I’d given up hope by the time Freddie called: Veneto Jorgas, by most accounts a shot fighter, was giving it one more go in the ring at the age of forty-two. The popular American cruiserweight’s promoter was frantically searching for a replacement tomato-can; the original they’d booked had just injured himself ahead of the fight, a tune-up for Jorgas’ eventual showdown with the current WBA champion, a Romanian slugger named Svevo. Jorgas had taken a long layoff from multiple injuries—a broken hand and a torn quadriceps—which clouded people’s sense of what he was still capable of when healthy. Now, after several years, he was fit and hoping to knock the rust off against an overmatched opponent, which was, oddly enough, a venerable tradition in boxing. So Freddie had gone to Jorgas’ people and said: why not Duke? After all, he was getting known, which would be good for ticket sales: a novelty fight was as good as any as a first step for a boxer on the comeback trail.
Jorgas’ side said only that they’d consider it—that was all. The risks for Duke were obvious: if this former hero of the ring, a four-time world champion in his prime, could, against the odds, still fight well, then not only might Duke lose (a likely outcome in any case), he might lose dangerously, depending on how weak his chin turned out to be. If Jorgas was the sort of fighter that didn’t gather much rust—even Jorgas couldn’t know the answer to that, only the ring would settle it—and if he’d recovered enough from his busted hand and torn-up thigh, he might well maim Duke.
In the end it was all moot. Jorgas went with someone else. Tolero, who had a 15-6 record and was on a three-bout losing streak: nothing but a piece of meat to devour. Freddie couldn’t persuade the promoter otherwise, but I was secretly relieved. Duke, of course, was shattered by the news—until, remarkably, Tolero broke his hand, not in training, bizarrely, but a domestic dispute. That made two tomato cans, already busted wide open. And who was there but Freddie with the save, less than a week till fight night. Jorgas had been told about the concept, and strangely, while his entourage and promoter had serious doubts, he positively welcomed the chance to fight a professional football player. Ever since mixed-martial arts had come on the scene, the entire fight game had gotten weird. Anything was possible, and every six months or so a new freak fight no-one could have conceived of before occurred, in front of much larger crowds than anyone had a right to hope for. The fans, the country itself, craved the surreal these days, in every aspect of life, from politics to movies down to sports. They’d hardly settle for less.
Naturally, for most viewers, the bout would carry distant echoes of MacGregor vs. Mayweather, though in this case only one of the competitors had ever dominated his sport. Duke had dominated as a college player, though, and that would be enough to sell it: the prodigy prospect versus the returning legend. Duke certainly wasn’t going to lay down, he told me after he’d heard the good news from Freddie. Even if Freddie probably would have preferred that he did, to protect his client’s football stock. But Duke liked the notion of trying to slay Goliath; he’d have to rely on the lone blow, the knock-out shot, even if having only five days until fight night meant his preparations for Jorgas would be severely abridged.
I knew Garrett had to be exhilarated by the absurdity of it all. What we called the grotesque was merely part of the flow of life for him, an accent on the most banal events; therefore it was to be expected and even welcomed when it turned up. The fight would certainly raise Duke’s profile, ostensibly promoting the fortunes of the Arête brand—though I couldn’t say just how. Luckily, that was someone else’s job, not mine.
Garrett had somehow even heard of Kimbo; he yelped with pleasure when I mentioned the laughing-stock legend. Duke would make for a new kind of Kimbo, though: a phenomenal athlete, a bona fide talent, just operating in the wrong sport. Wasn’t that more intriguing, like Jordan playing baseball? Even if he lost badly, it wouldn’t much hurt his football stock. I just hoped he’d take a knee whenever Jorgas started picking him apart, whether in the first round or the last.
I felt almost ashamed to tell Karen about the latest gambit. I’d started to miss her camaraderie, and took her silence over Garrett’s decision to carry on down this path as a tacit vote of confidence in me, even if she wasn’t willing to verbalize it. But now we’d be going even further. Would it undo whatever truce had formed between us? Surely she’d see their capitalizing on this stunt of Duke’s as only that much further beyond the pale, an even more brazen form of exploitation that actually put him in harm’s way. Yet having worked with Duke much more intimately than she had, it seemed to me he was the prime user of himself here, not us. After all, Duke knew we’d be “working from life” in developing the imagery for the campaign; he had a natural incentive to make his life as spectacular, as billboard-worthy, as possible. We’d all noticed it in both of them, Daphne and Duke, the dirty joy they took in the unfolding story of themselves, wrapping itself around the city. Most campaigns constructed their characters according to their own designs, like Leo Burnett’s classic, the Jolly Green Giant, or the Verizon guy, or Progressive’s Flo. Otherwise they recruited celebrities to play the roles they’d written. But in Antral’s campaign, the characters themselves were composing the pictures, simply by living. And so, it had to be admitted, our arrangement might deform their lives, even drive them toward unthinkable risks for the sake of the spectacle, rubbernecking at their own car wreck. Would Duke have even seriously considered Freddie’s boxing scheme if not for Garrett and I trailing him, knowing that we’d turn whatever he did into iconography, widely dispersed? He knew Garrett would warm to this, thrill to it even; he’d known it in Chicago, too, when he’d promised to find me some niggers, some guns and drugs, every white fantasy of black privation. Indeed, would Duke have been getting so close, so quickly, to his dark old South Side friends, if not for us? Either we, through our campaign, were demonstrably changing his life, or he was using us to change his own. It was terribly hard to say which, and even I couldn’t completely shake the thought that we were crossing into dangerous territory, no matter Garrett’s assurances, which in any case I no longer trusted, particularly given the way Paul had faded from sight of late, presumably under Garrett’s orders. I could only wonder at the struggle going on between those two.
As for Karen, I decided to tell her in person about this latest wrinkle, in a campaign full of them. She accepted my proposal to come by her Sunnyside apartment, then and there, if I liked, though the text was so short it wasn’t possible to read her mood. Proceed at your own risk, it seemed to suggest. So I rode the seven from midtown to her place. What a distance, I thought, she’d established from her New York kin, who’d been living almost exclusively in Tribeca and Chelsea for a few generations now. They would never have even considered Queens, where my train presently emerged aboveground. When I reached Karen’s apartment, I found the door cracked; apparently greetings weren’t in order today. And although it was cold outside, she’d taken up a spot on the balcony, in a bathrobe worn over some man’s oxford shirt, smoking long hot pink cigarettes with shiny gold filters. Beneath the box of Nat Shermans, she had two legal pads—not the usual notebooks—filled with her script, though her hand looked especially untidy, and the maroon of the ink wild.
I knew from Claire that this was Karen’s way when writing. Writers in action, real action, not merely posturing in cafés and punching out emails or grocery lists, but genuinely composing, were nearly always pathetic-looking things. Karen didn’t disappoint. Her skin was raw and uneven—the smoke wasn’t doing her any favors—her hair was stringy, and her dainty feet, put up in the rattan chair across from her, were corrupted by their blackened soles and the perfect circles of dirt on the pads of her toes. Smoke poured into her eyes from the cigarette she held in her mouth as she wrote on a third pad. How drab such a good-looking girl could make herself. She barely looked up as I came out onto the balcony. Was she still simmering about the bigotry she thought she saw in my pictures of Duke, and probably of Daphne, too? Or was it a matter of her present shabbiness, which was reason enough to avoid my gaze, vain as I’d always known her to be?
I sat at right angles to her, and when she kept silent, holding her pen in place on the pad in her lap, digging a hole into it, I imagined, I began to explain my purpose in being there, the foray into pure spectacle Duke himself was aiming for, and not just Garrett. But before I got very deep into it, she gave me a stare that was neither surprised nor angry but faraway. It brought me up short. After a beat or two, I helped myself to a silver cigarette, rolled it between my fingers slowly, held it up in the light. I smiled or anyway smirked. But she looked the same. So I stole the cigarette from her mouth, lit my own with it, and replaced it between her puckered lips, spilling ash onto her pad. She wiped it away, leaving a long gray trail across that yellow ground. I think she nearly smiled.
“We’ve already opened this box, haven’t we?” she said after a time, in a tranquil tone that signaled, to me, that she’d exhausted her emotional energy on this question some time ago. It disturbed me to hear it; I hadn’t expected her to be this bad. “And I know you think, somehow, we’re all getting somewhere here. And I don’t know that I can see it, but I know...” She trailed off, her voice trembling. She stared out over the balcony, just one floor up and looking out over a treed area, which wasn’t much wealthier than my neighborhood, but obviously less pathological, anyone could see, just from the greenish lawns and the fineness of the litter.
Without trying to, I began to read from the pad on the table, upside-down. What I found was a story, or perhaps the first chapter of a novel. She noticed eventually but didn’t try to stop me.
“It’s probably just all this writing that’s making me feel this way.”
There was more to it than that, of course. She had a wonderful sense for when the lines that mattered were being crossed. I’d thought so ever since I’d met her in school, on our first trip together to Disneyland, which was more or less the parent university of Cal Arts. She was also crossing other lines, from image to sentence, from art to writing, and this too, I felt, was making her mournful, putting her on the verge of tears. It made me horribly sad, sadder than I could ever have guessed. I moved my chair beside hers.
Over the months she’d been losing interest in the art of picture-making, distrusting it ever more, it seemed. My latest work wouldn’t have helped the cause. In fact, she probably thought my drawings for Antral were the best argument for ceasing altogether. It’s why she spent most of her time curating rather than creating images for Cosquer, which was the closest she could get to non-commercial practice without feeling burned. Now, though, it seemed she was losing trust in poetry, too, even her own, those lines gracing all those posters and placards, volleys of English that couldn’t be held to account, they were too uncertain for that. At the same time, she’d been discovering a new conviction in sturdy declarative prose, the kind that might make you see better than pictures and all their ambiguities. The story on the pad was about a relationship of some sort, and in the few paragraphs I read while Karen looked away, waiting, I believe, for me to do just that, I lost all desire to read on. It was written in the first person, from the point of view of a brittle male artist, and it didn’t take long for me to know which one. She waited for me to recognize the implications of the page; she gathered herself to explain. I finished and looked up at her neutrally, waiting for the blow.
“You know—”
“Yes?”
She sat up a little at my challenge and continued earnestly. “I guess I just think there’s a little more malice in you than most.”
I pursed my lips for a moment and then I puffed on my smoke, filling up the dead air.
“Because I don’t think you can be on truly intimate terms with the world any other way.”
“I can’t?”
“Not just you. No-one can. Do you think that could be true?”
I uncrossed my legs and shrugged.
“Nice people—straightforwardly nice—have a harder time with art. Everyone agrees on that. But that’s just because, I think, they have no genuine idea of what they are talking about. Of the actual world, I mean.”
I flipped my cigarette, mostly unsmoked, right off the balcony.
“It’s not like that’s the only thing you have. You have that eye, the real kind, not for composition or color, but for seeing which things are worth seeing. Just look at your stuff now. I sort of hate it, yeah, but still.”
The hardest thing to admit, Karen explained, was that the longer she looked at my pictures of Duke and Daphne, not to mention the city wearing them, the more they seemed to her to flicker, despite every appearance to the contrary, with some sort of occult generosity. You couldn’t say what this resided in, though you could certainly point to everything in my drawings for Garrett that was touched by delusiveness or chaos.
“They’re like those pictures of static,” she said, “that you stare at until you suddenly see something within the muddle. Most people aren’t going to see anything at all. And you can’t really explain those pictures to someone, can you? Not to anyone who needs the help.”
I’d been looking off the balcony, but the sudden cracking of her voice, just at the end, drew me back to her. There was water in her eyes.
“I tried to explain it to Rick. We had a very big fight just before you got here. He might leave the magazine.” She paused while shadowy feelings fluttered through her visage, and she continued only once they’d settled. “But I defended you, can you believe that? After writing this thing”—she swatted the notebook with hopeless disgust—“how could I not?”
I grasped for her then, the back of her neck, and kissed her deeply and unequivocally, out there in the cold where my hands were beginning to go numb and her cheeks were reddened by the nip. For the first time since sophomore year, she kissed me back without ambivalence. And for the first time between us, in all these years, one thing finally led to another.
Neither of us seemed to know just what to do when we woke. What exactly had we established overnight without meaning to? And where did all of this sit with respect to Claire? How could she not loom over this moment, even if, in truth, everyone knew the score, or should have. Karen still drew much of her understanding of me through Claire—the bad things especially, which Claire, I expect, would have expounded on with relish. But didn’t I, at least here and there, do something of the same in reverse? Claire was our double agent. The day before, after I’d read part of Karen’s story and taken her back inside from the balcony, I caught sight of a little sculpture of Claire’s, a dodo head worthy of a professional forger of natural history (there were more than you thought), although I knew its provenance at once. It used to live in our apartment, with pride of place on her nightstand, deliciously conjuring both the singular and the absurd. Plainly it had been dear enough for her to have removed it from my apartment, where she’d left so many other things behind, all those stacks of notebooks, and even, cruelly or carelessly, it came to the same thing, some of the paintings and drawings I’d given to her, made for her even.
And now to find Claire had simply given our dodo away? That the bird was now in Karen’s possession, and being used, of all things, as a bedroom doorstop? That’s how much she valued it? I tore her shirt out of shock, or rage, or both—a button struck the floor with a pop. Karen might, I hoped, take this as raw passion if I continued, and so the rest of the buttons came raining down. Only peals of laughter followed, though: she found it ludicrous. So I slammed her right through the dodo-propped door and onto her bed behind it, to get the bird head out of harm’s way, first of all, and to shore up my rouse of sexual volatility through this brutish display. The laughter stopped. She’d liked it, though I think she struck her head, too, as I pushed her into the psychic space Daphne always seemed so comfortable in; Daphne, the girl I’d been denied seeing by Nik and his film. Now I was taking Karen, somewhat to my shame, as a proxy for her. (How, then, could I blame Daphne for doing the same to me with Jeff and Alonso and who knows who else?)
What of my energies now truly belonged to Karen, not Daphne? And when I’d dismantled Daphne in bed, how much of that had really been meant for Karen?
I knew she couldn’t possibly like the things that went over with Daphne, but I felt the need to check anyway, even see if I could turn her. Frankly I admired the way she defied me. I slapped her crisply across the face, a gorgeous backhand—I’d shown promise in tennis once—that spun her head around, plunging her face into the pillow. When she dug herself out, she savaged my lip with a menacing kiss I couldn’t quite believe her capable of. I came soon afterward, her chin and neck stained with the blood of my mouth.
She turned gentler from there, pressing her face into my shoulder and tenderly rocking beneath me, and the more I bled onto her—it was quite a gash—the more my desire to warp her physical form dissolved. We kept sorting things out from there, so that the night became a long series of adjustments, our roles silently shifting. Karen could enjoy domination but didn’t need it, not the way Daphne did. She could also be surprisingly dominant, but she didn’t need that either, I discovered. There was hardly a repetition all night, each encounter bringing me off (and occasionally her) by a different route. There seemed to be a limitless variety of states she might put me in, if I cared to keep finding them.
At some point, I simply ran out of imagination; no-one’s went on forever. I felt her separating from the roles, little by little. This was toward nine, the lime green LED clock of hers told me. By this point she was peering at me coolly—not without kindness, but with some distance. Inevitably, I found myself useless, flaccid. Perhaps I’d satisfied half her desires for the night. I’d assumed the giggling girl, the icy entrepreneur, and the forlorn writer exhausted her being. What a foolish thought. And she, well, she may have overestimated me, which was the worst of feelings.
Last night we’d slept early and then woke early, too. There was such pressure to grasp the world we’d created overnight, the one we’d destroyed as well, but we were both smart (or old) enough to know it was too early to know much of anything. The only imperative was to part quickly. Temporarily, tenderly, but quickly.
Before I went, though, I thought I might demonstrate the regeneration of my creative capacities. I groped her, forced my hand into her; she pulled me out and shooed me with what were very obviously excuses. Before she could say something implausible about what she absolutely needed to do at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning, after the night we’d just had—something about going to gym, say—she got into furry, girly slippers near her bed, pressed the stack of legal pads into my hands, and pushed me out the door.
I did receive the indulgence of a single kiss, and a playful slap as well that actually hurt a bit, though she was laughing. I think Karen was returning the favor from the night before—her face bore the darkness of it now. She looked sad, folded her arms; I felt certain she was thinking of Claire, then. There were a dozen plausible reasons to be depressed about me at that moment, a sort of embarrassment of tragedies.
I got through most of the first pad on the nearly empty seven train, the material whipping by like the buildings out the window where the train ran overground. The day before it had been impossible to face these words, their knifelike clarity, so unlike the obliquity of her poems plastered all over the city. But now, having made a good start, I was resigned to the story’s invariably queasy moments. I could, at least, steel myself with the memories of last night. Karen had asked me for a favor just before I left her place, through the crack in the door that hid her near-nakedness (a man’s undershirt—not mine—no bottoms) both from the hall and from me: to tell her, after I finished the story, whether it belonged in the magazine. I could be her check on self-delusion, she said: I can’t trust the rest to cut me down to size. What about Claire? I asked. Quickly I wished I hadn’t, for the awkwardness it brought. But how could I not? When it came to fiction, Claire was an exquisite reader, everyone knew this. How badly I’d wanted Karen to close the door at that moment, to not be seen by her. The feeling was blessedly mutual.
“I’ll let you know,” I said through the door she’d just shut. She said nothing, although she had to have still been right there. I listened for any sounds through the door, and I had the suspicion she was doing the same. She would only move once she’d heard my steps, or once she’d been able to separate herself from the sticky thought of what she’d done.
Once I’d made it back to the Bronx, I decided to sit for a while in my neighborhood park, smelling the sweet rot of dead plants and homeless souls. From my bench I scanned the grass and the shrubs for the displaced Becker family, but thankfully I couldn’t find them. Next I looked for Helena, and again came up with nothing. She was probably still on the platform, waiting for who knows what. So I settled back on the bench, smoked the thin, garish cigarettes I’d stolen from Karen, and finished reading her tale of an artist and the unfathomable shape of his desire. The more well-defined one’s desires, the work suggested, the easier it was to be understood by others. This artist, though, his wants and intentions expressed themselves most saliently in the manner of their mutation, that is, not in their formed and stable state, but in the routes by which they got there, in just the way Cézanne brought a certain non-physical spatial structure, an architecture, to the ineffable impressions of his teachers.
Karen had no need of worrying about the story’s worth. She wrote sharply, without the sort of aesthetic self-consciousness I assumed would encumber it—less than was in evidence in her art, and there, too, it was already scarce. The text’s power was its directness. It traced a spark between the artist and, of course, an actress, one Karen summoned with rare intimacy. From her lone meeting with Daphne, she’d gleaned more than I had in half-a-dozen. But could she have been simply divining things, the way great novelists do? Or was it all much worse than that, and she’d been continuing to meet with Daphne all this time, sharing long and intimate conversations? Wouldn’t Daphne have told me by now, though? I had no way of knowing. In either case, I had to accept that these three pads were, in some respects at least, more potent than anything I’d drawn or painted of Daphne. Karen’s shift toward words had truly paid off.
The story took place like a Kiarostami film, in a car, a Dodge with a narrow center console. There was plenty of dialogue; she was handy with it. But unlike the Iranian director, she orchestrated a lot of action, too. Not exactly heist or car-chase material, but action nonetheless. Most remarkably, the point-of-view didn’t simply alternate between the two principals; sometimes there appeared a third vantage, emanating roughly from the car’s headlights, tracking the alterations in terrain, the slick pavements, pot-holed side streets, and dirt roads. The artist agrees to drop off a woman at an audition of some sort, but he repeatedly takes all the wrong roads, making the routine journey as hairy as possible, though it’s unclear how deliberate this is. His mind goes in and out of focus, and the directions of his inner drives become as difficult to track as those headlights, an hour after twilight.
What made this tale so affecting? Perhaps that it was exactly this, a drive with Daphne, that I’d been deprived of, when Jeff ended up chaperoning me home from New Jersey. That’s how I’d understood it, anyway, though I would have liked to ask Daphne just why she’d not pushed harder to drive me back herself, if she’d wanted to see me as much as she’d said. Karen’s story filled in this gap, though it added a quietly rendered hand job in the car, known to the reader mostly from the rhythmic excitation of the narrator’s voice, his proneness, for instance, to inappropriate exclamations and emphases whenever his body asked these of him.
Things end badly: the woman misses her audition by minutes, not long after the artist decides, very generously, that he’d like her to have the role (which is hardly up to him). Yet he’s unable to get her there in time: he’s dawdled too long; the world, its traffic, has gotten in the way.
Karen did such a good job of conjuring the actress, her appeal, that I actually felt a dire need to see Daphne after I finished reading. Judging by the texts that were filling my phone, Daphne felt the same way. Silence, as usual, had gotten me somewhere. She was nearly begging me to come see her in New Jersey by this point, though we’d need to be discreet. Nik was growing stormier by the day, with time running out on the shoot. In my mind, it was now only a question of recruiting an accomplice for the journey into the woods.