I laid out the drawings end-to-end at Cosquer’s offices, two pictures deep, facing either side of a long, light aluminum table that looked like it had been lifted from Antral’s headquarters. You could survey the work simply by circumnavigating the table. Karen, who’d retured my favor of silence—she’d not said a word to me about the pictures over the weekend—had a dark green notebook sitting on her personal desk, about five yards nearer the windows. She had reams of these books: a tony French or Japanese brand, I don’t remember which, that she’d started using so long ago the mere sight of them in a stationary or art store immediately got me thinking of her, wondering for a split second what was in their pages, as if any and all of them, even the brand new ones, had to contain something of the inner life of my dear friend. She’d even started off Claire on them.
Several Antral underlings were present at this meeting, helping to set up the drawings and photograph them. They were tweaking lights they’d apparently brought with them, an eccentricity of Paul’s. He liked to see what he was buying in a light he understood. So, he always took his own lights to the design contractor’s office, bright white sodium lights that eased comparison to the mock-ups and drafts he’d already seen. Garrett and Paul stood back now, leaning gently against the entirely empty and unmarked desk I used just often enough to be considered mine. Unusually, not just Paul but Garrett was dressed in a suit. Probably there was a luncheon with investors afterward.
Karen talked with them both while I finished setting up with the underlings. Once I was satisfied with the position of the lights—they’d exposed nothing really problematic—I waved them all over. Garrett approached with a furrowed brow and a certain caution, as if he were worried about what he’d find. Karen, for her part, looked slightly withdrawn. She’d eyed my drawings blankly as I’d pulled them from my portfolio, without opining in any way. She had plenty to worry about, I suppose, that had nothing to do with the pictures, like her own contribution to the project, which I still knew nothing of. She would have been doubly anxious with clients inspecting Cosquer work today. She’d told me of this feeling in her gut, whenever patrons assessed commissioned pieces, no matter how many times she’d gone through it before. It was odd to see her palpably concerned to please, which wasn’t the norm for her. Nor was it her forte. Notoriously, within the upper echelon of the art-design world, when there was a dispute over something she’d offered, and she felt the client’s criticism sprung from one or another kind of stupidity (there are just so many kinds, she liked to say), she’d quickly transform into the headstrong artist I knew, balking at such qualms. All the same, she genuinely liked the idea of pleasing: it’s what her upbringing demanded of her, no matter her recalcitrance. I had something of the same feeling with Sandy sometimes, when he’d sold works I’d not yet produced and I had to show him my efforts and gauge the buyer’s reaction from that. But those days were gone; I had no interest in returning to them. Cosquer’s success had proven that middlemen like Sandy weren’t really necessary, not today.
I say I had no apprehension, but when Paul, who dawdled with his phone for a little, finally came toward us, a palpable constriction seized my stomach and chest. He embodied a more direct challenge to me than did Garrett, skeptical as he was of the whole project, which was ultimately centered on my work. This veteran of advertising imagery, of consumer psychology, of even more esoteric semiotic matters surrounding management and authority—until the moment he entered the penumbra of his proprietary lights, he was the most matter-of-fact of any of us in the room, presumably having reviewed images in this way hundreds of times throughout his life. He didn’t bother acknowledging me as he stepped forward into his domain with a convincing air of objectivity about him. He merely flicked on that Schopenhauerian look of aesthetic contemplation; it was effortless, as though such appreciation, far from being some transcendent meditative experience, was utterly mundane. He’d spent more of his life in this state than in any other, perhaps even more than he cared to, but there was no way around it, the job demanded it of him. What could such a workaday approach to seeing really yield, I wondered. Yet was it any different, in the end, from the ways of most art historians, professors of art, and professional collectors? They did a better job of masking the perfunctory element, perhaps, but so what? Wasn’t it just this kind of man I’d been trying to escape from, in pulling away from the galleries and art shows? And here he was to give his appraisal.
“May I touch them?” Garrett asked.
This was the privilege of the patron. To fondle the work. If he destroyed it, well, he’d created it, in a way. But Garrett was in fact terribly careful in his touching. Rather than draw his fingers along the surface, through the charcoal lines I’d left without fixative—I’d always thought it flattened out the variations in texture and color one found in the best charcoals—he dabbed at it, as if blotting a stain. Most of the time, his fingers hovered over the surface in closest possible proximity; I could barely make out the space between his fingers and the paper, but it was there. It was this hover, he explained, that was essential to his manner of assessment. He’d done the same at Whent’s apartment, though his handling then had been a little rougher: he’d been drunk, he said apologetically, though he’d not mentioned the indiscretion to Whent. No wonder Garrett was no ally of the museums. He required a kind of kinesthetic access to art that couldn’t be had in such settings, not without ultimately destroying the objects when practiced en masse, like a vinyl record played ten thousand times or a public statue worn away at precisely those points at which contact was chronically made with it, like the fat bronze man’s penis presiding in Time Warner Center.
One of the great pleasures of my new patronage was the sense it gave me that I had nowhere better to be than my apartment, that being housebound was, remarkably, the most fiscally responsible use of my time. I’d holed up in the apartment the entire week, guilt-free, leaving only to restock on plain bagels and peanut butter and, a few times, around three in the morning, to tear apart fatty kebabs, while drawing at any and all times of day, without regard to the rhthms of ordinary life going on around me. Unexpected dividends arrived over the weekend: I’d managed to conjure up, indeed, felt compelled to conjure up, a few extra pieces.
The first of these late arriving items, set up now on an easel rather than lying flat on the table, was a landscape: a wheat field pulled from my imagination, and nourished by the memory of the only cross-country drive I’d ever made, when I’d traveled with Immo, as his chaperone, at a time when he was moving to New York and I was already settled there. The light was only twilight here, and the stalks of wheat looked engorged, as if they might burst. The piece was expansive: sixty by forty on black paper, now mounted with gum on a slice of plywood, all in white chalk sharpened to a very fine point, so that the detail was close, precise. It had taken twenty-five-hours to compose, working until dawn this morning.
A day and an hour, fueled by Theria, which Garrett had quietly agreed to supply me with in bulk now, as I’d already gone through the first case. Apparently Antral was still waiting on FDA approval. The delays, however, seemed endless, which gave me something to worry about. What exactly was it, chemically? What had that look on Paul’s face meant at our first meeting? I know I’d felt, while I’d worked all week, as though Theria were bringing a certain skew to my vision, a greater intensity to the periphery of consciousness, where many of its neglected curiosities lie. There were no hallucinations as such, none that I could verify, anyway. Yet the drink provided much more than mere energy or clarity, the sorts of things caffeine or Adderall could deliver. No, it had a way of recalibrating the senses, exploding assumptions and enhancing the imagination, apparently without even a touch of the psychosis or deceleration of thought produced by marijuana or LCD. With Theria, your epiphanies remained profound, even after you’d sobered up or told your friends about what you’d discovered. And I’d been having them for days now, various kinds of cognitive breakthroughs, in exact proportion to my consumption of the drink.
There’d been less exotic things in my diet, too, and they might have been just as important in their way. Bowls and bowls of steel-cut oats with chestnut honey; loaves of stale brioche and challah microwaved and eaten squishy and smoldering. There was shot after shot of watery espresso, the grind’s being all wrong. I was dropping cheap bodega coffee powder in the basket that wasn’t close to fine enough, so that the water would rush through the spouts. I had the impression hardly any of the actual coffee ended up extracted into the cup; it was just a lukewarm brown runoff. What was carrying me forward, really, was interest, more interest than I’d shown in anything in at least a year and a half. I had Garrett to thank for this, almost as much as for his money.
Pondering this wheat field shoulder to shoulder with the others, I felt there was something pleasingly generic about it, at least superficially. It looked a bit like a negative print, except for the life I’d put directly into the stalks, which shimmered as though everything weren’t quite black and white. I’d made them young and thrusting with growth, infused them with a heroic stoutness, so that they offered more or less successful resistance to the gusts that swept along a few leaves and bent the saplings among the surrounding trees. These shoots, compacted together and propping each other up, hardly yielded to the wind.
Paul and Garrett and their Antral lackeys might well have missed the quiet vitality of the scene; it would be easy enough to do. I wasn’t worried, though, since I’d planned on the campaign’s making this image ubiquitous, which Paul assured me it would be, so that on your fifteenth time crossing paths with it, down in the trains, on the side of a bus, or up above on a billboard or a building, its apparent triviality would give way, in your mind, to an underlying vigor. Certainly I hoped you’d be surprised to learn, weeks or months later (we hadn’t settled on a timetable) that this was a first glimpse in the rollout of a whiskey, the name of which was still being picked out by Garrett, who’d made it known that he wouldn’t be soliciting answers to this question.
Karen clasped my arm from behind. By the time I’d turned around to face her, after slipping out of my private thoughts while Antral people pored over my pictures, photographing them for later analysis, her head was almost upon my shoulder.
“I like it all,” she said flatly. “Even the wheat.”
I’d missed her voice—it had been a week since we’d spoken—though I’m not sure I believed what she was saying with it. Yet there was none of the repression her manner could subtly accommodate.
“I was thinking of lab equipment, too. For the Theria.”
“The origins of energy.”
“Basically.”
From where I stood, it was easy to see that the pages in the notebook on her desk didn’t sit perfectly flush. Except for the last quarter of it, there would have been a good deal of work in that volume, one of her project notebooks, of which there were many stacked on the office shelves, each one distinguished by a single word on the spine. Here, it was Arête. She would have been trying out text and layout for Theria in it, sans imagery; it was effectively a sort of sketchbook, which she used for purposes far from art or design or copywriting. Through Claire, I’d originally learned of the metamorphosis Karen tried not to talk about. More and more, she was shifting toward fiction, training herself, Claire had thought, to be the sort of novelist they both loved, the ones doing “advanced writing” today for tiny presses. Anyway, that was the direction Karen was headed in. She’d studied writing at CalArts within the Critical Studies department, as it was called. To me, writing always seemed a silly thing to take up in college, a bit of a waste, given how much we all naturally used it, practiced it in life, just as a matter of course. Better to find one’s way from there through self-study. But Karen had done it more as a signal of intent to herself, that she was something other than one more visual artist.
At the time she’d composed been poetry, prose poems, good ones, too, I recalled, redolent of Hejinian and Carson. Now her writings had grown longer. I could tell merely from the outsides of her notebooks, particularly a series she’d started a couple of years ago, marked N1, N2, all the way, so far, through N7. There were eighty sheets to those books: one hundred and sixty pages. She had a rather loose script, and there must have been various portions consumed by notes or research. But, at a minimum, she had something like a draft of a book-length work. Claire had told me it was a novel or pseudo-novel of sorts, and by the sounds Karen had been making lately, I had to think she wasn’t all that far from completion. Early on I’d asked to see those notebooks and was simply denied, something that hadn’t happened with the poetry, and didn’t happen with the non-fiction prose, on which she actively sought my opinion. I merely observed the accumulation of these notebooks, and around N4 she’d confirmed what I already knew from Claire, that it was indeed a work of extended prose fiction, though she reminded me that the Greeks wrote such things long before anyone used the word novel. Had I read those Greek proto-novels? I hadn’t, though I’d read enough Bakhtin to admire them in concept.
I was staring at the Arête notebook, yet Karen refused to acknowledge my interest, so the book stayed closed, its dark green covers closing off white depths within. Meanwhile Garrett and Paul kept circling the table. You couldn’t help but think of a very slow game of musical chairs, I pointed out to one of the Antral assistants, a fresh-faced man, probably a recent Columbia grad. And while there were indeed chairs slung to all sides, there was no music except for what we heard wafting in from Brady, our impeccably dressed neighbor and could-be conceptual artist. Shostakovich’s symphony cycle appeared to be his present obsession. The Second was just closing, and once it did, Paul and Garrett, who seemed to have been following its final notes, drew near.
“Paul?” Garrett said in an exploratory way. But his marketing director and chief strategist, never mind his close childhood friend, retained the same quasi-contemplative look he’d surveyed my drawings with while circling the table. Here was a man who reveled in judgment, oppressing us with its prospect until deciding to release us from the threat and issue his verdict. But without ado his boss simply moved on with his own thoughts, which were actually for Karen: “Don’t you think this is such a nice start?”
“The imagery is quite strong,” Paul
broke in, not wanting his opinion left aside. “I’d expected that.” He glanced dutifully
my way, above his spectacles. “But as far as the messaging, don’t we, well,
I know we want to be subtle—”
“Totally unbranded, Paul, I told you. We’ve promised the Public Art Fund and the rest as much. You did the promising.”
“I don’t mean branding per se. Obviously. But what about the smoke rising up out of Duke’s mouth, and the missing eyes?”
“And the robe, yes?” Garrett said quite confidently, as if unperturbed.
“And then, this one—this is what we’ve based off the girl’s yearbook pic? Can you see there might be people who’ve got problems with a pre-pubescent girl drawn like this?” He refused to look at me.
“Like what?” said Garrett. He was acting as my proxy, which gave the exchange a peculiar tenor I did nothing to disrupt. Garrett put his hands on his hips for a moment before setting them both down on the table and leaning forward slightly, bemusement overcoming his entire body, just as it was my mind. He rubbed his face with both hands.
“You don’t see anything off about it?” Paul pointed to the little girl with hair in pigtails, finely modeled in crosshatched lines, which gave her an intense plasticity. “These are going to be everywhere in Manhattan. That’s how we are positioning this first batch. So we should be sure that, well...”
Without any further talk or instruction, each of us independently began to look upon her as if she were a sexual object. We ogled little Daphne. I knew this by the way we all, even Karen, rotated through different squints, different postures, hunched shoulders, bent knees, hands on heads, each of us seeking to put ourselves in the most lascivious frame of mind. Once I’d managed this—I should say it was a frame I certainly hadn’t occupied in rendering her—I had to concede Paul’s point. Daphne’s breasts were fuller than any eleven-year-old’s had a right to be. They were fuller than they were now, possibly. I’d exceeded the source material, that yearbook picture. But hadn’t the photo attenuated the torso, so I was left having to make it up for myself? And the bangs, the face under it, the cheeky little hint of a smile I’d given her, perhaps it all suggested a pubescent world she was already hankering for.
The uniform of the schoolgirl naturally played into all sorts of sexual fantasies, and seeing it here, I wondered why exactly these dreams were tolerated, as they were across all of society. You could see references to them, the tartan skirt, the stiff white blouse, in even the most benign situation comedy. Yet were these not, at the end of it, the fantasies of a pedophile? I surveyed the growing alarm on Karen’s and Garrett’s countenances as they came to a similar realization. Meanwhile, Paul exuded a sense of triumph over what he’d been able to make us see: the drawing’s iniquity. Yet hadn’t I only concretized the lurid side of a quotidian fantasy? The volumetric richness I’d given young Daphne had played its role not in generating verisimilitude but in showing something about sexual essences, how they lived right in the child and could manifest long before it was appropriate to acknowledge them, or even welcome them. Didn’t our fantasies count for something?
“What do you think?” I asked Karen. This wasn’t a rhetorical gambit, though Paul’s bearing, ever skeptical, searching for guardedness in me and probably all the artists he worked with, suggested it might be. Garrett turned to her expectantly. He appeared shaken in some way, uncertain about his judgment perhaps, which was rare. So then, what did she think? Whatever she said in this moment was going to count, and count for a lot. She could scuttle the entire project with an inapt response, or re-inflect it in ways that weren’t necessarily recoverable later.
“Well... there doesn’t have to be a problem here,” Karen answered. “But I see what Paul means, in a practical sense.”
Before I could probe her meaning, Garrett intervened. “Well, it certainly has power, I know that much. And that’s exactly what I asked you for. It’s just too rare a quality, Paul, for us to police it out of existence.” He favored me with an assured nod.
Paul expected this response from his employer, it seemed. It was always his response. The marketer interlocked his hands in front of him like a tennis linesman and said, “I think if we were to add some text—no clear branding, James, just copy, words of any kind, poetry for that matter, whatever—that could steer us away from meanings we don’t want.”
“And it could bring other qualities to the pictures, expand them,” Karen added. “It wouldn’t have to be a dodge. It wouldn’t have to read like that.”
Garrett pondered this while holding my gaze. “I don’t know what meanings we don’t want, Paul. Do you? I want as many meanings as there are. That’s what puts this all beyond persuasion, rhetoric. I know that’s your specialty and all.” His voice immediately softened: “But look, Karen, are you saying you’ve got stuff? Right now?”
She pointed to the notebook. “Maybe some lines for the Daphne pieces. But not much for Duke yet.” She eyed me as though it were my fault she had nothing on Duke. I could have told her more about him during the week, sure. But after what had happened with Daphne I didn’t see the sense in it.
“I’ve got nothing against text here,” Garrett said, “as long as these don’t end up looking like ads in any way, except for their locations. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing?”
Paul’s lips went taut and flat as agitation skittered across his face.
“So you want to try anything out on us then?” Garrett said.
“Oh, she’s been trying things on me,” Paul said. “That’s partly why I brought it up.”
A wave of fear coursed through Karen’s features. She’d told me nothing of this collusion with Paul. I looked away.
“Not really, though,” she said. “I haven’t had enough time with the drawings themselves, just little snaps.”
I turned back to her with a certain sharpness but she refused to regard me. Yet her next words seemed bent on addressing my glare: “We could even skip the copy in the end, though. We should consider that.”
“But let’s just see, first,” Paul said. “I think it could be very smart. I really do, James. We want this to fly a long ways. If this is supposed to be just the start, we have to think about what gives us the best chance at it.”
“I need something up now,” Garrett snapped. “There’s no end to thinking, once it starts.”
“How about we make a call on it at the end of the week?” Karen offered in a spirit of conciliation. “I’ll have some things for you by then. We can decide if they do anything you want them to, or if we should just go ahead with imagery for now.”
We all agreed—Garrett and I somewhat reluctantly, sensing this as a hindrance rather than help, and the other two, the practical ones, with visible relief. In certain company, I’d always thought Karen became too sensible for her own good, and Paul was that kind of company. It made me wonder what sort of novelist she would end up being, if the wrong influences were to work upon her. If indeed writing fiction was where her future lay, if she left behind Cosquer eventually. She was already halfway out, I thought, more of an editor than a creator now as she handed off various editorial duties to Rick, making sure her knowledge became his, as her possible successor. What she did produce for the magazine increasingly was writing. Short, elliptical, critical things. Yet as she moved forward, would she feel the most viable path was a more transparent one, even a realist one? Would matters of scale begin to impinge on and indeed infect her reasoning, as they clearly had Paul’s? If Karen’s effect on the campaign was going to be a matter of temperance, as Paul had suggested, well, I wanted no part of it.
I didn’t really want to see Daphne after Garrett and Paul concluded our meeting, both looking generally pleased as they left our offices. I should have been happy enough, given how things had gone, but instead I felt as though I were very close to turning vicious. I had a reputation for it. People who’d only met me briefly couldn’t quite believe it, as I reserved it for those I had some feeling for. But it was an excellent reason, among others, not to know me. It was part of why Claire had gone. As an act of mutual generosity, then, I left without explanation. I didn’t even collect the drawings; the assistants could convey those to headquarters when they wanted to. On my way out, I saw Karen’s notebook for the campaign and felt the urge to take it with me, not so much to read it but to toss it in the East River.