Cosmogony

by Lucy Ives

  On this night, I was not quite in touch with myself yet. I was still somewhat close to the surface when we started learning about Crystal’s latest exploits.

  Crystal’s story was imparted via dialogue. It wasn’t a linear narrative. “You remember when . . .?” my father asks, mentioning how Crystal cleverly bopped the master of ceremonies over the head with a sourdough baguette when he was getting salty.

  “What a surprise,” says my father.

  My mother giggles.

  “Your mother is becoming a superstar. I think we’re going to be able to stay for free next season. Your mother was going around to all the tables. They almost called her back on stage. Back by popular demand! He asked her what her name was and she says, ‘Crystal.’ He says, ‘The Mystical Crystal?’ She says, ‘That depends on who wants to know!’ That was just the beginning. Someone said to me, ‘You have to take this show on the road.’”

  “Roadie,” my mother says.

  “‘Mystical Crystal and Her Roadie,’” says my father.

  “I have to keep my public happy,” my mother says.

  “Your work is never done,” says my father.

  Hank and I stay at my parents’ place overnight. After dinner, we stumble into the downstairs guest room. All I can remember is Hank telling me he wants me to put on these shoes I brought with me in my bag. They’re heels with platforms. I have them for a wedding we’re actually up here to attend.

  I think he ties me to the bed, but I don’t remember. He often says things like, “This is what you need,” or: “This is what you get.”

  But where was I? Oh yes, I remember, it’s later on in this part of my life, the deck, my mother’s offer. She is asking, can she pick something up for me.

  “I don’t think I need anything,” I say, feeling proud. In a moment she’ll leave and I can take a shower, and then I’ll drive to my trust-building retreat with my office colleagues.

  But my mother doesn’t leave. She keeps on standing there, overdressed for the summer heat, staring down at me.

  “Maybe I can just pick you up a little HPV vaccine?”

  It is like a blow.

  “What?” I say.

  “I just thought, I’m going by the drugstore. Maybe I can just pick you up some vaccine and you can take it.”

  “You can’t buy that over the counter,” I tell her, as if the problem here is merely that she’s misinformed. “You can’t buy HPV vaccine at the store.”

  I must seem angry, because my mother giggles and nods. She takes on a hovering quality, her car and house keys clicking against the key fob in her hand. “Will you be here when I get back?”

  “Probably not,” I say.

  And it’s true. I won’t be. I’m going to be driving a short distance to another state. And near the border between these states I’m going to wind around an ancient, ground-down mountain in the old Volkswagen they’re lending me and I’m going to see that determined Chrysler SUV hauling ass up that nearly blind curve, its heavy newness and gleaming grille like a solution, a quantity, I’ll see, that fits into all of my equations, because all things, I now know, are equivalent to force. This is the way things work—not through vision but through blindness. And if I swerve toward it, it’s because I see. And if I swerve back again, it’s because I don’t yet know what else I know.

  Scary Sites

  —So you’re asking me if I know, specifically, of another instance of this thing, apart from yours?

  —I guess my question is how did you know that? Because I did not.

  —I’m trying to think if I know of another instance. In a way it all operates by hearsay, and what you get is an accumulated negative opinion in the next circle out. And of course the opinion does not become uniformly negative. For some people . . .

  —They’re like, great!

  —Like the victor is . . .

  —Like, that fucking woman, why did she be a woman?

  —Right. Like, why was that cunt a cunt?

  —As it’s usually put.

  —As it’s usually put. So, to me, the social effects are—let’s take your example, I do notice every time Cody comes up in conversation and what is said about him. We used to live in a quasi-polite society, so, like, whether those opinions get reflected back into action against this person, however slight, is always unclear.

  —He doesn’t live here.

  —Right, well, like, before. But I do know, and I do think this is true, and this is, ha, unfortunately for him, doubly true for people who are in the arts, reputational issues rustle around you in a pretty intense way.

  —It’s weird because no one seems to know who he is. Like they may have known that I was married for a fair amount of time or something. But they don’t know who that person is I was married to. Like, to the extent that, when I moved out of my place, I basically was like, everybody come and take my furniture.

  —I remember.

  —I was a bit deep in trauma.

  —Do you miss any of that stuff?

  —No!

  —Great.

  —It was the best thing I’ve done in years, and I did it by accident. But someone came over with Phoebe Klein, actually this guy she’s married to, I don’t even know what his name is. But I had this print by a guy who lives in Iowa, and this guy, Phoebe’s husband, was like, are you giving that away? And I was like, oh no. I am not giving the art away! I hope I said that in a nice way. And then this guy was like, oh that’s so great, who is it by. And I said, Oren Droste. And he was like, oh, I know him! That’s crazy, how do you have his work, he’s an esoteric outsider artist. And I was like, yeah, but he teaches at a university.

  —He’s not really an outsider!

  —I mean, what is an outsider?

  —You know Cody is pretending to be an outsider artist.

  —I know! Anyway, this guy, Phoebe’s husband, was like, how did you get this, and I was like, I used to hang out with these people, and he was like, oh yeah I knew them, or this circle of people, and then it came out that the person he knew best was Cody. And he just said it like that, “Cody Garrison.” And I think I had given some generic version of the story in which I said I used to be married to someone who was close to Oren Droste. And after the guy said Cody Garrison, I was like, yes, that’s the person I used to be married to. And the guy was like, oh. He sort of didn’t know what to say.

  —Poor schmuck.

  —Yeah. And then he said, “Is Cody still in New York?” Because I guess that’s the question you ask!

  —(laughs) You were like, leave my home.

  —I was like, Phoebe, I am sorry that you had a child with this person. Hope it works out.

  —(laughing)

  —I was like, um, no, he doesn’t live in New York. I was like, he—and I mean, I was freaking out internally at this point, I felt like I was in a nightmare—he, Cody, had to leave, I said. I said he did some really bad things. And I just left it at that. And basically Phoebe packed this guy up, her husband or whatever. But it left me in this mode of, this person didn’t know where Cody was or anything about his life, and clearly it had been four years since he had spoken to him. And that’s the only time that Cody has come up, like with anyone anywhere. And I must have seen, maybe you showed me this, that Roberta Smith tweeted about his work years ago.

  —I sent that to you.

  —Which made me think, maybe I should do something about this, but then I was like, who cares. It’s just another drop in the bucket.

  —How would you have responded?

  —There’s nothing I could say. I mean, I think my main thing has been, actually, I tried to talk to Thomas Rice, be like, Tom, in case, I want to make sure that you know about what happened with this artist. And I’ve also tried to be like Tom, you should be aware of what happened between me and Darren. I mean, I haven’t said that explicitly to him, but I’ve made it just about as clear as I possibly could without telling him.

  —Why does it matter to you that Tom Rice knows th
at about you and Darren?

  —Because Tom has three daughters.

  —Wait, they had another kid? When did they have another kid?

  —Two weeks ago.

  —What?

  —It’s crazy. And they are like, we actually do not know how we are going to pull this out, in terms of real estate and stuff. I was like, how can that be? You guys are both working full time and I assume that your families are wildly wealthy.

  —I don’t know about him, but she looks very moneyed.

  —Well, I think Tom’s family is in oil. He’s like, super rich. I thought! But what do I know, it’s hard to tell what goes on.

  —You never know.

  —You never know! But I guess it’s important to me because Tom is somebody who entered a certain space and like his relationship was criticized by his friends as being uxorious. There was some—OK, this is weird gossip—but there was some intervention.

  —Before they married?

  —Yeah.

  —You know that she is supposedly on Tinder? Have you heard this?

  —What?

  —Oh yeah.

  —That sounds like a crazy rumor!

  —To be clear, the rumor comes from Danny French, who is a congenital and compulsive liar.

  —That’s really mean! And I think that may be a symptom of—I think a lot of these guys who are in that circle are really intimidated by this woman.

  —Why do you think that?

  —Because she’s very successful, professionally, and she doesn’t really, there’s like no empathy coming from her at all. And in a certain way she’s hard to pity. Like I think people pity Alana, for example. They’re like, oh she’s such a genius, but she’s so emotionally fucked up. I don’t know. I need to get away from all this stuff. I find it so emotionally toxic.

  —(laughing)

  —(laughing)

  —Have you had this conversation with people?

  —It’s just, every conversation is that! That’s the message about Alana. And I’m just like, I do not know this person!

  —Do you not? Have you never spent time with her?

  —I mean, I have. But I don’t know her! Anyway, this is all neither here nor there, and I am saying mean things. But I think it’s interesting, because Tom is in this kind of double position, where he’s made these alliances with different white men, and French, for example, has talked to me about how he specifically seeks out other straight white men to work with because it’s a good way to make money.

  —That’s the most French thing ever.

  —It was amazing to hear someone say that.

  —Talk about pulling the veil back!

  —It was interesting to see someone take that route. But with Tom, there are other routes where he’s like, I’m all about, like, diversity! But, then, he has this situation where he lives with four women. And he has three daughters. And I think for him, this is just a theory, but he’s like, oh fuck I see how my friends have treated women, what they’ve said about them, what they’ve explicitly told me they would do and then did.

  —Wait. Other than French, who are you talking about?

  —I don’t know but, like, I told you that stuff Darren said to me about how he and Alejandro would behave at parties.

  —As in?

  —They would have these plans for women, like for picking women up, that they would then execute.

  —But that doesn’t seem hyper-misogynistic to me. That just seems like a thing that straight guys have done since time immemorial.

  —Oh, it seems hyper-misogynistic to me, but that is probably because I’m super naïve.

  —You can do that in a hyper-manipulative way then having succeeded treat the woman badly, or you can ingratiate yourself according to basic laws of human behavior, like the kinds of things they teach you in the FBI, like here’s how to make someone trust you, it’s just steps 1 2 3 4 5. So you can use those for bad ends or good. It could be used against either sex.

  —It’s not specific, except insofar as they were not targeting other men.

  —Sure. They were doing it for a specific end.

  —(laughing)

  —(laughing) I’m not necessarily defending this sort of behavior.

  —I mean, men can jerk each other off, too.

  —I don’t find this shocking.

  —All I’m saying is, I’ve had this theory about Tom for a long time.

  —So many theories about such a boring person!

  —He’s not boring!

  —He’s boring.

  —He’s really funny! He is. I think he’s a very good public speaker.

  —(laughing) Because that’s all that matters. That is damning with faint praise, if I have ever heard it.

  —I’m horrible.

  —How are you doing?

  —I’m OK. I guess I look at other people’s behavior and I’m like, do they think I’m a marked human? One of the last things Cody said to me—this was over the phone before I hung up on him—was, “You’re always going to be a victim.” And the implication was, this is why this happened, because you are a victim.

  —What he was implying, I think, was, not because you are a victim but because you conceive yourself to be one.

  —Yes. But the point was, you inspire these kinds of actions in other people. To me, when I heard him say that, I felt there was a kind of aggression, whether it was conscious or not. That, while he might have thought he was saying, this is a performance that you do because you can’t stand to occupy any other kind of role, I think he was also saying, like, that’s actually your role, is to be a victim for people who need to do some fucked-up thing.

  —It’s possible that’s what he meant.

  —I don’t think he heard himself saying that. That’s just the way it sounded to me.

  —Was this in the context of a fight?

  —This is in the context of him saying, I don’t know why—we were talking on the phone—maybe he wanted to pick some stuff up at the house, I don’t remember. I mean, it was just really hard to go from being with someone for eleven years to not speaking to them. I may have even initiated the conversation. I think what happened was I was like, hey, you lied to me for a really long time. Why did you do that? That was really fucked up.

  —And what did he say?

  —That was when he said it. Well, the first thing he said was you never loved me, and the second was, you’re a victim and you’ll always be a victim.

  —So, to further extrapolate, what he was saying was, it’s your fault, you forced me to behave this way.

  —Exactly. And that is what I wanted to ask you about, the invisible social effects. I think that Darren took a similar position, he was like, you’re crazy, you’re out of control, no one who wants to have the kind of professional success I want to have could be your partner because you’re so crazy.

  —You’re not a good gala wife.

  —Exactly.

  —And I was like, but I’m pretty!

  —Oh no.

  —And he was like, your ass is too sexy. And I was like, this is not going to end well.

  —What I was talking about is more a kind of quiet reputational harm that can happen—which is the case with Cody but less with Darren, because you had a preexisting and highly public social contract with Cody.

  —I still have that contract, even.

  —I bet you do. So, the invisible social effects are liable to be greater with Cody because anyone who is in the little ripple around you two has some version or other of what happened and to the extent there’s a whisper network, or shunning, or changes in opinion that may never ever even become explicit but will in some way affect how that person is treated for a long time, like, I can’t give you empirical evidence about how it operates, but I know that it does, because I do it, and other people do it, too, so we know it’s real.

  —I think with both of them I was freaked out because their take on this was, you’re crazy and you’re projecting and that’s why
all of this happened, essentially. Because you didn’t have a good grip on reality.

  —What does that have to do with the situation with Cody?

  —I think he was saying that I thought that I was being a partner in a normal way, but actually what I was doing was really fucked up and no one could live with me. That was the thing that he said to me, no one could live with you. Which is what is so hard for me to understand, because for years I’d been picking him up off the floor and carrying him back to the house. And I was kind of like, no one could live with me?! Like, I thought the whole thing about our relationship was that I took care of you? And that was really—I’m still shocked by that. It’s so hurtful to me. I was giving up a lot of stuff to be with him. It was stupid of me, which is why it’s great that the relationship ended, but it did a lot of damage. But the same thing was true of Darren, because I would listen to him all the time when he would talk about his insecurities and I would just be like, no, you’re great! Like, don’t worry about it, you’ve got this. He used to call me all the time when he would have a bad meeting with somebody, and I would say, don’t listen to that asshole, you’re a good person and things will work out.

  —He was like, they didn’t give me enough money!

  —No, that’s what would happen! I was so naïve! I was such a naïve fool. And then, later, he sort of said the same thing, like, you’re too unstable or something, and I was like, but my marriage of eleven years just ended and you’d be unstable, too. But that’s the thing I started to be really afraid of—that everyone I knew also saw me that way. Like, as being someone who just projects things, who is really out of control, and I was worried because I didn’t feel like I was behaving this way, I felt like I was trying to support both of these people. So it’s those effects that I’m trying to understand. And it sounds like it’s mostly within me and has nothing to do with the objective world, so called.

  —Right, right. I mean, I can really only speak for myself.

  —OK.

  —I mean, because I don’t know how others saw you during that period, because they didn’t tell me.