When it came out waxy and thick—translucent and matte, exactly as I wanted—I was ecstatic with relief.
And then I fell into my paintings again, and time was suspended, like always.
* * *
No smear or flood or brushstroke held the exact same weight, the same body, as the originals. Regardless, I was delighted to see them, these newest versions, to work from a memory into a new place. I followed the notes in my notebook, worked against the photos in my camera, and let myself luxuriate in the freedom of those beginnings, where nothing has to come together yet—nothing is final.
In that rhythm, I felt, for the first time, genuinely comfortable at Pine City. It wasn’t lonely. It was alone. We were alone with ourselves, living inside the universes we created, agreeing not to disturb each other’s fantasies, only to meet in the spaces between them.
And we did meet—or rather, Marlin, Jack, Tyler, and I met, and Jes remained silent—nods and hellos and high fives, brief chats, meeting in the most literal sense as all of our timings, our patterns of behavior, seemed to be different. I woke up before dawn and painted until nightfall, showered, and passed out. Jes and Marlin were barely around in the evenings, going back and forth to the city and Hudson with relative frequency. I thought that Jack might be the person I saw most, but his daughters caught a summer flu; I ran into him as he was leaving, packing his minivan with a heavy sigh and matching frown.
“There goes this week,” he said sadly.
“Catch you soon, I hope.”
“Two weeks,” he said. “See you then?”
“I’ll be here.”
That left Tyler and me alone on the massive property, and we soon fell—after several more days of heys and small smiles and waving with two fingers from behind the wheel after we passed on the road—into a nice familiarity.
Then, one night, when Tyler’s windows were the only ones that glowed against the dusk, and his car the only one in the carports, he called to ask me over for dinner. It would only be the two of us, as Jes and Marlin had driven to Hudson for another opening, and Jack was home with his family. Did I eat meat?
Flattered—and nervous—I accepted.
* * *
On the inside of Tyler’s all-black house, where he’d raised the ceiling to the angled rafters, the paint colors soaked up all the light so you could see the blues and greens of them, the browns and the grays. Lucinda Williams played on the stereo. His furniture was comfortable and uncomplicated. I leaned against the sofa with a beer, watching him cook, unsure of what to say.
He kicked it off. “How’s it going over there?”
“Great,” I said. “Everything’s good.”
He looked at me, long and hard, raising his eyebrows, mocking me. I looked away. The same envelope that had been Jack’s bookmark, a piece of certified mail addressed to Pine City, LLC, from Eliot&Sprain, poked out of a stack of papers on his kitchen counter. I tried not to stare at it too obviously.
“Soooo…then tell me about the paintings you lost,” he said casually, like it was nothing, flipping a hamburger.
I balked and offered a half-truth. “Um. Prudence was originally inset with a verdigris made from the copper gutters of St. Patrick’s Cathedral—I, um, befriended the janitor there and he let me scrape them when they came down for cleaning—but I couldn’t get that again. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” He shook his head and looked up, a grin on his face—a look that said, Lady, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. “We can play this game if you want. But, look, I’m not going to rat you out. I swear.”
I stared at him for a minute before I replied. He stared back. “Prove it,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, smiling, taking out his phone, and pulling up a photo. “Look at that.”
It was a human brain, encased in a tall plastic take-out container.
The little microscopic pink lines of it; the squish against the walls of the jar—ugh—my mouth went dry, papery, and I had to grab the counter for support.
“It’s so illegal,” he said, taking back the phone, “and so delicate that I haven’t been able to finish working with it. I can’t get it to survive the electroforming bath. Thus far the legal arguments have hinged on the work as a form of public interest. But this is not a work yet—it’s a stolen brain in a plastic Tupperware container that I bought in New Jersey for twenty thousand dollars in cash. That’s why we don’t throw big parties here anymore, by the way. Now: You have something on me.”
“I still want to know why you do it.”
“You already asked me that.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t satisfied with your answer.”
“Why do I acquire human organs on the black market, or why do I bronze them, or why do I sell them?”
“All of the above. Full enchilada.”
“Uh—okay.” He turned around and leaned against the counter, holding the spatula at a thoughtful angle. I did the same, aping his body language, and it seemed, for a second, like we were going to tell each other the truth.
“First…I guess I should say, I’m definitely taking organs from someone who is trying to bypass a list of some kind. My intervention stops the black market from being at its most efficient. But then—in some ways, I’m simply another variable. I’m probably raising the price of the organs by creating additional demand. I actually don’t know if that’s moral or not, and I guess that question is an interesting one to me.” He thought for a second and then continued, ticking off his fingers as he spoke. “It is addictively dangerous. People die every day, but buying black-market organs is complicated. It’s astonishingly remunerative, as art, more than it should be. But—and for me this is the most important thing—the finished work does something to people. It is objectively only an art object—the organs can’t be used again.”
“It’s calculated.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “I mean, nothing is thoughtless. People assume it’s insincere—it’s not. It’s a holy thing, to hold a person’s kidney.”
“I’m not in a position to criticize anyone for insincerity,” I replied. He clearly knew what I was doing. I owned up to it. “I’m remaking work for the biggest show of my career. I’m terrified they’re going to look like—like a bad face-lift. Jacqueline’s been telling everyone that they took two years to make. She sold half of them already. It’s fraud.” It was a relief to say it out loud.
“It’s not fraud,” he corrected me. “It’s your choice. In the end—nobody else gets to tell you who you are. That’s the only thing we get, as artists. You’re the only one who chooses it. The work you’re making now is as real as what you made before.”
“I hope that’s true.”
“You can’t lean on the idea that there’s some magic current animating you,” he said, with a little bit of contempt in his voice. “Choice is what distinguishes us”—he meant fine artists—“from people who make houses out of bottle caps.”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
“So how many?”
“Seven.”
His eyebrows shot up. “That’s a lot.”
“I know. It was all of them.”
“Does Jacqueline know?”
“No. They need to look exactly as they did.”
“What are they called?”
“Prudence—you saw that one already—then there’s Chastity, Humility, Obedience, Modesty, Temperance, and Purity.”
“Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity,” he said.
“How do you know that?” I asked, surprised. “You know Blake?”
“I looked it up after I saw the ad for your show.” He winked. “Milot took out that billboard on Tenth.”
“Oh, the billboard.” I sighed, worry trickling down my forehead like sweat. “God, that billboard. How much do billboards cost?”
“She probably got a deal on it. Maybe fifty? It had five shows on it, one in every location. It’s not your problem,” he reassured me.
“No,” I agr
eed, too embarrassed to reveal that my contract made it my problem, apparently, ten thousand dollars’ worth of my problem.
“You know your Blake, though,” he said.
“Yes. I love Blake. I love anyone who takes apart the church and tries to put you back together again.”
“Your family’s religious?”
“My mother is,” I said. “She sins—and she prays—and she asks to be forgiven. Rinse and repeat.” I trailed off, and felt him let me go, back behind my wall. “I’m living with more of a creative faith these days. It’s the only thing I feel.”
“Why are the paintings called what they’re called?”
“Those words are women’s words, if you know what I mean. Those aren’t words used to police men’s behavior. Only—only women’s. I was raised to believe that being all of those things was important. More important than anything else. But I’m—I’m sick of them. It was time to grow up. For me, I mean.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means…the paintings are things that I love but I no longer need. Making a painting is a way to discard something. I put it in the painting, and then I’m over it. Or through it, maybe.” Then I rolled my eyes at myself. “It doesn’t always work. I’m still dyeing my hair pink, for example, even though I did a painting called Hair Money.”
“Then—the names are very apt. Your paintings are transparent. It’s like seeing your feelings. It’s pretty unsettling, actually.”
“Thank you. They didn’t have names until, I don’t know, five or six years ago,” I explained.
“Why not?”
“I was too self-contained,” I said. “I was making unconsciously. Even in art school I made unconsciously. Everybody treated me like I was Rain Man.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I lied, downing my beer, hiding my face as I walked to the refrigerator and reached in for another. I didn’t want to tell him—I didn’t want to tell anybody. Not ever.
“So how long does it normally take?”
“To make a painting?”
“Yeah.”
“Three, four months. I’ve never tried to go fast.”
“How long do you have?”
“Uh—” I counted in my head. “Thirty-five days of painting. Thirty days to dry. That’s when I have to build the frames and crates.”
“Wow. Frames like the one at Max’s house?”
“No, they’re much better now. I know.” I doubled over, and dropped my head between my knees. “It’s too much.”
“Why not wait? I mean, why not put off the show?”
“Because Jacqueline won’t, for starters, and I’m flat fucking broke, and I’m homeless, and this—it’s the biggest opportunity of my life. I can’t waste it.”
“It’ll be okay,” he said, reassuring me again. I wanted to believe him.
“I—can you please, please not tell Jes or Marlin or Jack or anyone about my paintings? Because you could ruin my life. If something goes wrong—I will be in huge debt, I will still be homeless, and I won’t have a gallery.”
“Of course.” He looked insulted. “Of course I won’t.”
We ate dinner, seated cross-legged from each other on opposite ends of the sofa, plates in our laps, beers on the floor. He got up every now and then to change the record, but otherwise the evening was fluid; we talked about art, mostly, because it was easy, it was our lingua franca.
It was nice to be with him—to see him up close. It takes a lot of looking to see someone, to really see the shape of their nose or distinguish the shades of their laughter, even, or perhaps especially, if you’ve seen them from a distance a dozen times before. He began to come into real focus, separating from the mystery that had shrouded him, emerging as a real, independent person.
When he went to the restroom, I peeked at the letter on the counter. It was a demand letter for an artwork by Carey Logan filmed without permission on Eliot&Sprain property. It specified that the artwork contained two reels of film, which Pine City were to return to Eliot&Sprain upon receipt of the letter itself. The threat for noncompliance was a lawsuit to the gut-checking tune of $15 million. A copy of this letter has been sent to Cartwright, Benson and Pendergast, LLC. Sincerely, Charles Eliot and Helen Sprain.
An electric shock buzzed my spine, the vertebrae clacking against each other as my fingers pinched the paper. Two reels of film—that was all it requested. I nearly pocketed it before remembering that I was not supposed to be looking at it.
At the sound of the sink running in the bathroom, I eased the letter back into its envelope and took a beer from the fridge. When Tyler reappeared in the kitchen, I was tossing the bottle cap into the trash, my heart racing. No wonder Charlie and Tyler had been so cold to each other at the party. They were in the middle of a war.
“So you met the rest of Pine City at the Academy?” I asked the only question I could think of.
“Marlin and Jack. Jes and Carey we met after, in New York.”
“How did you meet Carey?”
“I—” He stumbled and looked at his drink. The beacon, the connection to something, that lack of openness I’d sensed before, turned on behind his eyes, and I felt him move away from me. “Can we talk about Carey another time?”
There was so much misery radiating from his voice that I didn’t think he could possibly contain it. I felt clumsy, beastly, even, for scratching such an obviously gaping wound. I didn’t want to imagine him doing what the people at Max’s party had implied—dismantling her body—or hurting her, like Cady had suggested—and inadvertently shook my head to dislodge the thought.
“Is that okay?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” I said, and diverted my gaze to the near-black planks of the floor. “I didn’t mean to shake my head, I’m so tired, I’m—I’m doing the opposite of what I mean,” I said, shifting my weight around, breaking the tension. As I moved, he caught sight of the still-healing scab on my calf. The glue had mostly peeled off.
“What happened there?” He grazed it with his fingertips, and a liquid blush traveled to and from the center of my body.
“I tried to climb the ladder in the barn, but it collapsed under my weight.”
He looked confused for a second. “The old barn?”
“Yeah. It’s okay.”
Suddenly his hands were wrapping around my calf, thumbs on each side of the ragged pink and brown skin. He leaned forward, pressed his forehead to my calf, and apologized.
“I’m so sorry. It was thoughtless and cruel. I can be—I can be closed off,” he said, breathing into the skin of my leg.
I could feel the tide of his breath forming and receding. It was so surprising—and instantaneously erotic, like completing a circuit—that I froze, closing my eyes, unsure of what to do, wanting desperately to remain completely still, to stay with it, with him, whatever he was.
But then he must have looked up. “Are you upset with me?” he asked.
“No,” I breathed—and then I opened my eyes.
I wanted him, that night. Thinking about it even now makes me lovesick, stops me like a hand on my chest: the feeling of his skin on mine, of his breath moving across my leg.
Yet when my eyes flew open inside that black house, I saw only how black it was, and in a flash I was overcome by the physical act of repainting everything, of reupholstering all the furniture, of dyeing the lampshades and curtains. I saw only an act of grief that he was still inhabiting. My sense that he was spoken for was accurate—if not by a living person, then by a dead one.
A chill pooled beneath my skin, running every which way like a spilled glass of water. I took my leg back and stood up. Our eyes met—holding for a long second—until he did the same, pulling his hands back into his body, and then the moment was gone, absorbed into the blackness of his house.
“Thank you so much for dinner,” I said. “But—my back is killing me. I should get some sleep”—and then I was out of there, running to my cabin, nea
rly slamming the door behind me.
Chapter Eleven
A dagger. Or a striper—or a sword. In any supply store, whatever the name, it’s the same kind of brush. I like dagger best. The bristles of a dagger are four to five inches long (about the distance from your middle finger to your thumb), and when you dip them in liquid, they show you what a twirl looks like. Sign painters use them, as do custom automotive painters, because the dagger line is lyrical—wetly calligraphic, capable of becoming both delicately fat and softly thin. Not unlike a marker line, but with more…puddle to it.
They are ultimately not my aesthetic. Still, I sneak them, for compact baby swoops, for a little pizzazz on a rainy day, an orange slice kind of feeling. Then nine times out of ten they are squeegeed down later. Occasionally one of them stays—usually a little ombré gradient with a star on it, something that looks like part of an airbrushed t-shirt—a little hello from Florida no bigger than a square inch. I like to think they are messages to other painters through the vacuum of our collectors’ living rooms: I made this for you. I made this for me. I made this for us.
Daggers are tricky to use. You’ve got to have a hand for them, because otherwise you’re slopping all over the place, and the medium has to be the right kind of refrigerator-temperature olive oil. (You can’t be working with Marmite-ish beeswax or watered-down gouache—not with a dagger. The paint needs to run heavy, like cold blood.) Gorky used them—then de Kooning—then Whitten—and now, me.
Five years ago, two years before she died, Carey Logan had a show at Eliot&Sprain titled YOKEFELLOWS, of bodies curled up together like cats. It was her last sculptural show before she moved to performance work. She was so astonishingly realist in most of the forms, despite (maybe because of?) the classical nature of the materials, that when I spotted a paint line—a long draggy river along a calf—I actually clapped my hand over my mouth in the gallery. A dagger line. It made me smile. Nobody can resist daggers. They are so musical.
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