“No. Small metals is what we call jewelry these days.”
“Ah.”
In most ways, the University of New Mexico is not your traditional college campus. The climate is too dry for ivy-covered walls and too hot for tweedy-jacketed professors. One thing it does have in common with other universities is the shared delusion that you can change reality by changing labels.
5
After Helga left, the Tweedle Twins arrived. I recognized them by their beards. Melvin Armstrong had a frizzy Vandyke that did a poor job of what I assumed he grew it for—hiding his pointed chin.
Junior Prather’s red beard appeared not to have been trimmed since the first term of the Reagan presidency. He was wrinklier than a shar-pei. A lot taller too.
“I’m Assistant Professor Junior Prather,” he announced, “and this is Full Professor Melvin Armstrong. We came to tell you we decided not to speak to you.”
“Why did you change your minds?”
His wrinkles increased, especially on his forehead. “I beg your pardon?”
“You said you decided not to talk to me, but you just did. So I wondered why you changed your minds.”
Junior opened his mouth, but Melvin raised a hand to silence him. “We did not change our minds. Our decision not to talk to you stands. We are not here to talk to you. We are here to tell you we are not going to talk to you.”
I couldn’t stifle my laugh. “Did you also decide not to listen to me?”
They looked at each other, perplexed. Evidently, they hadn’t discussed listening, only talking.
“Because if you haven’t ruled out listening to me, I have a suggestion. The next time you decide not to talk to someone, send them a note. That way you won’t have to talk to them.”
“We are not talking to you,” Melvin insisted.
I remembered what Helga had advised. “Do you know which way the wind is blowing in the art department?”
“We do. But we are not going to talk to you about it.”
“So you’ll talk to me about not talking to me but not about which way the wind is blowing?”
“Yes,” said Junior.
“Goodbye,” said Melvin.
Tweedle Twins indeed.
My next visitor was not the Gnome. I deduced that from the fact that it was a man and he was six feet tall.
“Harte Hockley, painter,” he said, extending his hand.
His smile was genuine, his grip somewhat limp. Maybe because he never grasped anything heavier than a brush.
“Hubie Schuze,” I said. “I take it painter is not your family name nor Hockley your middle one.”
His laugh was as winning as his smile. “I don’t know why I always introduce myself that way. Perhaps a vain attempt to distance myself from the artisans. No disrespect intended.”
“None taken. I’m proud to be an artisan.”
“Will you submit for the student/faculty show?”
“I’m not familiar with it.”
“Each year in the fall, the John Sommers Gallery has a juried show of works by our own students and faculty.”
“Is that the gallery I saw on the TV screen in Professor Shorter’s office?”
“Yes. That’s a closed-circuit feed we installed after the gallery attendant position was cut. And no offense, but some of the faculty wonder why we hired you when we don’t have funds for the gallery attendant.”
I didn’t comment on the budget issue. “I’m just an artisan. I doubt my work would be worthy of a gallery.”
“Acceptance into the show depends more on departmental politics than artistic merit.”
“Which way the wind is blowing?” I hazarded.
“You’re a quick study, Schuze. One day on the job and you already understand us. Can I see your work somewhere?”
I handed him my copy of the Tularosa black-on-white olla.
He held it toward the light. “Nice work.”
I showed him the original. “It’s just a copy.”
He placed the pot gently on the desk. “When my students ask why I require them to make precise copies of paintings by Cézanne and Rothko, I tell them, ‘If you can’t copy, you can’t paint.’ Copying is how we develop the eye.”
Since I didn’t understand that, I merely nodded and asked him if he planned to submit work for the student/faculty show.
“My agent won’t allow it. Says it would look ridiculous if I was rejected by my own department. There’s another reason. Come with me.”
I followed him down the main hall. I heard humming noises as we turned into a smaller hall and approached a pair of metal doors, one of which he opened to reveal a room full of drill presses, grinders, and tanks of oxygen and acetylene.
I spotted Bruce Slater’s iguana T-shirt under a welding hood. He flipped up the hood and gave me a thumbs-up. I waved back at him.
Hockley gestured toward the equipment. “Looks like the mechanic’s shop where I have my Bimmer repaired,” he said, and laughed. “I don’t display my paintings next to wrought-iron gates. Any questions?”
“Yes. What sort of art does Milton Shorter do?”
“He does therapy.”
“They appointed someone from another department to head this one?”
“Unfortunately, he is from this department. He teaches art therapy.”
“Like if a painter develops carpal tunnel syndrome, he can help them recover use of their hand?”
“No. It isn’t physical therapy. It’s more psychological.”
“He counsels artists who are afraid of their brushes?”
He laughed and shook his head. “He teaches people how to use art as therapy for the depressed. The theory is that if you give a canvas and a brush to people who sit around drooling on themselves all day, they will find inner peace. And maybe even learn to breathe through their noses.”
“So you are not a fan of his discipline.”
“It isn’t a discipline. He doesn’t impart skills or knowledge. He simply indoctrinates students with the idea that they should use whatever artistic talent they have to cheer people up rather than create art.”
“But doesn’t he have to be an artist to teach art therapy?”
He shrugged. “He was an artist at one point.”
After Hockley left, I returned to my office and rewrapped the Tularosa pot and my copy of it and replaced them in the box. I couldn’t leave them in an unlocked office I shared with … how many other adjuncts? There were seven drawers in the desk, three on each side and one shallow one in the middle. If we each got one drawer, I might have as many as six fellow adjuncts. All the more reason not to leave anything in the office.
I picked up the box and closed the door.
“What did he tell you about me?”
She seemed to have materialized out of nowhere.
“And you are?” I asked.
“Jollo Bakkie. I’m a painter.”
“And who is the he you are asking about?”
“Harte Hockley, of course. The guy you were just talking to.”
“He didn’t mention you.”
“I’m surprised. He never misses a chance to undermine me. See those paintings,” she asked, pointing to the wall opposite my office.
“Yes, I’ve been admiring them. Did you paint them?”
She looked like she had just sucked on a lemon. Which went with her wide face, oval body and stubby legs. She had to be the Gnome. I realize unwanted nicknames can be cruel, but it was easy to see why Helga tagged her with that one.
“I did not paint them. Hockley did. And if you admire them, you don’t know much about art.”
“I admit that. But I know what I like.” I couldn’t resist.
She gave me the you-are-stupid look and said, “They don’t look like anything.”
“I t
hought art had moved beyond representation,” I replied, feeling myself drifting into uncertain territory.
“Paintings don’t have to look like a photograph, but they have to look like something. There is no such thing as purely abstract art. That’s why a simple horizontal line on a canvas is classified as a landscape.”
“It is?”
“Yes. And any blob with protrusions is a human figure.”
Only if you were the model, I thought but didn’t say.
I don’t like insulting people even when it’s done silently in my head. But someone whose first words to a stranger are “What did he tell you about me?” has already rent the cloth of civility.
To atone for my insult, I asked her if any of her canvases were on display.
Her eyes narrowed. “He did talk about me. You knew those were not my paintings. Well, mine will be up there soon enough. I know which way the wind blows.”
She waddled away.
I locked my office and left the Art Building. Which was like passing back through the looking glass into the real world.
6
My margarita had no salt on its rim because I had rotated the glass with each sip to balance the salt with the tequila, lime juice and triple sec. I was admiring my handiwork after asking Susannah about art therapy. And also feeling lucky that my best friend knew something about the department I was temporarily a small part of.
Her margarita also had no salt, because that’s the way she orders them.
“Art is not the only discipline used for therapy,” she said. “There’s dance therapy, drama therapy, equine therapy—”
“They have therapy for horses?”
“No. It’s therapy using horses.”
“So you ride around on a horse until you feel better?”
“Basically, yes. Florence Nightingale was one of the persons who invented it. The idea is that the natural bond between humans and horses is nurturing.”
“So do the horses charge by the hour like a regular shrink?”
She squinted at me. “Do you want to hear about these therapies or not?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, the other ones I can think of that are offered at UNM are music therapy, poetry therapy and sand-tray therapy.”
“I’ll probably regret asking, but what is sand-tray therapy?”
“The patient constructs her own microcosm using miniature figures and colored sand. The construction sums up the patient’s life, and by seeing it displayed in 3-D right in front of her, she can resolve conflicts.”
“You have got to be kidding. What department teaches that?”
“I’m not certain. It’s one of the departments in the college of education.”
“I might have guessed.”
She ignored my comment and asked why I was interested in art therapy.
“I’m not interested in it. I just wondered what it is because the acting department head teaches it.”
“Are you having fun yet in the art department?”
“Not so far. The faculty are a weird bunch, and I had to take away the students’ cell phones to get them to pay attention.”
“Why not just tell them to turn off their phones?”
“I did. But Aleesha picked hers up when it wiggled.”
“They don’t wiggle. They vibrate.”
“Whatever. She started texting, so I decided the only way to get their attention away from the phones was to get the phones away from them. Turns out I didn’t need to do that. Telling them I forge pots got their attention.”
“I’ll bet they like having a criminal as a professor.”
“I’m not a professor,” I said, and helped myself to some of the pico de gallo, leaving the criminal issue dangling. “I tried to be clever and justify my forgery by using the example of Manet’s Olympia being a redo of Titian’s The Venus of Urbino, but a kid named Raúl Zamoria said that was an ‘appropriation,’ not a copy. Then he said Manet’s version was appropriated by someone named Morimoto.”
“Morimoto is one of those iron chefs. The artist is Morimura.”
“Sounds the same. Another kid named Alfred said Makimori’s version of Olympia is his favorite painting.”
“Maki Mori is a Japanese opera singer.”
“That probably explains why I’ve never seen any of her paintings.”
“Sheesh. Morimura inserts his face and sometimes his whole body into famous historical paintings.”
“Like the Mona Lisa?”
“Right, and self-portraits of Frieda Kahlo and photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman.”
“There seems to be a pattern here.”
“Yep. All women.”
“So he’s a drag queen?”
“It’s a bit more complex than that, Hubert. His art deals with cultural and sexual appropriation.”
“So all I have to do to make my fakes politically correct is call them Appropriations of the Anasazi.”
“I like that. I can see it being the title of a display of your work. But you couldn’t use exact copies. You’d have to change them in such a way that they broach important cultural themes.”
“If I made a crude handmade pot and decorated it with an image of a modern potter’s wheel, would that be art?”
“Sure. It forces the viewer to think about the artistic effects of mechanization.”
I think of Susannah as a rancher girl, and not just because she grew up on the Inchaustigui Ranch near Willard. She’s fresh, energetic and blunt, with the kind of outdoorsy beauty you expect to see on the face of someone who rides a horse named Buttermilk. So it’s somewhat jarring when she displays mastery of convoluted intellectual theories. Which just proves that men always underestimate the complexity of women.
“It just occurred to me that Alfred may be gay,” I said.
“Just because he likes Morimura’s Olympia?”
“That and the fact that he wears Elton John glasses. And when he cuddled the Anasazi pot I took to class, Aleesha said he would make a good mommy.”
“That wasn’t very nice. I’m not surprised you don’t have gaydar. You totally missed Chris being gay until he kissed you.”
“Gaydar?”
“The ability to spot a gay person.”
“That’s a word?”
“I rest my case.”
“Wait—you were the one dating him. You’re the one with no gaydar. You didn’t know he was gay until I told you he made a pass at me.”
“I had an excuse. He asked me out, so I assumed they were dates. Besides, he was so drop-dead handsome, I was totally not paying attention to anything else.”
“So I have the same excuse you do. He was asking you on dates, so I assumed he was straight.”
She laughed and said we should call it even. “So Alfred is the possibly gay guy. Who is Aleesha?”
“She’s tall and black with a great smile and a bit of attitude.”
“Black attitude?”
“Is that like gaydar? Because I don’t think attitude has color.”
“Of course it does.”
“Sharice is black, and she doesn’t have attitude.”
“She’s from Canada.”
“So black attitude can be frozen off like a wart?”
She dipped a chip into the metate of pico de gallo. “You really are lost in space when it comes to popular culture.”
“Happily so.”
She ate the chip and changed the subject. “So there’s Raúl, Alfred and Aleesha. You know the names of all your students after just one meeting?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll bet you used the memory walk technique you taught me at the Lawrence Ranch.”
I admitted my memory isn’t as sharp as it used to be. The slight decline is not due to age. I
’m only in my forties.
Okay, late forties.
Susannah’s memory is almost perfect. But how much do you have to forget when you’re only in your twenties?
A memory walk is a method for remembering a list of things like names by placing them along an imaginary walk or journey. I explained to Susannah how I used towns for my students.
“I start walking in San Francisco, where I run into Alfred Caron.”
“Profiling, Hubie.”
“It’s a memory technique. It doesn’t have to be politically correct.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“I walk to Salt Lake City, where I see Nathan Lake. Then Chicago, where I see Aleesha Jones, because she has a Midwestern accent. Next I go to Mescalero, New Mexico, where I see Apache Fire.”
“You have a student named Apache Fire?”
“His name on the official role from the registrar is Larry Smith. When I asked him about that, he said he asked the Registrar’s Office to change it, but they refused because he never had his name legally changed.”
“I can see where if he thought Larry Smith was a boring name, he might choose Apache Fire to kindle a new start.”
“Groan. He said he didn’t choose Apache Fire—it chose him.”
“Did you ask him to explain that?”
I shook my head.
“Probably a good decision,” she said. “Tell me the rest of the walk.”
I did, but I’ll spare you and just give you the cast of characters.
You already know about Alfred Caron, Aleesha Jones, the reptile pair (Nathan Lake with his snake tattoo and Bruce Slater with his iguana T-shirt), Raúl Zamoria the intellectual and Apache Fire the crusader.
The other ones were a giant black guy named Marlon Johnson, a comely brown-skinned lass named Mia New, a white nontraditional student with the alliterative name of Carly Carlisle and the mysterious Ximena Sifuentes. Her deep-set eyes were like black holes capturing any light that came too close.
After everyone else had spoken and been identified during that first class meeting, I looked down at the roll, looked up at Ximena and said, “There is only one other name on the roll, so by process of elimination, you must be Ms. Sifuentes.”
She opened her mouth to answer but closed it quickly and sneezed. Then she handed me a paper and a pen. The paper was a form each of her instructors had to sign for her to receive her financial aid. When I returned the form to her, she sneezed again.
The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey Page 4
