Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  But then I didn’t. I closed my laptop.

  I went into the kitchen and made myself a decent omelet and ate it standing beside the counter. I did the dishes. I walked once around each of the rooms in the apartment, taking stock of the eclectic furniture situation. I rolled a ragged cigarette from a pouch of stale tobacco I keep at the back of a kitchen drawer and smoked half of it out the window before pitching the rest away. I got out Ella Voss’s and Paul Coral’s respective publications. I was pretending as hard as I possibly could that I had forgotten all about the presence of Paul’s keys at the bottom of the tote. I retired to my bedroom.

  I flipped around Paul’s collections. I really wasn’t sure what should interest me here. I had acquired The Telephone and also the more recent Superimposed Worlds. These just looked like poems to me. I mean, I was very glad to have these two collections, because I cared about Paul and his work. However, I was unsure what his published verbal exertions could mean to my current conundrums. I skimmed dutifully, but nothing was coming up. I turned to Ella’s latest.

  The cover showed an image of a child’s hand grasping a lilac bloom. It had been described by various luminaries as “gripping,” “important,” “strange,” and “upsetting.” A photograph of Ella Voss graced the lower left-hand corner of the back cover of the book. She appeared exceedingly unassuming, like someone’s drawing of an older woman. She was expressionless, her neck wrapped in a prissy paisley scarf.

  A few pages in, we are treated to a family dinner scene.

  “The best part,” Jason was saying, pointing for emphasis with a fork that was held, his father felt, perilously close to his right eye, “of the story—”

  “Jason,” said his father, “do me a favor, son, and lower that.”

  “What?”

  “The fork,” his mother clarified. She blew on a morsel and gazed expectantly at her husband.

  “Yes, sir.” Jason frowned. He took a slug of milk from a tall glass. “Anyway, it switches to the point of view of this guy who gets sent to this other planet where there’s total peace and harmony but it’s only so peaceful because there’s this, this, uh, big machine that’s controlling everyone’s brain. Except it’s kind of like a plant, you know? Like, it’s living?” Jason emptied his glass. He canvassed his father’s face.

  Charles Crystal nodded. His wife, a blonde, had once been reasonably pretty. Her face was heart shaped and worn. Now she got up from the table and refilled her son’s glass.

  Jason’s pale eyes widened. “So, get this, then the guy shoots the machine until it dies, because he thinks everyone is a slave, and he wants them to be free, even if that means that they have to have war and poverty and all of that. And then the machine dies, because it turns out it’s actually not that hard for it to die, and all these people, all these millions of people on the planet, are liberated. But then, get this, he has to take over for the machine. He has to. He doesn’t want to but they make him do it.” Jason was staring at his father.

  Charles Crystal smiled indulgently. He observed the smooth, tanned brow of his elder son, which was bright with enthusiasm and dismay. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess that man became president?” Charles Crystal chuckled, pleased with himself.

  “No—” Jason was starting to say.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, Philip?” Charles Crystal turned to his younger son, who was seated beside his wife. “What can we do for you this evening?”

  Philip was nine. “Dad, I want to know if Sherry is going to get better soon.”

  Sherry was the Crystals’ dog. She was a chocolate lab and was currently in the late stages of a difficult pregnancy.

  Charles Crystal approved of his younger son’s interest in the female condition, and his eyes danced briefly over to his wife. “Well, do you think something’s wrong there, son?”

  “I dunno, Dad. She just seems so heavy, like she doesn’t want to do anything anymore.”

  “What?” Jason was meanwhile demanding. “Jesus Christ, Philip, the dog is knocked up. Can’t you understand that?”

  “Oh!” said their mother.

  “Jason!” Charles Crystal warned.

  “I know that,” Philip muttered. He looked down at the remaining mashed potatoes on his plate and slowly stirred them. The child was different. Though he did not cry or otherwise trouble his parents at night, they were aware that he seldom slept. Charles, en route to sample a leftover drumstick or cold ham, often passed the child’s open door and found his younger son lying on his back, eyes open, motionless in the light of the moon. Now, outside, the mellow song of the ice cream truck had begun. Philip did not seem to hear it.

  Charles Crystal was reaching into his pants pocket for his wallet. The boy should feel his care.

  “Philip,” Charles Crystal said, “are you finished with your supper?”

  Slowly, painfully, the boy nodded. He continued staring at his plate.

  “Well, then, young man, you should go find yourself some dessert!” Charles Crystal removed a crisp dollar bill from his wallet and passed it smoothly across the table, dropping it beside his younger son’s plate.

  The boy sat there.

  No one spoke.

  “Go on,” said Philip’s father.

  Trembling, the boy reached out one still-dimpled hand and lowered it over the bill, unconsciously crumpling the money into a ball as he took hold of it, and wordlessly left the table.

  When Philip had gone, Charles Crystal turned to address Jason. “Do you really feel that’s the sort of talk your brother should hear?”

  Lisette Crystal stood on cue and retired with her plate and Philip’s plate into the kitchen. She had barely touched her food.

  Jason was frowning. “I don’t know, Dad. I think maybe he needs to remember that that dog’s gonna have puppies. That’s all.”

  “He’s only nine! And he’s a sensitive child. He’s not like you, Jason. A man has to know whom he’s dealing with. Philip may not be ready to understand all that you have already understood. We must be patient with him.”

  “You can say that again!” Jason continued to eat. “Say,” he said, “d’you think I could go back in there,” he indicated the kitchen with a toss of his head, “and have the rest of Philip’s?”

  Charles Crystal considered his elder son. “I don’t see why not. Just remember, when Philip comes back indoors, go easy on him.”

  Charles Crystal is an engineer with Halex, but something is wrong. Ideas sift through his fingers unsubstantially, soft as ash. Sometimes he cannot understand what his colleagues say. He has taken to sneaking into the desk of a younger Halex engineer at night, stealing that man’s work, passing it off as his own. Diet pills and scotch, along with sporadic secretarial assignations, relieve his anguish.

  Philip Crystal is allowed to stay home from school. His mother, Lisette, imagines herself drawing a witchy circle around her son. She purchases unnecessarily large quantities of canned food in case of nuclear holocaust, now that colonial projects are failing. The dog, Sherry, becomes more and more obese.

  “Halexvale,” a seven-mile industrial park abutting residential suburbs of the novel’s pseudo-Rochester, comes to include some two hundred chemical plants. Countless leaks and spills result in toxic silver contamination of sediment in the pseudo-Genesee River bed (the novel names it the “Gentle River”) as well as soil in and around the city.

  In 1981, a pipe ruptures near P.S. 2, a school at the southern border of Halexvale, releasing thirty thousand gallons of methylene chloride. Worried parents yank most of the 594 children enrolled at P.S. 2 out of school. Classes are briefly canceled, but then the school rapidly reopens in triumph, after state health officials discover high concentrations of chemical vapors underground but, as they are keen to emphasize, insignificant traces in the school building.

  Sherry the dog gives birth in a closet on the day of the spill, and Philip is at home and can witness the biologically instructive event. By afternoon he gets it in his mind th
at he will be the first to tell Jason what has happened and at last prove he understands canine reproduction.

  Eavesdropping on his mother’s late-day telephone conversation, Philip is able to discern where Jason will spend the afternoon. When the coast is clear, Philip removes his bicycle from the garage and pedals into the grid, arriving at the raised ranch home in question and dropping his bike on the lawn. The door is open, but there is no one present anywhere on the upper two floors of the house. Philip is about to leave when he remembers something his brother has told him about basements of houses, that this is an important and underappreciated portion of the home. Philip goes downstairs and in one windowless room in the basement his brother and friends are raping a very young boy probably the same age as Philip. The End.

  —

  IT WAS VERY LATE, AND I put the novel down. I felt clammy, sick at heart, having given my attention over to a work that had forced me to visualize things I very much did not want to visualize, making me complicit in their recurrence, even if only in my mind’s eye. I was seduced by Voss’s prickly detailing of surreal events. Philip Crystal also put me in mind of Lorelei’s otherworldly retreat, but how different were these two accounts of ex-urban utopia: Hennicott’s elegiac; Voss’s explicit, vaguely noir.

  And I thought of Paul, about the time that he had spent inside of American Objects’ false building, behind the façade of the customs house, in a dozen different false living rooms.

  friday

  [ 22 ]

  It was Friday. At my desk in the morning I had received an email from Caro with no subject, the body of which simply said, “Nice to see you. XXO.”

  My active evening notwithstanding, I still had some questions about the mystery known as my job, as well as its contextualizing historical surrounds. I was also trying not to think about Paul’s keys.

  The temporal location toward which my mind was now tending was a bit on the earlier side. I considered the 1930 donation of Brunhilda Wunsch Gaypoole’s commonplace book and the lack of proper documentation of other items that had come along with it that August. I had no hope for the digital catalog, however I still did a due diligence search. Alice Gaypoole Wynne had, according to the database results I received, made but one donation in her life, i.e., her great-grandmother’s scrapbook. Though this was very generous and good, when you thought about it, an heiress of her standing would in any and all cases have given more, if she had things to give. I pondered this fact for a moment. If she had things to give, which she indubitably had, see Elysia Club collection. What could have impeded Alice? Who or what could have stood in her way? For the moment I didn’t have time to consider the question further, but it was one worth asking. I would need to return to this later.

  There was something I had for too long avoided doing, and it was time to remedy this. I needed to go downstairs and view what I imagined to be Fred’s show of earnest, on-the-nose American excellence.

  I dragged myself back into the wing.

  The title “Land of the Limner” had been elegantly emblazoned on a purpose-built false wall before the relevant galleries in intricate, ribbonlike script, as if cut with the tip of a sword.

  I was in a hurry, so I didn’t linger over the introductory text. I passed behind the pony wall into the first windowless gallery.

  It was dim in the room, not to mention that the walls had been painted flat black, so that the setup felt puritanical in the extreme. Overheads cast halos on a series of eighteenth-century works, full-body portraits of the Dutch for the most part, accomplished on wood paneling by individuals more or less able to paint. It’s a moment in aesthetic production that you pretty much have to look at to believe, because you have centuries of ridiculously, hubristically accomplished painting in the Netherlands, and then you get to ye olde New World, and crap looks like this. This is to say, it was a far cry from Van Eyck. Females in ostentatious silk heels and triangular ankle-length dresses were described flatly, in mostly unmixed colors. They held flowers. Their dresses were embroidered with additional flowers. They stood, blushing, facing forward, the better to render their anatomy easy to depict.

  I found myself particularly drawn to one portrait, a woman in a vertically striped skirt who held a long rose, the blossom of which was nearly as large as her face. She was holding the rose up to her nose, as if she might sniff it, but her gaze was turned out of the portrait, toward us. I went in for a closer look at the label. This told me that the portrait was attributed to someone known by convention as the “Wunsch Limner,” since the last name of the person depicted was likely Wunsch and nothing was known of the artist beyond his (or her, though likely his) accomplishment here. The date attributed to the painting was “ca. 1790.” I would have preferred to just go about my business now, viewing the rest of the show, but I recognized this all-too-familiar last name from my research. It was a very uncanny coincidence if it was a coincidence, but probably it was not a coincidence. In fact, there was no way in hell it was a coincidence. I took a picture of the lady with the rose. I knew it was not necessary to do this, seeing as I myself had but a matter of days ago wrangled image files for every work in the show, but it seemed to me somehow crucial that I capture her for myself again, now and here.

  I went into the next room. It contained early-nineteenth-century works. These were mostly British patrons, though again a baby Wunsch, similarly the work of an anonymous limner, made itself known. How, I berated myself, when I had been working on the checklist, had I failed to notice this pattern, the ubiquity of this surname? I paused for a moment to admire the advances in modeling and conveyance of three-dimensional space that accompanied the advent of the year 1800. Congratulations, Americans! Although, on the other hand, there really was something to be said for the previous room, with its awkward pictures of the daughters of rich upstate ranchers of Dutch and German descent. It showed you something that the art historian seldom has a chance, and probably does not want, to discuss, i.e., the fact that the history of art, or the history of the production of aesthetic objects, is not merely a narrative of progress and increasing skill in the relation of realist detail, or just the invention of new ways to convey politics to an in-group. There is also branching and backtracking. And there is isolation, and there is miracle. And there is something people call “charm,” which is what happens when nothing works in a given painting. But what you get when nothing works is everything.

  Subsequent rooms contained genre paintings of adorable pets (the Internet would, I felt sure, reward Fred) and additional portraits by the eccentrics of the limning world, mid-nineteenth-century painters who combined photography with painting or painted the same image over and over again, such that it seemed less like a painting and more like an infinitely reproducible work, like a painted sign with its conventions for lettering and graphic cheer, or even a lithograph. There were religious works and enormous family portraits.

  Then I came to the modern rooms. Some of the canvases here showed fleshy heiresses nine feet tall, about to extend a dimpled ivory pinkie into the twentieth century, if their ruthlessly cinched waists would permit them to move that far from the supportive furniture of their drawing rooms. There were scenes of street life, tiny canvases depicting nightlife haps and the interiors of various interwar galleries, lubricated with illicit hooch and packed with female painters in backless dresses and male painters in rumpled suits, and then a lively daytime painting contest. There were also a few little-seen Stettheimers on loan from various private collections, a Kuniyoshi. What surprised me most of all was that the small canvases, these group scenes I mention, were the museum’s own. I had never seen any of these paintings before.

  I had to give Fred credit, it was pretty much an incredible show. Seeing the progression of this style of working on the East Coast just felt so specific, and I wasn’t even thinking about what Fred had done as a pseudoinnocent attempt to self-promote anymore. He was promoting himself by doing something actually useful and culturally relevant. Or, now the dismal t
houghts kicked in, he was actually shamelessly promoting himself by doing such good work, had shamelessly strategized every move here. I really could not tell. He was too good. Would I feel better about what he had done if he had just guessed and randomly came up with the right thing to propel himself into the art-historical stratosphere?

  This was the thing about Fred. When he was close to you or you felt close to him, he was the hero you had always sought, who understood the truth of the world, and you believed or wanted to believe that he knew what the right thing was, perpetually and unquestionably, and that was why he was doing whatever he was doing. But when you took a step back, everything changed, and he was a ruthless jerk. I could not decide where I wanted to stand. I truly did not hate Fred and did not think of him as an evil mastermind, but neither did I feel that he was the Second Coming of Christ. He was a pretty man who was good at his job, and he fucked like a total sweetheart. This was, I kept trying to convince myself, the beginning and the end of my commitment to him.

  I went back upstairs to the department.

  The question was, I kept reflecting, how long would Fred continue to tolerate closeness to someone who chose to remain agnostic with respect to him and his talent? By remaining in the same department in which he worked and continuing to consider him human, was I putting my own career in jeopardy? And: Would this remain an abhorrently distracting feature of my life, for the rest of my life, were I to stay here? Would he continue to claim, in exchange for my determined noncredence in his god status, my heart?

  Fred was cool, but he also had standards. Perhaps more than anything he had standards. He would demand a fee. This was one thing I could be sure of. Obviously neither side of his family had gotten as rich as they had by giving, even immaterial, goods away.