I am an actuary by trade. My job involves evaluating risk. This has been ranked the number one low-stress occupation in the country, according to recent media reports, and I can attest to their veracity (which is why my dentist finds it so surprising that I grind my teeth in the night—bruxism, it’s called. That sounds like the name of an art movement, does it not? Something darkly male, something tantalizingly unkempt. My No. 14 and No. 19 molars have evidently suffered such irreparable damage that it threatens to alter the appearance of my jawline. I’m currently awaiting delivery of my custom-fitted mouthguard, my own nocturnal bite plate. This is the kind of excitement I have to look forward to these days, Miss Subramanium).
As both a professional and a parent, it is my job to calculate risks, not take them. Taking risks—that is the artist’s, and the child’s, job.
Your feet-on-the-ground dictum, or “rool,” as Georgia put it in her journal, is just the starting point. There is also your oft-stated desire that the children make their crayon strokes in one direction and one direction only, putting cross-hatching on the same criminal level as giving a classmate a wedgie. And snipping the erasers off the ends of their pencils so that they’re forced to confront their “mistakes”—I won’t even go there right now. What I would like to focus on is your insistence that a drawing is not complete until the child has filled in the background.
Can I call your attention to the Toronto painter Ronald Bloore? Most famous for his white-on-white paintings of the 1970s and ’80s, which he has said represent “freedom for the viewer,” Bloore is a master of texture. The aesthetic pleasure of these works lies in the very white space you claim to abhor. The intra-textural space is the image. (I came so close to buying a Bloore once at auction, but my husband, much like you, Miss Subramanium, could not see the value in the pristine expansiveness of the painting, calling it—I’m almost embarrassed to type the phrase lest you think he speaks like this in front of Georgia—“a wank job.” It could be that my husband was jealous. If you have seen photographs of Bloore in his middle years you would agree that he had a rakish quality, that airborne charisma of the rogue male artist confident in his abilities and able to draw people, namely women, effortlessly into his vortex. He is, at that age, a doppelgänger for my dentist. The resemblance is rather uncanny, save that my dentist does not dangle a cigarette between his fingers as he plies his trade.)
To focus so intently on the absence of colour. To trust the viewer to distinguish between different kinds of whiteness—between degrees of whiteness. There is a bold erotic charge to this deliberate withholding. Bloore himself once called art “a three-letter word.” Can you understand the rigour involved in denial, Miss Subramanium?
This is not to say that a child handing in a blank sheet of paper and calling it art should be met with cries of bravissimo! (although it would be rather clever), but that art is elastic and your insistence on mimetic drawings, complete with backgrounds, rather retrograde.
I can almost hear you sighing, Miss Subramanium. It isn’t my tendency to psychoanalyze, but it’s not difficult to imagine what this fear of white space implies. You don’t like to be alone, do you? Whiling away empty hours fills you with an unnameable terror, does it not? There are people who can help with this—God knows I have a list of contacts as long as my arm. Just say the word.
The point of art, Miss Subramanium, is in not meeting expectations. Ha! Yes, that is the point! I surprise even myself with this revelation. So Georgia, in “not yet meeting expectations,” is, in fact, at the top of her class. Art, and here I include dance, music, film, and belles lettres, is perhaps the only human activity where not meeting expectations corresponds with success, not failure.
And in a life full of almost continual, albeit inconsequential, disappointments, with others, with ourselves, in a life full of notable failure (to secure a date with Daryl Sawatsky for the high-school graduation dance; to place in the top percentile of your statistics class despite pulling enough all-nighters and popping enough bennies to fell an aurochs), this ability of the few to defy, to subvert, expectations gives the rest of us something to live for—vicariously, in the third person as it were.
In all fairness I should tell you that your self-referential habit when addressing the children has become a source of amusement at our house. Miss S. is getting frustrated over the level of the noise in the classroom. Miss S. needs someone to run to the office and get her some Tylenol 3s. Miss S. needs a minute to finish her text message to her ex-boyfriend. “Miss S. sounds likes Dobbie in Harry Potter,” Georgia said the other day, and we shared a laugh, picturing you as the beleaguered house elf smashing yourself on the head with a desk lamp after one transgression or another. That actually brought some tears to my eyes. (My husband came to your defence; feathered earrings and patchouli-scented heavy-metal cotton Ts no doubt dangling like sugarplums over his head.)
Perhaps you come from a troubled home or even a troubled country, if your last name is any indication. It is not in my nature to pry. But your quest for order appears to me a manifestation of an obsessive need to wield complete control over your small fiefdom. The word martinet comes to mind. How am I as a parent to know that an ill-timed scrawl outside the lines won’t trigger a psychotic episode due to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder; that you’re not above administering medieval forms of punishment? How am I to ascertain that my child is safe in your classroom, with its almost Pol Pot-ish rules about behaviour? What’s next, Miss Subramanium, a pile of polished skulls in the supply cupboard?
Can I call you Shayana, Miss Subramanium? Miss Subramanium is, after all, a mouthful, and so formal considering I am technically old enough to be your mother. As for Miss S.—well, I’m hardly one of your little charges.
There was a time, Shayana, when I wore my era’s equivalent to your dreamcatchers and rebellious T-shirts. I had aspirations. I was giddy with my own sexual power—a simulacrum of power fed by the illusions of youth and a type of wan beauty, but power of a kind nonetheless. Every day brought a new opportunity for adventure. Did I imagine then that I would spend the bulk of my days, year upon year, in a small office cubicle with an Excel spreadsheet on the monitor in front of me, a photograph of a laughing girl on a portable potty as my screen saver, and on my desk a miniature inflatable punching bag (a Secret Santa gift from my colleagues) of the existential figure from Munch’s The Scream? Not for a moment. I was going to be an artist.
I had an advantage over my fellow students at the art college—I could see voices as colours and shapes, and without the aid of any psychotropic. As long as someone was talking, I had a palette to work with. The nasal Upper Canada monotone of my life-class instructor produced oddly compelling anorexic oatmeal-streaked buttocks and breasts (you may imagine how this annoyed the model, who was rather voluptuous and rosy hued, but the sketches earned me instant recognition as an iconoclast). My roommate’s throaty smoker’s laugh gave me a series of large canvas magma flares in reds, oranges, and basalt. The melancholy-flecked sound of my Estonian landlady talking to her daughter over the telephone, a small umbral gem.
Recorded voices, digitized voices, mediated voices didn’t have any effect. This synesthesia only worked “live.” Walking along a crowded street was quite literally a psychedelic experience. “Your voice is damaged swimwear,” I told a stranger waiting for a bus, a pimply-faced teen whose girlfriend poked him in the ribs with her pointy little elbow before he could respond. “You sound like fresh cement,” I said to a waitress midway through her recitation of the daily specials.
I was flying, that’s what it felt like. Until the day I came across a man whose voice I couldn’t see.
Have you ever had a demon lover, Shayana?
Forget bad-boy musicians or beautiful vampires. I’m talking about the kind of man who turns his dirty dishes over and, when both sides are used, throws them out in a way that is both ceremonial and completely nonchalant, and has you utterly, utterly convinced that this is a “philosophy.” A m
an who adds not one but three umlauts to his name for a devastating Teutonic effect. I’m talking about a terrifying and destructive charisma.
He was famous for a time, and then infamous. This was the mid-eighties, when money flowed towards the neoexpressionists like blood from an unstanched head wound. Basquiat. Fischl. Salle. Schnabel. He was the unacknowledged leader of the neo-geo movement, a concerted assault on the neo-expressionists, whom he deemed hopeless—and dangerous—Romantics. (A danger to art, that is.) You may have come across his name somewhere recently because of the unresolved court case, in a Vanity Fair or an Interview (although your periodical tastes may run more towards Us and Hello!—to each his or her own, I always say). There is a Facebook group, Mephisto’s Muses, devoted to his memory. (I’ll leave you to judge for yourself the degree of collective self-absorption involved there.) Did he have a disarming grimace? I honestly can’t remember.
I’m going to tell you a story, Shayana, and don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t immediately make sense. Good stories seldom do.
Once upon a time a young woman encountered a man. It doesn’t matter how they met. One moment she was up in the air, the next she was falling to earth but didn’t care. The man was not what anyone would call handsome or young. His hair was stiff and matted, his belly soft, his breath sulphuric; his eyes had slits for pupils, like a goat’s. But when he spoke, all she could see and hear was his voice. She could feel his voice, she knew she could find him anywhere through echolocation. It was as if she had become a bat. A small, needy fruit bat.
He said her name often, and every time he did so it was as if he were pinning her to a corkboard, each pronouncement of her name a kind of claiming. Why did he want her so? This went on for some time, this living blind in a cave with only his voice for company, seldom venturing out in human form.
Near the end of that honeymoon period, they were in someone’s basement den after a long night of flitting from club to club. How he loved the clubs! The body heat, the insistent beats, the obliteration of the senses, the fawning recognition of slinky creatures. The light above the billiard table was bothering his eyes. Unscrew the bulb, he told her. And she did, with her bare fingers, barely flinching while onlookers caught their breath. By this time he had formed a habit of patting her on the head when she did something that pleased him, as if she were a loyal pooch, no longer stroking her mouse-brown fur, her leathered wingtips, no longer content to stay in their cave. He was spending more and more time with a woman who kept a steppe wolf in her laundry room. The wolf mistress, she realized, even then, was the kind of woman she could never be.
I can grant you any wish you want, he told her that night she burnt her fingertips. Did he actually say this or only imply it? Had she invoked him, her demon, like Theophilus or Faustus, or even poor Robert Johnson down at the crossroad? She had been content living blind, eating fermenting plums, breathing deep, the world just brief flickering shadows on the moist walls of a cave when he lit his bong. What was left that she could wish for?
To be an artist or to be a muse—that was what tore her in two. The spell she was under led her to believe being his muse would be the more fulfilling of the two. And they lived happily ever after. Or so it would seem, for a time.
So you see, thwarted artists can be anywhere, Shayana. There is artistry to Georgia’s rages, to my husband’s carefully cultivated philistinism, even to your straining T-shirts with their incoherent stage heroes and faux satanic symbols. There is an artistry to how my dentist scales my bicuspids (yes, he does his own scaling). And when he talks to me, sticking to strictly technical terms as he cups my collapsing jaw in his smooth nitrile-glove-cloaked hand, I can almost hear colours again. (I think he could help you with your overbite, I really do. I am willing to do this, to share. You only have to say the word.) My umbral masterpiece hangs above the bidet, to my husband’s discomfort, a reminder of how much has been lost and how much has been gained, and of the almost incalculable distance between the two things.
Just let me ask you this, Shayana. Can we honestly say any of us really have our feet firmly on the ground?
Sincerely,
Anne (Georgia’s mother)
INVESTMENT RESULTS MAY VARY
Dan and Patricia O’Donnell are always searching for the best of everything. Here they are now. Patricia—her long, dark hair tied back in an impossibly sleek braid, hair pulled so tight her eyebrows look as if they’re about to boomerang around the room—partially reclines on what appears to be a chaise longue. Dan leans against an old-fashioned radiator by an open window, one loafer-clad foot crossed in front of the other, looking like one of those guys in high school Nina always wanted to hump on the leg like a crazed standard poodle. You know, dry-humping away, knees locked, eyes bulging, just to get that self-satisfied smirk off his face. Dan and Patricia’s teeth are preternaturally white, boraxed incisors gleaming. Their ceiling soars above them at least sixteen feet. A crudely painted saddle—a swollen lily, Georgia O’Keeffe–inspired, over the seat—vies for wall space with pressed-tin skeletons dangling on wires. The single orchid in an intentionally crooked raku vase on the edge of a spotless glass table screams wabi-sabi pretensions with twice-weekly maid service.
And the light. The light in the room is fantastic. Vermeer, all business, hands on his hips, directing the sun. Of course, there’s the berber rug. Not a Paul-Bowles-got-wasted-on-this-rug berber, but creamy, white wool, Yaletown berber.
Nina, sitting cross-legged on her basement suite’s futon couch, fennel tea cooling beside her on the upturned milk crate draped with a beach towel, really does want to hate them. She has already started that ascent to the dizzying heights a decent bout of righteous anger can transport her to—that place where the air thins, the blood grows hypoxic, and you can muse on your own demise in an oddly detached manner— but the fine print gets in the way. Dramatization, it reads in tiny type at the bottom of the magazine ad. The clients’ names and story are fictitious and intended to be an illustration of services available through Merrill Lynch. Investment results may vary.
Still, there’s that light and the unnerving placement of naïf objets d’art. And Patricia, coiled to spring even in repose. It’s as if Jeff Wall has done an ad for Merrill Lynch. The People You Will Never Be So Kill Yourself Now (cibachrome, 2006).
Another house on the North Shore has been swallowed by the mountainside. A stunning cliff-edge post-and-beam completed in 1956. It’s been happening with alarming frequency lately. There are those who find these disappearances—what else to call them?—less dramatic but more frightening than the mudslides triggered by torrential rains that have destroyed both houses and their inhabitants. Those incidents could be ascribed to foul weather and bureaucratic ineptitude. Those tragedies are always well attended by debris and rescue squads and grim-looking television news crews who are secretly elated by the great fucking visuals (a direct quote).
What happens goes something like this: You leave for work in the morning and on your return there is the peeling arbutus, with the tire swing still dangling from the lowest branch, the rope slightly frayed but not so much you’ve ever noticed. There’s the cedar hedge that hid the partially disassembled Triumph Twin in the carport that you will now never ride down the I-5 to the Coast Highway, cruising all the way to Eureka to visit that chowder shack where you first met (so never mind that the clam chowder tasted like it had been stewed in an ashtray, you’ll always remember it as ambrosia). There’s the empty koi pond—so incompatible with the wandering black bears and the fat, happy raccoons—with ghost fish flickering in the shallows. The upturned blue box is still at the curb. And in the spot where the house once stood is a long, dull pucker, a barely perceptible seam where the earth has hastily knit itself together.
And no insurance policy in the world with a clause to cover what has happened.
Honey Fortunata (her real name) sings “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” as she manoeuvres her new lease-to-own Hummer along Georgia towards the Lions Ga
te Bridge. It’s been her anthem, practically a mantra, ever since she heard it on Martha Stewart’s Apprentice. “Everybody’s looking for thomething …” The slightest trace of an accent—people often mistake it for a lisp—creeps into her voice whenever she’s feeling emotional.
There are those who would view the Hummer as capitulation, but Honey tends to look on the bright side—that’s how she stays afloat. She kept what her favourite British children’s stories called a stiff upper lip when her mother left seven-yearold Honey with her grandmother in Davao City and flew fifteen time zones across the Pacific to take care of another woman’s children. The lip barely quivered at age fourteen when she didn’t even recognize her own mother on the international arrivals level of the Vancouver airport, or the six-year-old girl who, her mother told Honey, was her sister. That same lip, encased in sensible matte-finish Taupe by MAC, stayed the course when her mother died and when her little sister, Charity, decided that sliding her crotch up and down the pole at No. 5 Orange was preferable to attending classes at Van Tech Secondary while Honey worked days sorting processed meats into neat stacks at Subway and studying nights for her real estate licence.
Let the other agents travel in packs like cowardly hyenas or teenaged boys with pants riding the barrens of their non-existent buttocks. Let them retreat in fear, taking jobs in felt-lined cubicles on the nineteenth floor of a securities company. Honey Fortunata, snug in her Kevlar pantsuit, behind the wheel of her bulletproof high-mobility multi-purpose vehicle (civilian version), is on her way to close on the $7-million-plus split-level on Decourcy Court. And no thwarted buyer taking potshots at real estate agents is going to stop her. She even has the RE/MAX logo on the driver’s side door—the #1 in We’re #1 in West Van! forming what could be construed as a perfect bull’s eye at her left breast.
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives Page 6
