Eventually, Karen and I had to reckon with the contents of that notebook, and she wanted me to meet her at an art event to do it. As much as she claimed to be some kind of outsider, the sheer number of events she attended, and even more, the far greater number she declined to, was a prime index of her member status. Interest in Cosquer seemed to double every six months, with no sign of an upper limit. Demand was growing on the circuit, not so much for her artwork, which, perhaps it’s cruel to say, hadn’t attracted enormous interest (unfairly, I thought... sometimes), but for her celebrated editorial project. Many peers, and even a slightly older generation of artists, were turning to her, seeking reviews of their shows: however gnomic the magazine’s write-ups were, you could count on their being written by someone worth puzzling over. And if it wasn’t reviews they were after, it was small portfolios—Karen liked running micro-spreads—that they’d try to place in this smallest of magazines. The truth was, as far as Cosquer went, I owed Karen a lot. The magazine was, almost by itself, keeping me in demand, ever since I’d left the power brokers at Hinton. My visibility, it seemed, couldn’t sink while being lashed to the magazine. It’s part of what Lindy wanted in associating with us, this glow of untouchable cool, even if her cast of mind ill-suited her for our operation (though I suppose the same could be said of Rick). Karen shielded me from most of what came along with being a tastemaker positioned between the underground proper and the more vulgarized world of Frieze and Art in America, never mind ARTnews. It was some feat she managed, not winding up in a conflict with me these days, where so many others had failed. Fellow-feeling played its part, but at bottom, a great curator or editor knows that her real resource is talent—the talent of the artists and writers she goes on to present, to package. And I knew from Claire that Karen thought I had a good deal of it, and that she was in fact secretly possessive of my work in the magazine, to the annoyance of others of the group.
I was reminded of my place in Karen’s stable whenever I had to meet her somewhere other than the Long Island City offices, as well why I always tried to keep our meetings limited to those offices, namely, so that we might avoid the eyes of the art set. She did occasionally make the trek to my apartment, if far more frequently when I was living with Claire. Nowadays our meetings were usually proximal to some art event in Brooklyn or the city, either immediately before or after one. The scene would unfold similarly each time: an assembling or dispersing crowd, and my having to hunt for her figure among the flux before moving on to whatever venue we’d selected, a dive bar, a park bench, a Chinese spot.
This time, we were meeting just after an e-flux book launch and panel discussion, downtown at the Ace, in one of the event rooms. I waited for Karen in the lobby, on an early evening when traffic wasn’t especially thick but the squawk of car horns nevertheless pervaded your soul. The usual mess of creatives gazed into their laptops, cocktails sweating by their sides as they rustled the keys. I found a deep sofa facing the stairs, next to a clutch of tech workers prattling on about their jobs, when a crush of people filtered out of the bowels of the hotel through the lobby, some of whom I recognized and no longer spoke with much anymore. Every third one was carrying a thin red-and-black hardcover. I searched for Karen amid the crowd with a fugitive gaze, making sure not to keep my eyes fixed for too long in any one place. Doing so would have invited contact, connection, things I didn’t need, not with these particular people, anyway. I was practiced at this now, so that with consummate skill my eyes flitted about, catching several waving hands and mouthed greetings in the swift arc they carved around the room, too rapidly to commit me to anyone. Which of them might still refuse to keep their distance? There were always a few.
Karen was suddenly upon me. She didn’t bother waving or shouting, she knew there was no point. She simply sat very close to me and wasted no time, opening that red-and-black book over our knees. She walked me through a sheaf of prismatic photos that had been distressed to appear more analogue in origin than they were. These were mostly old family photos, and some party pictures, too, black tie. I thought I recognized a few of the mutated visages, Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, leaking down the frame, or burnt out entirely, missing arms and legs, mutilated as if in a war. Karen thumbed through the pages without pause or comment. We were both used to this icebreaker between us. She’d show me whatever there was to see on the day or night and wait till I’d finished looking to comment.
A different photographer’s work filled the latter half of the book. These images were fully abstract, involving, as the little italicized descriptions informed me, unusual treatments of the emulsion: buried film developed after decomposing in the soil for months, as if nature herself had coughed them up. It was fine work. Which is to say, I couldn’t see why anyone had bothered, given the certainty they’d be swallowed up by tomorrow’s event at the Frick, Thursday’s on Bogart Street, and Friday’s, some literary-art soirée at Albertine’s. These photos’ fates would hinge almost entirely on the charisma of their creators. That’s why a launch like this was crucial; it was an opportunity for the artists to interest the audience in them, never mind the picture book. Apparently the authors had been only mildly charismatic. Not enough to push themselves to the front of the crowd, but not so deficient as to preclude them from releasing another book in a few years’ time. I suppose there was nothing wrong with this arrangement. Academics, too, operated in parallel, putting out creditable contributions to the literature. That was the word for marginally significant work. Creditable. Karen and I both laughed quite harshly then. She counted on me to bring out this cold-bloodedness in her from time to time. That’s why she invited me, to serve as an inoculant against complacency as she made the rounds, taking in art book releases and gallery openings three or four times a week. What was merely creditable was of no account to either of us, really. That was our common ground, even if she enunciated it less now that Cosquer had grown. These photos would never feature in her magazine, though of course she’d been invited today on just such a hope.
The crowd itself, which had by now filled the lobby to bursting, had the talent in it, here and there, that the book lacked, Karen said. For her, it had been worth coming just to have had a word with a few of the guests, which she’d done during the mingle after the launch. And it would do something for me, she teased, simply for them to find me here in the lobby talking with her.
“Open that thing,” I said.
“Oh, that?” She followed my eyes to her navy leather bag. The green notebook from earlier today was poking out of it.
“It’s got to be better than the one we just looked at.”
“I don’t know. You’re tough. And the more I think about it, the more I think we might want to just save our breath, skip the copy.”
“Just images, then.”
“Or maybe run some text separately, in parallel.”
“Like what?” I put my hand on the book, expecting her to brush me off, but when she didn’t, I pulled it to me slowly and, still more slowly, opened the cover. I had no way of telling, of course, which pictures of mine might have induced which lines I found inside.
The room that doesn’t, and isn’t.
Had this one come from the eyeless Duke trailing smoke—the room being, then, the theater of his mind? There was a less oblique possibility: Duke twisting the doorknob of his old apartment. I looked up at Karen and read the phrase aloud, quietly. She looked back at me blankly, unwilling to guide me. Another possibility for this headline, the more because it wasn’t Duke but Daphne she’d had contact with: the actress’ painted face hanging over the margarita glass—although we would ultimately be selling whiskey, nothing fit for the glass I’d drawn.
Wouldn’t it be hard to tell?
This came at the top of the next page, along with several crossed-out lines. Blacked out, really. A lot of ink had been applied to the paper, which was plain in design but patently archival. Forty euros per notebook, I knew. They were one of her childhood luxuries, when her parents had paid for everything, that she’d never been able to give up. But the ink had been so profuse that even this stalwart paper, meant to last centuries, had started to wilt into an infinitely black patch. The first of these black boxes would have obscured a long paragraph, extending for two inches at least. “You must have used half a cartridge here,” I said, touching it with my finger. It was inked as if for fingerprints, still wet. The redactions had to have been conducted earlier that day. “I would have liked to see some extended text.”
Karen wasn’t going to engage. We had our template for such, from our days in college, in the library, where we’d dig up books and sit next to each other, flicking through, looking and looking at the pictures. It was then, in fact, we’d hit upon the value of reserving serious comment until the book was closed.
I flipped the page and studied the obverse of this first bit of censorship. It’d nearly come through the other side, which had a remarkably even, frosted gray tone, with little sign of pen strokes. Had she brushed out these passages? I touched the back and held the page upright in the book; I thought my finger might shatter the black pane. She might have thought so, too, because she turned the page in the book for me, saying only, and incredibly, “It was empty.”
Hardly. But what had called for such total erasure, rather than a simple strikethrough? Her words in these books often segued into metacommentary, the diaristic function of notebooks being irrepressible, whatever official use you gave them. Under the circumstances, I had plenty of reason to wonder whether the volume might be fraught with matters pertaining to Daphne and me. But then, she’d chosen to show me what remained in the book, or anyway allowed me to look when I’d reached for it, when she needn’t have. I stroked her hand instinctively, to settle her; she withdrew it sharply, uncomfortably.
She turned the page, but three pages went together, bound by a paperclip.
“Too on the nose, this next one,” she warned me.
I followed her eyes to the page: There is no crisis.
“What about ‘Against the grain’?” I offered.
“For wheat field? That is so bad.”
I knew that. But she looked a little more comfortable; some color came back into her face. I could smell the Sauvignon Blanc on her breath from the reception.
Study for a theatre of the unknown.
“Yes, good. And ‘R-E’ instead of ‘E-R’—better that way,” I said.
“There’s no drawing for that one, though.”
“There could be, right?” I held my hand over the page. “You could maybe title some of my drawings for me.”
She looked truly surprised. As a rule I never worked together on art that mattered to me, not even with Claire, which had sometimes been a sore point between us.
“You could try, I mean. We could see.”
“You mean... collaborate?” she squealed. “I thought I was going to fuck up your work.”
“Is that a disgrace? Collaboration?”
She kissed me on the cheek almost violently, rocking my head with a thrust of her face. She grabbed the hand she’d rejected moments ago, spontaneously, fraternally. It warmed me.
“Did you know, in my head, I title all your pictures, the ones that go in the magazine? I’ve had lots of practice with this, figuring out where to put them in the issue.”
“So if I dug around in your notebooks, I’d find all these titles?”
She nodded briskly, beaming.
“Which you’ve never bothered to share with me?”
She grabbed my knee and put her weight on it, as if rising. I think she would have accepted the kiss I just about gave her then, something that was to be less than fraternal, a visitation or an intimation. But the friendly face of a video artist I knew destroyed all my feeling for her, the second I saw it looming just behind her as I leaned toward her mouth. I smiled at him, wishing I could strike his kind from the world altogether. Nothing would be lost.
“Or would they all be blacked out, too?” I whispered to her without backing up much.
Her face reddened slightly. She’d been on the cusp of accepting my offering, I’d drawn the feeling to the surface in her, and now it would submerge again. She gathered herself and I leaned back, still looking at the video artist, this man whose name I couldn’t even remember, who’d taken something from me now. “I think we could run some of these titles without the pictures,” she said. “Even before the pictures rolled out. Like, now.”
“And how about after, too?”
She was all yeses.
“Maybe some longer things—like Daphne had wanted, you said. Black-box sized.” I touched one of the rectangular redactions in the book.
She blushed profanely. I had trouble looking at her now without reaching for her, too. “Honestly, the thing is, I couldn’t think of anything to fill them. Or I only thought of shit.”
“And what about the typefaces? Are you going to get sansy?”
“Are you going to get blacklettery?”
“You remember.”
“Well, you even tried it with Joy Division.”
“It would have worked.”
“I could do this all in Caxon if you want.”
“I could do it all by hand.”
“Until your spacing goes. I wish I could kern all your lettering, it would be perfect.”
“What do you think Paul and Garrett will think about all this?”
“I don’t know how you feel about Paul, but he’s actually not so bad, I think. I’ve dealt with morons and hacks over the last couple of years, and he’s not one of them.”
I believed her. It’s what made him a problem, his formidability. Karen returned to the book. I scanned its obscure pages, trying to parse the textual fragments that existed between garden-variety strikethroughs, slightly more vigorous erasures, and those ominous boxes of black that must have contained things that just couldn’t be revealed to me or anyone else, though they might represent the most essential commentary of all in her mind. She could recall them so vividly, she could afford to black them out. Nothing was lost.
“So I guess this would be your first collaboration,” she said with pronounced pride.
“I did some things with Claire.”
“Not enough.” She looked sorry as soon as she’d said it.
“They didn’t see the light of day, I guess. Maybe they don’t count.”
“Our thing is going to be seen in the craziest way, though, isn’t it?” She grabbed my hands and squeezed. “James is sort of psychotic. I wish I had more clients who’d go this far.”
I continued with the book, reading aloud now:
The not-quite-parallel.
Grab and smash.
“I don’t know about a lot of these,” she said pre-emptively.
“Just the unconscious speaking in these ones, I guess. Duke would love it. Grab and Smash, right along the bottom.”
“We can’t use some of these, obviously.”
“It’d read like an APB almost. For suspected statutory, maybe?”
“Oh Jesus, no. I don’t know. What the fuck did he do exactly?”
“What does he do, you mean. Will he do. I can’t say yet. But what about Daphne? You know her well enough by now.”
She rolled her eyes and commandeered the book, flipped a few pages and set it back on my knee.
Clearly.
“This is for the glasses? You know the line is going to be called Obscura, right?”
“These are just notes. God.”
“Selected notes—otherwise what are all the cross-outs about?”
She flipped to another page, near the end.
The one who didn’t get away.
“Do you mean Daphne? As a victim or something? Seriously?”
She studied my face before her own turned from perplexity to disgust. “You know, you read everything in the worst possible way.”
“That’s the way everyone reads. Aren’t you the one who said she’s had her problems with men? And you saw The Sort.”
“No, men—sick men—have had their problems with her. Even Lindy understands that much.”
“It doesn’t seem like Daphne’s had a lot of success separating herself from them.”
“Well, we can’t use that line, not that way.”
“You wrote it down.”
“My unconscious, though.”
“You believe in all that?”
“You don’t, I know.”
“I believe in self-deception. Excuses. But that’s something else, isn’t it. Anyway, why not use it?”
“Garrett does have an actual business to protect, you know.”
“He’s psychotic, you said.”
“Not like you.”
“Neither are you these days, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I guess you have your own business to protect.”
She snatched the book from me and snapped it shut. “That’s really not what this is about.”
“Actually, I bet he’s more reckless than you, in some ways, because he can afford to be, so it’s not really reckless at all. If all of this tanks, do you think the shale industry is going to care about it, when they need Antral’s containers for runoff from all the fracking? Or Lockheed Martin when they need carbon fiber polymers? That’s the real engine of this business. It’s like Bloomberg’s terminals. Everything else is illusion.”
“Rick’s been nagging me about Antral, you know.” She spoke more quietly then: “Something about riot control?”
“Oh, I think that was a different company. Antral is all about receptacles, trapping everything noxious for us, everything we do to ourselves. But I bet Rick doesn’t even like waste storage, does he?”
“Do you?” she shot back.
I was still, shall we say, sorting through my feelings on the matter.
“Has Rick brought down his energy use to whatever they say we’d all need to use to keep this planet going? What is it, two thousand watts a day?” I asked. “How would he listen to his music like that, through that beautiful sound system of his? How would he and Lindy put on that film and sound show we saw? When he gives up all that, I’ll call Garrett and tell him his services are no longer needed, mankind has ascended. Until then, though, he probably has his uses, you know?
“Anyway, look, I know you need to fill up this notebook. It’s mostly redactions at this point. Let Paul censor us if he wants. I don’t see why you should do it for him. Maybe don’t even show them this. They’ll think you’re full of doubts.”
My voice was like a knife now. What had changed exactly, even I couldn’t say.
“Excuse me?” Someone said to me from behind our couch, where the video artist had briefly been. That man had been replaced by two others who, as far as I knew, were strangers to me.
“Your fans,” Karen jabbed. She stuffed the book back in her bag and rose to her feet with an acid wink. It was the most peculiar thing, this wink she could give, really letting you know, in the nicest way, how much she hated you just then. After quick shakes of the hand with the two of them she was gone, out into the street. They came around the couch and introduced themselves somewhat sheepishly. In days past I would have stood up, showed reasonable manners. But now I didn’t even bother with a shake, a nod was as far as I went, and even that was desultory, easily mistaken for accidental movement, perhaps some sort of stretching of the neck.
Karen had stood, of course. I liked to lean on her for grace these days. But in this case she’d gotten up only because she was leaving—naturally, to their disappointment. The two of them were fans of hers, too. In their nervousness, the men had still not actually said who they were, only that they knew who we were. Karen had seemed vaguely to recognize them, or was anyway kind enough to pretend to. I wasn’t going to ask. Probably, judging by their youth, they were newer elements of the very crowd I’d been escaping from over the last year, a choice that had brought me both pleasure and pain, though the ratio refused to settle.
One of the men sat down in Karen’s place. They were both wrapped in black cotton, and in prime New York shape. The effect was flattering, even intimidating for a certain sort of person (sadly, I wasn’t one of them); there was an exhibitionistic coarseness to it all that cut against their beauty. I thought they might be models. They knew of me from her magazine, apparently, and seemed, impressively, to have some sense of what was distinctive about my work, the way my line flitted between severity and self-effacement, one said, while the other mentioned my ineffable way with space. Sycophantic, certainly, but at least they were listening to the right people. They moved on, as I knew they would—I was just an instrument here—from praising me to praising Karen. Arts people spent a lot of time these days currying favor with anyone close to her, in the hopes of being able to sneak something into Cosquer’s punishingly slender profile. I smoothed my coat at this point, patted my legs, made the noises of a man soon to take his leave when they got around to business that, surprisingly enough, did concern me. They were hoping I might be able to help them, specifically, by making a poster for their exhibition. They were artists, not designers—finally that was clear. Could they know Daphne in some way? That I’d agreed to do something for her theater troupe? In fact, they were young cohorts of an artist who’d told them all about me: Terry Ohly. He was a feature player in this planned show, they said, and though he wasn’t here now, he too was hoping I would agree to this.
Terry. I knew him well enough. He’d not mentioned any show to me, but then there’d been little opportunity of late. Perhaps this was his way of telling me of his latest work, sending his emissaries, as royalty would. I had to smile a little; Terry relished ellipses. But knowing what I knew of him, those oversexed rampages he tore through New York, other possibilities suggested themselves. I invited the men to sit. They were exceptionally handsome, really, a truth that shone forth more brightly as they sipped at their clear fizzy drinks. And they were very young; they belonged in Interview, if it hadn’t have gone broke, anyway. I wouldn’t have been shocked if they’d turned out to be sixteen, frankly, and Terry was up to his statutory games again, which were, everyone knew, his preferred form of art-making, as he’d joked with me once before flashing a ruthless grin. Might these two be his latest toys, deluded about their real value to him, very far as it was from ink or paint or paper or canvas? No, it was their mucus membranes in which Terry needed to smother parts of himself. I almost laughed in front of them at Terry’s deviousness. He was very good, I’d always thought, at getting what he needed. Frankly he was weak with a brush, but apparently quite good down below. He was involved in art more for the sex than anything else. It could win you time with lambs as few things could.
I was suddenly giddy with Terry’s ploy. Encouraged by the change that came over me, my newfound elation, the two of them told me more. There were actually four of them showing together, so it was Terry and three boys. There was grant money to pay for the poster; that wasn’t an issue. And, as long as Garrett was in the picture, I didn’t really need any help anyway. I thrilled to the charade and told them to let Terry know he could count on me to handle the job. They bought me a drink, a shot of whiskey, and we toasted. I knew, of course, there’d be no show. But Terry’s act itself was its own benevolence, a gift and a warning of sorts to these neophytes, about the tricks of the city. Terry only performed these days, and wrote. What he didn’t do was show. Perhaps he’d incorporate this ruse into his latest project, the series of lascivious diary entries he’d been publishing on a semi-regular basis, a few of them, naturally, showing up in the pages of Cosquer itself.