne was less beautiful than some of those girls, if beauty creates a sense of completion, balance, and harmony, if it can’t be fundamentally uncertain, which is precisely the feeling her angularity, her four percent body fat, her assured gait produced. The woman’s flesh seemed hitched to her mind so tightly that negligible changes of affect or conviction, the kind that are usually imperceptible to others and only known to us by the most careful introspection, when we choose to engage in it—all these minor modulations that don’t matter enough for us to bother expressing them, they readily surfaced in her. Her body said too much, I suppose, so that psychically she blurred in front of you. Not like a Richter painting; those blurs were harmonious, very much intelligible. You didn’t actually feel, in their presence, like trying to squint through them to something on the far side, to treat them as frosted windows rather than as objects of attention in their own right. With Daphne, though, when you focused on her, you couldn’t help but peer straight through her. Her body was a window, and inevitably you felt, judging by everything you could see through her, that you were missing something about her nature. Many things, in fact, so that you wished you could grasp it all. Then, after this phase passed, you simply wished for her to disappear, to unburden your senses.
And so I was happy to see her leave in the morning. I made no protest and doubted that she would hold that against me. She must have been familiar with this response, people’s desire being drained by her—temporarily, anyway. Perhaps that’s why she accepted my enervation so readily: she knew it couldn’t last. And wasn’t I already beginning to miss her? Not very much at just this moment, but I could feel that changing by the hour.
Garrett eventually called. I didn’t pick up, though. I’d done nothing wrong, this wasn’t statutory, yet still I could hear the blood pulse in my ears. I can’t say she didn’t seem to be charmed, as they say in certain parts of Africa, after she’d come back from the bathroom with a scrubbed face. Perhaps the night’s climax would be described as my fault. She was nineteen and high, a business partner in the campaign, and a very fond friend of Garrett’s to boot. How could you not know better?
Hoping to snuff out the gentle hangover beginning to engulf me, I slogged my way through a paper bowl of microwaved oatmeal. Whenever I ran out of perishables around breakfast, whatever time I might be having it, I always ended up back at oatmeal, a foodstuff with uranium’s half-life, unlike, say, eggs (never mind that I treated them, at great risk to myself, much the same). The mere sight of oat-meal now, at home or in diners, invariably put me in mind of grocery stores, where I ought to be refilling my fridge, so that I might avoid this watered dust, made only slightly more palatable by a nugget of crystalized honey—another comestible I was sure could last forever, even though, when you kept it around as long as I did, it barely melted in the heat of the mush. Finishing up the bowl, I let possibilities of a conversation with Garrett roll through me, all the branching contingencies, how each might look five moves in. At some point, I knew they’d all converge here: Couldn’t I tell something was off with her? How could you contaminate the project this way? Did I not tell you she was almost a relative of mine? The checkmate would follow soon after. I’d put myself far out of position last night, and restoring the defenses now, should the attack come, was probably impossible. Certainly not to my opponent’s satisfaction. That’s what made conversation different from chess: the rules, the outcomes which were to count as decisive or terminal, were not agreed upon in advance, so that what you regarded as an impregnable defense might be full of holes as far as the man on the other side was concerned, and no ultimate authority was anywhere to be found to settle matters. It was as though two overlapping but distinct games were in play; and despite my best efforts, even my great skill, I might lose simply for not knowing where the line was with Garrett, what would count as a conclusive defeat for him.
Which is all to say that, after the call, the whole project could well end up in the garbage. There was nothing to prevent that.
So I dialed.
He answered in one ring and I braced myself.
“Well?”
I hesitated.
“What do you think?”
“About her?”
He laughed a little distantly. “I have a feeling what you think of her. She called me.”
“She did.”
“She’s looking forward to your first sketches for the project, I can tell you that. So am I. I mean the glasses, though. Obscura. You like that name for the line?”
“I haven’t opened the boxes, actually.”
“You can open them now, can’t you?”
The boxes were still by the door, sealed in a curious metallic blue tape honeycombed with some sort of fiber—overkill, it seemed to me. Likely proprietary, too. I put the phone on speaker and went for a kitchen knife.
“We brought on people from some of the best places. Eyevan, you know them? Dita, Matsuda, even the son of the founder of Oliver Peoples. Just to seed things. Paul’s idea.”
I started working on the tape with a butter knife, my only clean blade left.
“But you know how I think by now. Every chance you get, you have to expand the gene pool, keep the mutations coming. Which is why I called.”
The knife’s almost notional serrations made no headway with the stickytape on the top box, which, like everything else relating to Antral, must have been high-tech—created, I would not have been surprised to learn, to yield only to a razor blade and nothing else, and liberally used in all their packaging, whether consumer or industrial. Stupidly, hopelessly, I kept sawing away at it, as though the firm’s R&D wing hadn’t accounted for the powers of the humble butter knife. Prying at the tape, my last resort, disfigured my knife, bending it in two—nothing would make the seal give.
“You got them open yet? I think in one of them... well, Paul had everything packed. Have a look at the glasses and, you know, if you could play around, incorporate them into some of your drawings...”
“I can try.” I was trying now.
“Paul tells me lots of people come into optical design this way—the way you are. Although you’re more prepared than most, I have to think. Your home turf is the face! You won’t have to build anything; all the technical stuff, fabrication, I’ll leave you out of. I just want your DNA in this project, too. These frames are still just prototypes.”
My DNA. I thought of last night and everything I’d done with it. That nothing about Daphne had come up yet, that he was in such good spirits, apparently—I didn’t want anything I said now to inflect that. Who could say what she’d told him, or exactly how grave my misjudgment was?
“Sounds very good.”
“Then I’ll ask you one other thing, too, if you don’t mind.” Garrett sounded less appreciative than I’d hoped, the if you don’t mind being patently rhetorical. Perhaps he did know about my indiscretion, and it was this that negated any thanks he might have otherwise felt. “Would you do some drawing through the frames?”
“They’ve got the actual lenses in them?”
“Have you not gotten the box opened yet? Still hung over, I guess.”
He was peeved. And there they were again, those dreadful intimations I couldn’t seem to escape. Nor would they come out fully into the light. My tormentor seemed to want to keep them where they were.
“Not really,” I said, a new edge flashing in my voice. It surprised me, the velocity at which my fear had turned to anger. “I just don’t have the right tools at the moment.”
He chuckled, sensing my resistance. “Did you get something out of last night, the show?”
“Jeff was wonderful.”
“Oh, you met him?” He was off-balance now, searching for words. “Wait, that’s right. He does good work, don’t you think?”
“What’s he do for you, exactly?”
“Exactly’s asking a lot.”
“Beyond working with light,” I added, “which is all I got out of him. I work with light. That says nothing.”
“Or that you and he are more alike than it seems, right? It could say that. I never considered it, actually. She, though, she can be feisty. Did you find that? After the show, wherever you two went? I’ll tell you something, she’s basically a good girl. I hope you saw that.”
“I don’t really know what I saw.”
“Well, I can’t wait to see what you come up with. And to answer your question: yes, they’ve got Antral polymers in those lenses. My first love was plastics. How sad is that? I think you’ll be surprised by them, though, what they can do. Someone as discriminating as you. Just try them out, once you get them out of the box. And enjoy the Bears. Take Karen with you this time, maybe. Everything’s better with a girl, isn’t it.”
He clicked off. I wasn’t relieved, exactly. Still, even after whatever he’d heard from Daphne, and perhaps Jeff, too, come to think of it, Garrett wasn’t going to derail the project over it. I should have been relieved, that is, if he’d definitely gotten the news about last night. But why should he have? When a man meets alone with a woman like Daphne, you could form the very suspicions Garrett appeared to harbor about me without any evidence at all beyond the laws of nature.
The blue tape, though. I still hadn’t breached it. So I opened the dishwasher, which had been off-duty for something like three weeks: I just kept sink-washing the same fork and plate and glass. Digging through the cutlery basket, I plucked out a steak knife thoroughly encrusted with fat—an instrument that had last been used, I believe, to dismember a gristly kebab from the street cart a few blocks over—and this time, it took only a flick of the wrist to slash open the top box, the tape gave so easily. I pushed aside the mountains of yellow tissue—how fragile could these glasses be?—and discovered a clutch of dark blue cases nestled in the center, like eggs in a nest. The smell of vinyl, or something synthetic, came to me at once.
Within the first case, I found frames with squared lenses, the temples tapering down to svelte ends. The whole thing was black acetate or some more exotic composite material, given that it was nearly weightless—disconcertingly so. When I held the glasses at an angle to the light, the lenses gave off the mild rainbow shine of gasoline, and there was a bit of tinting to them, too, a purplish-gray hue. I put them on, expecting something like the visual effect demonstrated in those low-budget commercials for driving glasses with orange lenses that cost almost nothing, if not for the remarkable shipping and handling rates. Good in the car and on the golf range, too: the ads would start with a long over-the-shoulder shot, for instance, of a young buck of the fraternity system in a budget-friendly roadster. He’d be wearing the sunglasses, navigating a treacherous mountain lane with frightening ease, totally carefree, singing along to the radio, although he’s just inches from plummeting off the cliff. Next we see a sunglassed man in his fifties, graying at the temples—could it even be the same man, later in life?—wielding a three wood on the range with familiar nonchalance. This time around, it’s his lower back that’s the hazard, but that’s not stopping him from swinging free and easy, with a reckless confidence—the confidence he’s always known, and which the glasses allow him, even as he ages, to retain.
What did I see through the squarish glasses I’d put on? Discriminating as I could be, I was at a loss to make out the spectacle’s effects. They were nothing like those advertised driving glasses, as far as I could tell: no aggressive coloration, and no great cleavage of foreground from background, just a mild violet shading projected serially onto the other sealed box—it would turn out to house an entire case of Theria, which I’d not been informed of—the mural on my walls, the cutlery piled in the sink, and then onto the light itself as it came through my bedroom windows. I had to wonder whether these frames might be placebos of a kind, and Garrett, or Paul, more likely, was operating on some hypothesis they tested out on all their trial subjects: namely, whether I might see more in that violet shade than there actually was to see. I wouldn’t have minded being fooled, though. If you could generate a psychic difference without a physical one, so much the better (and cheaper).
If there was anything to notice, I realized, it was going to take time to emerge. I’d have to watch for signs as I went about my business, just as I’d be doing with Theria, which Antral, it looked like, intended to supply me with going forward. Ballast was the in-house code name by which the nootropic sometimes went in the all-staff memos Paul and Garrett occasionally forwarded me. Perhaps for its stabilizing influence? Or was it rather for its closeness to Blast, which was pretty much the opposite of stabilizing? Did the word betray itself, and was this their point in using it? More practically, were they going to change the name from Theria to Ballast when the drink was released, or was latter only for private consumption?
These matters never strayed far from my mind as I cracked open the rest of the eyeglass cases, spread them out around me, and tried the frames on in sequence. One had rims so thin you wondered why they’d bothered with them. Architect glasses was what Karen and Claire called this kind, and not incorrectly. Unlike with the first pair, the lenses were uncolored. Were they different in other ways, too? Next was a sports frame, much meatier in build, yet molded out of a crystalline resin that made the entire body seem fleet and liquid. I hooked the tiny red elastic cord in the case around my temples and put them on. The artist, headed to a pickup basketball game. A suitable caption.
I kept those frames on while pencil sketching another, a bug-eyed pair with giant lenses and a gold metal outline embedded within translucent pink plastic, like something from Dior. My mother owned a pair like these, wearing them sometimes when she was in a playful mood, or if she wanted to be in such a mood. I could never take her entirely seriously when she had them on, which was a strange feeling, since generally it was impossible not to receive her in earnest, given the calm, somewhat severe tones she spoke in, underlaid by a hint of brittleness, all developed in the foyers of art galleries. I think that’s why my father had bought the sunglasses for her, and much else besides—to take some of the edge off her.
All afternoon, I worked on the new optical drawings, scaling them up to twice actual size, wearing one pair while limning the next, until I’d gone through all the glasses and I’d achieved some dimension and polish with the pictures: the soft, chunky graphite sticks I used with overlapping strokes and light blending produced a reflective silver-gray tone that appeared to make each frame float above the white paper. All afternoon, though, I was also wondering not about graphite but a different sort of medium: the very one I was looking through. Remarkably, the lenses made seeing itself pleasurable. I reveled in studying the various frames through them, ogling them almost, while pondering the manner in which each related to the absent human face to which they might be ideally appended. When I felt I couldn’t proceed without some semblance of an actual face, however, I used the hand mirror lying on the ground next to me. I would gaze at myself bedecked with these advanced optical instruments but only put to paper the frame, so that my face remained a ghost, knowable only by inference. Large white sheets were my ground, cut from a long roll of paper with little tooth, not much good for charcoal or pastel but serviceable for graphite. I left much free space on the sheets, and later, in the early evening, over dim sum from a neighborhood hole-in-the-wall—those pillow-like roast pork buns—I conjured alternative versions of each pair, small variations, probably life-size but handled somewhat roughly. By the end, with the drawings all pinned up on the three walls of my apartment mural, I had a fresco of disembodied spectacles studying me. One even had eyes scratched in—the first drawing I’d done—just to orient me to the task of representing not just objects of sight, but instruments of it, too.
My hand burned from the careful work once I’d finished. I sat on the sofa still wearing the second-to-last pair, a rounded set of English glasses cast from silvery metal. My eyes continually darted around the room, often dragging my aching neck and head with them, searching, I think, for things to look at, familiar things, new things, anything. Relenting to the new needs of my eyes, I got up and wandered my apartment for a bit. The disrepair around me was notable—at least from the vantage of my old partner. Remarkably, it was as if I were, for the moment, looking through Claire’s eyes, and it was simple to see she’d have had no truck with the present condition of things. It wasn’t that Claire was excessively neat, but that I lacked standards of order that were widely shared. Had she been here now, there wouldn’t have been carpets made strictly of dust lying atop the floorboards, or caked dishes overstuffed into a washer that had idled so long it was really more of a filthy cupboard at this point. I’d run out of cleaning pods some time ago and only did the dishes—the absolutely necessary ones—by hand now, when I did them at all and didn’t advert to paper or Styrofoam.
Most of all, my work, the detritus from it, at least, lingered everywhere, more than it had to or should. I had no good excuse for the state of things, certainly none that Claire would have accepted. What pushed matters beyond the pale, however, what made them unforgivable, was my paying for the entire floor below me—Kiver wouldn’t consider letting me out of the lease, I knew, as he wanted me, my kind, here—without having the courage to sort through the Becker’s orphaned chattel and make the space usable. Shame would overcome me on the ground-floor threshold every time I gazed through the spiderwebbed glass. Still, even without use of the extra floor, Claire wouldn’t have thrown out the stuff I’d left scattered about, just organize or tuck it away in reasonable stacks for later perusal. Violet, it seemed, didn’t work much like rose when it came to the tint of glasses.
Oddly, none of this troubled me too much. It all felt apt enough, given the man I was at this particular time in my life. It was, perhaps, not a life that I, the one looking through the glasses, might choose. It violated good taste, order, harmony. It had its incongruities. There was an obvious wastefulness and indulgence to it. Nevertheless, it was a life with life, and irrefutable evidence of feeling: for all the garbage, I was choking mostly on pictures, some of which, despite the wretched context, really did shine. I could see, then, and without much effort or insistence, this particular apartment’s point, unlike so many nicer, cleaner ones; I could see, most of all, how the compost surrounding me might make worthy things possible, and conversely how a “gorgeous home” might abolish all fecundity in the name—of all things—of beauty.
I paused in front of the floor mirror next, which was beside the film room and positioned at right angles to the window at the end of the hall. It was an odd spot for a glass, so far from the front door, but then it had been there from those first weeks when I’d slept on the inherited couch in the screening room, which had no mirrors of its own. And though I’d long since moved to the bedroom, I would, even now, if the moment felt important enough, make my way down the hall to check myself before leaving the apartment.
I crouched in front of the mirror now, the last rays of daylight sitting on my shoulders and cheeks. I hadn’t yet seen this pair of glasses in a mirror—this English, Lennon-styled pair. When I drew the frames earlier, I’d been thinking, without actually seeing them on my face, that they were the kind of frames that wouldn’t agree with my countenance, indeed that it would look ludicrous on me. Now I could see this wasn’t really so. I stayed crouched, examined myself this way and that, seeing what sense might be found in my own likeness. Something about these particular frames must have compelled me to keep searching. This was, in fact, frequently how I discovered an adequate subject: my interest would fail to wane in the natural way, and I’d find myself detained, paralyzed even, by sight. Is that what these lenses did?
I went searching for some paper, something with greater tooth. Beside my drawing board I found some toned sheets, a faint orange, just right for a portrait in autumn light. Lately I’d gone away from dry media like pastels toward the simplest of tools: charcoal and graphite and, occasionally, black conté. Now, though, seemed like a moment for color. From my bedroom I collected a set of soft pastels, secreted away in the closet—a recent and unexpected gift from Sarah, the one who’d taught me introductory drawing in college; the same Sarah, in fact, I’d stolen nibs from (out of love, I believe). These dense sticks were from an old private stock of hers I’d first admired in her studio, where she used to hold “office” hours sometimes. John and I battled for her attention all through that drawing course. As I remember it, I won, though he might have seen things differently. Sarah was legitimately beautiful, so attractive and beguiling you wondered why she ever bothered with something as cerebral as drawing. Why not painting? Or acting, for that matter? While she was also a teacher of real ingenuity, it had to be said that many of her pieces were more impressive for the canniness of her selection of materials—medium, support—than for the imaginative or compositional depths she achieved. She had a talent for integrating exotic specimens of both, a gift, unfortunately, that didn’t always extend to execution. Yet my affection and respect for her remained undimmed; having a deep talent for anything was already rare enough. Sarah’s pastels, apparently made in New Zealand and now discontinued, were the closest I’d ever seen to pure pigment, undiluted with binder. I’d remarked offhandedly on the luster of a sketch she’d executed with them, and I remember her seeming distinctly pleased I’d noticed. (Had others not?) We’d kept in touch through the years; she followed my career with some admiration. Her own had risen only so high: nice notices, comfy academic posts, but lacking the racier undertones that were lusted after, sometimes not so secretly. About a year ago, I told her that I’d turned toward pastel and drawing, to the things I’d studied with her; a few months later, a box of her treasured pastels arrived.
Paper in hand, I sat before the mirror so that my reflection occupied only the lower third of the glass: proportions I decided to recapitulate in the composition of my sketch. I swiped a stick the color of setting suns along a test sheet and realized how much I missed the simple tactility of the medium, the feeling of the stick crumbling onto the support, the slightly bumpy, uneven resistance it generated, which decent graphite and most charcoals wouldn’t give you. With my eyes red and slowly closing behind those effeminate frames, I began to dab my bespectacled face onto the paper and soon enough found myself estranged from the results. I’d never worn glasses; my eyes were better than twenty-twenty. More curiously, I’d never worn sunglasses, as I couldn’t overcome the sense, no matter how subtle the tint, that the lenses stood between my gaze and reality. At the periphery of vision, the margins of the frame, I was continually reminded, by every sideways glance, of a brighter, more various world, one I could always get closer to by ditching the glasses. Annoyed by my complaints about the heavy sun one day—often, I opted to keep indoors in canonically idyllic weather—Rick once pointed out to me that for creatures who evolved with just slightly different eyes, the world would organically look just as it did to me through sunglasses. What’s more, he said, some sorts of spectacles might enhance one’s vision, as ordinary glasses did for those who wore them, not corrupt it. It made no difference to me, though. I’d rather squint through a blazing sun than sit behind filters.
And so it was an unfamiliar sight—myself in glasses of any kind—that greeted me in the mirror today. It was almost like drawing someone else. Perhaps that’s why I had so held my own attention. The first notable property of these circle glasses was that the violet tint, stronger here than in the other pairs, somehow didn’t give me that queasy feeling of separation from the world. I felt no need to shed this perspective, I mean, even when I peeked out beyond the edge of the frame and saw the bright blur of life. I wanted mediation now, and preferred to keep my eyes straight ahead, away from the margins, in just the way the short-sighted do.
I worked on the picture slowly and deliberately. Lately I’d abstained from self-portraiture, which meant it’d been some time since I’d peered this closely into a mirror, a device that always put me in mind of the Renaissance, of perspective artificialis, of Brunelleschi’s original experiments, to wit, his mirror image of the courtyard fronting the church. I didn’t adhere closely to the rules of this visual regime anymore. I’d stopped gridding out underdrawings. Brunelleschi’s was one more point-of-view I wasn’t much interested in occupying, whether or not it was an enhancement of vision, as it seemed to me you couldn’t transpose a geometrical theory of optics onto rough and ready experience without losing something. Which meant I tended to deploy perspective selectively, to wit, whenever I ran into an intractable problem using more experiential methods. The impressionists had gone too far, but in their overcorrection was insight. The proper starting point, it had always seemed to me —the central datum to be accounted for—was the simple thisness of experience. It wasn’t some immutable category. No, experience changed as our ideas about the processes of the world did. Yet whatever it was perception delivered to us had to be accommodated within our understanding, even if, occasionally, it was only by massaging theory into sensation that we could arrive at a coherent result.
About halfway through, my face began to emerge on the page, my long jaw, my narrow cheeks, the prickly stubble I frequently wore, my eyes of brown. I was myself no picture of serene beauty. I didn’t look betrayed or forlorn, the way Daphne did, nor did I look wicked, as someone with similar features might. If I had the building blocks of menace, they came together benignly in me. But there was usually a rawness to my gaze, something undiluted in it, even when cut with a gentle smile, that preemptively cautioned those around me. I’d attempted at various times to suppress this brutishness with my accompanying manner: genteel elocution, gorgeous posture, all the things my mother had emphasized from the earliest days. (She had, in fact, helped civilize my father in some ways, who was exceptionally clever but also somewhat unregenerate, though certain matters of comportment relating to integrity or decency—like the manner in which one dressed—were ones he took deadly seriously.) Suppression, though, only seemed to shunt the unruliness in my heart right into my eyes, giving anyone around me advance warning of the volatility of my spirit.
The second I’d seen the round frames on my face, I’d been struck by the way they offset that rawness so effectively in the mirror, I suppose because they were the first line of defense against the offending objects that exceeded my control: my eyes. Yet now, as I saw my half-rendered face on paper, and I compared it to what I saw directly in the mirror, I was less sure of the lenses’ efficacy. They seemed not to soften or shape my portrait, but to unsuccessfully perpetrate an outright deception, casting me in the role of the intellectual who relished distance and academic brinkmanship, cleverness and bookishness, all things that my natural face, for its part—and I was quite proud about this—exposed as a sham, or at most a half-truth.
Although these glasses remained, in themselves, perfectly respectable, and there was nothing a priori unreasonable about their shape or materials, when coupled with my face, I—the man behind the face—appeared, through the contrast they set up, more brutal than usual, not less, with cheeks so jagged you could follow them through heavy stubble. Was it just that the frames didn’t suit my face, as we say? Were they an overlay that garbled my visage? Did they somehow manage to lie about me? Or instead, was it that they made my face confess its true darkness, revealing a physiognomic fact about me I might not even be conceptually equipped to describe?
I altered the self-portrait with a variation of the circular frame I’d dreamed up earlier in the margins: the lenses were slightly ovoid, neutralizing the monocle effect, the sense of affectation and dress-up. But as I began transforming the portrait to interpolate the new glasses, I could see that strictly speaking the picture was straying further from the physical properties of my face, even if I did appear less of a fraud. I decided to backtrack and further pursue the thing in the mirror—my face in the perfectly round frames—and the eventual effect felt to me like revelation, not distortion. Was the visual relief the lenses set the world in helping me to cleave more closely to underlying structure now, the structure that undergirds not only the skin you see, but the deeper tissue that can strangely lead you away from ultimate form? Yet as I kept on drawing and filling in detail, and the picture came to fruition, a less severe structure emerged, a kind of composite between the deepest forms that this enhanced attention revealed, coupled to a more finished rendering of the most superficial tissue, what the light did to my topmost skin cells, in the many shades of pastel I covered the surface with to capture it. My hand was in flames by the time I’d finished, but the drawing, as darkness grew outside, seemed to have taken on an undeniable force, even if it wasn’t exactly pleasant.
That was with the glasses on. I took them off. Besides subtracting the violet tint, what else had changed? I took the drawing to my bedroom, where on the panel above my closet I’d hung four other self-portraits from the last few years. Though it lacked the polish of its predecessors—it was only a sketch—somehow it seemed to hold its own, assert its authority, which was grounded in its superiority in one respect at least, the one I’d discovered with the glasses on: surface and structure, tone and contour, clarified each other rather than simply dissolving into a unity. My skin complemented the musculature of my face and the lay of my bones without being entirely faithful to them, the cutaneous curves slightly varying from the fleshly and skeletal depths below. None of the layers asserted final priority, though together they suggested a convincing sense of articulated mass. What’s more, this picture seemed to find a place for the frames within the broader structure of my body, welcoming them to my face, as it were. The element of caricature and guile I’d previously noted, the kind that goes along with a fake nose and glasses, had also dissipated; there was nothing laughable about me now, not just physically but psychically. The final work disclosed the composite, fungible quality of personality, and demonstrated that there need be nothing untoward in this variability.
I hadn’t emerged as markedly more handsome than before, I should say, but the circle glasses now resonated with something in me, something perhaps that was a less-than-beautiful thing, but the affinity, the congruence, couldn’t be denied. I can’t pretend to have grasped the optical properties of the glasses then, and their extraordinary capacity to affect my vision even after I’d taken them off. I snapped a few photos of the day’s drawings and sent them on to Paul—as always, without commentary. Let him take the first chance.