Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  Bay Farm diplomas were illustrated, by a committee of artistic students, with icons of the particular graduate’s abilities and tastes, suitable for framing.

  It was fall of 1969 and then it was 1970. The end of the sixties. The bland round of the zero seemed to say, with parental repres-siveness, Enough now. Settle down. But, “The sixties ended in sixty-eight,” Maude insisted in a high-handed way. “They ended when Nixon was elected.” To bolster this, she cited the Weathermen and the Panthers, the way they overthrew the we-shall-overcome spirit of a peaceful peace movement and the ideals of race blindness and brotherhood: those were the sixties. Nixon was elected because Robert Kennedy was shot. Brotherhood went down with King. Spring ’68, the Negro kids at school turned black and stopped talking to the white kids; they sat apart at their own table in the refectory, introducing segregation where it had never been.

  Of course, other things had ended in ’68 in Maude’s own particular life. That may have influenced her view.

  In the artworld, however, it had always been the sixties, it always would be, and this it had in common with Bay Farm. There was that fizzy atmosphere of anything is possible, you can be whatever you want. In the artworld this meant freedom that would not be called license; an open invitation to experiment and go as far as you could. This was always the atmosphere of art, but it was more so in the sixties. The sixties squared it, you could say; took it to the next power.

  At the groovy art school—among the day students, who were normal college age, her age—she could impress her classmates, if she wanted to, by saying she was a high school dropout, as if she wore a leather jacket, as if she were a Jet or a Shark. She always added, “Not really. I just started college early.” Either way, it sounded done by choice. It didn’t sound as if she were in her own private 1950s, locked into a grid with limited, stilted right-angle options for movement, as if stuck in one of Milton’s paintings. Compact and square, his paintings were always grouped in fours. A quartet of them made a single work—like their family. That was how they were sold, in units of four. After the gut-eviscerating terror of her apartment search, she was still living with him, commuting from the G’Island.

  Bruno Heim got visiting artists to teach Concepts class for him. One of them, a woman—the only time a woman came in—showed them a picture of herself from the 1950s. “That was when I was old,” she said, giving it to them to pass around. Peter Pan collar, worried, serious smile, lipstick, bangs cut high so that she had the forehead of a cretin—a proper coed. For the class she appeared in tight jeans and wild frizzed-out hair to show them slides of her monumental, immaculately rendered gray paintings of screws and nails and corrugated steel. She seemed as wild and jazzed as her hair. She had left the fifties. She invited all of them to come visit her loft. She brought two clear little plexiglass boxes. One was filled with her own dark pubic hairs, gathered from sheets and shower; the other contained fingernail parings—as if, if you meticulously saved what your body shed, you would see yourself. The parts of your body that are really dead, the parts that weirdly keep growing when the body is dead. You would know. The self you would find would be the person invisible in the compliant, unhappy coed. As if self-discovery meant, not finding your limits but seeing that there were none.

  The artist pointed out that the little boxes made abstract sculptures, the airy calligraphic squiggles of the dark curls, the pearly repeating crescents piling up against the clear walls.

  Bruno wore his grin throughout this presentation, sometimes with a derisive little wheeze through the gap in his front teeth. He laughed at anyone, just a little but quite openly. This seemed more pointed, though; nastier. “She’s crazy,” he said to Maude after class, in his office. There were four of five of them in the class who were privileged to hang around his office, eating chicken legs on the rocking chair there wasn’t really room for, lounging on the couch. None of the others were there, though. It was only Maude for the moment.

  “She doesn’t seem any ‘crazier’ than _____ [the artist who plucked out his body hair, naked in a gallery, while viewers came and went] or ______ [the artist who cut himself, photographing the bleeding and healing].” Both had visited Concepts class.

  Bruno snorted and shook his head. “She thinks I’ll want to sleep with her.”

  Maude’s black-olive eyes assessed him—short-legged, with a belly, balding like a tonsure, with those long blond strands, the pale, pale eyes ringed by stiff lashes, and that half-open mouth showing the gap, that life-is-a-big-joke look. The visiting artist was beautiful, sparky, and fun. Fortyish, if she went to college in the fifties. Maybe Bruno only wanted them if they weren’t interested, or were half his age, like Maude. “She would have to be crazy, to want to.”

  He loved this. He crunched Maude around the shoulders, swirled her around, and stopped with a big thwack of his wide lips on hers. She gave him her coolest, most sardonic look. This made him laugh more and reach for her again. She stepped neatly out of his way.

  “What a cliché,” she said. “Doing it with the teacher!”

  He gave a deep ha-ha-ha from the belly. “Come on. Let’s go to the bar.” He sometimes invited a student to the bar. If you went to the bar, you were in the really serious teaching part of Concepts class.

  “Even the bottoms of our feet were black, from dancing barefoot. The funny thing is, when I see my mother these days, she com-plains, ‘Oh, Maudie, you’re always wearing black.’ ”

  The famous artist Maude was talking to laughed.

  “Huh, that’s interesting,” he said, the only one at the bar who worked something as old-fashioned as paint on canvas in this avant-garde and very recently successful crowd, a group whose idea had been to repudiate success. The one thing Maude had been surest she liked about their work was that it couldn’t be sold, couldn’t even really be shown. Not having a product tricked the art world out of its ugly categories of success and failure. Now, it seemed, this was a selling point.

  The painter’s paintings were, however, in a sense, as null as they could be. The only color used was white. “So he’s really like a total idealistic Bauhaus modernist, your father?” he asked.

  “You know, I like the idea of better living through design,” said Maude. “I always did. It’s just that I have a different idea of better living.”

  The painter was older than most of the men, with tired skin and a forbearing expression that suggested he was less impressed by his own success and avoided people who were impressed.

  “It’s the thing I hate about abstraction,” she went on. “Most abstraction. It’s about taking things away, including meaning. Some pictures, you look into them and you think, if that were my life, I’d be happy. But—. It’s about reduction. You wouldn’t feel that way about Mondrian. He reduced everything to verticals and horizontals, but his idea was to include all of reality. Most abstraction—it leaves out what counts. Or you’re not allowed to consider the emotion in it.”

  He gave her a measured look. “Yep. Formalism is a straight-jacket. The funny thing is, though, I’m in love with the medium. I’m so in love with its textures and forms that color can feel like a violation of something. Too strong. Kind of violent.” He leveled a pale look on her. “You and Bruno have to come by sometime. Visit my studio.” He assumed she was Bruno’s girlfriend. As Bruno had said, she “looked likely.”

  They were sitting at a long table, or rather, all the little tables had been pushed together along the banquette to make one. A long double row of artists. All male. Someone had an Arts Review in which Bruno appeared, looking as if he’d been snapped unaware, looking crazed and goggle-eyed. The whole idea of the press in depicting these guys was that they were far out, willing weirdos, the Yippies of the art world, people who staged stunts (tweezing chest hair! self-mutilation!).

  Nonlinear: that was the big word. It was interesting to hear these guys, in an oddly boring way. The guy who did paintings that were words—not painted, actually, but produced through some photolithogra
phic process whose impersonal technological finish was also in its fashionable favor, some commercial print process, in a factory—sat at the row of tables in the bar saying, “My work is nonverbal.” He closed his eyes as he spoke. Which did offer the opportunity of studying his blond-bristled eyelids and pudgy cheeks.

  A short, intense man, sitting across from her and the white-painting guy, who’d been listening too intently to Maude, added his two cents. He spoke in a rushed monotone, not meeting anyone’s eyes. Maude felt sorry for him, although he was tre-mendously respected. The other men fell silent to listen to him. But she could see he didn’t know how to receive their respect and remained enclosed.

  “You become an artist because the world doesn’t match your needs. You need to create something to make the world habitable for yourself. That’s one side of the equation. On the other side are the people who can afford art. They also want to make their world habitable, but they don’t know how to create what they need. So they try to buy it. But nothing quite matches. And they’re nervous. Unlike artists, they forget that they’re doing it for themselves. They worry about whether they’re being made fools of, and whether it’s a good ‘investment.’ They don’t have the courage of their convictions. So they pay for experts—gallery owners, critics—to tell them. But if the owners and critics make it too easy, they put themselves out of business. The business side has to keep moving the line. And the artists, half the time they don’t know what it is they want—to sell, to please the rich people and become rich themselves, or to go for what they started out for—saving themselves, making the world bearable for themselves by living in their art—and besides, what they make never makes the world habitable for them anyway, or only for about two minutes. You always feel outside and disappointed. So even the artists collude with these jerks. They lose sight of their own real interests. Then everyone is second-guessing.”

  What if the things you made to satisfy your own needs pleased no one, and the things you made that pleased other people satisfied nothing in yourself?

  “That’s too fucking teleological,” said the word artist who claimed that his work was nonverbal, chomping ice, from down the table.

  The man next to Maude sat up suddenly, like a full-figure erection. He had straight hair down to his waist and an aquiline profile. “I know that girl,” he said, his eyes fixed on one of the waitresses, undernourished-looking like all of them, big-eyed; like walking wet dreams, they wanted nothing other than to please. He slumped as if embarrassed by revealing enthusiasm. “I think I fucked her once.” He turned to Maude, speaking to her directly for the first time. “Do you know her?”

  Maude didn’t know what to say. He was loathesome. He should notice her. She swung back to the intense little man everyone thought was a genius, who looked as if he had a crush on her.

  Someone mentioned Hegel. They loved to say “phenomenology.” “What do you mean?” said one of the men.

  “Well, that there’s this straight line to history and that it’s all leading somewhere, in one direction, and that direction just happens to be the art that some critic, who buys up a lot of this stuff, likes. And what he understands about it is what’s most literal about it—that there seems to be no subject besides paint, besides two-dimensionality, besides color, composition, and line. Sure, you can look at Piero della Francesca that way, in terms of color and composition, but that doesn’t mean that’s all that’s there. It’s not all iconography, but it’s not all formal effects either. Who was saying that before, about stuff being too reductive?” He looked around the table, his glance skipping her. He might have a crush on her, but she was a girl: she couldn’t have spoken that way.

  She could feel her skin tighten in that way that meant she was about to volunteer herself.

  “So what else is it like being an artist’s daughter?” said the white-painting artist, with his comfortable nothing-to-prove manner, with his tired skin.

  Maude laughed through the blush of nearly having addressed this crowd. “I never had a lot to do with his work. He did once ask me to pose . . .” She described that long-ago experience, so strangely hurtful. “And I don’t know why I was so disappointed. What did I expect? But I really thought I was going to look at his picture and see me.” She reflected a moment. “It looked like a pile of sticks.”

  Conversation meandered on, and on. A lot of shoptalk about commissions and dealers and who got what. Leaning so elabo-rately on one elbow that her head was nearly in the puddles and bent stirrers and ashes of the wobbly pedestal tables that had been pushed together, Maude looked past Bruno’s active profile, down the long row of artists.

  There was the excitable Italian with the big international reputation who was winningly jolly and unpretentious about his mathematically determined constructions, which were probably a great success because they were really pretty. You weren’t supposed to think things like that, pretty. Beautiful was only marginally more acceptable. His little teeth were even and neat, like corn kernels, and always on display in his search for mirth. Next to him was the guy who did light sculptures. These too were regarded as austere and rigorous and were in fact whimsical, sweet-colored, and, at their best, beautiful, and Maude liked this man because he would say as much. She liked the light sculptures—which had disgusted Milt, outraged him. There was the man who did white paintings.

  She gave in to Bruno’s importunities. They went to his tiny Greenwich Village walkup, where a water tap was allowed to gush unrepaired—a New Yorker’s tough joke of a fountain. She called Milton and told him she was at a girlfriend’s.

  Sex with Bruno seemed like some necessary, chastening part of her education. But it made her lonely. Each impact of Bruno’s flesh or limbs was an absence of Danny, who otherwise she mostly managed not to think about. She pressed herself against Bruno all the more determinedly. The memories and images seemed to slide themselves between their bodies.

  She felt a wound gaping inside her chest as if it were an apple, fallen in the grass and gnawed by insects, a wide crescent exposed, only it was the meat of her, dark red and glistening. She had never stopped wanting Danny. You were supposed to get over things. It seemed as if she never got over anything. Each new loss only deepened that gnawed, hollowed-out place.

  In that inverted, cutting way, then, sex with Bruno, when-ever she consented to it, became a memento of what she had to recognize now as real love, however flawed. Sometimes, to heal the gnawed place or dull that ache, she pretended Bruno was Danny all around her and inside her. At other times, his not being Danny made sex something ordinary, as if it really were just a transaction between bodies, the spasm at the end no more exciting than rubbing against your own finger.

  That night, she was nearly trapped in the city by the blizzard that began in the early hours. But trains were still running. By the time she returned to the city a day later, the deep snow had already been plowed to the sides of the streets, where it made icebergs, a Great Wall of packed, slabby snow. The next few weeks were cold, so the icebergs stayed, stained by dog pee and human pee and gradually accumulating, like black snow on a cliffy, mountainous landscape, the soot of the city. By the time Bruno and Maude visited the white-painter’s studio, the snow was black. The streets glistened with snowmelt.

  While the men talked at one end of the long brick-walled loft, she wandered off, still too cold to take off her coat. The brick walls bore a line of white pictures around three sides of the loft. Stepping sideways, she inspected them—slow, intermittent steps, long pauses. The paintings spoke of the viscid, supple lusciousness of paint. They also seemed to say that there was something here that was about her. It was intimate and important. But it kept slipping just outside the lit area of her brain.

  While the men’s voices murmured, while they sat in the far kitchen end, she went back along the walls and studied the paintings again. They weren’t really white, in the sense that there were several shades of white. She loved to look at the tubes in art supply stores—titanium white, ivo
ry white—the plenitude, the cornucopia, the seductions of color. But there was another seduction, each time she finished covering a painting panel with gesso. The gesso was white and gloopy, too loose and shiny to have the sensuality of oil. Even so, she had loved making patterns with it when she first started using it, at Bay Farm. There was an unaccountable feeling of loss when she smoothed the patterns out—flattening one painting, in effect, a white painting, to make the humble, submissive surface for another. Philip, mean, amusing, sarcastic Philip Neuberger used to watch her at it, pushing up his glasses and tossing his long, greasy bangs, with that happy look he had when he was able to be provocative. “Have the courage of your convictions, Pugh. You love it! You love action painting, admit it, leave it that way, leave it alone.” But she wouldn’t. She was anti-abstraction. She wanted it to mean something.

  These paintings, the white-painting artist’s paintings, not only meant something but seemed to mean what she meant. If only she knew what it was. She stopped before one in a single shade of white, with horizontal brushstrokes thickly incised at the top and bottom covering an overall scumble. She almost laughed, as if to recognize herself.

  She thought again of her gesso paintings, the squiggles of white on white. She’d been at Bay Farm when she did them. Of course, she thought: etchings.

  What she found particularly wonderful in making etchings was, you could print them at every stage. Each time you made a line or a mark, you could make a print of your composition just to that point. It was preserved forever. It wouldn’t be lost under successive marks, because even if it was lost on the printing plate, in the paper print you’d still have it. Even if your etching plate got ungapotchkeh, you’d still have that pristine print, your beautiful white imprinted snow, that you could keep if your choices proved wrong or something went awry in the acid bath. The simple line drawing that got rounded out with cross-hatching and then the flowered wallpaper you scratched in behind it and then the way you’d tried to shade the background that made it all look busy, you didn’t have only that, the mess you’d made.