“Confusion, never mind. My bad. I just wanted to say ‘breasts.’ I find that it calms me. I have nightmares where I’m speaking confidently before thousands of people and suddenly I realize that I’m naked, but what’s really weird is I have … breasts. So I say ‘breasts’ to myself to dispel my anxiety.” He tells Maggie about the time he received a phone call from someone who asked him to speak at the annual meeting of the Fire Sprinkler Association of America. He thought it was a joke at first. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll do it for twenty-five thousand dollars.” There was a pause. “We can’t afford that,” the fire sprinkler voice said. “We only have fifteen thousand in the budget.” Three months later he faced a room full of fire sprinkler salesmen and spoke for an hour on fire extinguishers. His audience was deeply offended by the misunderstanding, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He had gone on at length about the Shirtwaist fire in New York, where dozens of immigrant girls perished for lack of fire extinguishers, or sprinklers, for that matter, and how the tragedy brought about the formation of the first garment workers’ union. There was no applause after his speech, and several tough-looking guys appeared to be waiting for him at the exit. “What did I do wrong?” he whispered to the woman who handed him a check and ushered him quickly out an emergency exit. “There are two Fire Sprinkler Associations,” she hissed, pushing him out the door. “This one represents the nonunion shops!”
Maggie laughs uproariously, then looks at him with amused sympathy, her laughter still echoing through the room.
“Incidentally, what’s a breast pump convention doing in this Company town? Are all the geeks lactating?”
“Good question. My guess is that our CEO is interested in the subject, we may be designing software. We design software for everything else. We’ve already redesigned most of the people who work here.”
Wakefield shudders. Growing domes and breasts is one thing. A redesigned person is something else. He wonders what’s inside Maggie.
After two hot toddies Wakefield feels that he could easily give a great speech to the breast pump conventioneers, no problem. Maggie is radiating motherly warmth, it’s still snowing outside, and discreetly piped-in Christmas carols have suffused everything with heavenly peace. Wakefield is hungry. Maggie directs him to a table laden with free happy-hour food and Wakefield comes back with paper plates full of chili-cheese fries, little sausages, and buffalo chicken wings swimming in red barbeque sauce.
“America, land of plenty. My friend Zamyatin always says that if Russians ever found out about America’s happy hours, they would invade and eat everything without stopping.”
Free food is not prudent, Zamyatin would say, shaking his head. When he first emigrated, Zamyatin had lived by necessity on three American institutions: happy-hour bar food, late-night bar food (things floating in jars behind the bar, pickled eggs, marinated pigs’ feet, salted peanuts, that sort of thing), and all-you-can-eat buffets. The institution of the buffet elicited his most lyrical effusions. “Imagine please,” he exulted, “the buffet! Hordes of my countrymen hiding in the bushes while one buys a buffet ticket! Soon, the buffet is all gone and the bushes are full of bones and corncobs and everybody is patting their stomachs, singing, snoring, and fucking! Food! Food!”
When Maggie and Wakefield stroll back to her car, full of cheese fries and good feelings, it’s still snowing. The darkness is pierced only by the bright signs of the 24-hour supermarket and the fast-food places, which glow through swirling flakes. An interstate highway runs past the hotel to other Midwestern towns, towns that have risen out of the cornfields and become home to corporations looking for a way out of cities. Maggie’s talked him into going to a party. Wakefield thinks of his anonymous room with the minibar and the bathtub and maybe soft-core porn on TV, and regrets having accepted. On the other hand, he has a buzz on and he feels very at ease in Maggie’s company.
The car radio reports a multiple-vehicle pileup on the interstate, and more snow is predicted. “Do you mind if we stop to check on my daughter before we go to the party?” Maggie asks. “My aunt Greta is babysitting, and she tends to fall asleep early.” Wakefield doesn’t mind.
Maggie’s little house is a friendly jumble of toys, clothes, and books. Disney dialogue from a big TV fills the living room and two shaggy dogs leap on Wakefield. A small girl with a mop of blond hair is sucking her thumb at one end of a couch, absorbed by the cartoon, and an elderly woman is snoring at the other end. Maggie kisses the child, who never takes her eyes off the screen, then drags the dogs off Wakefield. The introductions are brief; Aunt Greta quickly resumes snoring. Wakefield sees stairs leading to a second story or an attic, and though he feels with some certainty that there isn’t a husband or boyfriend, he gets ready to shake another hand, just in case.
“There hasn’t been a man here in six years. It’s quite nice. We are very, very happy.” Maggie laughs.
As they drive away, Maggie tells him a little more about Typical. Soon after The Company moved here, the city commissioned a sculpture of the “Typical Family” to be erected in the town square.
“The funny thing is,” Maggie tells him, “the divorce rate in Typical was pretty average before The Company came, and the arrival of The Company didn’t really change that, but the city council got all disturbed about how we were going to lose our small-town ‘family values’ if we didn’t do something to show them off.”
So the city organized a competition, and a sculptor from a nearby university won the commission. She showed the elders sketches of an upright typical family. The sculptor sculpted hidden away in her studio and the marble monument was installed, draped in a heavy canvas sheet, the night before the dedication ceremony. The next day the whole town gathered for a celebratory parade: there was a festive float for guests of honor, a military color guard, the Typical High School marching band, cheerleaders, hot dogs, cotton candy, and lemonade. Even the CEO of The Company was there, though he lives mostly on his corporate jet. The band played, the city manager shook hands with the sculptor, who wore an unusual paper dress made from back issues of the Typical Ledger, and the sculpture was unveiled by the town’s and the Midwest’s oldest veteran, Maggie’s one-hundred-and-three-year-old grandfather, who, as it happened, was blind. When the canvas fell away, the citizens gasped. The Typical Family consisted of a naked mother nursing a baby with a naked pubescent girl child standing at her side. There was no father figure, no protector, no Man. Maggie’s grandfather, thinking that the gasp of horror had something to do with the quality of his work, kept pulling at the cord attached to the fallen sheet until he collapsed. He lay in a coma for three days, then died.
The scandal was complete. The Ledger editorialized: “The ‘artist’ has taken advantage of our trust. A family of naked women with an absent father may be typical in the rest of America, but not in Typical! We should remove this offense immediately, or demand that the sculptress add a man and decently clothe the mother and children.” The death of Maggie’s grandfather was seen as a judgment: “It is no coincidence that the oldest living veteran in the Midwest was struck dead at the moment of the outrage. This is a world we do not wish to live in.”
But other citizens of Typical, including Maggie, thought the sculpture was beautiful and appropriate. She laughed at the newspaper’s maudlin connection of the death of her grandfather, who’d had six wives and went to prison for a few years for killing one of them, to the statue, innocent by comparison. There were demonstrations and counterdemonstrations. Maggie, together with a dozen single mothers, protested that the statue stay as it was. Church groups, roused to action, picketed the monument every day, singing hymns and carrying placards that read Daddy Come Home! Someone spray-painted a bra on the mother and a dress on the girl. They even diapered the baby. The Typical Family became a cause célèbre that even made the national news. Finally the city sent a bulldozer in one night to destroy the sculpture, in the process killing a teenager who was sitting beneath it drinking a beer.
The sac
rifice of the boy sobered everyone. The sculptor, entirely on her own initiative, made a new statue, adding a likeness of the boy, a man in a suit, who looked like a salesman, and clothing the mother and the girl. The baby remained naked, as did the breast she suckled. The controversy might have faded but for the vandalism that followed. Almost every night, the monument was attacked: the father’s foot broken off, one of his eyes scooped out, the mother’s breasts hammered, the child’s nose chiseled.
“I know who was doing it,” Maggie tells Wakefield, who by now is fascinated by this uncommonly rich allegory. “Friends of the dead boy, teenagers. They stayed true to the realism. None of them have fathers at home.”
The Typical Family was eventually removed by the city fathers, and everyone pretended not to notice. Now only the pediment remains, covered with snow, surrounded by new landscaping. Maggie points it out in the cold blue moonlight.
“I find it extraordinary that nobody checked the sculptor’s progress before the unveiling,” wonders Wakefield.
“Small-town trust”—Maggie smiles—“or fear of art. Pick one. They either trusted her to do as she said or felt checking up on an ‘artist’ would be crude. Artists carry a certain aura, folks are superstitious about them … they are still sacred beasts, unpredictable. They would have never authorized an abstract sculpture, but figures, well, they’ve got to be okay.”
Wakefield is enjoying himself. He considers, as part of his inventory of alternatives, living here with Maggie in the Midwest: he could work for The Company, go to happy hour at the hotel bar, shovel the snow from the driveway, and play the part of the father figure. It’s a soothing vision. But he stops short. What would the Devil think of that? Wakefield hears the Devil laughing. “This is what you got me out of bed for? I’m supposed to give you a reprieve for becoming a frigging cliché? If suburban bliss was the ‘authentic life,’ I’d never collect anybody. There are millions of normals out there, all of them ‘authentic.’ I don’t even deal with them, we’ve got cleaning crews for their kind, they scoop them up by the millions.… There’s even been some discussion about cutting down costs by giving them all a virus at the same time, instead of individual heart attacks.… Those cost money!” The Devil’s indignation is not lost on Wakefield. Still, this would be his, Wakefield’s, idea of “authenticity,” a choice he would make deliberately. In any case, it’s academic. He hasn’t heard the starter pistol yet. The deal didn’t include saying, Sorry, I’ve already found the life I want, I’m staying put.
The car crunches over ice, glides over snowbanks, and slides into a parking lot behind a windowless brick building shaking with loud music. When they step out, it feels like thirty below zero, the same temperature as Wakefield’s anxiety. He’s sure that something nasty waits for him inside.
“This is the old high school,” Maggie explains. “After the building was abandoned it was taken over by artists.” She pushes the door open and they find themselves in a smoky auditorium full of people dancing to a bluegrass band.
It’s frigid inside, yet in one corner there is a woman in lingerie posing on a shabby couch, seemingly impervious to the cold. Another woman is sketching her, and drawings of the same woman in lingerie on a shabby couch cover the walls.
Wakefield peers over the shoulder of the sketcher at her sketch. “All these yours?” He nods toward the walls.
“Yup.”
“They remind me of the covers of old detective novels.”
“Bingo!” The woman stops sketching, offers him a charcoal-covered hand. “Noir. It’s my name.” She gestures to the model, who shifts lazily and reaches for a cigarette still smoldering in an ashtray on the floor. “Rose, my model.”
Wakefield sees Maggie huddled with a tall ballerina in a red tutu and fur slippers. The band gets louder, feedback upchucks through the speakers, and Wakefield’s anxiety spikes. This demonstration of artistic life in the middle of nowhere is typical of every small town these days: the need to flaunt a difference has spilled over into something beyond the family. Does the Devil make them do it? The Devil is easily bored, but what could he really have against so-called normality? The “normal” family is, after all, the source of what the Devil enjoys most: anxiety, mental illness, violence, evil thoughts, fear, and social unrest. What the Devil hates are attempts to escape the quotidian horror of ordinariness. These escapes into art, into otherness, must give him headaches because they might, just might, lead to innocence. Neither he nor Wakefield believes that this particular exercise of esthetic difference is going to transcend anything. But before the sneer has time to settle on Wakefield’s face, everyone’s holding a lantern, a flashlight, or a candle, and Maggie motions him to join her at the front of the line with the ballerina.
Behind the stage a creaky medieval-looking door slides open, and the procession files into a small room. The light of the candles, lanterns, and flashlights illuminates what appears to be an old-fashioned electric chair: the ballerina sits on the chair and snaps a blinding Polaroid of herself. Maggie attaches a collanderlike contraption with dangling wires to the ballerina’s head, and in the light of the second Polaroid flash, Wakefield notices that the ballerina is wearing nothing under the tutu and she is shivering, from either the cold or her mock electrocution.
The crowd claps and cheers, and they all move on to another room, where a long dining table is heaped with platters of eyeballs and guts. A chant begins and the nearly naked ballerina crawls into a coffin. Her friends dump the guts and eyeballs on top of her. More Polaroids. They journey on, crawling sometimes, through other chambers furnished with procrustean beds and iron maidens, through a ghost-filled swamp, through a gallery of life-size statues of serial killers (“Most of them come from the Midwest,” Maggie explains). Wakefield trails the flashing Polaroid and rustling red tutu, and knows for certain that the photos will be duly displayed in a soon-to-be-mounted art exhibit at City Hall, the same City Hall from which the Company manager responsible for the sculpture fiasco has retired, making way for a dynamic young politician who has the initiative to, among other things, mount art shows in the halls of government in the hope of stimulating tourism in connection with the famed Typical Family debacle. And thus, Wakefield reflects, the Republic moves forward.
If you’ve lived a long time like the Devil has, or a short but well-read time like Wakefield has, you, too, might be made queasy by such kitsch. If you’ve seen the, let’s say, real Inquisition and had fresh eyeballs full of genuine fear garnishing your plate of brain tartare, or if you’ve studied Baroque depictions of the suffering of martyrs in the museums of Europe, this kind of display would certainly embarrass you. The genuine item, or the “authentic” if you like, never descends to the level of self-parody and kitsch.
But this is a special time in History. These are the days when the President’s penis stars on television every evening, a celebrity in its own right. It takes a lot to make shocking art when everyone, including the political leader of the greatest nation on earth, has become an artist. An artist who uses nothing more or less than his own dick! The philistines declare, of course, that the President is an accidental artist, or perhaps only a medium for the artistic ambitions of others, but be that as it may, there it is! The Presidential penis itself, not in the symbolic form of a scepter, or as the prayed-for virile instrument of a king, but as a dick, pure and simple, has joined a gallery of celebrity dicks caught in the glare of publicity!
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp shocked the art world with a urinal, and claimed that bicycles and sewing machines were art because they were simple but one couldn’t make them at home. How true. The public is interested in the President’s penis, Wakefield speculates, because it is simple, and there is only one President. And yet, there is a penis in every home (well, in nearly every home, excepting the norm), but the home penis is sub rosa, not a celebrity. Fashion designers, who invented supermodels, are using musicians and actors in their advertising more and more. Self-starvation, chea
ply available heroin, and digital cameras can make anyone look like a supermodel, and the market cries out for something different, for something that, as Duchamp stipulated, cannot be made at home. Musicians and actors possess that something, namely talent. And the President, whatever one might say about him, is a talented man, a unique and powerful personage whose penis is a powerful and instantly comprehensible statement.
The problem with this artlike spasm in Typical is that it’s so “artsy,” so contrived, so gentle. These people probably don’t even believe in the Devil, thinks Wakefield. They think he’s just a Halloween costume for the kids. When the procession returns from the tour of grotesque chambers, the lingerie model, who had not joined them, is smoking a cigarette on the stage, chatting up the guitarist, who gazes unabashedly between her legs, proving to Wakefield that the only constant currency is sex. But not even sex, he corrects himself. The promise of sex, for the sake of which you will buy something, do something, sacrifice something. Sex is the reward of earning power, of sophistication, of understanding Art.
Now, just when it seems that there might be an end to the evening, there’s more. The procession has only been leading up to a campy wedding. The bride is wearing a blood-stained wedding dress, the groom a knife-punctured tuxedo and a top hat with an arrow stuck through it, and both bride and groom are male. An official wearing a prison jumpsuit and holding a staff crowned by a monkey head intones: “I now pronounce you husband and wife, please take turns.” Maggie gives away the bride. “Take her. Please,” she says.
Wakefield is not amused. It is all so sweetly pop and wholesome, this transgendering in mid-America. He knows that most of the folks fooling around here tonight will be in his audience at The Company tomorrow. The Company encourages “creativity” and tolerance: one can take one’s partner to the Christmas party, and same-gender couples can kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Wakefield will speak to them about money and poetry (with a detour in art), he will be paid, then he will fly to a big city to make another speech with the same title but, hopefully, different content. After that he is supposed to go west for a rather more mysterious gig. His agent received a request from a Western art collector for Wakefield’s presence. The agent reported that this collector would pay his fee simply for being at a party. He signals Maggie, who’s seated on the bride’s lap drinking red wine from a bottle, his desire to leave this party. She jumps off, bottle still in hand, and walks toward him.
Wakefield Page 4
