Glover's Mistake

by Nick Laird

  Even you, David thought, especially you.

  ‘Of course,’ Larry reassured, reaching out to press Glover’s shoulder. ‘Well, I’m glad we’ve squared that.’

  Glover wouldn’t let it go. The coke had left his mind desperate to gnaw on something. It occurred to David that his flatmate really wasn’t very bright.

  ‘I mean, that’s exactly what it is. Past.’

  ‘You said it.’

  Ruth’s bulging leather purse lay on the desk, and beside it her San Francisco Savings Bank credit card. It featured the Golden Gate Bridge strung across the sky, and along its top edge, like accumulating cirrus hanging over the Bay Area, cocaine dreck was smeared. David lifted the photograph of Jess and slipped it into the back of one of the purse’s inner pockets, between the stub of a boarding pass and a Starbucks loyalty card.

  When David eventually got home that night, alone, he decided to post online an honest appraisal of Ruth’s retrospective. Even if Ruth found it by googling herself, which she claimed not to do, there was nothing on the site that could identify The Dampener, and she’d never link it to him. He opened a new section, entitled Art Reviews, and tried to be as candid as possible. Some of the pieces, particularly the early ones, had merit, and a certain contemporaneous interest. However, there was always a great deal of fetishization. And the finished picture of Glover exemplified this. It was a child’s view, an egoistic, solipsistic vision of the world. I want. I want. I want. Similarly, the treatment of the female body in the artworks seemed to David to posit a very tired view of sexuality. The photographs of vaginas were not far from pornography, though pornography was better lit, and her images had none of the grace of Mapplethorpe. There was also a kind of triumphant lesbiana on show that, at least for this viewer, made one wish for the softer analogies of Oppenheim. He concluded by pointing out that the recent works, making special mention of The Nearly Transparent Heart, were sentimental, ugly, and showed a sad reversion to exhausted dialectics. Though he didn’t say it, his first response on encountering almost every piece was that he could have made it easily himself. The fact that he hadn’t was completely irrelevant.

  The republic of no one

  Glover was being distant, and his coolness was partly due, David thought, to the fact that David himself must be a reminder of his indiscretion. Ruth seemed very busy and inspired, and was working on into the evenings. In the absence of genuine interaction with her, David had become quite the Ruth Marks scholar. He googled her repeatedly, getting involved in a chat room devoted to international women’s art, and updating her Wikipedia page. The internet was useful, too, for learning the fundamental facts, the kind normal people just tell you. The online consensus was that Ruth had been born in Syracuse in New York State in 1960, which made her, as he had always thought, forty-five.

  In 1979, while at the New York Fine Arts School, she had started the Republic of Women project. It was at once proclaimed to be in the vanguard of feminist art, and Ruth was famous. David located JPEGs of some of the artefacts—she alleged she’d found them buried in chests on a farm in Vermont. The lost civilization had comprised only females. Here was the crockery; the diaries; the uniforms and military awards. Here was a newssheet. Here was some kind of sports racket with two heads. Here was a headdress designed to celebrate menstrual days that coincided with the advent of the full moon. It was barmy and rather wonderful. Ruth had written a rambling essay on the circumstances of the find (gathering mushrooms, stubbing toe) and appended a signed letter from the farmer who owned the land, Hart Skrum, assuring the world of its impeccable provenance.

  David found an image online from when she was twenty-one and her hair came past her waist. She looked like a blonde Ali MacGraw, though her eyebrows were thicker and her face a little leaner. The Republic of Women avalanched, though not just due to Ruth. The title was borrowed for a play, a TV series, an artists’ retreat in Oregon, exhibitions where none of the work was Ruth’s but all equal parts rip-off and homage. She had an affair with Bathsheba, a playwright, then moved to Paris, then Barcelona. The common adjective to describe her was ‘conscious’.

  A few times a week, if the weather accommodated, David began to trek the entire way from Oxford Street back to the flat. It left him sweaty and tired, and took over an hour, but for the first time in years he sensed he wasn’t getting larger. He would not be visible from space; his mother would be pleased.

  The evening after Valentine’s Day, which he spent alone with his computer, he arrived home to a yellow Post-it note in the middle of the kitchen door. It read, in Glover’s painstaking handwriting:

  Saturday April 23rd, 1 pm?

  Islington Registry Office?

  DAVID CAN YOU DO?

  It reconfirmed something in his mind: what passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned. Everyone you meet is wearing some disguise, and the lover is the best liar of the lot. Of course, there was the information that they could hardly avoid. Ruth must have noticed that she had no genius in her bed, and as for Ruth, well, no neurotic can hide her neurosis completely. Glover found her insecurities disarming; they made him feel necessary, but that would soon become exhausting. Already David could see the thing weakening. Ruth’s interaction was so exclusive and entire that when she turned her attention elsewhere, as she had to, Glover grew cold and irritated in the sudden shade. Ruth had told David once that no feeling was for ever, and Glover had nothing of the quality of patience he possessed.

  David pulled the Post-it off the door and stared at it, a gambler studying form. There was hope yet in those question marks that grappled up the side of the thing, that hung on. The air of haste about the enterprise suggested bluffing on both sides, as if each expected the other to buckle and backtrack. Glover had a peculiar, faraway smile that appeared every time Ruth was mentioned, and when David had called her the previous Friday to fix a time to talk about their project, she’d barely listened, and then responded by telling him how James had forgotten his scarf that morning, the brick-red one.

  That night David decided to go to work on the project by himself. To raise her interest again in their collaborative enterprise, he knew she would have to be pushed a little, and a week later he arrived, unannounced, at the studio. He’d put together a folder with printouts of digital photos he’d taken over that weekend (graffiti, road signs, billboards), some poems and lines and notes of his own, and a worksheet listing in bullet points some ideas on how they could match words to the imagery, on the style of the thing, on what tone it might have. Her interest could not fail to be snagged.

  The door was ajar and Ruth was standing in the middle of the floor, staring fixedly at a canvas—at one of the canvases—of Glover’s torso. The room smelt as if methylated spirits had recently been spilt. As he knocked, she twisted her body round, startled, then smiled and raised a coffee mug a few inches in greeting. Her apron was rigid with paint. It must once have been as white and pristine as any worn by his father, and it struck him as strange, and then as not strange, that the vestments of destruction should require spotlessness.

  ‘That thing could do with a wash.’ He pointed at the strange impasto down her front.

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’ She lifted the apron’s bottom corners as if carrying apples in it. ‘It’s battle-scarred. I couldn’t wash it any more than I could throw it in the dumpster.’

  ‘So you’ve set a date.’

  Ruth beamed, dropped the corners and gave a little twirl. Stiffly the apron swung outwards. ‘James was going to check it was all right with you.’

  ‘Oh no, he did. It’s fine. It’s great.’

  David placed his satchel on one of the tables and drew out the project folders. He silently handed over her copy, then sat on the edge of a crate. Ruth gave a baffled smile and opened hers, then took her seat by the trestle table, adjusting the Anglepoise so the light fell a
way from her. He started explaining and when he’d run through all his suggestions, said, ‘And for a name I’d thought: The Republic of No one, or Scenes from the Republic of No one. Like an update.’

  Ruth gave a single lengthy nod. ‘Yeah, I’m kind of keen not to go backwards.’ She stood, leaving the open folder on the table, and hugged herself. Under the apron she wore only a white T-shirt, and a reflex muscle in her forearm fluttered as she talked. Her skin was stippled with goosebumps. ‘A lot of artists do one thing, and it’s successful, and they end up doing that for the whole of their lives, you know.’ She was talking slowly, David felt, explaining to the unsophisticated, to a commonplace intelligence. ‘And I’m just not interested in that.’ She looked down—David was staring at his folder—and her tone softened. ‘Though I…you know, I do love some of these ideas and your photographs are terrific. There’s a real awareness of framing.’

  He nodded, tucking some of the flesh of his cheek between his teeth and biting down on it. She picked up some pieces of glass lying on discs of emery paper by the polishing machine and, as if about to shoot craps, jiggled them in her palm. ‘I get a kick from new stuff.’

  David felt desperation rise; it felt like being left by someone and knowing everything you say from here on in will only make them want to leave you more. It was like Sarah going to India. Like Natalie leaving college.

  ‘We don’t have to stick to what’s written down here. And we could easily change the title. I just thought it could reference your most successful work…’

  It was out of his mouth before he could stop it; and he compounded the mistake by falling silent. He looked up from the folder, but Ruth had her back to him now. She dropped the rounded shards with a clatter on the table and said, ‘I know you might find this difficult, David, but I think it’s a misjudgement to confuse fame with success.’ She turned around. Her face had hardened; the curves of her generous mouth had straightened. ‘And it’s certainly a mistake to judge success by fame.’

  Another pseudo-profound chiasmus. David wasn’t at all sure there was a difference in the two things she’d said, but he nodded thoughtfully, his face veneered with empathy. She started filling the kettle and, to be heard above the running tap, raised her voice a pitch. ‘And for the record, my success was also pretty weird and mostly unpleasant and brought me a lot of grief, jealousy, all the wrong kinds of attention. It almost killed me. That’s when I ended up in Europe the first time.’

  She docked the kettle in its plastic base and switched it on. He closed the folder and clutched it across his chest, bringing his chin to rest on its sharp top.

  ‘It must have been difficult.’ What was difficult was for David to say the sentence without sarcasm. ‘I just thought that The Republic of Women was so impressive, you know, so richly imagined…’

  Ruth wrinkled her nose with distaste. He changed tack.

  ‘And with everything that’s happening in America, you know, it could be The Republic of No one because so many of the American people simply aren’t being represented. And this could be…If you look in the folder you’ll see I made certain political signs. I found one at a bus stop.’ He opened his file again but Ruth, resting against the sink, made no motion to pick hers up. ‘You can see it there, on page…twelve. Where someone had added an H to the sign so it said “BusH Stop”. It would have been better as an imperative, I thought, you know, “Stop Bush” rather than a plea, but—’ Ruth held up a paint-speckled hand and David stopped talking. He was out of breath. She had closed her eyes at some point during his speech and now opened them, slowly, as if the effort it took was immense and unknown and could never, ever be explained.

  ‘I appreciate the trouble you’ve gone to with this, David, but it’s not something…This isn’t how my art works. It’s not that baldly political, and even talking this way makes me feel slightly nauseated.’

  He closed the folder again, and stared at the PMP crest on the cover. It was yellow and outdated and ridiculous. The motto in its gothic script: Stet Fortuna Domus.

  ‘Ruth, there’s no need to insult me.’

  ‘Oh, David, I don’t mean to.’ She came across the studio, untying her apron and flipping the string of it neatly over her head. She was about to touch his shoulder and then seemed to decide not to, veering away to the sink.

  ‘It’s just our ideas are so different. Of course, we can work on it. We can do something. Just not that. I just don’t want to spend any more time making artefacts or images for some non-existent republic. You’ve got such a neat view of things. You can’t… Everything’s really messy, David, where art’s concerned. Stuff just comes out.’

  David watched a volley of steam rise from the kettle’s underbite, and then it clicked decisively off.

  At 2.17 a.m. that night he came to a decision. What was best for Ruth and Glover amounted to one thing. Glover had said he wasn’t Catholic, that confession wasn’t the deal here. He’d erased Rosie’s phone number from his mobile the day after, and along with it the event itself. And Ruth was obsessed, fearless, painting him, praising him. In eight weeks’ time, a wedding.

  Stet fortuna domus. The situation needed Michelangelo’s disegno, the most sublime problem-solving, and the solution would be a work of art reflecting the continuing conflicting calls of function, site, material and subject, verisimilitude, expressivity and formal beauty. Not to mention freedom and restraint.

  Thus he spent two hours on Wednesday evening, in the empty flat, opening an account in the name of Kimber1986@ hotmail.com and drafting an email from Kimberley to Ruth. Larry’s email was on the Barbican website as her representative, and David decided to send it to him. Why not? People are odd. They do odd things.

  To: larryfrobisher@thefrobishergallery.com

  From: Kimber1986@hotmail.com

  ONLY FOR THE EYES OF Ms RUTH MARKS

  Please forgive me writing you. This is a very difficult thing to write. I found your contact email on the Barbican website where I understand you are in a residency.

  I wanted to warn you about what you are getting into with a certain man. In January we had our Mocks Party on a boat on the Tames, and our English teacher Mr Pinner, brought a friend of his called James. My sister Rosie, whose an undergrad, had a situation with James and she ended up really liking him. She asked me to get his number and I’ve since found out from Mr Pinner that he’s engaged, and to you, Mr Pinner’s friend the artist. James came on very heavy with my sister. He told her he was single and said he’d ring her but that was all just to get her into bed. I had a boyfriend Simon Moffet for two years who was cheating on me and I would have wanted to know. And afterwards it turned out everyone knew what was going on and had said nothing to me. Mr Pinner told us all about your exhibition and some of us from class have been to the ICA to see it and I know that you are a good person, as well as being a good artist. I knew that the right thing to do was to tell you what happened that night on the boat.

  Yours in sisterhood and friendship

  Kimberley

  He sent it at 8.27 p.m. on Friday night. He knew Larry probably didn’t work weekends, but he still felt disappointed when he woke the next morning and nothing had changed. There were no texts, missed calls or emails; no consequences. After skimming the newspaper websites, he ate a few rounds of toast sodden with butter, and a bowl of porridge and honey. Then he climbed back into bed in his dressing gown. Too anxious to do much, he smoked and listened to a Sibelius symphony rise and fall on his iPod, then picked up the anthology that lived by his pillow. He wanted a poem to fit the blankness of his mood. He started in on Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ and dozed off almost instantly.

  In his dream he was lying on the herringbone parquet at the back of his classroom in PMP, paralysed like Gulliver, when Sarah appeared at his feet. She looked the same as fourteen years ago, mad-eyed with those dangly fish earrings, except she wore a white butcher’s trilby and a tie-dyed apron. She walked around him without saying a word, then dropped suddenly to
her knees and started pressing piano wire down onto his neck, cutting through the flesh. She was screaming. He woke with a jolt as if dropped from a height onto the bed; Sibelius’s Fourth crashed in one ear. He reached up to his neck and rubbed at his Adam’s apple. One of the iPod’s earphones had come out and the cord had wrapped round his throat.

  It had already begun to get dark, which meant he’d successfully squandered the entire day. His mouth was parched, all the liquid in his body having sweated out of his back. He peeled off his T-shirt. He didn’t smell so good. He needed a glass of water.

  Glover’s jeans were lying on the hallway floor, pointing to his bedroom. He must have dropped them when he was doing his washing. As David bent to pick them up, some movement in his peripheral vision made him glance through Glover’s doorway. They were here, in the flat. Between the door and jamb there was a gap of a few inches and, his back to David, Glover stood naked at the foot of his bed. Ruth was on all fours in front of him, wearing only a silver ankle bracelet. He watched as Glover’s fat little ass grew and then wrinkled and shrunk with each thrust. The skin was paper white and his hips seemed very narrow. The parts of Ruth that he could make out were browner, softer. One hand held her by the indent of her waist and the other was curved under her, holding a breast. David could hardly see it. It could have been anyone. Her blonde hair shifted in and out of shot, as did her ass, which rode in the air, receiving, pushing upwards against Glover—it was a standard pornographic image; it lacked imagination. It almost came as a relief. David stood there, naked himself apart from his black silk boxer shorts. He could hear himself breathing.

  The time of the voyeur—like the time of the victim—is slow. Each movement extended before him, for him. There was something automatic in the action, the hydraulic effort of those nodding donkeys that drill for oil in Texas. He crept backwards into his room and lay on the bed. He thought of women on the internet, of their expressions as they got fucked like dogs: how they’d close their eyes and pout and pant and moan and beg and sigh. Sometimes they might scream and yell and bite the pillow, taking it. He listened to the propulsive sounds from the next room, and masturbated rapidly, coming into the sweaty T-shirt that he’d left lying on his pillow. Afterwards he put on his dressing gown and softly opened then loudly shut the door of his bedroom. He heard Ruth make a whimper of surprise, not joy, not joy. Glover’s bedroom door was slammed. David walked around the flat, banging cupboards and turning up the kitchen radio; then ran himself a bath that came, when he sat in it, right up to the brim.