The morning Daphne was to come to my apartment and sit for me, I left some of the still unnamed whiskey out for us. With her, it was never too early. Since I’d seen her last, two weeks ago, we’d mostly exchanged pictures (hers) and exclamation points (mine). She’d offered no explanation of where exactly those photos had been taken, or the meaning of the half-dressed men in them, although through Karen I’d at least figured out that Nik’s troupe was based upstate. They must have convened there recently.
“The Bronx!” she yelped as I opened the door.
Daphne was very precisely on time, eleven o’clock. I had expected her to be in sunglasses, I don’t know why, given that it was intermittently drizzling. I found both relief and disappointment in her having had better sense than to shade her eyes, at least on the day. Her hair was still a slightly grotesque blond, too bright for good taste, reassuringly so, with less body to it today than on the night of the show, and more wave. Wet, too.
“What is going on downstairs? It looks like a murder scene.”
“They’re on vacation.”
“Where?”
“We’re not that close.”
“I really don’t think they’re coming back.”
I left her at the couch and headed to the kitchen to get us drinks. It was good to have her here again, to wonder where we were.
“I saw me today.”
“In what way?”
“The with-my-eyes way. In Noho. I must be a hundred feet up, looking down over traffic.”
I had to set the bottle down. It was shameless and brutal, how Garrett had dared, even after our agreement, to change things up again without telling me. Did he want to suggest what a pawn I was? Why, though? Which principle of his did that serve? I opened a drawer as though I were searching for something, just to give myself a moment to regain my composure, the only thing I needed now with Daphne already in my apartment. She didn’t notice. She was almost laughing to herself with joy, imagining that billboard, her own image.
“What was it like?” I finally to say.
“Have you not seen it? Here.” She scrolled through her photo roll and handed her phone to me.
“You took this from the car?”
She smiled without answering, substituting, as the attractive often do, a rictus for yes. She made her way past me into the kitchen, having spotted the bottle of whiskey; the smile, then, might have had nothing to do with this photo, which was shot from an extreme angle relative to the surface of the billboard, not so far from parallel with it, when it would have appeared merely a black line in the sky. As it was, the face of the board was severely foreshortened, occupying only a narrow sliver of the picture plane. Daphne would have almost passed the sign before taking the shot. But there she was, the little-known actress, perhaps never to be grasped much beyond these drawings of mine, looking like those nineteenth century, gaslit danseuses of Paris I’d studied so carefully, with her morose and frightened visage, pale white yet heavily shadowed in my rendering, out in bright sun on the billboard, this countenance floating atop a pond of tequila, triple sec, and whatever else.
“No text though, right?” I could see none in the picture, but I needed to know how far Garrett and the others were willing to cross me.
“You don’t know about that?” She was holding the whiskey bottle in one hand.
“I thought I did. There shouldn’t be a single word.”
“No text,” she said in a whisper, right into my ear. So, he wasn’t yet willing to go all the way. “But there are all those possibilities, aren’t there, all over town? Karen’s work.” She said the name as if it were a dirty word.
I took the bottle from her and directed her back to the sofa. I followed with two stubby glasses, two fingers full, pinched together in one hand, her phone in the other, and a feeling of some small joy that Garrett hadn’t gone completely rogue. “Have you seen the color boards we’ve been putting up, too? The stripes?” I pointed to the photo still displayed on the phone, to a small awning in the background, upon which ran a raw stripe of straw, running into nothing, like a loaded brush discharging. It was the other thing, I’d only recently learned, Garrett had gone ahead and done without my approval, although at least the hues were quite faithful representations of the samples I’d provided at the meeting we’d had at Cosquer.
“That’s part of it?” She touched my hand and took one of the glasses. “I think I’ve seen a few of those, actually. Isn’t there one in Grand Central?”
“I assume.” I had no idea, but why not.
“It’s sort of... a signature. Is that what you’d call it? A hallmark? What would be the word?”
“Looks like neither of us really knows the plan here.”
“That’s Jimmy.”
“Oh is it.”
“Especially with the ones he likes. Haven’t you found him that way? He doesn’t mean any harm, I think. He just feels he and his friends ought to trust one another.”
I couldn’t have trusted “Jimmy” less now, and doubted I ever would again. Was it worth it to him, earning my contempt like this?
“It’s one of the first things I did, those swatches of color. There’s a giant blue one just up in Union Square. It’s easy to miss, in a way, because it’s so big and neutral and watery. But if you look closely, it’s got all sorts of variation in it, like a Rothko, except not at all a Rothko. Other ones are like streaks of straw—the one in the photo, for instance.”
“It’s like a patch of light.”
“It’s like light being lighted.”
She turned to me with a sharpness couched in the clenching of her jaw. This was the tautness of desire I hadn’t seen from her since that first night—what I’d been waiting to see from her since. This time was even better, as she wasn’t drunk or stoned, not as far as I knew. Perhaps that’s why it retreated so quickly from her body. She returned to practical things: “But is there an actual logo for any of this? Jimmy isn’t being clear with me.”
“I think we’re all wondering about that. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, really. A lack of a logo.” I was eyeing her hips.
She looked at me curiously, sensing that I was wondering about other things now, entertaining possibilities triggered by that lapse in her mien. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re like him, you know.”
Was I?
She snatched her phone back. “I sent this shot to my friends. I’ve been getting emails about it already.”
“Do you like it?” I ventured, not yet sure if I cared whether she did. It depended on who she turned out to be, really, how deep her aloofness ran. I knew too many “difficult” girls to want to add another to the roster.
“Can I have some coke?” she asked.
My eyes widened.
“Diet Coke.”
She got the can herself from the fridge and the rebuke I knew was coming came. “It’s like a cliché, this fridge.” She poured half the can into our pure and delicate whiskey, of which there was very much a finite supply. It would take another generation to get more of it.
“Can you taste it that way?” I gestured at her glass with mine.
“Do you think Jimmy cares if I can?”
“I thought you might care. You’re the one drinking it.”
“I look the part. That’s what he said when he came to me with this.”
“I agree.”
She took a few steps and was up against the wall, drawing her hands over the mural, her fingertips mostly hovering above it, just as Garrett’s had.
“It doesn’t really matter if you hate the drink, we’re doing things so obliquely,” I said. “He’s right, I guess.”
“Is that what you think? That I hate it?”
“What matters is that there’s a relationship.”
She drank a bit of it. “What kind?”
“It doesn’t even have to be an affinity or a parallel.”
“So hate is okay?”
“Right angles, anyway.”
She turned just her head toward me and smiled, dismissing my cleverness by acknowledging it. A few more steps, efficient yet gilded with grace, extension, sweep. It was no metaphor to invoke dance with her; she moved with the kind of casual articulacy I’d never seen off a stage. She fell into a crouch over a stack of drawings I’d piled arbitrarily in the corner, behind a stool. The frill of her pale orange cotton dress, exceptionally sheer while remaining opaque, picked up pencil shavings as she shifted around the piles, adjusting to the orientation of the pictures. There were many piles, and there was rarely any meaning to their exact composition. I’d set the pieces that way simply to keep from trampling them in the dark. She pulled her hand back at the last moment and turned to me, as if for approval to peruse, though I doubted anything was going to stop her.
I looked away, out through the window beyond her, the one with the grease lattice still upon it. I wondered if it could even be wiped off at this point, or if it had eaten its way into the glass, much as bleach had annihilated her hair, whatever its true color. She used a smile the way I used absence, omission: by turning away from her I signaled not exactly yes, perhaps, but at least that I had no objection. She understood. By the fourth or fifth drawing, she came out of the crouch onto her knees, shuffling about more like a child as her attention seized each image. She proceeded meticulously, sometimes seeming almost to read the picture, left to right, top to bottom. Perhaps she thought this brought objectivity to her gaze. Then she’d let herself observe less calculatedly, her eyes shooting here and there in accordance with the logic, when there was one, of the sketch itself. She made no attempt to compliment me, nor did she turn to verbal critique. You could only tell what she thought of something by the time she spent with it. She would throw over some drawings in a matter of seconds, long before you could have come to grips with their nuances: she’d lost interest already. In other cases she lingered a very long time, only gradually rolling the page over while her eyes clung to the marked surface, refusing to give up the picture to the action of her hands.
“I wish we could do something like this.” She was looking at one of my large format drawings, done with delicate closed contours with an uncommonly dark graphite. I’d had to re-sharpen the stick almost every stroke to keep the line fine and clean.
On all fours she moved to another stack a few yards away, against the west wall, with a facility that would have come from years of exercises dreamed up by St. Denis and Grotowski. It could have been a come-on, the animality she was enacting before me, if it weren’t so fully rendered; there was nothing being portrayed, which is where the eroticism normally came from—pretense, role-play. This was simple incarnation, wondrous from a technical standpoint, the appearance of this creature in her place, bound to a form of life that, not participating in the feelings of man, could only be remote.
What sort of creature, though? Her strides were accompanied by a slight rolling of the hips, the place in which kinetic energy was concentrated and idling for the moment. She was genuinely lost in the drawings themselves. The idea was bound to please me. But then her line of work was acting. It made picking up sincerity in her more difficult than it already was. What I felt, deception or not, was that her movements weren’t addressed to me, but to herself. They stemmed from some inner need to take up certain postures, to be low to the ground, to travel quadrupedally, and so on. My stacks merely provided the occasion for this, in the way of scratching posts.
She sat back a little, transferring her weight to her legs, and without a word began nodding vigorously. If some relied on body language, Daphne seemed to live within it, without residue. This wasn’t a matter of using gestures and actions to express assertions, the kind one might also verbalize, so much as generating a distinctive sort of extra-linguistic significance, which the drama teacher Delsarte, I knew, had quixotically attempted to map for all time in his system of expression. There would be no mapping this space, as later generations would learn. But that was precisely what made masters like Daphne so enchanting. What was it they knew, or simply were, that no-one could seem to represent? She’d probably carried on entire conversations like this with Nik’s group, among others who could articulate themselves as she could. I wasn’t a fitting partner, of course. I could only watch.
She sprung up, returned to her old form at my desk, to examine the final pile of drawings in eyeshot.
“I saw a show of Pettibon at the New Museum a couple of years ago.”
I shrugged. Garrett had mentioned him, too, the same exhibition in fact. Maybe they’d gone on a date.
“Not that you make me think of him.”
I complicated the shrug with words: “Garrett thought he was too rough, improvisational.”
“You wouldn’t like improv, I guess.”
“Not outside the theater.”
“Do you go to the theater? Never mind what you like.”
“Only with women.” I looked at her crooked. “Just like ballet.”
She could sense the purposeful ignorance I was tossing her way.
“I imagine you seeing, I don’t know, Corneille. Racine.”
“I haven’t.”
“And Brecht?”
“Definitely not.”
“That’s what I think, too. I despise him in some ways. So what about Wilson? I can go on like this forever, you know. You should probably—”
“You must like him. Your play seemed like—”
“Well, no, not really. Nik is doing such different things with light than him.”
“What about Foreman?”
“So you know a little. But we aren’t re-creating the sixties. Hysteria’s sort of passé. But tell me someone you do like now.”
I leaned back and thought a long time.
“This is fun.”
I kept thinking; she kept waiting.
“Well,” I said, “what about Marlowe?”
“Better than the Bard!” she provoked. “I’ve done a few of his plays, more than Faust, though there obviously aren’t many to choose from. How did he die again?”
Once more her person seemed to speak with an eloquence I would never achieve. There was something terrifying in it, the way she mounted my vinyl chair, whipping around and balling up in it, with her feet resting on the seat and her knees sticking up and her arms wrapped lightly around them.
“Do you consider yourself—” I began but broke off. She leaned forward in the chair. I tried again. “Have you heard the expression athlete of the heart?”
Daphne convulsed with laughter and lust. “Oh, I don’t know about all that. Is Artaud your man? Do you want me to be an athlete of the heart? For your pictures? For you? What if I were just an athlete?” She walked over to me gently and formally, as though she were as far from untrammeled desire as one could be, showing me she could be anything.
“Just looking at you, I thought...”
“I hate improv, too. Did you guess that? Artaud doesn’t have to be that, maybe, but the ones who’ve come along since have seen it that way. Grotowski, Brook. They want to shatter something in you, right? Through ritual. And I don’t destroy things. All that Freudian stuff about an untamed core of ours that everything else papers over. You don’t believe that either, do you?”
She walked to the window, stared out through the grease bars. “What you’ve put up on the billboard downtown, I think I remember the moment. From that night.” She turned back to me sharply. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since I saw the picture. There’s a depth to it, but no... well, what? No revelation. That’s it.” She walked back toward me. “I don’t remember you taking a single photo, either. But there’s total control to that drawing. Memory! Not improv.”
“Fantasy can be as controlled as anything.”
She reached me as I reached for the bottle. “It’s not a very nice fantasy, you know. It is a strong one. That face you gave me...” She looked sullen, and then just as suddenly recovered. “I guess that’s why it’s strong, though.” She sat on the couch and kissed me lightly on the cheek. I nearly touched her but allowed her to pull away unencumbered, snatch the bottle from my hand.
“You’re aware of the source of this?” I asked.
“Hm?”
“The limits on supply?”
She kept pouring until there were four fingers in the glass and settled herself back on the sofa. “Do you know how long I’ve been drinking this? Ever since Jim first started sharing the stock with my dad. After they discovered it out there in Illinois, near the farm. Two years ago, I think. I know exactly how much there is.” She drank half the glass to make her point. However smooth it may have been, in that quantity, any spirit was going to exact a toll. She gulped hard through an alcohol-stung throat and dangled the glass by the rim with her fingertips, loosely swinging her wrist.
“Have you ever tried it with the other one?” I asked. “Theria, they’re calling it.”
“Should we?” Her words came out strangled, her throat still in spasms.
I lingered at the fridge to let her find her voice. She must have regretted her bravado now.
“I used to get into the liquor cabinet,” she said, coughing slightly between words, squeezing them out, “our big, wide, white cabinet. When I’d just started college, I would still come around a lot—home, I mean. And one day I saw this whiskey bottle with a handwritten label, just a date, no name. My dad isn’t a whiskey guy, mostly wine. It stuck out. My dearest drug buddy, Jackie, she and I watered that bottle down to nothing over a month or two. I think it’s still sitting in there, just water with a touch of color. It’s the most transparent gold in the world.”
“That good.”
“It was just so exotic to us, not bourbon or scotch or Irish whiskey. I doubt he ever noticed what we’d done. He’d taken the bottle just for Jimmy’s sake.”
She met me at the kitchen counter with her glass, there were still two fingers in it; she replenished mine to the same level.
“But did you give me that face, or is that just what was there? I’m just not sure, looking at it.”
This hardly seemed to exhaust the options. I took the bottlecap off the Theria.
“There is so much command in that picture. That’s a word Nik loves. Alonso also. I don’t... I don’t think I look like that anywhere else, though. Like in The Sort. That’s what all my friends are saying, too. Just how odd it is.”
Her phone seemed to vibrate every ten seconds with a new text. Who was Alonso?
“But not that it’s untrue to me,” she said. “They’re saying, well, like this one: How is that you? It is you, but how?”
“You can’t compare drawing to film, I guess.”
“Why not?”
“Drawing is different. It’s not like painting either.”
“The drawings you and Paul and Daphne run by me, I look at them all the time. I don’t even think it’s about vanity. How could it be? I look awful in them.”
“That’s not really true.”
“I keep wanting to disown them, but the longer I look, the less I can. I only adore you more, the one who did this to me.” She gave me a brief, whiskeyed kiss, the first proper kiss of the day, standing in the kitchen. “Well, pour it in,” she said. We watched the marine tones of Theria crash into a sea of gold. “I mean, I look so full of fear in that picture, right, but then I’m brimming with confidence, too. And not in two different ways. I was telling a friend of mine, it’s like an Escher, but psychologically. An impossible person.”
“Maybe you’re just...”—I tasted the mixed drink before continuing; we both did, and were surprised by their harmony—“...frighteningly confident,” I finished what I’d started.
Daphne winced and drank another finger’s worth. The pressure dropped and an intimacy enclosed us that, for the first time since that night, didn’t dissipate at once. I’d need to keep things this way, actually, if I were to get any useful work in with her today.
“This is so good! It works better than water with it.”
“Now will you go sit in the light for me? There isn’t much of it today.”
“And what about everything I’m telling you?”
“Keep telling me.”
She shook her head and followed my finger to the rusting corner stool that really was too tall for most women. But then, that’s how I liked them to be, precariously sitting on the peak.
“I was paying you a compliment just now,” Daphne said. She didn’t appreciate my parries, which were all part of shepherding her, as every portraitist learned to do, if they ever got anything done.
“Was that what it was? You said my picture, what was it, bothered you?”
“I didn’t say bother. But yeah. That was the compliment.”
“I’m just glad we see it the same way.”
She climbed up onto the stool with none of the trouble of other sitters. Even when she was half-drunk, her kinesthetic authority shone. She swiveled around to face into the corner, away from me. I dusted the hem of her skirt, freeing it of all those fluttering pencil shavings. She paid me no mind, kicked her feet at the walls, my mural.
“And the poster you made, the headless me!” She caught my arm for a moment. I was bent over her knees, swatting at the hem, when she leaned down and kissed me gently on the lips. I adjusted the dress on her, smoothed it along her waist and belly.
“It is so right. Nik’s going to put it up soon—not just for the show you saw, which is pretty much over anyway—but for the future.”
“Is it because you’re headless that Nik likes it?”
“But I’m not, really. You can see something in the shadows, and everyone, Alonso, they can all tell right away it’s me. Not by the body, either. By the face.”
“Can you?”
She laughed a little and drank again. The glass was nearly done and she had to have been objectively drunk now; it just hadn’t hit her yet.
“Alonso wasn’t in the performance I saw, was he?”
“Well, he was the last to join the troupe. I’m sure he’ll be in the next things—he’s a star. Nik is in love with him.”
“And what about you?”
She snickered and finished the glass. Her thoughts, or at least her words, shifted: “What’s it taste like by itself, though? This mixer.”
“Haven’t you had any?”
“Does it work like a speedball or something, when you blend it?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, I’m glad Garrett doesn’t mind reusing the poster for your troupe in his campaign.”
“Oh, don’t worry about him, he loves it.” She looked at me while I was still at her feet. Her eyes were reeling. “Will you propose while you’re down there?”
I got up from my knees and swept my hand toward the illuminated corner, among the trees of the park painted on one wall, the crumbling sidewalk across the street on the other.
“I think, actually, if we get rid of the stool, and just have you right here...” I picked up a charcoal stick lying on a bit of unstretched canvas from an abandoned painting, got up, and pulled her off the stool. I pinched the glass from her, too. “Just for now, over here...”
“Nik really likes me without my head. He said you two met.”
“Was he the short one?”
“He’s the one who made me quit NYU. I’m learning so much upstate, at his school.”
“That’s where the photos you sent came from?”
“Just keeping you in the know. Did you appreciate that? I didn’t want you to worry.”
“And all the men, then? Was that supposed to put me at ease?”
“Everyone works together. The writers, the set designers, the actors. Jeff, Alonso.”
“Wait—you mean the olive-skinned stud in speedos?”
“Those weren’t speedos.”
“But what was the point of—”
“It all comes down from Meyerhold—”
“Orgies?”
“Not to have a fixed script you’re just handed, or even a set. It all comes together at once. And Nik, he is just so interesting. Anti-expressive without being pro-artifice. Do you know what I mean by that? There’s no-one like him.”
“Anti-expressive.”
“Anti-holistic, anti-organic. But anti-formalist, too.”
“Anti- a lot of things.”
Apparently she wasn’t going to explain the only thing that really needed explaining: that the men were frequently only half-dressed.
“He just thinks the mind and the body should never be mixed up. And isn’t that exactly what your billboard avoids? That’s what we thought when we all talked...”
“Who all? The people in the photographs? I didn’t recognize most of them from the show.”
“The school’s got more people than that.”
“Good-looking ones, too.”
“You think so?”
Finally I detected a shade of knowingness in her bearing, something in the bend of her mouth. But then she yawned, and it was back to blankness.
“But mind and body—I keep them nice and separate, Nik thinks?”
“They’re together, but apart. Look at where the light strikes me?” She fumbled with her phone, dropped it.
“Just leave it.”
“Where you made it strike me. Right at the neck.”
“It’s like a decapitation.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“I think you’ve been laughing at me, actually. But Nik’s a dualist, I guess.”
“He hates Strasberg as much as Artaud is what I know. Those two gods. You would like Nik. Not everyone does, or can. And I am not laughing, just keeping you apprised. What I said from the start. You must have missed me, I guess.”
“Just stand right here and let me get going with this?”
Once I’d pulled the stool away, and she got herself into the corner where I wanted her, I brought out an irregularly cut sheet of brushed vellum, one that preserved the look of animal hide: mottled, supple, you could have just as easily used it as a drumhead.
“You’re going to put me on that?”
I pinned it down on the easel and looked her over with care for a couple of minutes while she basked in my attention, which had now freed itself from all the usual barriers—basic social graces—erected in ordinary life. We were operating under the banner of art now, which meant I was free to gawk with impunity. It was one of the finest parts of the job, to leer fearlessly, without needing to be prepared to shift your eyes away lest you give a false signal, induce some unintended consequence.
I wandered around before Daphne, slowly closing the distance, studying each limb from very close range, each joint, observing how she was linked into a whole. Only a few minutes later, though, she was wilting from boredom. The pleasures of being seen evaporate before those of seeing do, that’s an ironclad law confirmed for me by every portrait I’ve ever made. And once someone loses interest in being seen, she really does become someone else.
“Is this dress right?” she asked, slapping the orange fabric in annoyance. “I have tights on underneath, and a tank-top in my bag, if you want something that shows me more.”
“Let’s do the dress first. Can you turn, though, slightly to your right?”
She torqued her body without moving her feet, and something, I could feel it, locked into place. So many postures only disorganize our form, scatter us. Now she seemed of a piece.
I sketched her in like this, concentrating on the ways her weight was distributed in space, how each element fell against the others. Once I’d put down enough for my imagination to work upon later—once she was struggling to hold her posture, really, the twist I’d put into her—I got another sheet and dragged the stool back to its original place for her to sit upon. It reorganized her. Her slender limbs, elegant while she stood, were in some way disguised atop the stool, like grace at rest. I rendered the vectors along which her limbs ran, and as she could naturally sit longer than stand, I put more finish on this one. Instead of only adumbrating the force and direction of the light, its precise play on her, now I let myself revel in the details, particularly the way the dress resisted a purer delineation of her form, or brought her a second form, in fact.
Daphne sat quietly now. I hadn’t been sure she was capable of that, but then I recalled the drive home with her from Brooklyn, when she’d been silent most of the ride, and probably less drunk. There was also probably a touch of self-interest involved today, the best kind: she wanted to let me concentrate, so these pictures would come out right.
We took a short break, smoked cigarettes on the front steps, but she remained turned inward and I made no attempt to change this. It was all coming out wonderfully, from my point of view. Perhaps I was as anti-expressive as Nik. I didn’t think the mind always had to be ramified through the body, that one should always seek the greatest possible transparency. Actually, it was one of the most interesting features of being—that it could hide in the shadows, that you could miss it, and that that could be just right. Afterward I had her change into clothing more easily dominated by her form: a tight silk tank-top in burgundy, black tights, no shoes (she had slender feet). I put her on the long table this time, not far from the southern wall of the apartment. She ignored the folding chair I’d positioned to help her up, leaping instead with a feline fluidity that shouldn’t have been possible in one so drunk. Immediately she became, through proximity, absorbed with the finer points of the mural beside her. She traced the picture with her eyes as I traced her body, with Sumi ink, onto watercolor paper.
She was lying on the table, that’s the way she ended up on it, and I didn’t alter the position she found for herself, only told her to hold it. There was nothing seductive about the pose; it had the pragmatic quality of someone avoiding a flood. Without the dress, there was no interlacing of forms. Her hips were hurting, she soon complained. She’d arranged her body for herself this time, but inhabited it less surely than the postures I’d found for her. She needed more whiskey, she told me, to carry on like this. I was too far into the piece to refuse her now, even if it was only the excuse of a lush. She wanted the cocktail again, whiskey and Theria. And so we both drank it, periodically breaking for gulps from the glass, while I continued rendering her in a foreshortened position, on her belly and side, looking hard at the wall.
“I am sick of being silent and frozen.”
“You can talk. Who said you couldn’t?”
“But what about holding my face perfectly still?”
“I can work on it later. Just keep your body where it is.”
She craned her neck both ways, testing the bounds of her freedom, before tucking her chin against her chest. I worked on her legs, her feet, and those few shavings that still clung to her soles despite my dusting. Eventually her eyes closed—her opinion of silence must have changed—until at last she began to speak, carefully but naturally, without excessive music, though in a language centuries-old.
“In thee, thou valiant man of Persia, I see the folly of thy emperor... I hold the fates bound fast in iron chains... draw forth thy sword, thou mighty man-at-arms... And when my name and honor shall spread, as far as Boreas claps his Brazen wings, or fair Bootes sends his cheerful delight, then shall thou be competitor with me, and sit with Tamburlaine in all his majesty.”
I stopped drawing a quarter of the way through this speech to appreciate its irony. Yet by the time she came to the end of it, somehow I felt genuinely moved, the way she’d managed, even while sauced, to convert a high-toned bit of Marlowe into something so right-seeming on the modern tongue. It would have taken years to achieve this tone, perched between artifice and organicity. Physically, she drew the necessary variation from her face and neck alone; it seemed as though nothing at all was missing, that there was nothing frozen about her. It was a marvel, this dexterity.
“See,” she said, “I can work from a set text! I just like working with the group. Sometimes Nik has us wear masks—the noble mask, it’s called, or was called, before it was corrupted by the guy’s disciples into ‘neutral’ mask, which is all wrong, since there’s nothing neutral about it. What’s the name of the guy? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
The control she’d just exhibited during her recitation was apparently on the wane. I tried to speak but she cut me off, not even on purpose, which was the shame of it.
“Though it does neutralize the face. Your entire body takes its place, your personality ends up squeezed into your feet, your hands. But I always liked the other exercise better, the reverse one, where everything ends up in your face.”
The shape of her words was beginning to unravel: it wasn’t understatement anymore, as I might have taken it earlier, but the first trace of slurring. I could see the same in her body, the wilting of the casual posture, on her side, she’d maintained up to now. Her limbs sagged, seeking positions requiring the least effort, which our sense of grace normally prevents us from assuming.
Grace was sometimes a burden, though. I began to subtly re-shape the forms of the drawing, putting this droop into her, and the piece took on an expressionistic aspect. She could hardly say her inner state, her disappearing mind, was not expressing itself, making itself known, through her body—not an effect I was necessarily looking for here, but now that it was here, I was happy enough to let it manifest in the picture. If it contradicted her aesthetic aims, or her director’s, perhaps that’s what would make it most interesting: the way her mind, less inhibited, refused to mask itself. She’d argue with the result, as I’m sure she didn’t know how positively ugly she was growing before me. Who would have, in her state?
“And sometimes”—she lurched back to life, shrill and less composed, as if this were a vital afterthought she couldn’t suppress—“we’ll read from behind a screen, each of us behind our own veils, just our voices flying through the text. Learning how not to inflect, to affect, to overcompensate like fucking fools. Letting the meanings we find pick the phrase, the phrasing, not the other way. But there’s no technique we’re all taught. We do what we respond to. Biomechanics. Sense memories. Even fucking improv, for the lesser ones!”
“And you like what you’re taught?”
“The teacher doesn’t teach, I just fucking said.”
“But I bet he teaches you what he doesn’t know.”
“Don’t you laugh.”
She scowled violently, in a way I recognized from the bar; it was a version of the look I’d made into my first drawing of her for the project. I had a way of bringing it out of her, and it seemed to me, immediately after taking such offense, she was more pliant, more mine. It was a hard lesson we all learned at some point: the things cruelty can do for us, with or without theater.
“I’m not laughing,” I said.
“I didn’t fuck them. That’s what you’ve been dying to know, isn’t it.”
“Nik helps you teach yourself.” She wouldn’t look at me. “You know, I made sure I got taught the same way, in art school, even if that’s not what my teachers were hoping for.”
The final thing I did, once she fell silent, was put a pair of the company’s glasses on her. I expected resistance, now that she’d grown drunk and antagonistic. I didn’t bother asking her to choose a frame; choice only aggravates a drunk’s condition. Instead, I got the box of frames and approached her quietly. I pulled out the first of them, the perfectly round, English ones, held them up near her nose, preparing to place them on her. With her eyes groggily opening and closing—I couldn’t help but think of dear Helena and her piss-stained fatigues—she found them to be a fresh source of interest rather than a disruption to her reverie. I slid them on her and she looked back at me cross-eyed.
“What do I look like?”
“Do you need a mirror?”
“It would ruin my pose, I think.” Indeed, she was still managing to hold some semblance of it, though in a fallen state, which filled me with pity and admiration. “You have to tell me what you see.”
“Let me do some comparing first.” I took another pair from the cardboard box, this one was more Bushwick, chunky acrylic frames, and although she made a face when I opened its arms—well aware they were no longer especially fashionable—she didn’t resist when I settled them on her nose and ears.
Most faces will accommodate only certain frames, certain geometries. Half the pairs in the box had seemed odd on me, after all. But as I cycled through the same glasses on her, putting them on her myself while she stared ahead impassively, her eyes open but apparently seeing very little, or only intermittently, when the mind behind them snapped to, I couldn’t find even one that lacked all interest. Each one seemed to stretch or narrow her face in an intriguing way, and none looked plainly wrong.
“Well?” she kept saying, almost like a mantra, after I removed each from her face and studied her. But I simply moved on to the next in silence. Even drunk, she respected my need to inspect without comment, to operate in a certain quiet. In the end, I settled on the fourth pair I’d put on her, trapezoidal lenses in brushed titanium that had an academic air, meant for the shrinking sort, really. Yet her natural forwardness offset them nicely, like the whiskey and Theria that had me seeing so quickly and clearly.
By the time I’d chosen a pair, she’d lost even more starch. Her body, that tiny thing, was failing, and she’d gone mute under the pretext of aggrievement. All of this was induced by liquor, too much of it, taken too quickly, for someone likely weighing in the double digits. Looking at the bottle, the low oval defining the whiskey’s surface, I realized I’d not been supervising her closely enough. I asked her several times if she might stand up—we could find something else for her to do—but she just lay there on her stomach, in a posture that was no longer merely restful. In the arch of her back and the twist of her waist you could find an element of seductive resistance, accentuated by the librarianesque restraint implied by the glasses: another collective fantasy.
I could have taken her. But, I wondered, had she really not been with those men in the photos? With doubts circulating in my mind, I focused on draftsmanship. My discretion eventually led her to whine, and then to simmer, yet I continued to work on my final life drawing of her, in sanguine. It came out as the gentlest of the lot, only mildly rippled with tension, even if, psychologically, this must have been the moment of greatest torment for her. Daphne was right: I didn’t think the body always, or even ideally, expressed the mind.
I took my time, the alcohol cutting against the Theria, so that when I finished she was actually asleep, resistance having mutated into unwilled unconsciousness. I studied her as I had at the start of the session, yet with even greater freedom, almost an obscene degree of it, knowing that she could see nothing of me now. I must have looked her over not for five minutes, as before, but for half-an-hour, poring over her body, making small notations on a half-dozen sheets in a notebook as a tailor might, filling out that notecard of measurements you found in the breast pocket of a bespoke jacket, all about her angles, twelve versions of her knee and its graceless jut. I manipulated her, too, rolling her over on her side for eight takes of her scaphoid and the soft slant of her foreshortened spine. All the charm she’d held while conscious was gone, leaving only a pile of matter behind, doubtless with its own points of interest, whether or not they had anything to do with beauty.
None of these observations could be directly transposed to the campaign pictures, which had to be charged, vital, as far as I’d understood Garrett. Now, though, Daphne was in a disenchanted state, her spirit made absent and in full retreat, her body lying awkwardly, semi-conscious at best, not unlike underground Helena and all the dispossessed of the subway and my sidewalks, who seemed always to be growing, like a tide or a fungus.
Remarkably, the next day, when I sent Garrett these little unconscious animal glimpses of Daphne to test his feelings, he took to them immediately, not finding them soulless in the least. They were even a little erotic, it surprised me to hear him say. Erotic because, for him, they conveyed the quintessence of that part of her spirit it was easiest to neglect. It was the same way with Claire, he thought, when he’d seen my drawings at Whent’s. This, in fact, was what he loved most about the way I drew. What I could see, it wasn’t merely beauty in abasement—aestheticized suffering was old hat. What was the Iliad if not that? Or the Greek tragedies that would follow? No, he thought, I could see something like the rightness or worthiness in what was repugnant. It didn’t make it beautiful, it remained repugnant, which was the key. The phrase he used, which I’d found odd but seemed to me absolutely correct, was this: I could see the victory in it.
This was beauty absconding. It was probably the very quality Daphne meant, concerning the billboard in Noho: a frankly unpleasant image, in many respects, and an untrue one, too, but one she and her friends still recognized as apt. In that picture, she seemed to be succeeding, flowing smoothly forward, wind at her back, despite, and unbeknownst to, herself. What did knowledge have to do with the good, the right, even the ideal? Here was a question that cropped up more and more for me. Only within my image, it seemed, could she recognize the worthiness of a terror she’d not chosen.
There was the possibility, of course, that for all Garrett said, he didn’t quite know why he liked my work so much; or else that he knew exactly why, he just couldn’t tell me, for fear of disrupting its steady flow. I tried not to think about this too carefully. It could make the job more complicated than it already was. I thought to put this collapsed heap that was Daphne, now totally desexualized —indeed, frankly, somewhat nauseating—onto the couch, into a posture that was a bit more pretty, that was less likely to lead to a stiff neck and an aching back the next morning, or whenever she woke. But, as I reached out to do so, it felt to me no different from moving Helena to a sleeping bag, or carrying her out of the station and laying her on the grass of the community center, or giving her five dollars instead of my admiring gaze. I was going to let Daphne have what life had prepared for her, even if it had nothing to do with her happiness, or pleasure, or desire, or beauty. You could ruin everything, saving people.
It turned out I wasn’t quite as pure as I’d wished, not yet: I couldn’t help putting a pillow under her head eventually, to straighten out her neck. Other than that, I left her to sleep as night came on, along with the lights around the neighborhood, repelling it.
Later on, after I’d been settled in bed for quite some time, blasting my white noise machine to silence the screams and thuds coming down to me from above, and flicking through Towards a Poor Theatre, which I’d not thought of since high school, I looked up to find Daphne standing in the doorway, wide awake and continually making as if to speak but unable to decide on what to say. I turned off the machine—perhaps she didn’t want to yell over it—and put down my book, and when I did she crawled in next to me. I turned out the lights and we listened to voices from the street suffuse the apartment, along with stronger voices from within. We heard Tanya being punched in the throat; it was the only way I could explain the odd ejaculation she made, as if air were being forced out of her body. I’d heard this sound at various times over the months, seen her wearing turtlenecks in the blazing heat of summer, and I’d thought, naturally, to call the police. Once, I even made the trip upstairs to confront Rodney after hearing noises of this sort earlier in the evening. He told me with a wink that this was just what Tanya sounded like in bed. What was the crying about, then? I knew, anyway, what my interventions had done to the Beckers below. Suppose Tanya, and even the boys, too, were being thrashed overhead. Was the street liable to be any kinder? As long as she remained well-stocked with turtlenecks, I guess things were working.
So, in that spirit, I let her serenade Daphne and me with hoarse yelps and cattish squeals. You really could ruin everything, saving people, and Daphne seemed to understand this: she positioned pillows over her ears to muffle the sounds, and then, as more and more things could be heard breaking above, and the kids kept pleading hopelessly for peace, she reached down under the covers and worked my cock until I came. Silence eventually fell until the coda—a gentle, endless wailing, which was all that remained of Tanya by this point. Daphne flipped the white noise machine back on and went to sleep.