Early Work

by Andrew Martin

  Katie gave her a stoned, deadpan glare. “You must convince the others. I am a good person.”

  “If I cannot, we will run away. Together.”

  Katie kissed her, and then put her head on Leslie’s shoulder. Their sleepiness and laziness did not bode well for the upcoming hours of heedless mayhem, but they could probably rally. And maybe that was the way adults should experience punk rock anyway. Observe and assimilate rather than take a direct role in the destruction. Were they adults? Leslie was twenty-five. Katie would soon be thirty. Hard to say.

  When her beloved band came on, they watched the set from the back of the room, Leslie resisting, barely, the urge to rush the stage. She imagined she was storing the energy from the room for later, for fucking. When they got home, however, the action leaned closer to soft rock than hardcore.

  Something similar, but worse, happened a couple of weeks later. They took the train out to see an exhibition of Sol LeWitt drawings at an art museum in the Hudson Valley. In Leslie’s conception of herself, Sol LeWitt was one of her favorite artists, someone who, through his conceptual practice, embodied some kind of defiance that she found appealing. And she found his stuff nice to look at, too, soothing in its repetition and formality. She was, in general, a sucker for minimalism, in both its quietest and most imposing forms. She worried that it might be because it echoed some fundamental emptiness at the heart of her idea of things, some inability to understand and process the world in all its richness and complexity. It was easy to say that art was all [this] when you couldn’t conceive of anything beyond [this].

  When they got there, Katie pronounced the whole thing tedious, and Leslie, partly because of her influence, and partly because of her own unpredictable swings in patience and taste, was left antsy and underwhelmed, too, and the low-hanging gray sky and galleries packed with well-to-do, superficially satisfied patrons didn’t help either. They wandered through the permanent collection, Leslie mostly frustrated by her own frustration. Katie seemed bemused, but happy enough. Whatever the problems in play, they were mostly Leslie’s. They stopped in a room filled with paintings by On Kawara, whose work had always left Leslie cold. The paintings in this room all consisted of white letters and numbers, identifying the date on which they were painted, on uniform black, rectangular canvases. Leslie was expecting to not give a shit as usual, but instead she felt an overwhelming sadness flooding into her chest. These things were a monument to … what? The reading pushed by the wall panel was something about the inevitability of time, the inability of humans to freeze it or memorialize it effectively. Somehow, the wall panel thought, painting the date every day for forty years or whatever had a cumulatively devastating effect, like reading an epic autobiographical novel. But, Jesus, could On Kawara, even if he was the bleakest motherfucker on earth, really think that he was capturing his story in full? That he was capturing anything at all? Maybe, if you were looking from space, it was enough to see that someone had said, I’m here, I’m here. But she was on earth. She was here, too.

  “Do you like these?” Katie asked. She seemed genuinely curious.

  “I think I hate them,” Leslie said. “But it might just be me.”

  “Yeah,” Katie said. She put her arm around Leslie’s shoulder. They were standing in front of OCT. 31, 1978. “It’s like looking in a mirror.”

  * * *

  They took the train back without talking much. Katie was going to a dinner party to which Leslie had not been explicitly invited, though Katie had insisted repeatedly that she was welcome. Leslie didn’t feel welcome, though she recognized that this was, again, mostly her problem. Wasn’t alienation always your own fault? People were what they were. You could either get in line and find a way to make it work or be a soul adrift upon the wandering etc. People could surprise you. People were interesting. The problem was you.

  So on her way from the subway to her apartment, she bought a bottle of Buffalo Trace—if she was going to get shitty for the first time in months, she might as well do it on something she liked. At home she poured herself a tumbler, neat, and sipped it fastidiously, and then not fastidiously, while reading a collection of art criticism by a writer she approved of, despite his conservative taste. She didn’t mind reading about Goya’s portraits for the millionth time, or Velázquez’s brushstrokes, or Piero’s transcendent stillness. It opened her brain up in a way that contemporary art could not, made her generous like school had said art should make her. She got drunker and slowly read a piece about Bonnard—fucking Bonnard!—and realized, or decided that she’d realized, that she should learn art history, really learn it. That was something she could imagine spending some time on, time that wouldn’t be, or at least feel, so wasted. Though the whole idea of wasting time felt to her like the usual accusatory capitalist horseshit that made everything in the world depressing and pointless. Not that she didn’t want money. But, like lots of people she knew, she mostly wanted it so she wouldn’t have to want it anymore, so that people would get off her back about how she didn’t have any. They’d get on her back about something else, though. They. The people who were mildly on her back—her family, a couple of her friends—usually went away after a childish, screaming request to be left alone. And then what? Back to intricately imagined fantasies of persecution in the company of no one.

  She wanted to get out of New York—right, who didn’t? In her internal monologue of escape, the Mountain West held a place of pride, Montana in particular. It was a little bit because of Merle Haggard, but also because one of Leslie’s friends, Edward, had once moved to the hinterlands of western Montana when he got a book contract. Though he’d failed to complete, or possibly even begin, his book of comedic essays, he came back with a patchy beard and boundless enthusiasm for Missoula, where the biggest political questions had to do with the killing and sparing of bears and wolves. She’d been surprised by the pang that the idea of the place gave her. She didn’t think of herself as a romantic about location, even though she was secretly romantic about everything.

  Now she texted Edward. These days, he wrote scripts for and occasionally acted in anarchic Internet videos for a satirical website. He was overwhelmingly cynical, so much so that, like Leslie, he came out on the other side to sincerity. He thought the government and the media and most people were so corrupt as to be unworthy of consideration, but found devotional solace in obscure Trojan Records cuts and stand-up routines and movies where the lengthily elaborated joke was that there was no joke. He spent a lot of time on drugs, listening to music in the company of middle school chums and ex-lovers. And he lived ten blocks away from Leslie. Lo and behold, he was down to hang. His place? She gulped another drink quickly while changing into rumpled, slightly cleaner clothes than the ones she’d been wearing.

  When her face hit the air outside, she got a better sense of how gone she was. It required conscious effort not to careen all over the sidewalk. She lived in the still mostly black part of the neighborhood—the walk to Edward’s was a journey through gentrification, the upshot being that the booze was wreaking gradual havoc on her nervous system, and she was more embarrassed to be drunk around her older black neighbors, who she imagined already disapproved of her, than around the young white people who roamed Edward’s block. Eventually she found herself swaying in front of the buzzers at Edward’s building and not remembering which one to press. She dimly recalled that his buzzer was broken anyway, and that, at least as of a year ago, this necessitated him throwing the key out of the window at her, and then, when that inevitably led to the key getting lost in the gutter or the bushes, him having to come down and help her find it anyway. So she remembered this and went into her texts to call him, but somehow managed to call Katie instead, and didn’t realize this until Katie answered on about the fifth ring, saying, “Hey, silly, did you decide you wanted to stop by?” And Leslie was confused and then immediately annoyed with herself, and blurted, “No,” to which Katie chirpily, grimly responded, “Okay, well, I’m still at the party, gotta
go!” and hung up. So now Leslie felt both guiltier and more in need of comforting than she had been a few minutes earlier, which was a pretty bad combination usually, and especially so when she’d had this much to drink and had concrete plans to drink more. She texted Katie back: “Sorry love, a misdial of the ♥. See u soon I hope.” Then she actually called Edward and it turned out his buzzer worked now. 3G. As she ascended the stairs, she got a text from Katie. “OK dear, cant help but wonder who you meant 2 b calling at this hour but trust u to make good choices. kind of.” Which was pretty passive-aggressive, or, actually, just aggressive, and it would have annoyed her more if she didn’t deserve it. But Katie didn’t know she deserved it, so Leslie had the right to be pissed at her, even if, maybe, Katie knew her well enough by now to know she wasn’t up to anything good. And if that was the case, it was infuriating in its own right—why did she have to advertise her unsuitability so baldly? Why was there nothing goddamn mysterious about her, like there was about everyone else? Why were even her adventures so cramped and circumscribed? She opened Edward’s door without knocking. He was sitting in the living room under his thrift store reproduction of Winslow Homer’s shark painting, the one with the lonesome black man in a fishing boat out in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by cartoonish but very threatening sharks. The guy in the picture didn’t look that worried, like he knew, maybe, that it was only a painting, which made it secretly postmodern in Leslie’s mind. You couldn’t write or paint anything after 1900 without acknowledging the frame, right? She knew, because she’d looked it up, that the shark painting, the original of it, was from 1899.

  “You made it,” Edward said.

  “I’m here now,” Leslie said.

  “You been drankin’?” he said.

  “I hadn’t been, so that’s probably why I’m so … drunk.”

  She flopped down onto the couch.

  “I’m going to get you some water,” Edward said.

  “Thank you,” Leslie croaked. She had the spins, which wasn’t typical for her, but she really hadn’t been drinking lately, and maybe tolerance wasn’t a myth after all. She took the water he gave her in a long, slow gulp and felt a little bit better.

  “Lassie? Can you speak, girl?” Edward said after a solid twenty seconds of her staring at the wall trying to focus her eyes. Had she actually turned into a dog recently?

  “Cat’s in the well?” she said. “Isn’t that a dumb Dylan song.”

  “And she’s back!” Edward said.

  “Buh,” she spit. “Well, I’m glad to see you, I guess. I think that’s why I came over.”

  “How can I make your difficult life more tolerable?”

  “Just be nice to me, I guess? My brain doesn’t work.”

  “Here, listen to this song me and the boys recorded.”

  A thin funk jam pulsed from the giant speakers on the floor, someone screaming about ketamine over repetitive guitar scratching.

  “Are you trying to make me throw up?”

  Edward wandered around the room bobbing his head like a chicken. When the song finally ended after what felt like half an hour, the speakers buzzed with ambient unease. He kneeled in front of a record crate, selected something, and dropped the needle on the turntable. Unintelligible dub shouting shook the floor.

  “What are you calling your song?” Leslie said.

  “Capitalist decadence meets the Technicolor ooze,” he said without hesitation. “So, what, you’re having trouble with the man? Got those midstage pseudo-relationship blues?”

  Half the things Edward said sounded, in both content and tone of voice, like something from a commercial playing on a television in the background of a cartoon.

  “Basically,” she said. “I’m seeing this cool girl who I probably don’t like enough.”

  Edward sighed in commiseration.

  “Do you think I should move to, like, Montana and become a writer?” she said.

  He stroked his chin, in parody, mostly, but it looked like he was really thinking.

  “I don’t see why not,” he said. “You hate it, come back.”

  He took a long hit from a big metal piece that looked like a plumber’s tool.

  “Thank you,” she said. She was grateful to him for taking her seriously. But:

  “But won’t you miss me?”

  He exhaled a cloud of smoke through his nostrils.

  “I already do,” he said.

  He handed over the piece, heavy and cool to the touch, and she took it from him without partaking.

  “You don’t think I’m just some dummy, right?” she said.

  He reached over and patted her on the head.

  “You’re a very particular, specific dummy,” he said. “I’d know you anywhere.”

  Leslie squeezed her knees to her chest and put her chin on her knees, like she was looking over a little wall made out of herself. The dub echoes were, as if by design, giving her a splitting headache.

  “Can we listen to something nice?” Leslie said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to just listen to something nice on your fancy speakers?”

  He sighed theatrically and hoisted himself to his feet. He flipped through the record box again.

  “What is nice, do you think?” he said.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Actually, you know, I’m not going to direct you. Let’s see what you think a nice record is.”

  He grunted and flipped, then chose something.

  “This isn’t going to be a this-record-will-change-your-life moment,” he said. The opening notes of “Astral Weeks” floated toward them.

  “You got it,” Leslie said. “Comfort isn’t supposed to be transcendent. I’ll take that weed now, please.”

  “It’s right next to you,” he said.

  And so it was.

  Leslie felt significantly less despair as time crawled forward. They listened to gentle shit from the sixties and came up with stupid ideas for videos, short stories, plays. (Robot Family was definitely going to be a hit.) She ignored a late call from Katie. By two a.m., she was sprawled across Edward’s chest, her hips unsubtly shifting over his pelvis in periodic attempts to “get comfortable.” When they inevitably had sex in his room, in complete darkness, she was the aggressor, or at least that was the word that ran through her mind as she sought and encouraged his dick. Though it had been only a few months since she’d last had sex with Todd, a recurrent thought in her stoned mind for the past few hours had been whether or not it would be somehow difficult or unwieldy to deal with a man after spending so much time with Katie. But, she recalled as things progressed, she and Edward had always shared an understanding that extended to bed. They could fuck like they were continuing a conversation, without the anxiety and ritual that attended most such encounters. This meant, at least for her, that they couldn’t reach the heights of great, specifically memorable sex that one always hoped for. But it seemed a worthwhile tradeoff in this case, to have his easeful weight bearing down on her. It was particularly satisfying, once they settled into her preferred position, to be powerfully and somewhat carelessly acted upon, until a definite conclusion was reached.

  She was leaving town, she decided, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on Edward’s ceiling. Maybe somewhere else she’d be able to hear herself think, or, failing that, get some fucking writing done.

  Part III

  From Monday to Friday, Leslie and I spent our days out at Kenny’s. We quickly abandoned the pretense that we were only going there as often as necessary for the chores—I left to pick Leslie up before nine a.m., and dropped her off a half hour or so before the end of the workday. That first Monday was overcast, then storming, so we stayed in the house and played with the kitten, letting him race around the house as fast as he could manage with his three legs. Kiki, after her initial enthusiasm for him was greeted with a bloody swipe across the nose from a tiny claw, noted his comings and goings forlornly from a corner. We sat in the shadowy living room watching the rain crash in sheets against
the big windows, listening to Kenny’s country records and reading. I’d finally found a book that held my interest—The Executioner’s Song, of all things. I knew that it was tied up in the joy of our lost weekending, but I loved that book like I’d loved The Call of the Wild as a kid, like I’d devoured The Swiss Family Robinson. I wanted to know every goddamn thing about these people, and thank Christ, the book was a thousand pages long. Leslie was reading Fools Crow by James Welch, “for some freaking balance” after Blood Meridian, but it seemed to be slow going. Whenever I cackled or exclaimed in surprise, she asked “What?” and I read her the line. Soon enough I was delivering paragraphs, then pages, and then we were alternating, taking breaks for beers when our throats got sore. We were both in love with Nicole Baker, so fucked-up and voracious, naïve but knowing. It seemed impossible that Mailer hadn’t made her up (and I guess a few other people have wondered about that, too). Leslie toyed with me off and on all afternoon, like a cat, but didn’t let me come until we were halfway out the door, when she finally sucked my cock in the foyer with what felt like one well-calibrated, continuous motion.

  Some afternoons I tried to work, mostly moving commas around on three-year-old stories, while Leslie stared pointedly into her computer screen, not typing. She had abandoned the screenplay she’d supposedly been working on after the friends she was writing it for told her that their main potential backer—a young app developer—had been indicted for securities fraud. Now, she said, she was focused on fiction. (So focused that she currently seemed in danger of boring a hole in her laptop screen with her eyes.)

  When it was sunny we took long walks around the property, and I recited half-remembered history that Kenny’d told me, much of it probably made-up, about the family that had lived and died there, their hopes and dreams and heights and weights. We absorbed splinters out on the dock, in our knees, hands, elsewhere. We fucked around in the water, fucked, once, in the wet, thick-pebbled dirt.