* * *
—
The couple are kissing now and there’s an element of display in their frantic groping. Eve recoils and looks away. Nothing to see here. Her eyes glaze as she focuses instead on memory’s inner gallery.
* * *
—
Who could forget, try though they might, Wanda’s “groundbreaking” show The Curse—the smell lingered in the nostrils for days—or He Loves Me/He Loves Me Not, for which she filmed herself plucking out her own pubic hair? She cast herself as the archetypal abused woman. Not abused enough, in Eve’s view.
4
The teenagers uncouple at the next station and leave. The doors close again and on the platform, safely outside the sealed train, the girl turns and shoots Eve a farewell hostile glance. Eve smiles as the Tube moves on and now she’s staring at the window watching her own reflection, superimposed on the sliding sooty walls of the tunnel.
* * *
—
She had her own trials of the heart. Who didn’t? But Florian Kiš was a good teacher. Those painful late-night visitations from other women had served a purpose. Who knows how many passed through there in her absence, but the first time he entertained another lover while Eve was in his studio, she was traumatised.
He was working on her portrait as she posed naked on the floor, when the doorbell rang. Handing her a woollen shawl, he sent her into the bathroom, where she locked the door and sat hunched on the toilet seat waiting, her bewilderment turning to horrified disbelief as she heard murmurs and muffled yelps of pleasure. Florian was making love to his visitor on the studio couch—the couch where Eve had lain with him earlier that evening and would do so again, hours after he had dismissed his visitor.
If Florian noticed Eve trembling when he finally called her from the bathroom to resume her pose, he might have put it down to the cold. She said nothing and later, when he tired of painting, they lay together once more on the couch, which was still scented and, she felt, warmed by another woman’s body. Eve left the studio at 3 a.m., racked by anguish. How could she put herself through that pain and humiliation again? But she talked herself down. Extraordinary men don’t play by ordinary rules. Would she swap unreadable, mercurial Florian for a transparently devoted chump? This was the price of proximity to genius.
The second time it happened, she was reconciled, comforting herself with the fact that it was her portrait he was painting, her body he was subjecting to his brilliant sustained gaze. The other women were meaningless; an itch scratched. She knew about them, the simple fact of their existence in Florian’s life, but they knew nothing of her—he always directed them to the bathroom downstairs. Eve felt her complicity conferred additional status. She was Florian’s co-conspirator and she became habituated, feeling no more than a passing squeamishness at a damp stain on the couch, an oddly familiar animalic scent, a stranger’s beaded earring on the floor or the sight of a stray hair: long strands of blonde silk, paler and finer than hers; dull mid-length, mid-brown filaments; dark springy coils which seemed faintly pubic.
Sometimes, when the doorbell rang, she would grab a newspaper and a pen to occupy herself in the bathroom. By the time she’d finished the quick crossword, the visitor would have gone. Occasionally, she would speculate about Florian’s Other Women, ascribing personalities and biographies on the basis of their fragrance. Jasmine conjured a lonely intellectual, a professor at the Royal College who kept cats for company; rose water, a vapid Home Counties girl with her own pony and a grace-and-favour job at an auctioneer’s; musk, an earth mother with artistic ambitions and questionable sanitary habits. But those late-night visitors—Eve was exiled, uncomplaining, to the bathroom at least a dozen times—didn’t even merit a thumbnail sketch; she had the greater part of him and posterity would know it.
Of course she came to resent the portrait, which fixed her in a moment that gave no hint of the fully realised artist she was to become. But the life lesson had been useful: there would always be another lover waiting in the wings, ready to step onstage and sweep her up for the next brief scene. She had no time for wound-licking.
The pursuit of love, or lust, became Eve’s primary career in New York, financed by the Underground Florilegium, waitressing stints and a spell as a bartender in an underground club, where her knowledge of contemporary indie music, acquired—though she’d never admit it—at her Saturday job in a suburban record store, lent her a certain countercultural authority. She was embraced, for a time, by Warhol’s late-period Factory set, who loved her British accent, were taken in by her fake punk credentials and invited her to join the twenty-four-hour party—costumed as for carnival—in rolling re-enactments of the Sack of Troy and the Fall of Rome. No party since deserved the name.
In between, somehow, she managed to paint—a small sequence of carnivorous plants, produced, miraculously, on the kitchen table of that chaotic Avenue B apartment. One critic later argued that here she’d moved into the realm of memoir, that the swollen, self-lubricating coils of the flesh-eating cobra lily, Darlingtonia californica, or the hairy traps of Aldrovanda vesiculosa, stood in for the snares of love. For a time, she wondered if they had a point. Now it seemed clear that the carnivorous series was her calculated nod to the New Wave, reflecting an anxiety that her fastidious botanical studies were insufficiently edgy for hip New York sensibilities.
Once she had prised herself away from Florian, she hurtled between adventures, occasionally misadventures, but there were no long shadows then in Eve’s intimate life; free of Kiš, she was invulnerable, lacking Mara’s susceptibility or Wanda’s appetite for operatic misery. It astonished Eve when she realised that some of her New York encounters, lightly made and lightly left, should have caused such scouring resentment in Wanda, who wished to claim them as her own—Jorge, the Colombian guitarist with the meth habit; Bradley, the exquisite actor with exquisite self-regard whom Eve bedded as a thank-you for his thrilling Hamlet, only to find that without Shakespeare’s ventriloquising, Bradley was a monosyllabic ass; then there was poor Mike, hapless, hopeless Mike, whom no one could have taken seriously, least of all Mike himself.
Here was a case of retrospective ardour: once Mike was lost to Aids, Wanda, who’d been dumped by him years before, recast him as her life’s Grand Passion, the indispensable soulmate stolen then left on the trash heap. Kristof, another object of Wanda’s romantic delusions, compounded the misery. Every artist needs a narrative. Even bad artists. In one recent interview, Wanda claimed she was a victim of PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. Eve laughed when she read it; a more accurate diagnosis would have been narcissistic personality disorder.
The warning signs had been there from the start, long before Eve decamped to New York with Mara and Wanda. Fresh from school, the three eighteen-year-olds had first met when they were assigned student accommodation together by the college. These middle-class white girls were so unalike, physically and temperamentally, in those distant monocultural days, that their differences could almost pass as diversity.
Mara, small, gamine and dark, a purposeful, jumpsuited doer, one of nature’s entrepreneurs; Eve, tall and blonde, given to reflection, the cool perfectionist in rock-chick black; and needy, manipulative Wanda, chunky and bushy-haired, with a taste for ethnic jewellery and vivid scarves, whose scatty nature could, in those days, be charitably described as “kooky.” Eve and Wanda sized each other up like boxers before a prizefight. Mara was their referee. Wanda was envious of Eve’s friendship with Mara and was always anxious that she was being excluded. Wanda was envious of Eve, period, as they said in New York.
When Eve’s relationship with Florian Kiš became public knowledge, making her the object of prurient press attention, Wanda was insufferable—there were tantrums and tears, as if Eve’s unasked-for fame consigned Wanda to further obscurity. Wanda’s first suicide attempt—her unresponsive form slumped across the bed, the empty bottle of pills—followed
closely on Eve’s success with the Underground Florilegium. When Mara and Eve finally got their groggy flatmate to the hospital, she was threatened with a stomach pump. The sight of tubing designed, it seemed, for unblocking industrial drains, had the effect of intravenous adrenalin. Wanda confessed that she’d taken two pills and thrown the rest down the sink—the grogginess was a sham, setting the tone for her future career.
* * *
—
Eve gazes up at the Tube map—her Tube map, in the eyes of a few idiots who credited her with Beck’s original work. The graphic skills wouldn’t have been beyond her, at least.
* * *
—
What expertise could Wanda claim? A flair for banal Grand Guignol? As a flatmate, she had a genius for possessiveness, even about her groceries. She marked milk bottles to catch out any visitors who dared to slip a slug in a cup of coffee. She concealed cheese and biscuits under her pillow in case a flatmate came back late and hungry.
“Ever thought of making one of your installations out of this?” Eve suggested. “A gallery full of half-empty milk bottles scored with black lines? Or a site-specific work here in your bedroom, where spectators are encouraged to rummage through your knicker drawer for concealed snacks?”
Mara, whose kindness, it struck Eve now, was nothing more than a refusal to make difficult choices, was the household arbitrator, on call during the long cold war, on twenty-four-hour fire watch when things heated up. Somehow, during Eve’s own low point, physically and emotionally, in London when it was finally over with Florian, Mara persuaded her that the move to New York with them would be a good idea.
“It’s the patriarchy that’s the problem,” she said. “Dividing and ruling…We don’t need them. There’s strength in solidarity. We’re a team, us three.”
It could never have worked. In the late-seventies saturnalia of the Lower East Side, groceries were the least of it. Eve turned sorrow into anger and entered the sexual fray as if intent on retribution. She set fires around the city and walked away without a backward glance. Wanda, though, spent her life looking over her shoulder and raining curses on those who, in her view, never loved her enough. This towering sense of grievance she went on to call her art.
Eve, once she was free of Florian’s prescriptions—“Flowers?” he would say, one shaggy eyebrow raised mockingly. “Again? Where’s the flesh? Where’s the blood and shit? The life?”—got back on track. Her subject matter transcended the merely personal. Why contort yourself, fixing your eye on the umbilical peephole, when you could stretch out and explore the entire biosphere? In love, too, why limit the focus? She laughed later to hear from Mara of her daughter Esme’s solemn declaration at eighteen, seven years before she changed course and embarked on her programme of radical body modification, that she was “polyamorous.” Weren’t we all, in the sixties and seventies?
Then came the plague years and the brutal cull of so many friends and lovers. Mike succumbed—spawning another self-referential performance from Wanda, who hadn’t spoken to him for three years. Eve knew it was time to get out. When she met Kristof, the timing was perfect. It was Wanda who introduced them—she’d bedded him herself at a warehouse party and earmarked him for her own purposes; he’d slept with her a couple of times, mildly amused by her work, but later confessed to Eve that he’d been repelled by her. When Kristof finally got together with Eve, Wanda took it hard and there was a second suicide attempt—the real thing this time, with a hardcore stomach pump—after Eve told her frankly about Kristof’s feelings. Maybe, as Mara said, Eve had been too brutal. But Wanda was looking for fresh material for her work and Eve had obliged. They hadn’t spoken since—the only communication over the years had been Wanda’s terse, pointed Christmas cards—until last month’s exchange at the Hayward.
The long stand-off hadn’t been helped by Eve’s off-the-cuff remark to a Village Voice diarist in the early eighties. There it was, in perpetuity: “Wanda Wilson’s sole talent is for monstrous self-pity.”
If Eve could unsay it, she would. It happened to be true, but it pitted her against the art establishment and was wheeled out far too often in the press, thanks to the Internet, which gave infinite shelf life to casual insults best kept private. It was also, in the public eye, another infuriating link to Wanda. Like atheists obliged by their name to define themselves in relation to a non-existent god, Eve became an “awilsonist,” perpetually twinned with Wanda. In fact, as with the non-believer’s deity, Wanda Wilson had no place in Eve’s universe. Wanda, though, clearly thought otherwise.
Her annual Christmas cards, addressed at first solely to Kristof and, for the last fifteen years, more irritatingly, to “Mr. and Mrs. Kristof Axness,” were eloquent. This year’s card—no doubt another boastful photograph of one of her shows or an advert for her latest “immersive art” piece—would be jostling for attention on tonight’s bookshelf line-up at Delaunay Gardens.
For Eve, Kristof, the gentle Dane who courted her so single-mindedly, was a recessive Viking—the peaceful seafarer as depicted in the Scandinavians’ whitewashed version of history. He offered safe sex on demand and he liked her, unlike those angry London punks, spitting with class resentment, or the self-involved pretty boy poets, or the pouting narcissists of Warhol’s Factory, tussling with their sexual identities and barely able to tear themselves from the mirror. Unlike Florian Kiš, who never forgave her for defying him and sticking to her creative course, which wasn’t his course. Kristof walked in just as Aids laid waste to their world, and Eve’s quest was over. Domestication, or this bohemian, comparatively well-resourced version of it, came as a relief, with intimacy on tap should she and those hungry hormones require it.
In their early years as a couple, there was still a sexual wildness—a reluctance to accept the conventions of heterosexual pairings. Experimentation was their duty; hasty sex in illicit places, explorations of the outer reaches of fetishism (more comic than erotic, they found). There were affairs too, on both sides. But finally, the needy beast—the monster that demanded instant sexual gratification—seemed to dwindle away. The primacy of work was restored.
Then eight months ago, when most women her age were indulging their grandchildren and packing to go gentle into that good night, the beast was back. He’d been cowering in the shadows all along, lying in wait, and, after two decades, he’d broken free again. But even now, surveying the wreckage, Eve couldn’t regret the return of her Lord of Misrule. He arrived just in time, before complacency set in, to shake things up, cast her life in the air and see where it landed. If it landed.
5
She looks around the carriage. Another cast change. They’re worrying their smartphones or gazing up, unseeing, at the Tube map—lost, like Eve, in reflection. The fallout over the Gerstein show has forced her into a broader retrospective. Yes, if there is any way of measuring her life, her work will have to do.
* * *
—
Fittingly, she started small. For her, so the family story went, it was speedwell: germander speedwell, Veronica chamaedrys, bird’s eye. Pinpoints of summer sky starring the soft grass beneath her sandalled feet. The child’s love of the miniature. She observed it later in her own daughter, though in Nancy’s case it wasn’t the natural world that entranced her but the artifice of human communities—the doll’s house. Nancy would spend hours intervening, rearranging; hers was a Victorian sensibility, drawn to order and propriety.
But it was the secretive, doughty beauty of speedwell that captivated young Eve. The flower was a foreign interloper, from Turkey and the Caucasus, introduced to Britain, she learned later, by those busy collectors of the nineteenth century. There was an argument that might challenge British xenophobes seeking to detach themselves from the wider world in the quest for sovereignty—look to the English garden, to the cherished flowers of Albion’s cottage beds and borders, and you’ll find the case for diversity and globalisation: ro
ses, peonies, lavender, hollyhocks, delphiniums—migrants all, making their way here from Europe, Asia and Africa, enriching the palette of our pastel Shangri-La.
She sometimes wonders if she was drawn to speedwell in early rebellion; her father, who gardened with the impersonal zeal of a lab technician, would have been determined to root out the little flower, which had adapted so well to English climate and soil that it was reclassified as a weed, a cerulean stain on the smooth, striped green Axminster of her father’s lawn.
Any drawing she might have done of the flower didn’t survive. She certainly picked it—according to both parents—and placed it in an eggcup, where she would have watched it wilt within minutes. A useful life lesson. In Germany, Florian told her, they call it Männertreu: men’s fidelity. There wasn’t, as far as she knew, a Frauertreu, but if there was, she imagined it would be slow-growing, lightly rooted, with livid flowers that, once gathered and placed in a vase, took on the colour of the surrounding room, all the better to disguise its carnivorous tendencies.
* * *
—
The carriage is filling. Craggy men, Eastern Europeans and South Asians in dusty clothes stiff as marble drapery, back from a labourer’s late shift; exhausted women, night cleaners, Romanians perhaps, possibly employed in one of Kristof’s corporate buildings, gripping plastic supermarket carriers as if they were handbags.
Nightshade Page 4
