Now that Karen had acknowledged, on my visit to Sunnyside, the obscure worth of “insensate Daphne” and “simian Duke”—evolutionary Duke, as she’d called that particular picture, in bed with me; given archaic meanings, the natural counterpart was stupid Daphne, I noted by way of reply—she’d also come to accept that she and I were in this together now, irrevocably so. Karen could make these concessions, however, only because of the unrepentant battle she planned to wage with my pictures, through her text pieces. This is how she explained the matter to herself, anyway. It calmed Paul a little to know this, brought him back into the fold after his misgivings had ballooned, like everyone else’s, once Duke had been dismissed from the Bears. Still, Karen’s shift toward me meant that Paul had lost a true stalwart, even though she never actually spoke directly in favor of my drawings. They were beyond defense, she would tell me cagily. For my part, I’d vetoed several of her lines that felt too didactic or witty; wit was a disease, I thought, a tic of a culture that had no room left for anything but gallows humor. It was vital, I’d said several times by now to her, mantra-like, that we not unmask anything, disabuse anyone. Pre-emptive suspicion was a mug’s game. In any case, why didn’t the great editor deserve an editing herself? It was to Karen’s credit that she didn’t begrudge my qualms, so long as I could make her see their sense.
To inaugurate our rapprochement, I asked Karen for help on the fight poster I was making, the one of Duke’s hand being mummified by Anton. It would be our first assay in integrating her text with an image of mine, the ultimate sign of the peace we’d forged, even if her acquiescence in the disrepute of the project was based more on trust (or lust) than insight. After cycling through three dozen taglines, we settled on the simple and clean Jorgas v Briar in Caslon, with centered text.
Meanwhile, Daphne assured me I’d eventually be given a screening of Adiaphora, which was actually still untitled. Nik planned on wrapping up production by next week, subject to a forbidding proviso: any scene might be reshot or recut if he felt it was no longer consistent with the Gesamtkunstwerk the troupe had created and would continuously re-create, down to the final minute before the film’s official release in January, when it would lead off a run in cosmopoleis and festivals. In the face of the release date, somehow Nik remained uncowed in his intention to scramble things whenever he liked; eleventh-hour heroics were simply his métier, never mind that our Hollywood “star,” Ms. Martin, wasn’t much used to such maneuvers. But what did her feelings matter to Nik, who’d only grudgingly taken this has-been on board, when he’d realized the film’s backers would really rather have someone like her attached, if only in a bit role? Soon enough, it came back to me that Nik was indeed poring over four or five versions of several key scenes, thinking about recutting and, to everyone’s dismay, especially Martin’s, reshooting, never mind how short on time we were now. It was part of Nik’s mystique, though; you felt as though he might go ahead and reshoot just to prove he was mad, and hence capable of genius like his Volger forebear, who had been, it turned out, a minor nemesis of Stanislavski’s.
Paul, in any case, made arrangements for me to discuss imagery with the film’s producer, and he met up with Alonso to clear some of my drawings—Daphne’s preparing with the script in hand, and the scene with Alonso in the clearing—for use in the movie’s promotion. Most of the drawings would be oblique: untitled supplements to the official campaign, though still the grandest part of it. The studio sent us the media materials they were likely to use for the campaign, mostly photos, mostly ham-handed and oversexed (even without my having read the script, it was clear that Daphne’s role had something of Lolita in it). Nik was sure to feel the same, whenever he ended up seeing it. Yet part of getting significant funding for a feature film was giving away some control to the machine. He was going to despise these visual clichés of Iberia, of intrigue, of lust, and I took some pleasure in knowing I’d be elevating matters with my parallel drawings, which fortunately didn’t need to bear any strong relation to the film; that was baked into the arrangement. Garrett, after all, was paying for the production and distribution of my images himself; the producers weren’t on the hook for any of it. And a little tension between the two sets of pictures, the official and unofficial ones, so to speak, might be to the good.
For Adiaphora I decided to go meta-cinematic, and offer drawings based on the film set itself, my charged memories of it all, very obviously bent by desire—as though behind-the-scenes footage might perfectly well suit the default grandeur of the two-hundred-foot façades these pictures would end up mounted upon. There’d be an element of visual journalism to these works, I considered, redolent of Steinberg’s coverage of foreign countries, wars, and foreign countries at war. Thumbing through those collections of his—I’d been pulling more of his books down from my shelf lately—I quite despised that thin nervous line of his, even if I found the substance of his drawings impossible to laugh off. I hated him the same way one can hate Kant.
These days, of course, the only place you find painters or draftsmen acting in a journalistic capacity is in the courtroom. In fact, even portrait painting often isn’t primarily about truth; portraits are frequently masks for sitters, expressly designed to prevent you from gleaning disagreeable data. With photographs, the easier they become to manipulate and fabricate, the more they lose their overpowering whiff of reality. That process started long ago, with airbrushing and other touch-ups, so that now we can say that the day on which photographs and CGI become indistinguishable will be the day the former lose their edge in verisimilitude over paintings and drawings. You will look at a realistic image and have no inkling of how it came into existence: whether by purely photographic processes, or, at the other extreme, without the least involvement of a camera lens.
To further accentuate the gap between the film images’ offhand substance and portentous form, we were going to make our first murals of the project, and have them reproduce the muted precision of graphite, which had become my preferred medium, even over charcoal, bringing me all the way around to those Ticonderoga pencils of first grade. Paul’s team had found a prominent façade on a nondescript office building on 33rd Street. It stretched sixty feet across, it started one floor up, and it extended another fifteen from there. Despite the little venture in my apartment I’d started with Connell’s help, I was no muralist. (Steinberg wasn’t either.) But I could supervise one, or learn to, anyway, while being supervised in turn by someone like John, who’d at one point done nothing but murals. Yet he’d have to be in a frame of mind to take part, and given his problems back in the Dakotas, I could hardly count on that.
In the short term, there were other matters to attend to. Duke had only a week left to prepare for his beatdown in the ring, and everything rested in Yuri’s hands, now that Anton had bowed out on principle. Yuri had been Anton’s understudy back when Duke was in high school and first stumbled into the gym. The young trainer could still remember the impression Duke’s raw punching power had made on the crowd. He was pleased to find that the power remained; it wasn’t something a boxer usually lost, not until the very end, when he’d lost everything else, his footwork, balance, tactics. In my afternoons down at the gym, where I now routinely watched Duke spar, just for the pleasure of it, I saw him stun more than one partner with heavy, arcing shots that came in at impossible angles. Every time one of those punches connected, it came as a surprise, especially after I’d gotten used to Yuri’s men having their way with Duke, forcing him to cover up thirty seconds into every round. Indeed, avoiding strikes is what Duke worked on most with Yuri: against a veteran like Jorgas, a weak offense was going to hurt far less than poor defense. So the trainer would have each sparring partner get at Duke in his own way, forcing the receiver to close off another avenue to unconsciousness. If all went well, Yuri thought—or at least hoped—Duke, on fight night, while inevitably losing, might at least keep possession of his senses.
Meanwhile, most evenings, just as I arrived home from the gym, Daphne would phone me. She’d discovered a private spot outside the hotel, deep in the trees, from where she could discreetly call me and still get reception. Mixed messages were what these calls amounted to. First, about what a tyrant Nik could be, how he’d happily destroy the film itself—what did he care—if she gave him any more trouble, say, in the form of a visitor; how he was also threatening to confiscate her phone, so that if I didn’t hear from her for more than a day, I ought to wonder, because he really is being terrible to me. It’s just so hard to be pinned here, she said, in this little rustic house and these empty Jersey fields with this troupe that I’m growing to despise, constantly rewriting, reimagining, re-acting the film we thought we’d already shot: we get ready to shoot something again, and then Nik calls off the change and disappears into his rooms.
On other calls, though, all the fear and anger in her receded. She’d suggest such tender things to me, things that seemed true or true enough, about what she saw in me, in my work—very much as Karen’s tale did, whoever it might have actually been about. I realized that Karen’s little story, quite remarkably, was somehow helping me get a handle on Daphne now, in anticipating her, and sympathizing with her, too, which seemed to me less an argument for the truth’s being many-sided, than for truth, the old, classic kind, simply not being as important, not all the time anyway, as we usually assumed it was.
There was a distinctly Hammurabian pleasure, I had to admit, in watching Daphne squirm. She’d neglected me not just that day on-set, but for the past weeks, where my thoughts often drifted toward her and my texts were only sporadically returned. Occasionally, by the syntax and tone, it felt as if someone else had been responding on her behalf—Alonso, or Jeff, or, what did I know, maybe even Nik. If I didn’t go to her now, I knew she’d be resentful, which I wouldn’t have minded except for her proximity to Alonso, who’d surely been capitalizing on my absence while sequestered with the troupe. As Jeff would have, too, and all the other suitors I hadn’t uncovered yet. What about the giant, Hank? Did he consort with her?
To think of Daphne alone, with that mesmerized look on her face, wrought of too much time with oneself, pleased me nearly as much as being with her, indeed, simply being near her, in the flesh, inhabiting the same room. Her relationship with space—how much richer it was than my own.
Claire had seemed to engage her surroundings as well, an immanent self that warped the world. Daphne’s was more of an exploded self, intoxicating to me in its inscrutability. I would rehearse the handful of moments I’d shared with her while I worked, or read, or even slept, puzzling over the trick to no avail. All I ended up with was this: she made you think panpsychism was plausible, that personality was simply a locus, nothing more than a neighborhood. In that performance in the clearing, she’d charged what was literally an open field. Wasn’t that what I craved now? To be in proximity to her, to dissipate into space itself? Yet if Nik was genuinely as unhinged as she thought, going to her now in the woods could bring irreversible consequences down on her and the film. Should I be discovered, that is.
By contrast, a more benign if fragile fondness had sprung up between Duke and me, built on those daily visits to the gym. I was going there as much for him as for myself. I realized early on that for all the boxing I’d watched growing up, especially the brilliant and murderous Venezuelan Edwin Valero, whose final knockout was of himself—suicide in prison, for the murder of his wife—I had no feeling for what training was like. Yuri had Duke rolling combinations of punches; the receiver’s natural gift for evasion flashed here and there, compensating, sometimes, for the mistakes of footwork and glove position. Duke wasn’t exactly fleet in the ring; his punches never magically blurred, as with truly quick boxers. But his vision, knowing where to be and not to be, was beginning to save him, so that after a couple of rounds of punishment from one of Yuri’s men, he tended to stay clean. Against Jorgas, though, without the padding around the head, those first couple of feel-out rounds could be his last.
Duke had always had a knack for the broken play. So it made sense that in the ring, when strategy and technique came apart or failed to jell, he made the most of the free-for-all, finding a way, over time, to dodge the big shots and at least occasionally land his own. We’d sit together, me and Duke and Yuri—sometimes even Anton was there in the back of the room, looking graver than usual—and we’d study tape of Jorgas’ fights, a couple of which I recalled from my teens. The trick was to find a pattern in the ex-champ, to see just where one of those crooked right hooks Duke had learned from Sasha could be discreetly deposited, blindsiding his opponent just as he had the two Dolphins—ideally with like results.