by Ben Lerner
“The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.” —Walter Benjamin
We chatted for the length of her cigarette about the show—the opening started in an hour or two—most of my consciousness still overwhelmed by her physical proximity, every atom belonging to her as well belonged to me, all senses fused into a general supersensitivity, crushed glass sparkling in the asphalt below. After she stubbed the cigarette out against the brick, a little shower of embers, I followed her back into the apartment, which was the gallery owner’s pied-à-terre. Alena went to a bathroom without turning on a light and I listened as she pissed; she didn’t flush, wash her hands, or, in that dark, consult the mirror.
We left the apartment together, but, by the time we reached the street, Alena had explained that she’d prefer to arrive at the opening separately, as a jealous ex would be there, and she didn’t want to deal with the interrogation. I was a little stung, but, trying to mimic her nonchalance, said sure, that I’d planned to meet Sharon first at a café not far from the gallery anyway, then head over to the opening with her; we kissed goodbye.
Alena worked alongside Sharon and her husband Jon, two of my oldest New York friends, at a small production company that specialized in editing documentary film. It was a job Alena held part-time in order to support what she called her “artistic practice,” a practice Sharon had had trouble describing and about which, because of the phrase “artistic practice,” I’d had grave doubts. But it turned out Alena was serious, in spite of being hailed as a rising star by a postmedia art world that so often valorizes stupidity. Her current show, which, unable to do any of the heavy lifting, I’d watched her hang, consisted of images and a few objects she had deftly aged: she’d painted a portrait from a contemporary photograph and then somehow distressed it— I couldn’t understand her reluctant explanations of her process—so that it was networked with fine cracks, making it appear like a painting from the past. There was a painting based on an image downloaded from the Internet and then enlarged of a young woman whose eyes are lined with running shadow and upon whose face a man beyond the frame has ejaculated; she stares at the viewer as if from another century, the craquelure confusing genres and lending the image tremendous gravity; the title read: The Picture of Sasha Grey. Alena had painted several magnificent Abstract Expressionist imitations and then subjected them to her method; the Pollocks appeared compellingly unchanged, others seemed as if they’d been recovered from the rubble of MoMA after an attack or had been defrosted from a future ice age. There was a small self-portrait, also painted from a photograph, that had not been altered, had suffered no crazing, and the immediacy of its address in the context of the other work, I mean the directness of the sitter’s gaze, was so powerfully located in the present tense that it was difficult to face.
Kissing Sharon hello at the café, I felt static as my lips brushed across her cheek, as if Alena and Sharon were coming into contact through me. Sharon ordered mint tea and I ordered what I thought was a simple drip coffee that turned out to be an exorbitantly priced single-origin Chemex affair. At the tiny table beside the window looking onto Houston, we split a large slice of chocolate bread. “It’s Valrhona,” Sharon said, which meant nothing to me; Sharon had a chocolatier’s vocabulary—almost everything she ate, it seemed, involved chocolate. “Are you sleeping together yet?”
When we left the café and wandered south I could feel the trains moving underground. I could feel, at least imagined that I felt, Sharon’s pulse in her biceps, slightly faster than my own, as we walked—as we almost always walked—arm in arm. I looked up at an illuminated billboard on which nothing appeared but a violet wash, probably because a new advertisement was going up, and asked Sharon, who is color-blind, what she saw. Overhead the stars occluded by light pollution were presences like words projected through time and I was aware that water surrounded the city, and that the water moved; I was aware of the delicacy of the bridges and tunnels spanning it, and of the traffic through those arteries, as though some cortical reorganization now allowed me to take the infrastructure personally, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. Sharon saw grays and blues, and as we crossed Delancey she described a movie she wanted to make about color-blind synesthetes who report that numbers are tinged with hues they otherwise can’t perceive.
Soon we arrived at the packed gallery, where we’d planned to meet Jon, but he’d texted to say his cold had worsened. We made our way to the white wine on a table in the near corner. I saw Alena talking to two tall and handsome people across the space and I raised a hand awkwardly. She looked at me steadily while speaking to them but did not return my wave; I couldn’t decide if her shadowed eyes were expressing perfect indifference or smoldering intensity, her signature form of ambiguity. I tried to turn from Alena’s gaze to talk with Sharon as if I’d barely noticed the former’s expression, but I spilled some of the wine as I lifted it to my lips. I glanced back at Alena, who was smiling slightly.
It was impossible, as at most openings, to look at the art; indeed, the opening as a form, insofar as I understood it, was a ritual destruction of the conditions of viewing for the artifacts it was meant to celebrate. Sharon and I tried to circulate a little, and, while the afterglow was slowly diminishing, I still experienced softly colliding with so many bodies as a pleasure, not an irritation; it was as if the crowd were a single, sensate organism. I said hello to a few people I knew from art magazines for which I’d written, but soon I could tell Sharon wanted to leave, and we began to swim our way to Alena, to congratulate her and move on to a drink.
Alena and Sharon kissed hello, but Alena and I didn’t touch. I explained, trying to feign cool, that Sharon and I were going to catch up somewhere quiet, but that she should text me when things were winding down and I’d come back to help clean up. She said thanks, but she doubted she’d need help; her tone implied my offer presumed a greater degree of intimacy than our exchange of fluids warranted.
I was alarmed by the thoroughness of what I experienced as Alena’s dissimulation, felt almost gaslighted, as if our encounter on the apartment floor had never happened. Here I was, still flush from our coition, my senses and the city vibrating at one frequency, wanting nothing so much as to possess and be possessed by her again, while she looked at me with a detachment so total I felt as if I were the jealous ex she’d wanted to avoid, a bourgeois prude incapable of conceiving of the erotic outside the lexicon of property. Maybe she’d separated from me only so she could reencounter me coolly, asserting her capacity to establish insuperable distances no matter our physical proximity. On the one hand, I felt a jealous anger rising within me, a desire for her to desire me, the only kind of desire, Alex had once told me during a fight, I was able to sustain. On the other hand, I frankly admired how she appeared capable of taking or leaving me, of taking and leaving me simultaneously, found it exciting, inspiring even, as if the energy we had generated were now free to circulate more generally, charging everything a little—bodies, streetlights, mixed media.
We walked west to a bar Sharon liked. It was lit in the speakeasy fashion, dark wood and a tooled tin ceiling, no music. “Jon says she knows Krav Maga. Remember to agree on a safe-word.” It was quiet enough to hear the bartender shaking an artisanal cocktail.
“Why do you assume I’m the submissive?” The drinks involved gin and grapefruit and were served in Collins glasses.
“Because you’re a pussy.” Sharon desired to be vulgar with an earnestness that defeated vulgarity.
“I’m the one having casual sex in a stranger’s apartment with a mysterious woman who probably doesn’t care about me. You’re married.” I had officiated their wedding, first ordaining myself online.
“She cares about you, she just doesn’t attach.”
“When a male octopus ‘attacks’ in the attempt to mate, it uses its suckers to grapple with its target and insert the hectocotylus.”
“If Alena ever reproduces, it’s going to be t
hrough fission.”
“The breath-play thing,” I said with the help of my second cocktail, “makes me nervous.”
“What if you stopped worrying about protecting women from their desires?”
Now we were walking down Delancey, a gas I hoped was only steam rising from the street vent. “Maybe it’s how she grapples with and overcomes a fear of death.”
“Maybe it’s how she grapples with the threat of voicelessness.”
A passing ambulance threw red lights against us. “Or takes pleasure in making you confront the pleasure you take in those threats.”
“The flood of oxygen upon release.” We descended underground.
“A match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed,” I quoted, but it was lost in the noise of the approaching train.
“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”
“We helped edit a film on bonobos for the BBC; they’re our closest relative and have no concept of sexual exclusivity.”
“They say monogamy is an effect of agriculture. Paternity only started to matter with the transmission of property.”
“Get tested for HIV today,” said the poster on the D.
“But they do eat the young of other primate species.”
“So why did you get married if you don’t want kids?” We emerged onto the Manhattan Bridge; almost everyone checked e-mail, texts.
“You left without saying goodbye,” Alex’s said.
“Shine bright like a diamond,” Rihanna sang through the earbuds of the girl beside me, whose fingernails were painted with stars.
We were seated at a restaurant in Crown Heights, the penny-tile floor glowing in the candlelight. “I believe in promises. I believe in publicity.”
“I promise to pass through a series of worlds with you,” I remembered from her vows. I’d told the waiter I was only having wine, but ate half the spinach gnocchi off her plate, then paid for everything.
“She’s going to get tired of you soon,” Jon said. He was lying on the couch streaming The Wire on his laptop with two pink tissues issuing from his nostrils like a villain’s mustache in an elementary school play. The coffee table was littered with used tea bags and copies of Film Quarterly. I rummaged in their kitchen but could only find warm gin.
“Why did you set us up, then?”
“She’s smart and beautiful and nice and claims to like your poetry.”
I walked home through the park. “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees,” I said to the mist. Because the park is on the flight path, the city corrals and euthanizes geese. Which mate for life, I confirmed on Wikipedia. The glow of the screen seemed to come off on my hand. I looked up and saw the clouds as craquelure.
I poured myself a large glass of water that I forgot to bring to bed. “The little shower of embers,” I texted Alena, then regretted it.
* * *
Out of Dr. Andrews’s climate-controlled office on the Upper East Side, I walked into the unseasonably warm December afternoon, turned on my phone, and checked my e-mail to find a message from Natali, a mentor and literary hero of mine, about her husband, Bernard, for me an equally important figure:
B fell in NYC and broke a vertebra in his neck. He had an operation and it went fine, and he is now out of immediate danger. But recovery is slow and I haven’t been told when he might be able to be transferred back to Providence. Starting tonight I am staying at a hotel close to Mt. Sinai Hospital with uncertain Internet access. Below is my cell phone number but I am not quite competent in receiving messages. Some seem to vanish. Love, N.
As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display. So much of the most important personal news I’d received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone while I was abroad in the city that I could plot on a map, could represent spatially, the major events, such as they were, of my early thirties. Place a thumbtack on the wall or drop a flag on Google Maps at Lincoln Center, where, beside the fountain, I took a call from Jon informing me that, for whatever complex of reasons, a friend had shot himself; mark the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where I read the message (“Apologies for the mass e-mail…”) a close cousin sent out describing the dire condition of her newborn; waiting in line at the post office on Atlantic, the adhan issuing from the crackling speakers of the adjacent mosque, I received your wedding announcement and was shocked to be shocked, crushed, and started a frightening multiweek descent, worse for being embarrassingly clichéd; while in the bathroom of the SoHo Crate and Barrel—the finest semipublic restroom in lower Manhattan—I learned I’d been awarded a grant that would take me overseas for a summer, and so came to associate the corner of Broadway and Houston with all that transpired in Morocco; at Zuccotti Park I heard that my then-girlfriend was not—as she’d been convinced—pregnant; while buying discounted dress socks at the Century 21 Department Store across from Ground Zero, I was informed by text that a friend in Oakland had been hospitalized after the police had broken his ribs. And so on: each of these experiences of reception remained, as it were, in situ, so that whenever I returned to a zone where significant news had been received, I discovered that the news and an echo of its attendant affect still awaited me like a curtain of beads.
Neither Bernard nor Natali had ever seemed to exist in time, at least not in the same temporal medium I occupied; Bernard’s wizardly beard and otherworldly learnedness had made him appear impossibly old when I first met him my freshman year of college, and it was only when I grew older that I was able to remember him as comparatively young; he was in his late sixties when I first attended one of his classes. And yet, precisely because he seemed beyond the reach of time, I could never imagine Bernard actually aging, and therefore his bodily fragility never seemed, in any particular present, real to me; in that sense he was forever young. Natali—the only person I knew who had read as much as Bernard, perhaps more, since she was fluent in several languages, having been born in Germany and having learned French as a child before becoming a major English-language poet—always seemed the same age to me, even in memory. This condition of temporal exception was in part the effect of a level of literary accomplishment that struck me as anachronistic: each was the author of more than twenty books in several genres; each had translated as many volumes; the small press they’d founded in the early sixties had published hundreds of books and pamphlets of experimental writing. Moreover, the house they inhabited in Providence—a house so full of books that it seemed built of books—also felt exempt from time. Bernard and Natali were always working and never working, that is, they were always reading and writing when they weren’t hosting receptions for other writers; there was no division between labor and leisure; their days were not structured conventionally; the house was not subject to quotidian rhythms but to the strange duration of the literary.
All of this, I should say, initially made me intensely suspicious; they seemed too perfect, too open, pure, generous; how could they be involved with generations of authors—the offensive, the quick to take offense, the batshit crazy—without making a single enemy, unless they were secretly bland or intellectually inert or there were bodies decaying under the floorboards? The first time I was in their house I moved gingerly not only because I felt I was in a museum, terrified of breaking something, but also because I feared a trap.
As I reread Natali’s message, I scrolled through memories of my first evenings in their house as my teenage years came to an end: spilling wine on hardwood and upholstery, Bernard and Natali patiently listening to my younger self as I affected literary seriousness, my speech no doubt a patchwork of interpretive clichés and errors of fact, their telling stories the import of which would often only occur to me years later. I remembered debating and/or flirting with other students and hangers-on, other young writers from whom I was desperate to distinguish myself, getting no help in that regar
d from either Bernard or Natali, since they treated everyone equally, infuriating me. But the memory that returned to me most vividly as I stood on East Seventy-ninth Street was of meeting their daughter, a young woman with whom I was for a time obsessed, and of whom I still occasionally think, despite having met her only once.
A distinguished South African writer had come that night to campus to read from his new novel, so I encountered the daughter at what was an unusually crowded gathering. It was perhaps the second or third time I’d been in the house, which meant I was still nervous, skeptical. I was standing in the dining room where food and wine and glasses had been laid out on the table, admiring a collage of Bernard’s on the wall, when a woman—older than I was then, younger than I am now—identified the source of one of the collage’s elements from behind me: a sliver of a movie poster for Murnau’s Sunrise. I turned to face her and was, as they say, stunned—large gray-blue eyes, a full mouth, long and jet-black hair with a few strands of silver in it, and an immediately apparent poise and intelligence for which no catalog of features could account. Realizing that I was just staring at her, it finally occurred to me to speak, and I managed to say something about the rightness of fit between silent film and collage, mute media that depend on splicing for effect. Whatever its merit, she acted as though I’d contributed something intelligent, and electricity branched through me with her smile. I asked her if she was often at Bernard’s and Natali’s and she said, laughing, “I grew up here,” and then I understood—her knowledge of the collage, her aura of brilliance, her obvious comfort in this hallowed space—that this gorgeous woman was their daughter.
