Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  At this crack, this separation, the creator of the commonplace, presumably Brunhilda herself, had pasted in a sheet of paper several times larger than the page to which it was attached. Being several times larger, it had had to be folded up. Gingerly, I now picked it open. The page flopped, releasing minuscule bits of antique fiber.

  “Hello again.”

  I jumped in my seat. The voice came from the doorway. Based on similarity to previous encounters, you may guess the speaker.

  “I was just coming to look for you,” he said.

  I decided that I would feign distraction, perhaps annoyance if things became serious enough. “Oh, really?” I said calmly. I did not look up from the page, which showed the map of Elysia. I stared as long as I could at the engraving, probably a total of four seconds, and then carefully but speedily folded the page shut again.

  “Really. I was going to remind you that we have that cocktail for WANSEE this evening and, as Bonnie is a little shaken up, I wanted to make sure that you were available.” This was said robotically, but all the same, somehow as if Fred might genuinely care.

  I had completely forgotten about the event, but I pretended that it constituted the most highly anticipated calendar item of my day. “Absolutely. I’m really looking forward to it, actually!”

  “Great. Thanks for making time.”

  I scooted my chair back a bit and craned my head around to look at Fred.

  It was, if I may say so, sort of like the face behind his face was leaning forward, looking out of his actual flesh face, trying to get an authoritative view of what was transpiring in the room before him. I don’t mean that he was necessarily so concerned with what I was doing with the commonplace book, but rather that he seemed to be engaged in surgical analysis of my aura.

  I said, “I’ll see you later on?”

  “You will. And I’m glad we could talk earlier.” There was an eerie, hard cast to Fred’s countenance as he said this.

  “No problem. Always glad to talk. What a day.”

  “Yes.” I could tell Fred wanted to demand to know what I was doing in the repair and study suite and why the keys to the visible storage were sitting out on the table next to my paper-towel arrangement and priceless book. He squinted. “You know, we keep cloths and weights and supports and that sort of thing in the closet outside.” He paused. “For future reference.”

  “Oh my God, yes!” I agreed. I had no idea why I was speaking to him in this way.

  Fred was nonplussed. “I mean, I have found them useful. We are also, just so you know, required by the museum’s charter to make use of them. So, for that reason, you may wish to avail yourself.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This seems like an interesting excursion.” Fred was withdrawing physically, but now his thought reached tantalizingly out to brush against mine.

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to get up from my chair but a rage unrelated to our current conversation held me in my place. I hated him for believing that he knew everything there was to know about everything in the world.

  “You do so much,” Fred continued. He seemed weirdly aroused, though his manner also let me know that even in this state he felt no compulsion to act upon corporeal whim.

  “Not really.” I awaited the next compliment.

  “You do so many things,” Fred repeated, this time with new meaning, though still his tone remained cool. “I’m so curious to know what you’ll come up with next.”

  “Probably nothing much!” I showed a lot of teeth, grinning for his benefit.

  —

  AFTER FRED RECUSED HIMSELF I had a few minutes left to examine the commonplace book. I began by taking a series of cell phone photos of the map, of the artful huts of the township and the neoclassical fantasy that was the surrounding woodlands. To say that a xerox is lossy is, of course, a gross understatement, and I wanted to be sure I had the best possible views. I’d ponder the minute community, I planned, later on. I next elected to page through the commonplace book, the better to know the woman who had collected all this imagery. There were flowers and regional landscapes, images of the ocean and ships, Europeans in various folk costumes along with explanatory text. There was a section of clippings picturing the schooling of small children; open mouths, pointing fingers.

  And then I came to something very, very strange. On some level it wasn’t so strange; it was merely an engraving of a beautiful woman on the period model. She had the features of a doll and an appropriately zaftig body. She stood, or, rather, hovered, on a pier in a gauzy dress with an empire waist. The legend below her read “Étoile, the Singer from Paradise.” I trembled a little. A small ship laden with flags was visible in the distance, and both the sun and a faint moon stood in the sky. I carefully employed my phone to obtain pictures. What was strange about this image was that in my parents’ apartment, in the house in which I had grown up, there was an engraving nearly identical to this one, framed and hanging in the hallway. I knew this because I had spent many hours standing in that hallway, studying it. Ours was, perhaps, an even finer imprint. Conceivably, this was just a coincidence. Still, I felt unsettled. I gulped, fumbled with the phone. My mouth was dry. Also, it was late.

  I had to take the commonplace book back out and lock it into its case again and neaten the suite. Then I had to run back up to my office and do my best using my makeup kit to make it look like I was intentionally dressing day to evening, or whatever they call that on people’s style blogs. It was a fine line, too, between looking like I was wearing fairly formal (the better to distract from my outfit) makeup and looking like a birthday cake. I put Paul’s keys back in my bag and headed out to the museum’s steps, where I paused for a moment to smoke.

  My head was full of spirits. I kept thinking of that spectral arm in the commonplace book, probably an illustration from Harper’s. I thought, too, of the somewhat more contemporary (and substantial) hand that had turned the page of the book, changing the image it displayed. Above all, I wanted to get home as soon as possible and read whatever Paul had written in those documents in “etc.” I wanted, too, to study the pictures now stored on my phone. Elysia was not necessarily real, but a version of it was sitting locked inside the visible storage, for whatever that was worth. The first stanza of the poem included with the map kept coming back into my head:

  Where is this paradise you seek,

  A place where no one mourns,

  And nothing irreplaceable is lost,

  And nothing lost is irretrievable?

  Whatever else one could say, there was something relevant about this as far as I was concerned, since in recent months I’d often had the opportunity to contemplate feelings of intense alienation, even emotional homelessness, in the very city in which I had been born. I felt that I could potentially agree with this line of questioning. Where was the paradise I had not just sought but, idiotically perhaps, believed myself to have successfully discovered? What had happened to that time and place in which love—yes, along with the drinking and yelling and lying and strangely aggressive behavior in bed and everywhere else I seemed to encounter the person I thought was my husband—had seemed unconditional? And why, oh why, was my own mother so incredibly weird?

  Something that now and again popped into my head was that my main error had been in seeking my home in the world in another human. I didn’t fully know what this intuition meant, but it was an idea that returned to me from time to time these days, always taking different forms. And ideas, like dreams, were apparitions that I now studied with greater care. I was troubled, still, by the sense that I hadn’t not known about what Whit was doing. I hadn’t always known, but I also hadn’t not known. I’d just never bothered to find out.

  These counterfactual reveries were interrupted by the appearance of Marco, who was currently exiting our fair institution in pressed slacks and what appeared to be a pressed tote bag.

  “Hiya,” I said, flourishing my cigarette. I felt a little old, which was sort of nice on a
day like today.

  “Hey.” Marco rushed over. It was evident we were going to talk about Paul.

  I smoked some more.

  “How are you doing? It’s so awful. I can’t believe it.” Marco was genuinely distressed. It made me realize, by contrast, how scarily numb I had been for the past nine hours. “I didn’t know what to do with myself all day. I almost came up to see you.” Marco was frowning in the twilight. It was possible that he might cry.

  “Do you want a cigarette?”

  “Sure.” Marco accepted and lit it himself with a lighter extracted from his blazer pocket. “God. Thank you.”

  I tried to smile.

  “Are you OK? I feel like you two were really friends and things. I mean, we all knew him. He was Paul.”

  “To be honest with you, I still don’t feel anything.” I thought about this for a second. “I might be a little mad. That seems weird to me.”

  “That’s probably right.” Marco was looking at me differently, which is to say, he looked different to me in this moment than he had ever looked before. We just stood there for a while, smoking in silence.

  [ 16 ]

  Ten minutes later Marco and I were sharing a cab down to TriBeCa. I had convinced him that he should join me for the WANSEE celebration. I knew both of us wanted to be either stone-cold sober or drunker than we’d ever been drunk, and there was no real way of telling how this was going to work itself out. But: strength in numbers. I also happened to know that Fred Lu approved of Marco, and the more I could throw them together in social situations the more likely Marco was to recognize Fred’s casual generosity toward those with whom he had passing acquaintance.

  I hate this kind of event. There is no way to sugarcoat it. From the moment Marco and I stepped into the copper-plated elevator that glided us up to the top of an unfathomably expensive and formerly industrial edifice, I was not just beginning to suffer but actively suffering. All I could think was how much I longed to already be experiencing the return trip, to be slightly buzzed and sinking safely back down to street level, where I could walk and then tuck myself anonymously into the subway. However, I do have a competitive side. I want, or would really, really like, to be less bad at this. And it bothers me that people I don’t completely respect, or have come to learn I can’t afford to respect, i.e., Fred, are so insanely better at this than I am.

  The copper container rang benignly as it slid to a gentle stop. I felt, briefly, that it might be mocking my terror, but there was little I could do to retaliate against a nonsentient mechanism. The doors, parting noiselessly, revealed an open floor plan as well as the major wealth that affords a walkthrough overlooking the Holland Tunnel stuffed with persons who are present only because you are sharing your money with them. There were maybe a hundred people here. This was for starters. The floor was poured concrete, very pale, nearly white. Multiple arrangements of tastefully minimalist sofas encircling maximalist neon area rugs gave the impression that the condo was a sort of hotel lobby, intended to be inhabited not by its owners but by guests, and that these guests were likely to have somewhat tenuous relationships with one another. The utterly intimidating decor was completed by Rauschenberg silkscreens and more recent works I could not identify in my ignorance of the art of the end of the last century.

  Marco strode out of the elevator, freakishly enraptured. He paused, glancing back at me. “You OK?”

  “Yes,” I burbled, experiencing terror. I felt my shoulders start to hunch up.

  Marco grimaced. “Come on. I’ll find you some booze.” He took my arm and all but dragged me into Babylon.

  There were twentysomethings in the unisex catering uniform of our era, white shirt plus black pants, swishing around with trays of drinks. Marco engaged one handsome individual (to whom he would probably have had more to say under alternate circumstances) and pulled down something made out of vodka and champagne for me. I could see Marco a little more clearly now, and I was starting to seriously admire his fortitude. He was capable of play, I saw, and would probably go far in this world. I, however, wanted to slink to a distant corner to drool on myself and await the angel of death.

  “Here you go.” Marco meaningfully wrapped one of my trembling hands around the drink.

  “Thanks.”

  Marco also took a cocktail for himself. “Thank you,” he told the server. I watched the two of them wordlessly come to an understanding that they would seek each other out at a more advantageous instant later on. I could only admire the grace on display.

  “Thank you,” I echoed Marco. I felt like I was twelve and a half. My face was flushed, greasy.

  “So”—Marco turned back to me, sipping—“do you know these people?”

  I gulped down half the contents of my glass. “Oh God,” was what I said.

  “Interesting,” said Marco.

  “No, no, I don’t know.” I was looking around. The crowd was slightly younger than usual, and it occurred to me that Fred was possibly making some adjustments or additions to his social stable this evening. There were, judging from the sizable eyewear and a few instances of cape dresses, some Chelsea gallerists in attendance, and even a few of their artists, one of whom was wearing yak-fur pants. The gallerists nodded a lot. They were pretty women in their forties who were aging magnificently and making tons of bank doing something they didn’t hate. As far as the current setting was concerned, they were noncommittal. This was fine for them, cocktails were plentiful, and if they got a new client out of the deal, great. Otherwise, this night was low stakes. I worshipped them. I mean, privately I worshipped them. I would never be them, but you could see that this was the way things could be if you were living right. They left the neuroses to the creatives they represented and went on subsisting very, very well, thank you.

  Some higher-up administrative types from the museum had also made the scene. They were the people in the crowd who seemed most thrilled to be here and wholly in their element. They were inhaling alcohol and walking around loudly greeting anyone willing to be accosted. Some of the females of the functionary class had on their “liberal” jewelry options this evening, wooden blocks on string or modernist brass triangles. They were feeling casual, optimistic. They had gone with a bright lip. And then there were a ton of other people I could not place—I mean, you of course had your circle of CeMArt curators, all squished together for moral support, trying to pretend they were just standing around casually. And there were the ladies with unfortunate nose jobs and unnaturally high metabolisms dressed in revealing pastel jumpsuits or vaguely southwestern getups. These were people with more money than sense, who were, for the successful curator, an occupational hazard and even necessity. They never knew what they were doing anywhere they went and therefore required constant attention.

  I espied Fred, who was in the midst of attempting to train one such woman to exchange social niceties with another hetero couple, both of whom had suffered alarming amounts of Botox to be injected into their foreheads, jowls, necks, and possibly eyeballs. There were newcomers as well: many very plain male executives in well-cut, looser suits and a few circumspect women milling around. They were corporate. They had come from WANSEE, and they clearly liked this space. They felt it was appropriate to the mission of a major art museum; plus, it had actual artists in it. The relevant boxes had been checked off. Staring at these clean, toned capitalists made me extremely nervous, for I knew that, by talking to them, I had the power, in my radical awkwardness, to disrupt the flow of not just the confidence in the room but also the capital. And though I did not much care for WANSEE or what seemed to be its ambitions to secure all of the earth’s moisture, I did to some extent care for my job, and I did not feel like giving this job away during the course of a cocktail party.

  Said Marco, “I think I recognize a few people.”

  “Listen, you should really feel free to mingle.”

  Marco just laughed.

  “Please,” I begged. “And please don’t laugh at me. I’ll do better i
f I’m left to drown on my own.”

  “I’m not laughing at you.”

  “You should! It is laughable. Please, I’m fine.”

  “Oh, Stella Krakus. Whatever you say.”

  I thanked him.

  “No, thank you. See you later?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I watched, twitching, as Marco made his way into the gelling crowd. I let myself be swallowed up by various indiscriminate jostling shoulders as the party seemed, in the course of fifteen minutes, to double in size.

  I sweated, bobbed, completed my drink, secured another. I managed to run into an auction house employee I knew vaguely from grad school, feigned bottomless nostalgia, and monopolized this hapless woman who, praise Baal, did not have either the presence of mind or powers of recollection to ask about Whit. Then someone tapped a glass repeatedly and Fred’s long-anticipated toast began. Everyone pivoted up into photographable position.

  “Hello,” said Fred. He opened with a fairly long homily, even for him, thanking Davis and Darren Axelmundsen-Coates, whose home this apparently was, for letting everyone traipse through their doors. The couple was somewhere in the assembly, but it was difficult, from my vantage at least, to see them. Whatever these two had done for Fred Lu, one thing was certain, it was not limited to this event.

  Languidly, Fred eased on to the matter of WANSEE, what a crucial partner the conglomerate was, how it/they really understood the contemporary arts and the needs of contemporary audiences for the arts, and how he was so endlessly grateful for valuable and refreshing conversations with so-and-so, who was executive director of this and that, and who had accomplished those and these extremely accomplished accomplishments.

  This, to be honest, made me feel like a microbe that was living under the shoe of a cockroach that was living under the sink of two of the most doltish frat boys you’d ever want to meet on a Billyburg corner at midnight midvape who’d just moved in together to explore their dreams of becoming middle managers. How could I possibly be a curator if Fred was a curator? I wasn’t a curator! I was just a human-shaped supply of erudition and random bits of data that kept the paintings from falling off the walls. Fred was meanwhile engineering the walls, inventing whatever it was that would come after walls, and whatever scruples had to be sacrificed to this illustrious undertaking, these were not keeping Frederick Lu up at night. As Fred talked and talked, I felt myself dissolving into the condo’s temperate air. I was a form of human decoration to this scene. It was laughable, as previous iterations of tonight’s occasion should have better instructed me, that I could think that Fred was nurturing any kind of undying feeling for me. It was a fucking joke. That he bothered to try to talk to me about what had transpired between us at all was not just an act of mercy on his part, it was the best a someone like me could ever hope to obtain from a someone like him, so why wasn’t I endlessly grateful and comforted and even kind of ecstatic? Why wasn’t I converting our dead-end romance into a species of professional success and getting on with it? I was crazy to think that he could genuinely care about me. Collaborate with, fine, but love, never. I was a moderately interesting iteration of my class, just another serviceable brain in a city already replete with geniuses.