Lately Paul was putting together the media-planning operation for the launch of the two drinks and the lenses. In one respect it was going to be simple: a purely outdoor campaign of billboards, posters, and such, with no internet, television, or periodical advertising whatsoever. But the limitation created complexities. He and the team at Siglin—joining Antral hadn’t meant leaving his firm—were busy identifying spaces throughout the city in which to lodge the first of my images, before expanding outward to a second set of sites, and later a third. Everything would unfurl in waves that eventually washed over the entire country: Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, together with the major national highways linking them all, beginning with what was once Route 66.
We would be operating at every conceivable scale. Daphne and Duke would sometimes appear only a couple of inches high, stuck in phonebooths on guerilla stickers of the Andre the Giant Has a Posse variety, or else nearly a foot tall, pasted up en masse all over construction sites on letter-sized flyers—in-the-wild postings, as Paul called them. But our principals would also stand hundreds of feet tall on the broad faces of major city buildings and infrastructure. At John’s suggestion, we were going to go with a billboard-style approach to production, blowing up my drawings and printing them, at extreme resolutions, at twenty-five and fifty times the size of life.
Siglin was negotiating for vast numbers of façades: blind ones, windowed ones, recessed ones, any and all. The same went for billboard spaces along the major and minor arteries leading into, out of, and through New York: the BQE, the FDR, Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The MTA and the broader public transport system, including the ferries, wouldn’t be spared. Buses and subways and taxis, they’d all be tapped in strategic ways that would be, at least at first, more up to Paul than to me. He and Garrett had been quick to tell me my input would be sought in all of this, but frankly, I might have had more to learn from a mercenary like Paul than the reverse in matters like this. I had that sort of humility at least.
Wearing his advertising hat, Paul had spent the bulk of his time persuading legions of building owners throughout the city, including the Bronx, to let us use their vacant façades for portraits, simply for purposes of residential and urban beautification. After all, our first batch of pieces would be entirely untouched by any sort of branding: no logos or names, nothing at all, these were Garrett’s orders. Though he might have chafed at the notion at first, Paul was proving skilled at turning constraints to his advantage.
No-one had even spoken publicly of there being corresponding products for these images, and no-one should have. Paul was pitching the drawings, and presenting me, in a way I’d been sure he couldn’t: as works of art by one of the burgeoning young painters the city had begun to bet on, and whom Garrett was underwriting as a matter of patronage and philanthropy, like Arnault or Saatchi. Yet public space mattered, too, Paul would contend; it might have been what mattered most to Garrett’s idea of the project. In this way, Paul and his lieutenants had begun to convince the city council of my value; he’d even succeeded, miraculously, in recruiting Sandy to the cause. I’d been avoiding my dealer for some time now. But, at Paul’s request, Sandy was now speaking on my behalf. He probably thought this would get him back in my good books. I knew he must be incensed by all the money and clout he thought I’d cost him, if only I’d not careened off the path he’d put me on. Yet like Paul, he had guile. Technically, Sandy was still my dealer. We were separated, not divorced, and so he maintained a right to represent me unless and until I revoked it. Now he was exercising that right, by way of a stellar reference, to coax me back into his orbit.
His endorsement was working on the city, if not on me. We were beginning to get the OK to renovate various public spaces—parks, roadways, municipal complexes, including the police station—provided, of course, that the council, in each case, could satisfy itself that our proposal would incontrovertibly improve what already held sway there. Our competition, luckily, was merely peeling paint, an index of renewal programs long ago defunded. The country had moved on from the idea that maintaining public space qualified as essential business of the state, had instead doubled down on security and contract enforcement. Which left the commons mostly in private hands these days, subject to the whims of the ultra-rich. This is what made Paul’s pitch viable in the first place: the city’s appetite for cost-free beautification. The MTA was a paradigm case, a circulatory system the city had nickel and dimed into infirmity, whose trains no longer had the capacity to get their riders to work on time. Whatever money the Transit Authority could get now, they invested in new infrastructure. Beauty would have to wait on men like Garrett.
On a call that Monday, after checking that I’d received the case of Theria he’d sent along with the eyeglasses, Garrett emphasized to me the importance of the simple power of the first batch of pictures—without, however, giving me any specific instruction in subject matter or execution. I depend on your judgment, he said. He wasn’t wrong to trust me on this. Unlike Lindy, I didn’t think the first volley in any project needed to bring fire and brimstone. There’d be time for that.
Karen was in touch a couple of times during the week, though always by the rather chilly means of email. Each time I opened her notes, I expected some hint about the overriding need for restraint in the initial imagery, given the delicate circumstances under which we’d won placement for them: the lie, more or less, we were passing off on the private and public organizations that would carry our pictures. The interpersonal restraint I’d failed to show with Daphne would have been plenty of justification for such a warning. But Karen, too, offered nothing of the sort. Was she trusting my judgment? Or merely giving me as much rope as I needed to hang myself? I suppose that would depend on just what sort of chat she’d had about me with Daphne—and perhaps even with Claire, later on.
On Monday, at my apartment, I inaugurated the afternoon, as I did most days now, by opening a bottle of Theria—I’d begun to revel in its protean profile—and charging my eyes, which amounted simply to looking, though without too much care, at the work of others. So many artists I knew seemed studiously to avoid this so as to circumvent the urge to copy, to steal. I never felt such an impulse; I let the art wash over me inchoately, the way the drink washed over my palate, before I began my own work for the day. I went into my library and targeted the wall of prints, taking down, with the help of a foot stool, a whole block of volumes. I went no further in imposing order on the shelf than ensuring only picture books sat on it, so that every time I swiped down a rack like this, it was like taking a core sample whose constitution I couldn’t predict. On this occasion, the book on one end of the block brimmed with illustrations of disease from the nineteenth century, horrific pictures of consumption and hysteria. Deeper inside, I discovered the classical scientific illustrations of Romer and Haeckel. Not just the infamous embryos, but the whole range of work, starbursts of color conjoined to the kind of sober modeling that furnished a veneer of objectivity and no more. It would all be of use to me now, this approach to physiognomy and verisimilitude that didn’t go by way of sensory fidelity but rather the analytic credibility of science, or pseudoscience, which, in truth, is simply another part of science. We don’t consider it pseudo until the evidence against it has crossed some threshold, as with mesmerism, say, or phrenology. There must be things we practice today in earnest that will one day take the moniker pseudo-. The science of consciousness? Or else the science of matter as we now conceive it?
Other books in this particular lot were more classical: one had prints from Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier; another carried a dedication to the great Italian draftsmen Pontormo and Mantegna; and a third gave most of Rubens’ sketches. In each book I focused on the works in chalk and conté, pastel and charcoal. As for more recent material, along with an Agnes Martin book I found myself lingering longest over a collection of prints of Mazzoni’s drawings. He was hardly the most profound of the artists I looked at, yet he managed to extract an uncommon lushness from a staid and neglected medium, colored pencil, that traded the clarity of graphite for the variety of color. Somehow, in his choice of shades (often pinks and purples) and layering of strokes, he managed to generate saturated hues without ceding the precision that remained the specialty of graphite. The combination could be captivating. And you felt the power of this even if you thought, not wrongly, that there was something insubstantial in Mazzoni’s baroque, quasi-mystical intertwining of flora and fauna, nature and man. Some pieces could remind you of high school doodles taken too far, or bad Bosch, particularly since many of them were executed on Moleskine paper. I would never be able to quite endorse him or his works. It all made me queasy. Yet there was undeniably a sensory world he put you in touch with, and it felt, despite itself, genuinely salutary.
One thing seemed certain: the city could hardly take offense to this kind of quasi-decorative work. So that week, I worked up imagery of Daphne and Duke that seemed to me unified in style, if nothing else, although they only faintly bore Mazzoni’s hallmarks. No colored pencil, for one. Instead, I opted for oil pastels highlighted with acrylic gouache, the only paint I had much use for anymore, and even then I tended to use it somewhat oddly, in its opaque and undiluted form, for the sake of intensity. Similarly, I’d shed Mazzoni’s preference for notebook paper and the necessarily off-handed quality such a ground imparted to anything drawn on it. It’s why Pettibon and Dzama and Davies were all too casual to help me now. Intentionally so, of course, but that didn’t change much, glorifying the slapdash, the note, the fragment. I had no longing, in any department of life, for the merely provisional. I might accept the provisional, from time to time, but only if I had to. Mazzoni, trivial though he was, at least brought his pictures off with a degree of polish.
For a support, I returned to lightly marbled, untreated goatskin vellum, for its sense of moment and concentration. It was expensive, and I’d always had to ration my use. No longer. The freedom of patronage on the scale I now enjoyed (for who knows how long, though?) could be measured through my new profligacy with animal skin. Dozens of rolls of the stuff arrived. My tiny supply in the coat closet never even got touched, I had such an abundance now, in all varieties, including a slightly pink one that appeared to have retained a mist of blood from the animal to which it once belonged. All sorts of strange hybrid supplies that art stores seemed only to sell on a lark, acrylic inks in one hundred and twenty colors, also descended on and deluged my apartment, filling up shelves intended for dishes and dry goods.
Remarkably, the budget Paul outlined was effectively uncapped, at least for me. So I acquired many other materials on a waywardly experimental basis, which Garrett didn’t discourage in the least. On matters of limits and boundaries I tended to consult with him first. Paul was a boxed-in sort; his life showed it in so many ways. Except for his role at his research firm, he’d grown used to a lifetime of seconds-in-command. It made sense he’d be tighter with money. Garrett, though, had spent his life building his own worlds, taking all the risks and setting all the rules.
Patronage, even just a few days of it, starting with my trip to Daphne’s show and, less than a week later, these indulgent acquisitions, was an intoxicating thing. Would anything I were doing somehow be any purer if the backing had come from the NEA or the Guggenheim Foundation, everything filled out in triplicate or what passed for it in the digital realm? There was something wonderfully Medician in producing work under Garrett’s conditions of extravagance. I’d anyway been looking back to Florence and Venice and Rome in my recent work, the oracular significance of historia and so on. Why not explore that world’s conditions of production? The beauty, of course, was that as with Dia or LUMA, there was no board of directors in charge; you needed only to convince a single person of the worth of your aims.
Most of that picture of Duke in the mirror shades with the trail of smoke, the very first I worked up in earnest, had a matte finish. But the eyes, or rather those eye-shaped frames, demanded oil, my estranged friend, for its singular shine. In the photo I’d based my rendering on, Duke’s body was entirely absent. I could see a bit of a Nehru collar, and that turned out to be enough. I was including the body in my version, as it seemed to me, in his trade, the body should never be forgotten. He, more than most, really was his body; it’s what allowed him to be who he was in the world. The collar of his shirt had led my hand more than my mind as I built up the picture in provisional strokes, maybe-shapes and forms that turned increasingly definite until reaching a threshold of commitment, which was different in every drawing but always clear enough for me to know when it had been crossed.
In this case, the tunic Duke ended up in formed the dividing line, with all the draping it permitted, the gentle play of modeled forms over his battering ram of a body. In his hand, a cellphone materialized, not a smartphone but an old flip, with its v-like structure clamped between the pads of his fingers: one of those burner phones, bought in bulk and ready to be disposed of when the job was done, whether the sale of drugs (the smoke put you in mind of this) or the detonation of IEDs (here the tunic helped). The picture might have served as the cover to an album by a Wahhabi MC. I took pains to capture Duke’s face with an almost overpowering verisimilitude, the kind that turns a visage into a vortex, inexorably dragging your attention down into it, particularly those two shielded eyes. Summoning my recollections of Duke from our night at Bryan’s, which came to surface after long reveries—now a controlled habit of mine when augmented and eased by Theria, I didn’t quite understand how—I would mentally rehearse each detail in the half-light. Duke’s face, after however many bowls of hash he’d smoked, manifested to me as vacated, holy, possessed.
In tandem with this picture, I worked on a charcoal piece of the football player. For now I held off on Daphne: Karen’s interference with her was retarding my thinking, my imagination, though the Theria might well help, just as it had that day watching Daphne on tape in The Sort. I drew this piece on toned paper, a pale green rice paper with smallish dimensions: fourteen by twelve. And I put Duke in a pose it took many drafts to discover: facing the door of his old childhood apartment at the end of that dark corridor, his hand gripping the knob of whoever’s home it was now, in a manner that conjured in some small degree the charming ambivalence reified most indelibly in the Mona Lisa.
In the two photos I had of this tableau, Duke was dressed purely in undergarments, black stretch material with red pin stripes and a fierce, almost blinding shine. Prototype Arête gear. I’m not quite sure what had happened immediately before that had led to this odd situation, a man effectively in his underwear out in a common space. Had I coaxed him into it that night? The look on his face did have something of that happy-now? quality. There was certainly a touch of humor to the whole thing. What I went on to draw represented the incident in somewhat less humorous terms. I left Duke in his tights, of course, and I left some wrapping on his knee that was partly coming undone, the spongy material trailing ludicrously down his calf and onto the floor like a wedding dress. Yet the perspective I adopted was low, the horizon and vanishing point much higher in the frame than in the photo, as if I were seeing the scene while keeled over from drink (had I been?). The focal point, the plcce every element seemed to funnel you toward, wasn’t, as in the bespectacled drawing, Duke’s face, which was cocked back toward the viewer, no sunglasses this time, just a curiously undetermined look, the look just before fixity comes to it. Nor was the focal point, as in the photos, the elaborate fresco tattooed on his back that could be seen beneath the narrowly defined tank top stretching across his back. The camera’s flash had made the ink more visible than it otherwise would have been, given how black his skin was. And the doorknob was barely visible, a glint of gold between his dark fingers.
As the drawing firmed up, the interest concentrated around that knob in his hand, and the odd kinetic charge of his body, which seemed not to project forward, in the direction of the apartment door, but back toward the viewer, the direction from which he’d come. Was the door locked and resisting the torsion running from his shoulder through his forearm to his hand? Or could he have been repelled by whatever he was hearing from the other side of the door? His eyes did seem to say, You hear that? as if physically he was proceeding, but psychically he was repelled, thinking that where the viewer stood, back behind him, might be the best place to be right now.
As I continued modeling the figure in charcoal, laying in a loose graphite wash with turpentine and wrapping space around Duke, all the hard geometry of the corridor aggressively pulling away from you, what materialized was a man, certainly some sort of athlete, turning the knob with the familiarity of one who knows this place and the estrangement of one who knows he doesn’t belong there anymore. This is how I remembered the scene, yet it surfaced fully as the drawing progressed and I got three or four bottles in with Garrett’s curious drink.
It was then, with a start, that I recalled someone coming out of the apartment that night: a girl of fourteen or fifteen, with braids and braces and something stronger than a mean streak. Before Duke could get into it with her, which in itself was slightly comical, but then not, given how belligerent she turned out to be, telling us all her brothers would be home and take care of us good, Bryan rushed out from his own apartment to calm things down. By the time one of the girl’s brothers came to the door—he’d actually been inside the entire time with his girlfriend, who gave us a violent and frightened stare—everything had been defused. We’d actually woken Bryan this way. He’d not been happy about it, obviously, and it was from there that they both showed me the door. Duke did spring for a car for me. I recalled now the three twenties he’d given me, crushed up bills poked through the crack in the window as I fell back in the seat. I could see, even then, that he’d been genuinely hurt by the teen’s anger, by how the past had expelled him.
It was late Wednesday when my thoughts resolved or simply calmed sufficiently, having not had to communicate with either Karen or Daphne for a couple of days, that I felt capable of working on the Daphne drawings properly. What role my steady consumption of Theria had played, I don’t know. But suddenly I had ideas. The first picture was going to double as the poster she’d wanted for her troupe, and not just for my convenience. The campaign, I thought, ought to subsume every facet of her life, however tangential it might have been to the product at hand, which meant that the pictures could serve the purposes of other promotions, in this case, the theater company’s. The unusual priorities of my patron gave me license. Antral’s fortunes were predicated on a certain randomness, as was the history of chemistry itself, the unpredictable reactions that occurred in testing, or simply by accident; and the particular properties any compound might end up having, about which you could only make smart guesses beforehand. Applied chemists were on good terms with the fluke; in many ways it was the engine of the enterprise.
Paul didn’t care for serendipity, I knew. But the laws of psychology were so much weaker than chemistry: if anything, he should be more comfortable with unpredictability, the failure of reason and the intellect. Yet when it comes to the human mind, the most complex compound we know, our ambitions to tame it, to believe we already have in some measure, get away from us. For me, as an artist who didn’t see himself as an investigator of nature, whether utopian, nihilistic, or participatory, one involved in a common project with the philosopher or the scientist or the activist, I couldn’t have been more cheered by the latitude Garrett granted all of us to operate in a commercial and artistic dark.
Several drawings for Daphne’s troupe came together before the end of the week. Perhaps they would amount to a set of variations, all executed on heavy cream stock, or better, yellow, a dull saffron shade. In the first of these pictures, a pastel offering, I positioned the girl in an untouched rhomboid area of the paper, climbing the giant and teetering out of the light, her head lost to the black. Even though I was going to vanish it soon, I drew her face carefully before using my fingers to scrub her away, just as I had the men of Joy Division. This time, however, I achieved the effect not through erasure but by blending the contour lines and stretching the gray-black that filled the upper third of the picture. This was not a taking back so much as a bleeding through, from one into the next. And, in the same way that Rauschenberg’s Gorky pictures held a trace of the original forms, so too did my Daphne, in that uneven dark that shimmered with so many grades of black. It took me a number of tries, using the chamois occasionally but mostly the stump, to get her to raise her head, almost triumphantly, into the dark, which was here something like a realm of purity and ignorance. It was in the light, by contrast, including that saffron of the paper and the white highlights that brought an even greater luminosity, where disfigurement lived. The giant onto whom she clings and his grotesque proportions shine brightly with that grimace upon his face as he stares toward the floor, leaning down into the light, while she’s held aloft, thrust into the black heavens. The dark, as for Garrett, is the promise.
A second image, in colored pencil, starker, less romantic than any Mazzoni I’d seen, although no less rich, would turn out to be critical. I had no sketch or photographic base to work off, but my memory of the moment was so strong there really was no need. (I seemed to remember everything more intensely these last weeks.) I could picture, almost see, Daphne’s face hovering over her margarita glass, with a ghostly lamp bouncing light onto our table, a brittle stripe of yellow down the mirror, raking her face like the gaslight falling on one of Degas’ danseuses, a face which, as I had it before me now, in my memory of that evening, had not yet glowered in anger. Daphne had a ghoulish cast for only slightly deeper reasons: she’d left the performance in such a hurry, as was her habit, that she hadn’t yet shed her stage makeup. In the picture, as in my memory, the margarita held the lamplight on its surface just beneath Daphne’s face, which was covered over by a danseuse’s mask of white paint. She carried an air of the mime, mute as ever, though strangely also lacking all expression, as I’d found her for portions of the night. Or else she was between expressions. She seemed to me very clearly to represent some untrammeled lake of feeling, meaning, expression, far larger than the little pond of liquor on which she floated.
Where was Daphne now? Was she going to wait until she sat for me to offer any hint of affection, or even simple interest? Was it already finished, used up? The pictures, the drink too, made me ask all this. It was the worst part of making these roughs, not the pain my hand ended up in, or my stiff neck, but the ache in my mind.
A third Daphne emerged only on Friday morning. The entire week blurred into one long day and night, which made me wonder what Theria was doing to me besides giving me “energy,” as if energy were some undifferentiated source of power. This draft was based on a photo that had come from my employer. I found it strange that Garrett should have it: Daphne’s yearbook picture from Spence, before she’d been expelled, or simply left, her financial latitude having disappeared with her mother when her parents split. Presumably that capital had been channeled into the mother’s new family, the step-siblings Daphne didn’t much care for.
In this rendering, Daphne looked remarkably... normal, I suppose. If we wanted to introduce her to her hometown with a certain nonchalance, this was it. Not only that, you couldn’t connect this girl of eleven or twelve with the young woman she was now. She had one of those faces, like Gerry Vanilla’s but with a much happier outcome, in which it seemed almost every bone had migrated some distance and formed new continents, just as there are those whose bones never stop shifting, so that you can’t even see the identity between the thirty-year-old and the sixty-year-old.
I went with red acrylic ink, the kind sometimes used for the jaunty, impressionistic contour drawings that had found their way into a good deal of advertising and identity work. But I opted for a more meticulous and sober approach: laborious marking with what might have been the most perfect nibbed pen I’d ever known, naturally from Japan. You could barely see the line it drew, it was so fine. Geometrically speaking, the drawing was correct; I’d gridded it out in graphite first to be sure. Yet I’d managed to extrude the usual illusionism from it, as the blistering ink on toned laid paper, red-brown and bark-like, didn’t lend itself to verisimilitude, which I’d no special desire for or against when I’d started the piece. I rarely had any such intentions of effect. The resulting image was almost holographic, the little girl’s face hovering over the paper, her spirit come to life.
When I finished these pictures in a state of sleepless fatigue, I did what I was under no obligation to do: I sent them over to Karen, but hedged in a manner I was borrowing now from Paul and Daphne, too: no explanations, no text anywhere, just the attachments. If she wanted to add anything to these, or comment on them, or use them to spur her own ideas, she was free to try. It was a show of goodwill, my sending these along without waiting for my arm to be twisted; it was also a push toward rapprochement after our spat over Daphne. It would show confidence, too, in myself, my pictures, and the project itself. In the end, if Karen added nothing to these pictures, indeed, even if she ended up thinking poorly of them, at least she wouldn’t be blindsided at the meeting with Antral. One more small kindness.