Winter warmed, yet in all other ways it remained unyielding. The Giants lost in the divisional round, to the Falcons. Badly. All game, Duke hobbled around, having never convalesced from the bruised quadriceps he’d suffered the week before. Without a passing threat, the field narrowed, leading to Kinney’s being repeatedly stonewalled at the line of scrimmage. And so the Giants fell. As Duke departed on crutches before the clock expired, a smattering of applause could be heard in the Atlanta stadium: pity for his strange fate, perhaps, and a touch of admiration, too.
Daphne’s film, to her chagrin, got recut and retitled once more (Adiaphora prevailed). Most of what the troupe had shot in that last week by the river, when a palpable, extra-filmic anxiety had consumed them—one that I myself played a role in occasioning—got abruptly reinserted into the film, after test audiences found the previous version, the one I’d seen in the private theater, too palatable for Nik’s taste. Funding always came with strings, of course; it was the distributor that had insisted on these vulgar screenings. And, quite incredibly, the viewers took this heterodox work of cinematic art for some sort of balmy, impressionistic pastoral. Nik actually walked out of one of these screenings, recalling then exactly why he’d shot that tortuous material in and around the country inn only once all guests, including me, had been barred. As time was running out and nerves were fraying, he pushed through the recut without the usual troupe consultations, which had lately turned fractious.
And so... the film flopped. Badly. Half-empty theaters, desultory reviews, no burn at all. Who can say if that quieter, dreamier version audiences had liked would have done any better? Early viewers can notoriously lead you astray. But what if their positive reaction, which had induced Nik’s negative one—he’d just assumed they must have misunderstood him, to be so pleased—had blinded the director to what was in fact a better film, artistically speaking? Maybe they had understood it perfectly well. Certainly the cast, Daphne included, preferred it to the final version, if not by much, just as they’d preferred the title Obsequy.
What did I think? Daphne inevitably asked. But was I really entitled to an opinion on which was the better cut, given that I’d spent my time watching the first version, in the theater with Daphne, with so many other things on my mind: the woman next to me, the woman I’d lost, and the woman I worked for? But what if, I proposed, for future screenings, or at least for the streaming version, the studio welded the two cuts together, back-to-back, so the world would always know what might have been? Whatever happened, I thought, Daphne’s performance, the quiet terror you could see welling up in her in either version, at least if you were paying attention, seemed to me permanent, something that would have to endure. Even a flop could be an opening, and some critics had noted their fondness for her acting. That is what I told her, though I’m not sure it helped. At least it was true.
To varying degrees—you could arrange us on a spectrum of concern—everyone involved with the project wondered what our work would mean for the products themselves, which were now very near to release. Paul, in airing his gripes with Karen and me, might well have touched on the real reason, if there could be a single reason, for Garrett’s blithe indifference to any overt advertising for Arête’s wares and the whiskey, too: he’d never had to hawk Antral’s other concerns, in biohazard and security. Buyers found him. So Garrett had fallen into the mistaken belief, Paul thought, that all truly valuable things could sell themselves; all you had to do was make them available.
I can recall a conversation with Garrett in late January in which he wondered unabashedly, despite Paul’s skepticism, whether we really could lay, or mostly already had laid, the groundwork for a new kind of citizen-consumer, one who stood beyond the reach of all traditional advertising, who responded to codes far less barbarous, almost non-codes, images and words that asserted no real control over viewers, that were not even expressly designed to, only presenting the elements of our common twenty-first century American dreamlife: the thing that would be called our Weltanschauung by historians, that had been pulled up in an almost Delphic manner into the space of my mind, and from which, depending on the make-up of their minds, they would wring sense and, perhaps, direction. I had no answers for him. I’m not sure he expected me or anyone else to.
In mid-March, all the products came out, and the only tangible advertising was factual text, typically the names of the brands: Accomplice: spectacles from Arête. Similar Theria ads followed, after the FDA ended up clearing the original formulation, the one I thought had burnt my mind irremediably. I could hardly believe this. I would go on to try more of it, but what I found is it made no appreciable difference now. Whatever the FDA said, I knew it had subtly changed me. There was a self that was no more, not quite. Field 25 received no direct promotion at all, except by bartenders at the most rarefied speakeasies in the country. I myself got a complimentary bottle, which I left unopened beside my drawing board. Apparently it was retailing for four hundred dollars.
All this happened just before what appeared, quite suddenly, to be the final piece of mine to be put up around the city, in April. With the release of the products, the need for more drawings had lapsed, Garrett told me, probably with the encouragement of Paul, who couldn’t have been more pleased to move on from what he clearly regarded as his most ostentatious failure, a profoundly botched campaign he might never live down in marketing circles, if anyone came to know a full-blooded campaign had been undertaken. Garrett would have had personal reasons to wind things down. Hadn’t we witnessed the annihilation of high drama in Daphne and Duke, the destruction of all enchantment? Hadn’t the both of them come up short? Weren’t they still entirely at risk of oblivion, the way Garrett himself was not? Antral, after all, remained enormously, invisibly strong, notwithstanding the moral controversies Garrett had courted. Perhaps he’d seen what he’d needed to, about our world, its logos. The parable had been framed, the story told. It was enough.
In this last piece, which I’d worked on through January, although back then I’d had no notion of its lastness, I finally weaved together our principals, the twin poles of Garrett’s imagination, in a large-scale drawing: six feet by four. They’d never actually met, Duke and Daphne, though both had suggested as much at different times. I’d enjoyed denying their wishes, and not only because I wanted to be the only one bedding Daphne. My mind, it seemed to me, should be the only clearing in which they met. It was my province. It’s a thought I’d been having for weeks, even in December, trying to find the nexus of these two lives. Paul especially had been prodding me about this. He was always searching for integration, simplicity, whereas Garrett and I were seeking a realm that probably couldn’t be gridded out.
In January I struck upon the simplest of ideas: a pair of black-and-white mugshots in graphite, as if from an endless book of them, with both Duke and Daphne looking just mildly bemused. I worked on these with Karen pleasantly hovering around me, or just beneath me, actually, doing what I hadn’t been able to, namely, sort through the world of the Beckers downstairs, the family that had made way for us. The first floor, it seemed, would end up hers rather than Claire’s. We were spending our time mutually, that is, together: sometimes Karen would stay for days at a stretch. When she wasn’t sorting through the debris below, scavenging what she could, she was in bed with her laptop, working to finish the novel, while I was left to the domain of images alone.
It was fine and classical portraiture, this last picture. I remember feeling I finally had the time to do that sort of work. Even though nothing explicit had yet come down to me from Garrett, I must have had some sense that these two people were gradually leaving my orbit. Truly, we plastered the city with this one. No textual complements, either, just the one pencil drawing, everywhere. I had no way of reasonably estimating the cost of this gesture, but what was the need for an estimate when you knew it had to be terrifically large?
And so?
They all sold well enough. The glasses. The smart drink. The whiskey. Not exceptionally well, but not embarrassingly so either. Field 25, as I’ve said, turned out to be priced at a remarkable point, but then there really wasn’t very much of it; I’d actually seen all the barrels of the stuff that existed in the world. The price might well have been fair for something so scarce, and it would remain scarce for at least a few decades, until new barrels could come of age. Theria, though, and possibly the Accomplice line and their custom lenses—here is where one could imagine, in due course, real revenues.
Even in a playoff loss, Duke had played disciplined, gutsy football. Committed football. There’d be a contract for next season if he wanted one, and for now, anyway, it seemed that he did. He also stayed true to us, never explaining to the media the significance of his likeness being all over the city and the country, not even once the mugshots went up. After the loss in Atlanta, he simply made his way back to Chicago for the offseason, trying, apparently, to put things right with Dante and Sheila—at his apartment by the lake. They’d been at the Chicago wild-card game, in fact; seeing him perform with conviction had induced a thaw.
Naturally, my separation from Daphne was always going to be stickier, but perhaps not as sticky as I’d imagined. The boost that Obsequy had given to her profile was probably driven by consumer lust. She knew how I handled women in paint, and ink and chalk and pencil: even when there was no hint of sex in the picture, she told me one day late in March after dropping by unannounced, people found some sort of charge in them. I’d not seen her since the screening in December; the turbid forces seeming always to whirl about her, the ones fairly caught by our mural, finally scared me off. Painting the mural with John and Connell, watching it take shape and fill up an entire wall downtown over a week and a half, I felt I could see where I would have to go to really have her, or just a piece of her. Maybe that’s all you could hope for with Daphne; some people are better—or better for you, at least—on paper, or on the stage, than they are in the flesh. Alonso, too, had put me off. Daphne had been appeasing him ever since his illness at the theater bar. They were together now, she said, although she didn’t seem as excited about it as she ought to have been. As I was, for instance, with Karen, who luckily wasn’t there the day Daphne came by.
I wasn’t quite sure why she’d come, or what she wanted from me. Frankly, there was something repellant about her now, unmitigatedly so. Was it only my lack of need, having Karen? Or had I seen something in her I really didn’t like? I snatched the bottle of Field from the drawing board, the bottle I’d thought I wouldn’t touch, took out two glasses, and poured the tiniest measures, purely symbolic ones. Her agent had gotten a string of calls about her, she relayed with a pride that felt brittle: interesting new parts, both film and theater. I toasted her future. I was happy to, really. Yet the more I complimented her, the more forlorn she became. So I broke off my speech and we drank. Finally, she asked me about Garrett, what he had planned for me. I didn’t take her meaning.
“You must see, by now, why Jimmy’s done all this for me, made me famous? I more or less told you last time, didn’t I?”
I hadn’t much thought about it since then, not very directly. I couldn’t see the point.
“How about this, then? He is why you’ve never seen my mother, Angela.” The woman held her husband, Tony, responsible for what had happened, for allowing one of his friends to do that to their daughter, to even begin to feel that way about her. It’s why Tony was her ex-husband now. Daphne had been of age, of course; there was nothing criminal about it. But the infatuation had begun long before the legality of it. Garrett always felt she was one of the charmed things in the world, her physical being, although it would be years until she turned into anyone’s idea of pretty, if she was that even now. Her evasiveness, even as a ten-year-old, when she’d struck Garrett as an obscure portent of enchantment, had won out in the end over every sensible consideration.
“It’s why Jimmy doesn’t talk to Tony anymore,” she concluded, as though she were putting things together for the first time. “Why he talks fondly of him but not the other way around.” She commandeered the bottle and poured herself a proper measure. I held my hand over my glass, which I nearly lost ahold of, I was sweating so much. “It’s why you never hear much about Elise. That’s Jimmy’s wife. Pretty thing, and all alone. The only hole in his lovely life. She left him after it came out, but she hasn’t divorced, for the convenience of it. I wouldn’t either.
“So Jim did all this for me, pushed me right into the spotlight, with your help. I don’t know how sorry he really is about it all, ruining my family. Sometimes I’m not sure how sorry I am either.”
She leaned in and kissed me and I let her swim in my mouth for a moment longer than I needed to. Then I pulled away. I was feeling sick, and it had nothing to do with Theria. She showed herself out; I’m not sure what I did then.
The summer came, which gave me some time to gather myself, to comprehend—or try to—who it was I’d been working for, as I began remaking my life with Karen. Cosquer released the special issue dedicated to my drawings, revealing, all at once, the link between these ubiquitous pictures and me. It was tantamount to a solo show, in Karen’s eyes. I hadn’t seen the layout yet; Karen had been keeping it from me until publication. When I finally did see the issue, in late August, it came in the mail, two days before its general release. I settled back into bed with the magazine, preparing to take stock of my work, my year, and felt a prideful anxiety, one I’d not anticipated, swallow me up. But as soon as I began to study the issue’s pages—the cover was actually pure black, bearing no trace of the innards—I discovered my pictures to be decorated (or defaced) in a small, erratic script that could only send me scrambling back to the living room for the envelope. I snatched it up from the floor: the issue had been forwarded to me, I could see, and the return address only confirmed what I knew—it had been sent to me by Claire. I stood there for a moment, getting my bearings. Back on the couch, I slowly opened the issue again, and on closer inspection found all my images carefully annotated with Claire’s thoughts.
Who, I asked myself, had always responded most meaningfully to my work, and taught me the most about it, if not Claire? Of course this would come from her, my greatest advocate, the one who even now had the firmest grasp on who it is I am, or was, or will be. Her hand, to see it engulf my work, head to foot, gutter to gutter, paralyzed me in the most exquisite way, drawing me worlds apart from Daphne and Duke and Garrett and even Karen, her great friend. Soon it became clear her marginalia formed a continuous letter keyed to my pictures, describing the time we’d now spent apart, and expounding on things I wouldn’t have been able to fathom on my own for years. How grateful I felt for the time she was saving me. I noticed too that the images had been very gently reworked. She’d treated what I’d done as a kind of underdrawing, and upon that base reshaped the faces, took what was ugly out of them—and there was plenty to take out. This, I realized, would be our only true collaboration. The pictures were beginning to make a different sort of sense to me. After several hours of study, when my eyes began to hurt, I set the magazine down on my terrace table, in the shining tower I resided in, not far from the East River. I’d known that the city’s “spot clearance” effort couldn’t be held off forever in the Bronx, especially in a neighborhood that had almost no clout in the wider borough. Reverting to old habits, New York was demolishing most of the firetraps around the Patterson Houses and hoping private developers, given favorable pricing and tax incentives, would rebuild it adequately. But when had this ever happened? Faith was a powerful thing.
As Garrett had predicted, my townhouse, which I’d anyway never managed to seize control of—Rodney and Tanya were going strong, despite it all, and remained there just as long as I did—and with it my immaculate mural of the outdoors, which had in some way already razed the building, bringing down the walls by depicting all that surrounded them, had been claimed by the state through eminent domain. The place would be rubble in ninety days. Kiver didn’t mind much: he was going to be bought out at a decent rate, and he had other properties from which to extract income. The residents of those neighborhood tenements, though, and of my grand old house, were being sent scurrying like rats, until a new home for them could be found or made. They—we—were being reduced to something like the state of Helena, who I imagined still lay on the platform each day, sniffing those shoes. We were all obstacles to the city’s dreams. And dreams were important, I knew that much. I wasn’t bitter.
So it was that after briefly entertaining the fantasy of arranging to have my apartment walls trucked and reconstructed in the manner of Goya, or Cosquer 2 and Lascaux 2, I abandoned the house, many weeks before its scheduled annihilation. There was, after all, nothing to touch up or paint over, given the building’s fate. I did take some photos of the mural, of course; the sort of photos you might never look at again. I could only leave so quickly, as Tanya and company could not, because I had a place to go, had had one for a long time, really, owing to Garrett.
I was on the Upper East Side now, not so far from Whent and Tony, actually, in an elegant duplex. I was among Garrett’s people. He had a large stake in the building—he was always building something. For the foreseeable future, he’d be subsidizing my rent and providing me a stipend, with no very clear conditions at all, as Antral’s project with Cosquer was finished. I wondered, as I sat outside on the terrace, staring at my collaboration with Claire on the table, what sorts of plans he had for this building, an old stone structure the color of ash with a marvelous rooftop overlooking the pleasant stillness of Seventy-Fourth Street, just as my private terrace did. What I was expected to do for him next, and how temporary the arrangement was, there were simply no answers he or Paul was willing to supply. What was certain was that I had the run of this place. Five bedrooms. Somehow, it seemed, I’d managed to relocate my palace rather than lose it.
Karen was staying with me off and on now, writing mostly, but also editing Cosquer with Rick, who’d taken on the day-to-day duties. I genuinely treasured not working with him and the others anymore. Karen had even given me her blessing not to proof the magazine, which meant I could stay away from the offices entirely. I felt it a matter of time before she gave the whole thing up herself. The notion of her and I being together properly, not in shadow, had percolated through our circle; even John had come to accept it, as he’d had to accept the grandeur of the project we’d managed together, as grand as anything the Bauhaus inspired, perhaps, and probably more effective. He was, in fact, the one person still working at Cosquer who I kept in touch with. Karen and I both did.
I flicked open the magazine once more under the high, bright sun, and in the autumn air, I thought of Redon and Goya and most of all, as ever, Degas and his washwomen and chanteuses and café-concert singers. My sense of having achieved something in these pictures, of braiding worlds, even if the materials were common stock, and even if I couldn’t say just what these worlds contained at their limit—perhaps this was only an index of my success—was undercut by the equally strong sense that for just this reason, I may have exhausted the profit to be had from a working method I’d been honing since college. Garrett’s project seemed to me the final iteration of it. Where to go now?
The question had left me housebound for weeks, though not exactly unhappily, given my new living arrangements with Karen. Eventually, I presumed, I would hear from Garrett, although I hadn’t for a month. Perhaps he and Paul were allowing me some off-time until Antral found a new challenge, a new controversy. For my part, having run out of ideas again, I might very well take them up on it, whatever exactly it was, however dark it was. Even riot-control dark. Who knows? I was feeling free—so free, in fact, that as much as I liked Karen, I often found satisfaction and a strange sort of solace in her leaving for Cosquer’s offices, or returning to Sunnyside for a few days (she’d kept her apartment), or just locking herself up beneath me, on the duplex’s lower floor, to write all day. Even Immo, who seemed to be in a détente with Vera; and my parents, who were keen to see how I was making out in my new, exalted environs, I put off till later for this re-entry into solitude, not unlike the one I’d known when Claire had left me. This time, though, solitude was a choice, a craving I had, now that Theria, which anyone could buy at the bodega, was no longer doing much for me. While Karen worked alone on her book, I was spending unbounded hours in my viewing room—our private theater—Claire’s and mine, I mean—first erected around that giant screen she’d reclaimed. Garrett had a very fine setup in the apartment, naturally; it’d been mostly furnished when I’d moved in. Yet he’d permitted me to bring whatever I wanted of the old place. Besides my art and my books, the only thing I’d saved was Claire’s plasma, which I’d set right in front of the state-of-the-art television that was already mounted on the wall like a painting.
I had some films on my hard drive, and there were the streaming services, of course. But all that was overdetermined, hermetic, subject to the terrible reign of my personal whims. No, instead of all this, the first guest I’d invited after moving in was the cable man, who these days was going the way of the milkman. I got the largest package of channels on offer: eight hundred of them, larger even than what I’d had in the Bronx. I would miss nothing and nobody.
Inevitably, I find myself rotating between the dozen major channels of my childhood, letting each of them tell me all that it needs to. This is as much choice as I allow myself now: a comfortable amount. I switch off my phone most of the day and drink it all in, so much more powerful than both of Garrett’s libations. Karen comes and goes—she has a lot to negotiate, Cosquer is evolving, and there’s a novel to finish—but I am right here, where I need to be.
Over the hours and days and weeks, I return to this room religiously, sometimes sleeping in it, too. I am watching, and waiting, of course, for signs of Duke and Daphne. (Karen understood this before I did.) Now, it’s only a matter of time, I feel, until I see them. And it is only when they arrive here, on this quaintest of media, television, that I’ll know they have wholly saturated the culture, and not before. It might be many years, it could be decades, but I have time. I’ll see them eventually, I know, or hope that I do, in some star-making circumstance, these two not-yet figures, still mostly unknown, still very much in danger of being drawn back into oblivion where the rest of us live. And I consider now, after the screen has somehow switched itself off and become nothing more than a humming black box; in this state just after waking, though in complete lucidity, which I now know springs from too many sources to name in my life, and not a simple drink; in this state of total exhaustion, too, which I cannot separate from it in the least, even in name, I consider what it must have been like to be Thérésa, the master’s dearest, the day before she and her kind became the stuff of all our dreams.