A few days later, taking a break from my work on the first batch of drawings, I met Karen and John for lunch, at her request. We decided on a place not far from Cosquer’s headquarters, one of those forlorn Hispanic bodegas, a Brazilian one, which doubled as a makeshift bistro for the direly hungry or the intrepid, with a few plastic tables and chairs settled right next to the counter and its covered aluminum bins of prepared food. Even at midday, the place was drenched in fluorescence, which always troubled me in a way it didn’t at night, where such intensely shallow light could be warranted by the absolute depletion of all better sources of it. But when you could see sunlight through the front door, being awash in a blue-white glare wasn’t easy to stomach.
Just as we were sitting down to our steel plates and the shared platters of meat and fish, rice and plantains, Karen wrongfooted me: to get a jump on the copywriting for the campaign, she’d gone ahead and met up with Daphne. Just to suss her out a little, she added to break the ensuing silence at the table. The point of our Brazilian lunch was obvious now. Having pounced on Daphne, Karen had to explain herself before I could find out about it another way. Given how quickly she’d abandoned Duke and me after the game, the idea that this was about efficiency or speed, or getting the jump on anything, rang hollow. And since she’d not seen any sketches from me yet, and so had nothing from which to work, what could have been the point of meeting Daphne, unless it was something personal?
While Karen and I were squaring off, John gorged on a foil pan of charcoal-fired beef, along with plates of beans and blue cassava. It was all going into his mouth at an extraordinary rate, as Karen and I sat there twirling our forks over empty plates, trying to figure out how to destroy each other with a witness. You didn’t have to eat it to see that the food was, as promised, quite beautifully done, something one got used to in New York: tragic surroundings, this neon blue plastic table with chairs so low your knees bent at a forty-five degree angle and pushed your feet beneath you (they must have been children’s seats, or else expressly designed for South American statures), combined with sublimely precise food, born not of fastidiousness but long, ancient experience. The staff would have turned this out effortlessly, I knew. The entire neighborhood was Brazilian, in fact, so the customers, bronze men and women with tiny bronze children running around their legs, were Brazilian as well, which created enough of a local market to make the place viable, even without people like us frequenting it.
Karen and I watched John with a contempt meant only for each other. He relished eating like a beast and generally flaunting a certain vulgarity in New York. It was almost an act of Midwestern preservation, his rural, strip mall childhood in Rapid City scarfing hotdish. He was the only one of our friends who’d gone on for an MFA, from RISD, right after returning from China—a black mark in my eyes, he knew this. He met us back in the city afterward and leveraged his rural tastes; they were nearly an extra credential, his very first degree, the one that made his MFA less damning. Today, though, with just Karen and me for an audience, there wasn’t much leveraging going on. He really did just crave platefuls of cheap grilled meat, and this dingy shop was one of the best around. He would know. Deals were something John pursued unabashedly. He was the poorest among us, which cleared him of any wrongdoing in being price-obsessed, or in jumping full-time into graphic design so early.
I noticed a vicious edge in the glances Karen sent my way. What did she know, or think she did, anyway? Had she somehow already heard about JG Chemical? I couldn’t say exactly what Paul had communicated to her. But I did know what she thought of cads, even the ones she liked, for instance, the man eating for all three of us now. She held me above John in that regard; I’d always prized that. But now I was getting looks she usually reserved for him, after she’d become aware of one of his exploits. It wasn’t an unfriendly gaze, exactly, although a degree of disgust evidently pervaded it. Was that because she’d grasped that Daphne and I had spent the night together? What knowledge could Daphne have dangled in front of Karen? Girls could always smell competition.
None of these matters could be hashed out properly with the boor feeding next to us, although I had my doubts he would have noticed anything. John kept the small plates coming: not just yellow rice, fried plantains, and green beans, but a sort of tomato casserole, a South American antipasto thick with red onions and Serrano peppers, and something that looked suspiciously like seafood gumbo. Pan-American cuisine, all for next to nothing. John barely spoke, and so Karen and I turned to coldly exchanging logistical information. It’s all we could talk of without insulting each other: about, say, when I’d have some fully-rendered drafts for her (I didn’t know, but soon), or whether she’d actually gotten any useful ideas for copy from her visit with Daphne (she didn’t know, it all depended on the drafts, really—an answer that infuriated me, of course, though I refused to stop smiling).
When we’d finally finished, the staff, bemused by our order of eleven dishes between three people, removed many of the trays still three-quarters full. The leftovers might end up with the dogs I could see out back through an open door, if the cook and the two children dangerously wandering around the kitchen, just in front of the animals, weren’t too hungry.
Our plan was to catch a screening at PS1 after lunch. This was a social call, technically, though I think the silent face-off we’d begun fulfilled Karen’s real aim. (John, true to form, was mostly here for the food.) Films were going to be projected, she said discouragingly, right onto the walls of the exhibition halls: real films, narrative ones with sync sound, not just doctored art films of the Frampton and Brakhage varieties. These days, Artforum dedicated as much space to feature-length cinema as to anything else. Why not. There were going to be drinks, too. The whole gallery would be made up quite comfortably for viewing, giant beanbags and some folding chairs, that sort of thing. Apparently you were encouraged to treat it as a social occasion, to talk over or through the films; all the art being fired onto the walls was incidental to your experience. Did we need PS1 for this, though? I asked through gritted teeth.
I was in a nasty mood, Karen had drawn me into it. They both wore a look of slight exhaustion, John even while he ate, in anticipation of what was to come. So I delivered. Surely, I continued, there were more natural spaces where talking over the entertainment already occurred, totally of its own accord. Wasn’t our time better spent simply bringing that existing practice, as it was realized in jazz clubs and hip-hop shows, the homes of friends and films shown in amid greenery, which New Yorkers were already familiar with, whether it was Bryant or Brooklyn Park—wasn’t our time better spent bringing this to greater self-consciousness? At least, anyway, if we believed some sort of Bulloughian notion of out-of-gear appreciation was a good, I said, or even the sine qua non of art—both of which I strenuously doubted. What did PS1 bring to all this, besides a certain kind of legitimation that hardly served anymore? Couldn’t we just accept that only a very few sorts of art were genuinely portable? That you could slap them up on a wall in a giant hall full of other pictures and get the most of what they had to give? That most work withered, like a joke with a strong punchline and an unintelligible conceit? Why, after all the decades of institutional critique, did we still feel the temptation to shoehorn in aesthetic experiences that naturally and most profoundly occurred elsewhere, except for the economic might of those institutions? If there was no money to be found there, would we care at all?
Before I could slice any deeper, John stuffed a couple of yams into his mouth and rose, wiping his hands on his jeans and looking resigned to the fact that I was, through my obnoxiousness, putting an end to his meal. Karen collected some sort of milk drink from the counter before they both walked out of the place into clear, bright sunlight, leaving their trays for the South Americans to scavenge. John separated a pack of cigarettes from its cellophane and continued feeding his appetites. After I’d caught up to them, I was just about to resume my harangue when he spoke properly for the first time.
“You know,” he drawled, “Lindy is showing something of hers here.” He turned to Karen: “What is it again? I know it’s longish, with amateur actors.”
I stopped in the street and then they did, too. Karen nodded broodingly in the face of my glower.
“If we mentioned anything earlier,” John said, “you wouldn’t have come at all. Lindy really wants you to see it, though. You don’t have to speak with her. She might not even be onsite right now. Just let’s go by, see what you think.”
“Rick would appreciate it, too,” she said. “He just loves her now, thanks to you.”
As usual, John and Karen were acting in concert. I could see I’d be expected to keep my thoughts to myself on the hopelessness of Lindy’s art, most recently championed in the back pages of Art in America. They would have made an attractive couple, these two, and in fact John had been wooing Karen a long time. As far as I knew, she’d always held out. She didn’t like the openly promiscuous types; she probably would have been with John if it wasn’t going to be taken, at least by him, as a form of conquest. In my gut, I’d always thought John really wanted something deeper with her, only her, the way he hung around at headquarters long after he strictly could have gone home. I don’t know that he’d admit anything of it, of course. He seemed to prefer playing the wild pig.
What really made me want to bolt wasn’t the prospect of meeting Lindy and confronting her art, or all the lies I would have to tell if I ran into her, but what Karen might try to wield over me the rest of the afternoon, tormenting me in subtle ways (she had the gift) with whatever she’d gleaned from Daphne. All the same, I needed to know what she knew. And even Karen’s implicit censure, my own rage at her presumptuousness, couldn’t help me from appreciating, beneath those bangs of dark hair, the shine of her skin, the pleasure of her company in other circumstances.
Though she’d eaten little, being embroiled in battle with me, she’d bought some kind of ethnic milkshake on the way out. We used to like drinking horchata back in LA, on the hottest days under what was in truth a Mexican sun, even if America had won that particular war, and she’d never given up the habit. The lid was off and by now she’d lost at least a quarter of the foamy pink contents to the pavement as we walked.
“Daphne was a little disappointed I didn’t have any text for her already. That was the main thing I got from her,” Karen said to me softly.
Daphne had hounded me prematurely, too, about drawings that I’d not yet created.
“She had thoughts about the project,” I said.
“I’m sure.”
“Meaningful ones. As if she’d been thinking about this sort of thing for a while.”
“Yeah?”
“Didn’t you know? You must have.”
John took possession of the milkshake and Karen wiped foam from her mouth with her sleeve. She seemed to regress whenever she consumed anything of this sort: a shake, ice cream, a Dutch waffle from one of the trucks in Manhattan. Probably she was happy to return to childhood now. It was strange to me, the way John, even now that he was done eating—he was contentedly pulling on a cigarette between sips of the shake, all his biological needs addressed—still had nothing to say about our project with Garrett. He seemed to know there wasn’t much room in it for him. At some point Karen would have explained to him Garrett’s obsession with my work in particular. By these means, John had become a kind of neutral observer, who seemed, if I grasped the import of the occasional glint in his eye aright, to be finding some pleasure in the simmering conflict between Karen and me.
Really, he had no reason to be upset about not looming larger in the project. He already had a heavy schedule. He always did. There were student loans he was still paying down that the rest of us hadn’t worried about in years, if we ever had. It’s why we tolerated his outbursts and excused his malice. He’d had an objectively harder ride than the rest of us, though the gap between me and him had closed lately more than he knew. John certainly had enough to be bitter about. His family had neither supported his career choices—in the context of the Dakotas, they could only appear less than masculine—nor offered him any sort of filial stability. How many times, when he was drunk, had he told me and anyone else in earshot, Oh this is nothing, Lenore is the real drinker in the family; he was an angel by comparison. It was only a matter of time, once John had started down this path, that he’d arrive in the same terrible place. You did everything in your power to disrupt it, but he would find a way back: she’d murdered Chelsea, he’d whisper. That’s how faithful a drinker she was; she wouldn’t rest until his sister was dead. Why? he asked in a slurred hush. Because finally Lenore had a reason to never stop drinking. She really was magnificent; her self-pity knew no bounds. Harried, smart, spotted skin, frazzled hair, and a murderer.
Lucas, his father (he actually called him Dad now and again), was still in the picture. John had no idea how the man had held on through all of this, how he could bear the murderer of his child. Sometimes this was a cause for admiration, other times contempt, depending on the day. Lucas was a gentle man, if not quite a gentleman, who’d only ended up in South Dakota because that’s where Lenore was from. He was a junior high school teacher—American history—whose primary charge was his wife, keeping her on track, taking her to dialysis treatment though she was only halfway through her fifties. They’d met in college, in Columbus, but Lenore just couldn’t stand to be far from her family, generations of them who, since Chelsea’s death, mostly kept their distance.
John was also the only one of our group to have entered into a marriage, and therefore the only one to have annulled one, too. He’d gotten married in that first year at RISD, proposing to another student almost on a dare, you sensed. His parents married in their early twenties and they’d barely known each other then. It was in his blood to do the same, he’d said at the time with a laugh. The truth was that, once upon a time, in school in California with us, he was a terribly lonely man, a depressive in the first instance, not an alcoholic. After the quick fizzle of his marriage, he put all that away. He’d annulled the inner world and spent his time now looking outward.
“Is it any good?” I asked him, pointing at the foamy puddle at the bottom of the clear plastic cup shining in the light. John stuck it out toward me and tilted it. A thin pink crescent formed at the bottom, its color fading as it melted. He inverted the cup above his head, tapped the last dribbles into his mouth, and tossed the cup ostentatiously in front of Karen, who had another of those mildly disgusted looks ready for him.
“One thing Daphne was thinking of was those ads from the 1920s,” she said to me, “where the copy totally dominates the picture. Pictures where you’d barely be able to see her, they’re so small.”
“She must have been trying to make you happy, I guess.”
“And not you?” she rejoined. “Anyway, the idea made enough sense to me—coming from her.”
“‘Coming from her’? What is it you know about her, exactly?”
We turned a corner and movies commandeered our minds. This one was playing on a PS1 façade, like a drive-in. It took us half a block to grasp that this was a film of films, spliced into narrative semi-cohesion from classic noir: The Hitchhiker, The Stranger, In a Lonely Way, The Big Sleep. We paused before the “screen,” where there were several dozen spectators already viewing the one- and two-minute clips that had been braided together. Karen sat down Indian-style on a patch of free grass; John went to one knee and chain-smoked his Pall Malls.
“Is this Lindy’s?” she asked.
“She usually shoots her own footage,” John said.
“I’ll go in and find where her film is showing.”
“Inside?” he said.
Karen snickered and patted John’s knee.
The two of them, I knew, thought they were sparing me something by pausing outside, giving me time to acclimate to the idea of being in a gallery before actually entering one. And so we listened to the staccato noir voices flowing through the speakers parked near us, Bogart and Bacall and Welles, all hailing from different films, convened for a roundtable discussion.
You could say I was trying to excise the noir from my life just then; I’d even tolerate Lindy’s work if it meant getting away from this. Generally it seemed a congenial scene: people were talking organically, smoking and drinking something or other, but if I’d genuinely sought such a setting earlier, the feeling had passed, I’d rather be gone. What was the problem, really, if Karen knew Daphne had stayed the night at my place? It might be an issue for Garrett, given his apparent closeness with the girl, but what was it to Karen, unless, of course, there was more to our own relationship than she cared to admit.
She and John were transfixed with the collage film, though I’d heard enough of Bogart’s gravelly, tough-guy seductions for today and maybe for all time. Which is to say, Bogart left me positively wanting to enter an exhibition space. My last visit to one had been to the new Whitney, for the Biennial, which failed to inspire even a twitch of interest in me. It was the smart pose, of course, to scoff at these sorts of shows now, this or Venice or (especially) Documenta. The art reviews filled up their issues with columns that, while disagreeing on the details, excoriated the work and its conceptual basis, regardless of what or who was exhibited. On all sides it was a play for absolution, I thought, for participating in a socio-economic system whose flaws were too well-known to be worth rehashing. Merely a passing acquaintance with Bourdieu showed you this. But contemporary art amounted to a way of life that no-one could—or rather, would—surrender willingly. The lifestyle it held out was too charming, however iniquitous. So the same display was always made, it was no different in Washington or on Wall Street, that rueful frown at the flute of champagne you were drinking, as if this somehow exculpated you. It was just the same in the pews, really, for the billions who held that merely acknowledging the fallenness of mankind, and pleading forgiveness, was all that redemption required. Along with this frown—this was perhaps specific to the art scene—would come various kinds of reforming critique: a plan for a better world, rife with the sorts of cosmetic changes (donating portions of gallery proceeds, say, which Sandy liked to do) that made participants feel a bit better. Whereas the only decision that truly counted for anything, that made any sort of fundamental improvement to your own life, if not the world, was whether you stayed or went. But then, to genuinely be in a position to choose, and not simply self-flagellate, you’d need a kind of courage in facing cultural oblivion that hardly anyone could summon.
Today, I was keen on finding a quieter space in which to confront Karen about Daphne, to get a proper sense for the actress’ state of mind, post-rendezvous, what she might have said or kept to herself. The funereal quality of art centers and exhibition spaces, so often with their long-faced attendants standing about, hands folded behind their backs, as if in cuffs, could be absolutely depended on—even, I suspected, in ones that asked you to be part of some belated happening.
Right in the lobby another film played, another collage, in fact, although there wasn’t much of an audience for this one. I’d always looked ambivalently upon such works, which were assemblages from other works, for the fact that their makers seemed so often only to be fishing for significance. You were dared to suppose that the artists, often carrying mighty university credentials, didn’t have some ingenious or profound conceit in play. This was a dare I usually made. After all, I’d known these same sorts back in art school, when they were taking their first tentative steps toward their professional identities and attitudes. One in ten, perhaps, had any real sense of direction. The rest were searching out an angle, a hook on which to hang a career.
The most interesting thing about this film was its raw materials: psychotronic films from Japan dating back as far as the seventies, mostly of the Yakuza variety, it looked like, given the bright red paint that stood in for blood, common also to Italian cult films of the same era, De Sica and the like, and linked there with the same archetype of organized crime. Somehow you read the precise shade of this blood back into earlier black-and-white films, imagining the blood in that unbelievable, almost pink tone. It had a touch of orange to it, too, and seemed alive, organismic, as it pooled all over the floor. But the image that had always stuck in my mind, and that I kept seeking out in the collage, was that of Joe Shishido, the legendary Japanese thespian with surgically enhanced cheeks. He’d made himself into a chipmunk, apparently, so he wouldn’t be forgotten in a sea of generically handsome Yakuza actors. It worked—at the price of disfigurement, of course.
I asked someone strolling past the three of us, either she’d lost interest in the film or she was an unmarked PS1 employee, perhaps even an artist, what did it matter—I asked her something simple: where might I find the films not made from other films? She gave a throaty, unpleasant chortle that made my quip seem poorer than it was; I resented her for this. Then someone slapped a hand on my shoulder—John—and Karen quickly flanked me on the other side. He clamped down, impressing upon me, by this gesture, the need to at least try not to attack anyone else today, while impressing upon her, whoever she was, that I meant her no harm, and that he, John, would anyway shield her from the worst of it.
The woman had just watched part of an original film, she told us, two rooms down. It must still be going. It looks ancient in a very modern way—she tittered and finished with this line. Karen and I followed the woman’s finger, while John—of course he would—stayed behind with the woman. On another occasion I would have rolled my eyes, but this time, as soon as I’d felt his hand on my shoulder, I perked up knowing there was a reasonable chance she’d detain him. She had a foolishness to her, and in a looker, foolishness of a certain sort could be profoundly appealing.
It was the right call, for all of us. I would be alone, finally, with Karen, and John could resume reveling in his senses. And the other woman? Well, when she found out John was an artist, a formidable one, rising in a manner more interesting than most, she’d be all right with things.