There were at least fifty people in Lindy’s space, although they weren’t keeping to the social premise of the show, which the wall text somewhat crudely informed you of as you entered the exhibition. Instead, they were silently watching this film, shot on Super 16, in all likelihood with the old Arriflex that had come down to Lindy from her grandfather, a middling if well-connected documentarian who’d catalogued the rise of Television and other post-punk outfits so many decades ago now. Lindy’s film unspooled in one continuous shot, the camera panning to and fro on some unshakeable dolly. She’d played fast and loose with the light meter, so everything was washed out, this barbeque in a cramped Brooklyn backyard that seemed vaguely charged with nefarious meanings, though I’d not been watching long enough to parse them. Something about the grass that was matted down in patches; the patties on the grill that convulsed in the flames; and the more or less unintelligible chit-chat that resolved itself here and there in instants of clarity, almost all of them portentous, the men leering at the women and the women just slightly recoiling, whenever they weren’t positively basking in the attention.
Whatever they thought of the film itself, the crowd looked distinctly uncomfortable with the viewing conditions, standing around, leaning on walls, sitting cross-legged on the bare concrete floor. And for the very few who were actually talking—the films were meant, after all, to be ambient accompaniments to social life—they did so rather dutifully, fulfilling the instructions of the artists with a theatrical, empty sort of jabbering and simply listening to themselves speak. They carried the expression that audiences invariably did at installations, a happily scandalized sort of face that was at the same time self-regarding, conveying pleasure with their own openness to such provocations. I always associated that face with the lone Venice Biennial I’d attended (I’d never go again), and the prize-winning installation, which consisted of runway-jaded models lolling around a room, just beneath a glass floor, like a fashion show run only slightly amok. (You could expect something just like it in Milan and London and New York very soon.)
If anyone were to draw conclusions from this exhibit—and I’m sure they would, as de rigueur panels were scheduled for later in the week—they’d be doing it from a needlessly deformed version of a quotidian phenomenon: the way it is possible to converse engagingly in the midst of watching a powerfully charged film, neither practice coming at the expense of the other. You were really watching and really talking; one shouldn’t speak of a state of distraction here. The same is true, paradigmatically, when ambient music bleeds into our conscious activities—reading, say—and we attain a curious kind of intimacy-at-a-distance with it. The background can be the most vital thing there is, like oxygen in a room.
What my counterparts didn’t fully appreciate was that heightened consciousness wasn’t always to the good; it could destroy or disfigure precisely what one yearned to be closer to. Some features of life were simply too delicate for the spotlight, which is merely to say, there are things in this world that exist most fully and truly in shadow. Indiscriminately throwing light everywhere you went only revealed something about your obsession with light-throwing. I’d learned these lessons from my own profiles. Some of the most probing pictures came together from a kind of inattention, from not peering so deeply into someone that you lost sight of their face.
If this insight-free chatter surrounding me now, about such things as, oh, how strange it felt to talk like this in public, or to watch like this together, or just how interesting the film was—if this was really the best they could muster, then I had to side with the ones who’d gone silent, who might never have even tried their hand (or voice), who might as well have been watching the film all alone, as most of us do now anyway. In fact, I realized, there was an opportunity here for me and Karen here, given all we had to say to each other, now that we’d dispatched John. I was sure we could do better.
“Did you mean, then, Daphne likes working with text?” I announced. The room acoustics put my voice on the same plane as the film’s soundtrack. I’d noticed this as others talked, too, the way their voices merged with the ones at the barbeque, particularly those three middle-aged men in trunks, no shirts, their bellies distended, kneeling beside an aboveground pool that was sky blue, while the sky itself was more faded than that. Yet it was altogether different to find one’s own voice disappearing into a space that was uninhabitable. I gave myself pause, talking. The loudspeakers must have been arranged just so to achieve this. There was impressive craft on display here, and Rick would have been the one to execute it, being expert in audio matters, even if it was Lindy’s idea.
Karen seemed perplexed, wondering, perhaps, what was making my voice swell so unnaturally, as if I were speaking from someplace other than here. The acoustics swept signals around the room, making it hard to localize sounds and impossible to know if one’s voice was being electronically processed somehow through planted microphones. She had other reasons to be confused as well, given the many minutes that had passed since we’d last spoken of Daphne. The actress had been on my mind ever since, though, and I’d been patiently waiting for the chance to discuss her further. My tone, the distinctness of my elocution, made others in the room break off their stilted exchanges, sensing that an actual dialogue, driven by actual need, was about to ensue, unlike their own or even the film’s.
“She likes what?” Karen replied.
I cocked my head incredulously, there being no need for words, and felt the audience sway as I sent gentle ripples through that field of attention, and through Lindy’s imagined world, too, which seemed suffused with a strange sort of brooding nostalgia. On the one hand, I’d been impressed by the aural techniques deployed in the exhibit. I didn’t mind admitting that, and I would tell them both, Rick and Lindy. On the other, the imagery and the narrative were somewhat less inspired, in ways familiar to me from Lindy’s oeuvre.
“Well, I don’t know what Daphne likes,” I declared. “I was asking you. But what about... Egyptian, condensed, in white, stamped right across the drawings? That kind of thing.”
“She’s not some sort of Kruger hack, no.” Each syllable of Karen’s careened off the walls; and both of our meanings, hers and mine, were amplified by the attentive forces surrounding us that stretched and shaped our words and gestures. You couldn’t not be aware of that power here, one I wasn’t much used to feeling lately, having been away from the podiums and openings and panels for a while. When was the last time I’d formally spoken? Or even had something I’d wanted to say to these sorts?
“Then who is she?” I said. “What about her ideas ‘makes sense’ to you? That’s what you said, before.” I looked around with only my eyes to see if I might find Lindy or Rick along the perimeter, somewhere in the crowd.
“I only mean...” Karen had lowered her voice, not because she was self-conscious, but because hearing your own voice at twice the volume you expected can make it hard to think. You became louder than your own thoughts. In this space, you felt, and this was clever of Lindy, that when you spoke, you were on stage, so that each word should count. There was no such thing as private talk here, really.
I presumed this acoustical anomaly, this effect on voices, had originally been an architectural accident. But Lindy must have noticed it at some point, perhaps while seeing an exhibition here months or years before, and claimed it for her own piece. The room had odd curves to it, I could see, and wedged right into the upper corners there were in fact what looked like the black bulbs of microphones: we were, then, being electronically amplified, our voices actively mixed with the soundtrack, though subtly enough that you couldn’t help but wonder whether you were losing control of your own voice or simply suffering a bout of technological paranoia.
Karen’s hushed cadences did absolutely no good. If anything, the hint of a whisper falsely freighted it with significances that didn’t exist, making it even harder to really think through this voice, knowing you were being misunderstood. And yet Karen, who was always ready, when challenged, to display a freedom from the yoke of politesse that Claire was loathe to, admirably decided to hold forth without further reservation.
“What I meant,” she said, “was this—she’s obsessed with scenography, that’s what she told me. With Meyerhold. Copeau. The way language could be a part of the mis-en-scène, when you blended it with sight, movement.”
The room was rapt and packed now. We’d drawn them all away from the film, its ambient ominousness, the waters of the swimming pool rocking across the screen like a Hockney come to life in a bad part of town. The imagery enriched our dispute, which the crowd would have been trying to unravel and interpret, particularly, or even only, because such a bold and unreserved discussion must have seemed a part of the installation itself. They would have been trying to figure out exactly who we were—perhaps, they might hazard, the artists themselves, Lindy and Rick. I swung my gaze around the room and noted the passing acquaintanceship I had with several of the flock. That would have gone triple for Karen, as Cosquer’s fortunes had risen. She was, I noticed, studiously avoiding the mention of Daphne’s name—perhaps she’d not entirely lost her graces—and I decided to follow her in this.
“Language onstage, you mean?” I asked.
“Maybe. But why not at home, too, right?” Karen’s voice seemed to break up over these words, but in a way that was no longer appealing. No, it was anger working its way through her mouth, anger nourished by the moment, the fact that this exchange was taking place far more publicly than we’d wanted it to. The word home had been specially marred by this new inflection.
“My home, you mean?”
“Well, what exactly did she say to you?”
“She wasn’t that keen on talking after coming off stage.”
“I’d heard that.”
“She’d also had a few drinks by the time I found her.”
“Go on.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I just remember you saying how drained she was after performing.” A hitch came next, which only the odd context gave drama to. “That’s about all you said, really.”
“She was fresher when she met you, I guess.”
“But I don’t know if that’s what it was, actually. Are you surprised she might not have felt hugely talkative around you? Can you think of someone who does? A woman, I mean.” She was taking us into dangerous territory; naturally, our audience tightened around us. By this point the film was running a distant second to our back-and-forth.
“You seem to do pretty well around me.”
She curtsied here. “Besides me, though.”
“Maybe she just finds it hard to talk to men.”
“I really do think it’s you.”
“So this is why you just had to meet her?”
“You gave me nothing in that note.”
“I didn’t get much from her.”
“Verbally, at least.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that’s why I went.”
“To find out.”
“To find out.”
“About me.”
“The project. I know too much about you as it is.”
“Well, if that’s all you were looking for, it was only a matter of time till you found out about it from me.”
“And how much time do you think we have? Cosquer, I mean.”
“Plenty of it.”
“Garrett doesn’t see it like that.”
I took half a step back, a reflexive expression of affront. Karen shrugged that practical shrug of hers, as if to say that behind all his inspiring words, Garrett was still just a client, that I shouldn’t confuse his aims with my own. But I wasn’t sure who was confused here, me or her. I could find it so ugly and beneath her at times, this off-handed matter-of-factness. It was then that I longed for the manners of Claire. I knew Karen didn’t really hold such vulgar attitudes, though she could be pushed toward them, like John, in a different way, with his hillbilly routine.
“So, exactly what time are you meeting Duke tomorrow?” I couldn’t suppress a smile.
“I could do that,” she said, smiling as well. “Or you could just tell me about him, so I don’t have to.”
“It would spoil your fun. I think you’d hit it off, you two.”
I considered bringing up her absence from my post-game meeting with him on the Lower East Side, when she’d had every chance to find out more, if she and Garrett were so concerned about time, progress. In truth, she would never agree to meet with Duke for any significant period without me, I knew that already. Despite her sound politics, there was such a thing as animal fear. And, yes, Duke took a certain pride in inspiring it, especially in Karen and her ilk, who were really only conceptually interested in the Dukes of the world, once such people had secured the right perch in society.
Did she, beyond the jealousy I sensed and savored in her—there was something unconsummated between us, for many years now, since that party with all the fallen bodies everywhere, and we the only survivors—did she also have business reasons to worry about me? Did she think, for instance, I might be unfair to Daphne, that the actress needed some protection from my imagination, a check on it only Karen could provide, through early, prophylactic contact with the girl, so that the images wouldn’t get out of hand? Was she concerned I might lose the project for her and bring ignominy to Cosquer through my encounters with Daphne, though not with Duke? What exactly did she think of me vis-à-vis womankind, I wondered. What had Claire said to her? Probably she’d painted a grotesque portrait of me, in her anger, that had put this fear into Karen. Were there other women, too, though? Which ones? And could Karen’s jealousy merely have been a phantasm of my mind, and in truth she was simply disgusted by what she’d heard I was capable of with women, things which might have been almost as bad, in certain psychic respects, anyway, as the things that were held against Duke?
“Did Garrett say something?” I asked. “About Daphne. That she needed...”
No answer, only a what’s-it-matter shrug from her. The room was silent. The crowd pushed ever closer to us as more gallery-goers trickled in, and all you could hear was the onscreen banter (about girls, of all things) between the three curly-haired men, who had by now moved to the patio and were looking out over the pool and the other guests. A dull rage began to sharpen in me; I thought it best to end the back-and-forth between us before I said something in poor taste. Perhaps Karen was even hoping to goad me into it. Her disgust was peaking. It’d be better simply to make her finish her performance and explain Daphne to me, all the things I was bound to miss about her, as a man. I took a full step back and turned up my palms. The floor was hers.
She observed my hands, touched a finger to her nose, as if weighing things up, and then, again rather impressively, began to expound on just what she’d meant by the phrase coming from her. She suppressed just enough information to mask Daphne’s identity, but was otherwise expansive, corkscrewing outward with the voices of these swarthy men coming through the loudspeakers, their chests bared. Some had donned what looked like Wayfarers; others, barely tinted driving glasses. There was a nod to the yakuza montage from the lobby, something gangsterish to the shape of their mouths when they laughed, jaws clenched so that you saw their teeth, even in profile, the lips peeling back as they bit down on cigarette filters. The sound editing, the contrapuntal orchestration of the dialogue, put it definitively beyond any mere rehashing of mobster tropes. But the Queens-y backyard, that inflatable pool, the dirty lawn chairs gathered in a circle, all had the feel of (barely) organized crime. That barely might have been the novelty: men on the cusp of that world but still only dreaming of it. It was this familiarity, bordering on cliché, that left so many spectators free to be drawn in by Karen’s monologue, which had something far fresher to it.
It was from this speech, now in full flight, that I gleaned certain truths about Daphne that the woman hadn’t bothered to share with me herself—though, of course, she’d had no problem spending the night. For one thing, she was no less steeped in poetry and prose than in theater and film, which explained why she’d be so curious about the copy going with the images. Daphne was an actor, yes, but she was less taken with Stanislavski than with Meyerhold when it came to mis-en-scène. Apparently words and their exact instantiation were a fundamental concern: their sounds, but also their typographic presentation, on a stage or a page. Indeed, a reasonable portion of her theater work involved projected text.
I nodded nonchalantly at Karen, as if
this were all so obvious,
it could be inferred by anyone who had so much as said hello to Daphne. Of
course, this wasn’t true. Nor had the actress, on the night we met, shown any
interest in telling me this or anything else. Maybe she wasn’t ready to get
personal with a man, merely physical. Or maybe Karen, and this is what I think
she was now implying, was just better at earning people’s confidence. But then
what reason would Daphne have had for telling me about matters relating to literature
and theater? I was a painter cum draftsman, not a wordsmith. Whereas Karen, as
a text artist, was the one turning toward literature. Which meant these details
about Daphne might have all come up quite naturally, and innocently, between
them.
“She’s like you, then,” I said. “There’s bound to be a book of poems. A novel, even.”
“She’s studied painting,” Karen said. “She even knows your work. She was comparing your sketches that night to what she knew of you.”
This much Daphne had told me, though I behaved as if it were something of a surprise. The scrutiny I felt all around me grew: who was this man? More than one person had recognized me as I’d entered, although I acknowledged their acknowledgement with the briefest of reciprocal glances. Withdrawal, the past year had taught me, tends to create a certain demand. Meanwhile the shot playing out on the great white wall in front of us showed the men, who pulled on tees and polos without drying themselves, going indoors, into the kitchen first and then through to the breakfast nook, which overlooked the yard, the smoking barbeque, and the pool in which water wiggled from children splashing about, and one almost-teenaged girl languidly shifting in it, sunbathing and imagining, I suspected, that she was older than she was.
What other details fell from Karen’s lips? Everything was bubbling up like a barely controlled taunt, so that I wasn’t sure if she was performing anymore or simply lashing out at me.
“She was a student in Paris for a time,” she said. “That’s when she met the French director and was cast in his film. Did you guess that, too?”
Karen’s question hung in the room while the men daydreamed of an afternoon at the beach with their families that was still to come. “It’ll put all this to shame,” the bulkiest of them joked with a sweep of his hand toward the window. Yeah, they were going to fire up one of those beach pits and throw something thick on it, let it cook while they swam in the Atlantic, not this what-the-fuck pool. The host, Charlie—his ease around the house, and the casually authoritative manner in which he led the other two men around, made this clear—Charlie chuckled quietly. But the jibes kept coming, as the other two pointed out each thing in his backyard—the fence, the patio tiling, the grill, the parasol—and cheerfully dissected its second-ratedness through increasingly violent bouts of laughter. Charlie, the handsome one among them, with a strong-jawed face not yet despoiled by age or the sun, and a solider torso than his chums, sat straighter and straighter in his chair while his chuckling grew more strained. After the other two had had their fun, they were quick to dial things back: the burgers had been spectacular, the sun was nice and heavy, and the grass was green, wasn’t it? I don’t think Charlie, who remained steely-eyed, believed any of this.
I nodded irefully at Karen then, as if I’d learned hardly anything from what she’d been saying, and that she really ought to just tell me the story in one go, not in little phrases and fun facts, so that I could see if she’d really learned anything new about Daphne, something that might matter.
One of the girls from out near the pool, probably in her late teens, came into the kitchen. She smiled uncertainly in the direction of the men while fixing a glass of lemonade. (Strange how effortlessly I followed both dramas at once; my admiration for this work was growing all the time.) Again we were treated to rolling waves, now in the carafe, the cloudy yellow water that put me in mind of piss in a pool. One of the men, small, stocky, and fat-faced, a bona fide guido, pointed her out from the nook: “And her, just look, isn’t she gorgeous?” Her appeal lay in her slender frame, as well as in the long straight chestnut hair that dripped down over her eyebrows and slightly hid her expression. But the two guests who’d been ribbing the host now offered him secretive smiles. At this, his handsome face blotched over with anger and only permitted him a smirk. Sitting between the other two, he grabbed them each by a shoulder and kept squeezing and grimacing until alarm and evident pain began to show in both of them. They’d pushed Charlie too far, it seemed. The tall girl was taking in the scene from the kitchen. She took a sip of lemonade, gathered her glass, and poured one more, presumably for someone out back, when the two men flanking the host, still rubbing out the pain in their arms, passed through the kitchen and ambled back outside. Now, her uncertain smile was nowhere to be found; she was losing all doubt that menace was afoot. But, just as she made to go back out into the yard, Charlie called to her. “Florence,” he said, in a way that somehow expunged the natural euphony of her name. He patted the empty chair next to him, and in a moment she was sitting on its edge.
I had to smile, considering our parallel play. Given how openly Karen and I had started to speak here, how our voices now dominated the room, it was nearly impossible for the audience to believe that we weren’t plants of just the kind I’d suspected would be around here somewhere, recapitulating or counterpointing the film’s conflicts. This smile wouldn’t have helped my case. Yet I refused to acknowledge the crowd with my eyes, and in this way managed to stay in character.
Charlie snatched the Ray Bans propped up on his head and hung them from the collar of his waterlogged shirt; then he stood up and began to quiz the girl. You saw that sky-blue pool through the window, pondered its immobile waters, now that it had emptied, while the girl wilted under the host’s calmly posed questions.
How’d you meet my boy exactly?
How well do you really know Chris, you think?
And how well does he know you?
And then much worse: Do you think you could be “the one for him”? His face turned as ugly as his friends’ as he asked this.
Florence was ashen by this point. You thought she might drop the two glasses of lemonade, or simply piss herself. Meanwhile, Karen hadn’t missed a beat. She hadn’t even thought of the screen in a while, caught up as she was in her monologue, enunciating her words with increasing bite. Unlike Charlie, she had answers, not questions. But it was hardly the well-told tale I’d requested, just an even longer string of unexplained assertions about Daphne, doled out, it seemed, in no particular order. Could she be believed in all this, or was this playacting now, rampant falsification?
She did theater and film at Tisch—only for a little while, though.
There were classes at SVA, just like Paul.
She dropped out of everything for this radical theater school upstate.
The string of photos came to my mind—the trip upstate, all the way to Kingston and beyond. (Did Karen know anything of this?) Yet I maintained—I was determined to maintain—a neutral façade, my own theatrical riposte to her rationed divulgences. So she ratcheted things up, just as the handsome man on the wall did, and I, cast by circumstances as the teenaged girl, Florence, continued, like her, to listen and burn. More crumbs from Karen, they came faster and faster now, like bullet points in a case file. She was possessed by the facts, and the quicker she served them up, the more deeply I resolved to remain impassive.
She hates American indie.
Mumblecore was recycled Rohmer; everything else—Haynes, Maddin—was lazy Lynch.
She loves Kenneth Anger, for his color. His stories are painted not filmed.
She loves Haneke for his precision, and Costa for his patience.
But she adores the grotesquery of Dumont.
I smiled.
She hates alcohol and drinks all the time.
She loves cigarettes, even in rehearsal.
She’s known she was bisexual since at least eleven.
There was a boyfriend in New York, in college, who tormented her for two years without even once touching her.
There are still the most vicious fights with her mother, Anna, whenever she shows up.
She lives with her father but likes him no better than Anna.
She has a “complicated” opinion of her father’s dear friend, Garrett.
German philosophy—her father taught her how to love it, and she does.
What to make of this? I no more trusted Karen, in this state, than I trusted the Italian or Greek father on screen and the things he was saying to Florence, who by all appearances was profoundly unsuitable for his son. Evidently she was a parasite of some sort, and later a rat. Certainly, by implication, she was a slut.
Karen exulted in telling me all the things I’d failed to uncover about Daphne, demonstrating just how abject my ignorance was, and how glorious her knowledge. She gave me the impression there were another fifty facts for every one she mentioned. Yet she overestimated how much I cared to know the real Daphne. And if I did, it would anyway take a less charged occasion to separate truth and fiction, a moment not unfolding in front of what was now a crowd of a hundred or more. Our tête-à-tête had pulled in visitors from neighboring rooms, including, I now saw, just beyond Daphne, the artist herself: Lindy. She was smiling at me curiously, pleased with herself, perhaps, for having orchestrated this chamber piece.
In a darkened corridor, away from the window, Charlie, the father, has just laid an extraordinarily paranoid accusation: that Florence was informing on the group, that this was her real interest in his son, not love, nothing of the kind. The cinematography and the narrative, which up until now have been both pointedly low-key, finally showed themselves to be as visceral as Rick’s soundwork.
When the first blow, close-fisted, landed on the girl’s solar plexus, a shot right between her pert breasts, I could see Lindy beaming at the screened images in a complicated sort of way, just before Rick swooped in behind her. Karen and I had stolen the crowd’s attention away from the film through our conversation; yet it took just seconds for us to be definitively upstaged by this train of projected images, by celluloid, and especially by the increasingly shapeless face of this teenage girl being sprayed across not only the walls of the gallery but, by the man’s fists and boots, the virtual walls of that darkened corridor in the house.
As in a Mike Leigh film, dread long summoned but seemingly bounded suddenly burst its dam. Soon we were leaving Leigh territory, lower-class domestic realism, for something approaching the brutality of those psychotronic films showing not fifty yards from here, with their flippant dismemberment of the female body, and those oddly casual thunderclaps that landed so surprisingly on the faces of women. The blows proved cathartic for the Japanese men depicted in those films, men who were somehow more sane, more balanced, after delivering these shots out of the blue. Slapping, then, was how they cured their own hysteria, and not that of the women, who often enough weren’t especially unhinged at the moment of impact.
Florence’s dismantling, however, really occurred psychically in Lindy’s film, as each strike was accompanied by a chilling rhetorical question, voiced through the host’s clenched teeth, that when taken together with all the other questions, came down to this: Who exactly do you think you are? An answer at this point was no longer sought, so the permutations of that single non-question perpetually expanded while the girl’s visage disappeared under the mark-making of his hands. The heavy glass door to the patio was shut, trapping her whimpers inside the house, so that in the yard, all were oblivious to her fate: the inflatable pool that had briefly been empty filled again with life; guests frolicked within its perimeter or else kneeled just outside it, in the grass, canned beer and brats in hand.
Evidently nothing Karen and I could say was going to compete with this. Indeed, even the two of us could only stare dumbly at the moving pictures. We’d been put in our place, Karen’s litany had been stymied. Like others around us, she was vexed by cinematic goings-on; I, though, was experiencing a sort of bliss, no longer having to listen to her. There was something tawdry about it all, what Lindy had set up here, but even I had to admit its power, and more than that its convenience.
Like a boxer laid low in the championship rounds of a dogfight, Florence was twitching in a pile on the floor. I hooked Karen’s arm a bit too sharply with my own—the kinetic force of the film was contagious—but before she could pull away I gave her shoulder a friendly little squeeze. Without another thought, we shaped our mouths into Os, exhaled like spent athletes, and briskly walked off, arm in arm, leaving the others behind, including Lindy and Rick, the only ones who showed signs of consternation.
On my way out of the exhibition hall, I’d given Lindy, this gifted, cloying character, a single glance of recognition, just over my shoulder, before sharply turning away. I did it for Rick’s sake, really. Lindy’s mercenary interest in me naturally had persisted even once she started dating Rick. Though he understood her eminently better—they shared more of a world—I carried more cachet, probably because of my lesser availability. I was no longer appearing in reviews; even the critics could hardly reach me. Between Karen and me, it was something of a running joke how I appeared to be perpetually trying, politely enough, to evade Lindy, this quite beautiful and fast-ascending artist-manqué with the spotless pedigree, a woman whom most men, for one reason or another, would having been rushing toward. That I preferred Karen’s mostly platonic company to something more corporeal with Lindy, that the gulf in my feelings for the two was wide enough for this to be possible, gave Karen real pleasure—one I was happy for her to have.
In many ways, Lindy embodied the archetypal contemporary artist, with her Yale BA/MFA and artistically “accomplished” New York father who’d greased the wheels of her career. She had a habit, in her work, of foregrounding either climaxes or the just-befores that gave you no real sense of the denouement to follow, and hence of the full shape of things. You were often left trying on potential endings to the action, and, because of your uncertainty, you lost all sense of the significance of what had happened or was just about to. Doubtless her rise in art-film and installation circles, depended on this peculiar dramatic structure undergirding her work. It made everything she did seem senseless in a certain way, incapable of being narrated convincingly. She’d become a specialist purveyor of this breed of insufficiency. In her PS1 film, say, near the end of the work, you couldn’t quite make out Charlie’s questions for Florence over the fireworks going off in his backyard; nor could you apprehend what answers, if any, were coming back through the girl’s screams and yelps. It made the violence unbearably transfixing.
Another work of hers: a series of photographs of industrial accidents, purportedly non-fictional ones, the way she’d written each of them up in convincing journalese for the accompanying wall text. You couldn’t quite get your head around the results, though. The pictures foregrounded a moment, or possible moment, of terrible consequence while withholding the knowledge you craved most—what sort of end the depicted persons came to. A man, for instance, with his shirt caught in a woodchipper, photographed looking rather confidently at the garment, as if it were sure to simply tear away, while those standing to his side looked terrified, far less certain of this outcome. The text that went with the photo simply referred to the initial conditions: so-and-so with his shirt caught in the jaws of an industrial woodchipper, Oregon, 2014.
In another work, Lindy presented you with a tsunami-like wave bearing down on a city (which?) and left you again to imagine whether this was just one more near miss, the kind that happened every day, or one of those that quite suddenly counted. The same with various mass shootings. There was something irredeemably cheap in all this, of course, and if it wasn’t the totality of what she had to offer, it was ever-present in her output. What were we likely to learn about the spectacular from this, though, at this point in history? And even if there was something there, how could it not be overwhelmed by the crudely sensational in her oeuvre? It was no saving grace, for me, that she would emphasize one of the quieter theoretical strands in discussing her work, about dramatic or narrative structure in relation to the aesthetic field, rather than the luridness that was actually responsible for her growing visibility in the arts.
Lindy certainly fancied herself, like all those enmeshed or dependent on university patronage, as a researcher and an activist: a philosopher (when she leaned toward the conceptual) or a social scientist (when the inclination turned political) who just happened to use a camera, and not a word processor, as her primary compositional instrument. Sometimes, as in the untitled quasi-gangster film I’d just seen, she seemed to be involved in critique, perhaps of cultural tropes, their horrendous car-wreck-like capacity to entrance us, as well as the degree to which we’d become inured to assaults of several kinds, going on in parallel, on women and even young girls. One sensed the aim was to bring this to consciousness and thereby free visitors of PS1 from the problem. At moments like this, John’s Midwestern skepticism toward the coastal establishment seemed thoroughly right-minded to me. It put him miles ahead of her, that attitude. There was also a tinge of nihilism to her work, although in truth it was a simple hedge. She played both sides, sometimes depicting art as a force of revelation, and other times as inescapably bogged down in the very things of which it was supposed to cleanse us. She could never be accused of naiveté, nor of being apolitical or jaded. She had it all, really.
The fellowship- and residency-hopping that would define Lindy’s life had already begun. She’d spent six months in Kiev on a Fulbright, researching Putin’s totalitarianism by studying one of its prime targets. The visiting teaching posts would come. Wasn’t she already doing quarters at Pratt? Perhaps one day, if all went well, she’d settle into a faculty position back at Yale and complete the circuit.
She’d found herself the perfect boyfriend in Rick; I may well have intuited this in introducing them. Rick was a man still consumed with abstraction, though free of expressionism (this was conceptual abstraction); with formal features of contemporary life transposed into the medium of sculptural paintings; with naming and the paradoxes of representation. It was only a matter of time before he discovered, or fell prey to, some signature gesture he’d be reproducing to the end of his days. He struck me as the third kind of artist domesticated by the art-center ecosystem: the conceptualist or post-conceptualist, though here the post-, just as when it was a suffix to modernism, was otiose, and should probably have been replaced simply by late, or in Rick’s case even post-historical, for those who thought Warhol’s Brillo Boxes had signaled the end of the history of art. Given his participation in Cosquer, which meant his working side-by-side with far less institutional artists like John and Karen, it was difficult to say how Rick’s next years would play out. I had no idea how to feel about him, really, now that promise alone was no longer enough for any one of our group, and our choices were beginning to accumulate, to matter. Maybe he’d even head in some art-rock direction, or become a sound sculptor. It was probably a good thing, though, the lack of clarity here—better than certainty about staying on his current path. It meant he might do something interesting after all, who knows when. Perhaps only after parting ways with Lindy, if he ever managed it.
Lindy’s future wasn’t hazy at all. It was much nearer, too. Already begun, almost. You could see it would be spent much as it already had been, traveling the world’s museums and universities, showing films like this one, alongside dozens, sometimes hundreds of others, depending on the particular exhibition or conference, and serving on achingly long panel discussions in seminar rooms and reception halls, where on other days businessmen sat in the same chairs talking of money. I could see her at the end of one of those long faux-wood tables, pulling a long-necked microphone toward her and wetting her lips with Poland Spring before reporting her “findings” in that abstemious voice humanists must have held under copyright. These findings, cavalierly culled from the language of Guattari and Agamben, Sloterdijk and Vattimo, she would of course have to quilt in patterns that strained not merely credulity but intelligibility. Mostly what you got from Lindy was a botched rehashing of theoretical reflections one or two decades old that had already been quietly superseded among the philosophers and theoreticians themselves. What she could offer was just what had had time to trickle down, second- or third-hand, to the laity. Lindy and her ilk were effectively illustrators of decaying ideas, working in the past light of old stars. The results of her artistic “experiments” were already validated before she ever came to test them in the studio. At best, her work amounted to replications of earlier trials; at worst, to just-so stories of the Kipling variety. Naturally, as a viewer, you’d have no notion of what in particular had been demonstrated by any of her pieces without the assistance of the wall text, or the artist’s statement, or the ultimate legend and repository of the show’s import, which one could usually consume more profitably and pleasurably than the show itself: the catalogue. You could replace any of these textual mashups with a thousand others and hardly anything would have been disturbed. The fit would be just as snug, because there was never any fit to begin with.
One curious feature of artists like Lindy—the very sort that most of those I’d gone to Cal Arts with were hoping to become—was the dutiful interest they took in what eluded institutional matrices, what had not or could not be accommodated. That it was necessary, in seeking absolution, to avow such concern—that every artist understood, however tacitly, the rank shame of being taken to the bosom of bureaucracy—suggested how different the field was to, say, physics or anthropology, where there was no need for forgiveness or apology. It was a measure of the artist’s talent, seriousness, and nobility, however, to evince disdain and resentment for his cage, to signal to all others that he, too, craved the outside—as if somehow it were difficult to get outside, when everyone knew the cage only locked from the inside. All that was really needed was a modicum of conviction in life outside. And this turned out to be remarkably hard to find.
Lindy was in love with me: my own exit from established grounds acted on her like an aphrodisiac. Being close to my escape, being married to it, would excuse her from having to make her own. She could enjoy the comforts of the cage while siphoning credibility from the chances I was taking with my career. That was my value to her. But I knew there was more to it. There was genuine longing. Every artist of her sort would leave the confines of the museums and universities if someone could guarantee that they’d remain visible and secure. Being beyond the aegis of the organs of consecration, without losing their blessing—it was the most coveted position of all, if you could manage it. That I was taking just this risk, turning down the perch and playing for it all, in the manner of Agnes Martin or Hammons or even Trisha Donnelly, was something Lindy would have wished she had the courage for. The top tier of institutionally sanctioned artists always had this wish, to see themselves as one step up even from the institutions that sheltered them.
So far, so good, she would have thought, with my name still buzzing around town. Scarcity had deepened the import of my endorsement. She’d been desperate for over a year to become some sort of intimate to me, I wasn’t sure exactly what. Given Lindy’s own choices, however, the feeling could hardly have been mutual. She was adored in certain quarters for her work and her legs, that much was true, I’d explained to Claire more than once. But I really didn’t see it—any of it. Yes, I admired the prices her works were fetching, and the spot on the payroll of the academy she held. But that was the extent of it. I think Claire had believed in my loyalty in the end, though I couldn’t be sure how much damage Lindy might have done. I’d never seen such spite in Claire until crafty little Lindy appeared on the scene, relentlessly searching out opportunities to bump into me: house parties of the underground, Cosquer functions (she eventually became a semi-regular of the magazine), even the obscure whiskey bars in upper Manhattan I was known to frequent, ones she had no business being at. It went so far, this craving for my stamp, that over the years she’d effectively offered herself to me a few times. Eventually I made a pact with Claire not to see Lindy anymore, one I was more than happy to keep, even now.
Admittedly, the way I’d managed to get her off my trail was perhaps not the most honorable. I’d put her onto Rick, talked up his burgeoning stature and iconoclasm. My maneuver had never been revealed to Rick for what it was, and I don’t think she ever made it clear to him how intensely she’d pursued me, as fiercely as any other career goal: a fellowship, a reference, a solo show. Rick had thought she was simply someone I thought he would like. Ever since, I could only think of him as someone who’d unwittingly taken a bullet intended for me. I was fonder of him, it had strengthened my sense of duty to him, that he’d been my shield. Lindy, then, might well have saved what was left of our friendship.
Rick had taken to her, though. That shouldn’t have surprised me. She had her virtues, for the right man, even if I felt guilty that it was he I’d thought of first as her ideal match, which had to say something about my esteem for Rick. I wouldn’t have introduced her in the same way, for instance, to John, who unquestionably would have enjoyed sleeping with her. Most men would have. But she wasn’t likely to be girlfriend material for him—not that he was looking, not openly—and he would have been insulted had I suggested the possibility. Without exactly saying so, John had conveyed to me what he thought of the pair of them, still plying their trade on the exhibition circuit. Unlike the rest of us, Rick found the handmaiden-to-the-philosopher role agreeable enough, as if Hegel and Duchamp were right and it was really only philosophy, pure thought, that could reconcile us to the world, which meant that either art had to play some other role in our lives, or it had to turn into a branch of philosophy—a rather poor relation, notwithstanding the contortions both artists and philosophers were willing to make to show that artworks were dialectically useful and could earn their keep, at least while post-historical artists like Rick and Lindy, in shoring up their own importance and seriousness, kept increasing scholars’ cultural influence and visibility (which is what academicians lacked most) by publicly parroting their clunking verbiage of nominalized Latinisms. Nothing could have been more drab and inartistic than this language colonizing their essays, artist statements, and wall text; the professoriate, for its part, would turn a blind eye to all the artists’ misunderstandings. They needed each other. Just as Lindy and Rick needed each other.
So, once again, I was tickled to be absconding without having to speak to either of them, especially together, when I felt most on the spot about the whole matter of their relationship and their art, those doubly dim futures. Lindy was never going to reach us before we could escape—not through such a thick crowd born of the very success of the work. I threw one last glance over my shoulder, I couldn’t help it, and there she was, amid that sea of people who were dumbstruck at her vicious art. She was pursuing me, she had let go of Rick’s arm to do it, shouldering her way through her own audience. Meanwhile I hurried Karen toward the doors. She was too tired to fight me, it seemed, and her own opinion of Lindy’s work may not have been much higher than my own, even if she was always going to be more diplomatic about it, given her loyalty to Rick, her right hand at Cosquer. Just before making it to safety, we glimpsed John, facing away from us, deeply engaged with the woman from earlier. She seemed terribly impressed with him now, as I knew she would be. He never saw us, though she did; she even waved, but John was implacable. Nothing could take him off course. And that’s how we left him.
As soon as Karen and I were outside, heading for the subway station, arm in arm, I began to bask in the uncertainty of her tale of Daphne. Among other things, we spoke of logistical matters, timing for the initial roughs and so forth, but I didn’t ask Karen to confirm or deny anything about her story, whether the more improbable elements belonged only to her imagination. Nor did she volunteer to clarify anything. She only laughed softly, spontaneously, as we arrived at the station, patting my chest and embracing me sharply. Our exceptionally public exchange seemed to have defused the tension between us without solving a thing. I kissed her hair, taking strands between my lips. I’m not sure she could feel it; she wasn’t going to show it just now if she did. She wasn’t prepared, I knew, to absolve me of sins either suspected or confirmed, only suggest, with this tight little squeeze of a hug, that she’d not given up on me. But there was also something of a warning in it, I thought, a personal one. It made me mournful. I clamped down on her arms and gave her a firmer kiss on the top of her head, a kiss unequivocal and unconcealed. She looked up at me—I thought she might even touch my cheek for a moment—before she walked off, back to headquarters. There was nothing, it seemed, she was prepared to confirm or deny today.
I wasn’t pleased, of course, about Karen’s get-together with Daphne. Yet I was hoping some of the closeness she’d developed with her, supposing any of it was genuine, might accrue to me; that it might help me overcome the discomfort I felt with the actress after what had happened that night. It might take me beyond that inscrutable exclamation point, borrowed from Garrett’s lexicon, I repeatedly adverted to in answering to her texts, almost nonsensically at this point; and it might let her feel that I wasn’t an aloof, Lucian Freud sort, wanting her merely as a subject for painting and then as a sexual object (or vice versa, as the case may be). That would have been what she expected of me, given her experience with photographers and filmmakers; it could even be what she wanted in some way, to bed another rising talent, to make each other. Of course, she might also just like someone to talk to.
I’d resolved that night to reply to Daphne properly and ask her, among other things, about the cryptic photos that continued to come to me by text. Was that the drama school—those little sheds or studios, the long flat buildings out along the plains—that Karen had told me about? And what exactly was Nik Volger’s approach to theater, if he had one? I was putting together my thoughts when another picture arrived, this one of the marble angel that hovered over Columbus Circle’s central island. Daphne’s return trip to the city was apparently complete. Immediately following the photo were her first written words to me: I like Karen.
For the smallest fraction of a second, I considered unleashing one final mark of exclamation. I settled instead on silence. I’d held out this long without a substantive reply; a tiny bit longer and she might finally surrender. She likes you was what came next from her, no period, and with that, I felt silence wouldn’t do anymore: I needed to cut off this avenue of conversation. I began to type out the matter about drama school, if that’s where she’d gone on her trip upstate. But I had a question. I typed faster, hoping to fire off my inquiry before anything further came back, but she struck first. Adored what you showed me at the apartment.
I stopped writing and let her finish. When she was through, I discovered it all to be rather benign. Why she was writing now, and she was only asking, was for art from me. For the same theater troupe I’d seen her with, though not the same show. She’d told the others about my paintings and drawings over the weekend, at an improv retreat upstate. Maybe like a poster that’s not exactly a poster? For no particular show. Long run. The troupe. She offered not a word of explanation about all those provocative photos. Were these meant to inspire the poster?
Sure was all I could muster in reply. Soon would be my follow-up response, whenever she ended up asking, as I knew she would, just when she’d be sitting for me. My apartment or hers?
It didn’t take a heart-to-heart with Karen for Duke to get back in touch with me. Ever since we’d met, in fact, he’d been sending me texts, real-time fragments of his doings and his life, thinking, correctly, that I was looking for inspiration. Unlike Daphne’s, the pictures had some concrete utility to the campaign; they weren’t, not in the first instance, coded messages. I suppose it wasn’t unusual to update one’s acquaintances like this these days, to no purpose at all, without solicitation (though had Garrett or Paul said anything to him?). Duke might have sent similar notes to his friends. For all I knew, he was sending these very ones with blind carbon copies to others. Parts of them were quotes in black dialect which he’d punched up for my benefit; but there were, as with Daphne, plenty of photos, too. (As my trade was pictures, I tended to prefer English for communiqués. I don’t think I ever once sent a photo message to either of them.)
One early snap that had struck me powerfully, especially for a phone selfie, one I felt sure would form the basis for a drawing as nothing Daphne sent me could, was of Duke wearing one of Arête’s new sunglasses while a thick coil of smoke rose from his mouth, like a snake wrapping itself around his face. I recognized the pair from the box I’d been sent; they had a truly brilliant mirror coating and small lenses shaped like eggs laid on their sides—a bit like eyes. Not only that, the lenses sat abnormally deep, so they seemed to inhabit the same plane as the eyes, replacing the organs rather than covering them. On me, I recalled, the glasses were simply nice. My face lacked the kind of angularity and tonal contrast that could generate traction against the frame’s rounded forms. Duke’s physiognomy, however, his jagged face, together with the blackness of his skin, seemed to transform the pair. The sunglasses performed a kind of voodoo on him, as his forefathers in the Congo might have. His eyes had been scooped right out of his skull and turned into reflective absences—that was one way of seeing him. The other was less voodoo than twenty-second century. You could experience him as an android under repair, with eyes popped out to work on the inner circuitry.
While walking away from the station, Karen had shouted one thing back at me, a deadline: one week. In seven days, she explained to me later, she and I would meet with Antral’s representatives with a portfolio of roughs that would be developed into the initial pieces of the campaign. Oddly, Karen never mentioned needing to see any preliminary drafts from me. But then, I thought, how could she work up any draft text to present at the meeting, if everything was meant, as Garrett had told us, to be inspired by my sketches? Could it mean she and Paul were having second thoughts about the relationship between images and text in the project? Might there no longer be any need for Karen to wait on my work—had she privately been given authority to operate independently of me? It had to be said, however many happy accidents owed their life to Garrett’s low-information model of teamwork—an approach that bore, especially of late, unfortunate associations with demagoguery—it necessarily produced suspicion between colleagues.