Among the Ten Thousand Things (15 page)

Jack thought they were going to a studio, but Jolie was passing the studios, also a sign for metal shop and another for neon, and when they got to the third floor, he understood they were going to a reception. Always there was a reception—everywhere he was being
received,
couldn’t anymore just
arrive.
And then never a very elaborate reception—nothing like what the Very Famous Architect would get if he came, if he were alive with nothing better to do outside Tempe. A reception was an evaluation he hadn’t wanted, his career laid out in rows of weak, sweet supermarket wine, prepoured a third of the way, his worth measured in cheapie plastic cups on a tablecloth made of hospital gown.

Here the four or five faculty members also wore name tags, and the students, not that there were many of
them,
not more than twelve, they wore tags too. The only one aside from Jack without a label was Jolie, who had him wrapped up in her little arm now, taking him in turns around the room like a show pony. And it wasn’t that the nearer she got to him the more he wanted to run. On the contrary—paradoxically! the inverse!—he found the more he wanted to run, the nearer he let himself be. He tuned out the room, drank wine when he was led to it, let Jolie answer his questions and brush his tail. He neighed every time, on cue.

A long hour later, they were at a dark bar across the road from the Super 8, brass-stemmed lampshades reaching down from the ceiling. Jolie had announced, in the elevator down from the reception, “I don’t know about you, but I could use a stiff one.” By which it turned out she meant a Sex on the Beach, ordered loudly. Jack drank Scotch and together they split a basket of fries.

“So I’m sorry to hear about your show,” she said. Jack looked at her and swallowed loosely, letting some spirit linger on his tongue, sink into the space where his gums met the soft slippery insides of his cheeks. “The explosion and all that.”

“Yes, I knew what you meant.”

“We still want the piece, if that’s what you were worried about.” She sucked in her cheeks as she drank. A smidge of lipstick kissed off on the straw. “If that’s why you came all this way.”

“I told you, I wanted—”

“To see the space. I know.” She broke a fry in two—they were the thick kind, wedge cut—and held the halves to her lips. “Just saying.”

Jolie ate more fries and Jack drank more Scotch. She said no to another drink, and Jack pushed back his stool and walked over to the bar.

He ordered two, took one like a shot right there. Jolie had her head down, her phone to one ear, and a finger in the other.

“My son,” she said, hanging up as he came back with his third.

“You could’ve stayed on.”

“No, it’s fine. It was a message. I was leaving a message.” She looked around the room. “You think it’s quiet enough that he heard?”

A jukebox in the corner looked like it was just for show, with at best a radio inside it, and there was no one at the pool table either. “I’d say there’s very little noise.”

She nodded. “He’s—you know, he’s wanting to join the army. Or, the navy, he’s wanting to join. They say that’s supposed to be safer. He says.”

“You don’t look old enough for an eighteen-year-old.”

She laughed. “You don’t look old enough for a line like that.” Most of the fries were gone, and there was still some peach schnapps pooled at the candied-cherry bottom of her glass, but he thought Jolie was a little drunk too.

He was aware of her crossing the street with him while he booked the room, and he was aware of her following him up and down the hall, of her shouting
“Bingo”
when she found the room number before he did. Probably she said something about getting him settled in or wanting to freshen up; he didn’t listen.

The room was wall-to-wall green carpet and two huge beds of depressing floral, quilted and sheeny like the insides of caskets. He sat at the foot of one while Jolie ran the bathroom faucet. He was tired all of a sudden. Everything in the world was conspiring to make him tired. Sleep made him tired. Coffee made him tired. Scotch. Receptions. Handshakes. Two Melissas. The price of things, that all things had a price.

Brown Bear. Brown Bear made him tired, plus old. Also? When the woman you’ve lived with fifteen years decides she won’t understand you anymore. When you know she could, only she doesn’t want to.

And Jolie, at the bar, that moment with her son. When she had seemed to him sad, and a bit pretty—even then she made him tired. That she was losing her son, that Jack was losing, well, everyone, that everyone loses everyone, eventually. How can anything make you more tired than that.

So Jolie came out of the bathroom with her hands still wet, and she put one of those hands on his hip, and she rocked a minute where she stood, or the vodka rocked her, and the rocking was like a blip in the system that told him this too was not real. They both were tired from so much lost, and nothing was real, to either of them.

Jack moved her thumb out from inside his belt loop and said good night.

He could lie down knowing he’d done the right thing, sending her home, making himself alone. He arranged his weight on one of the beds and from his pocket pulled a yellow-wrapped piece of taffy. He’d taken some the second time it was offered, with Jolie waving the bowl at him—“Now & Later?”—and without Kevin around he’d only varied the joke: “Maybe a Later.”

He gnawed at the wrapper with his bottom teeth and was hit right away with that banana smell that no actual banana ever had. His cell was dead, so he used the room phone to dial out, dial Deb, but he got only her voice mail and everything sticky. “Hey. It’s Jack. I mean, it’s me.” Even drunk he could hear how drunk he sounded. He told her where he was staying, and he could not find any extension on the base of the phone, not even the room number, “but if you give my name at the desk, I’m sure they’ll patch you through. Seems like we keep missing each other.” No good, this missing each other. Different pages.

He didn’t have the car. It was still in the parking lot outside the art museum. He flopped back on the bed and dragged his laptop onto his stomach to rise and fall with his breathing. The hotel Wi-Fi, big surprise, wasn’t working.

Different pages. Another taffy. Only yellow, these taffies? He realized he’d done the wrong thing with Jolie, letting her drive when she was that way.

You know you’ve hit bottom when you want for solitaire, for
Minesweeper.
What can you do without Internet, and not even any music on the machine, which had been for email almost exclusively. Email and also a few audio files, here. He’d never played them, but right away he knew what they were, and right away he knew that he would.

Double-clicking the earliest, he heard their first clear error, by no means the biggest of mistakes they would make. They’d used the recording software that came free with his machine (but no games?), and neither he nor the girl had known about the metronome that had to be toggled off. So it had stayed on, ticking like a clock or a sterile heart, keeping time with them, with how much time they had.

Okay. I think it’s recording. Is this okay?

Doesn’t bother me.

Um. So I’m just going to start. I have this list of questions, but we can deviate from them.

Sounds fine.

Do you think it’s an artist’s obligation to address current events?

Current events?

Like September eleventh.

So really we’re just talking about one event.

For the purposes of this conversation. Yes.

Okay. Obligation? Do I think the artist is obligated? No.

I think, good luck to her if she thinks she can avoid addressing what you call current events. What’s so fucked up in the world.

So nine-eleven was something you couldn’t avoid addressing?

I had to get it out of my system, I guess. I guess you could say that. At the time, you have to understand, I was working only a few blocks from the World Trade Center. I was there that morning.

I wanted to ask you about that. You’ve since moved uptown. This interview is taking place at your studio in Hell’s Kitchen.

I’m sorry, is that a question?

What motivated your move?

To Hell’s Kitchen? I liked the sound of it. We’re above a methadone clinic, I don’t know if you noticed. So there’s the atmosphere. And it’s cheaper. They say prices downtown fell after nine-eleven, but no one told my landlord.

So safety had nothing to do with it?

I don’t believe lightning would strike twice. Grand Central Station, Madison Square Garden. Maybe there.

Really they should watch the Empire State Building. The Chrysler. That would be harder, for people. No one loved the Twin Towers, the structures themselves, like they do those buildings. The terrorists would know that

if they watched a couple of New York movies.

You say a lot of inflammatory things I think without realizing they’re inflammatory.

I realize.

You don’t care about upsetting people then.

I care. The bullshit is that after nine-eleven everyone felt like a real New Yorker? Fuck that. You can’t wait for tragedy.

You’re from Texas, aren’t you? Texas originally?

Houston, that’s right. My parents are there still.

I’m sorry, I thought your father—I thought he passed away?

Yes. I’m sorry, yes, that’s correct.

Talk a little bit about what you saw that Tuesday. How did you find out? Were you on the street?

I went out. I listen to the radio while I work. Can’t hear it half the time, when I’m cutting or welding, but that’s how I learned something happened. I saw, you know, what everyone saw. The stuff on television. The stuff that ran once on television and got pulled. People running. People tired from running. I remember I’d been walking a while in a loop when someone offered me a bottle of water. They thought I’d been, somehow, a victim. Maybe one of the ones who got out. I get dirty when I work.

There’s this theory I have about your September series.

By all means.

You reminded me when you touched on the buildings. Instead of the towers, you chose to depict the victims—the actual physical people, the man on the plane, the woman in the office, the falling man—

Yes.

No one was willing to show those images. It was a kind of censorship.

Censorship is a strong word.

Where were those images then? Where else?

I don’t think I can address all that. Clearly, what I was trying to do, I failed.

You got people talking.

Not in the way I intended. That’s something artists say a lot, don’t they—good or bad, as long as it gets people talking? I don’t understand that. People are always talking. They’re desperate for talk. They’ll talk about anything. Most of what they say is stupid.

And if they hadn’t taken the series away when they did?

Who knows?

If they’d let the pieces stay on view, you might have had a different reaction.

It’s certainly flattering to think so. But I think that probably they were right, in taking them away. People didn’t like them, didn’t want to like them.

For what it’s worth, I thought they were exquisite.

You saw them?

Only in pictures. I was in Ohio for college at the time. They’re in a private collection now?

That’s right.

Well, I wish I had seen them. Actually I wish I’d been in New York then, to see all that.

You mean on nine-eleven?

Is that awful to say?

It’s natural. It was one of those rare important times, fully realized. A day that announced itself as history. That’s exciting. I wish I was there, and I was.

You say you were downtown by the time of the attacks, but you live uptown. How early do you usually begin work?

I stay at the studio overnight some nights.

And your family?

They’re very patient.

Is that of your wife?

That, no. That’s a picture for something I’m working on now.

Do you still work off live models?

Sometimes.

Strangers or people you know?

Doesn’t really matter. To me. Though it might matter to them.

I used to model a little, when I first moved to New York.

From the Super 8, he could walk to the minimart, where he bought an off-brand Big Gulp, and back to the bar, where he bought two more whiskeys, neat, and a vodka cranberry for the girl who sat down next to him and who would tell him his ChapStick tasted like piña colada. But that was Later.

In Jamestown, with the overhead off and the front door propped open, it was a dark summer morning indoors. The kids were still in bed. Deb looked into the fridge and decided her iced tea had cooled enough. She’d used the mushroom pitcher Jack had found once at a flea market in town. The ceramic bowl of it was carved with cremini, painted seventies beige and orange and brown. Two clumsy green leaves made up the spout.

She packed two glasses with ice and clutched them stinging cold against her dress and bare arms. Gary was at the great wood table, aiming a screwdriver at parts of a fishing reel and probably straining his eyes. “Whatcha got there?” she asked.

“Oh, I was thinking we might like to go fishing, one of these days. Maybe a birthday trip.”

She sat, peeled the glasses from her skin. “You were always good about that, birthdays.”

“Yours is easy to remember,” he said, though not why.

She thought of the first birthday she’d had with Jack, when he was married and she wasn’t. Her twenty-sixth. How could she have been sad about anything then? Crazy, stupid, tortured girl: She wanted to shake herself. Nothing is so bad, twenty-six. It had seemed bad, when Jack was two weeks with his wife in Cape Cod at some beach she’d never been to, and she was drunk from endless Bloody Marys at the endless birthday brunch her friends had arranged for her. She had chosen brunch over a proper party because Jack’s plane landed that night around eight and he’d promised to make it over.

And had she even thanked them for birthday brunch, her friends? She’d become indifferent to them; they’d become boring to her: Their opinions were not his. She’d liked him immediately, and so much. What do they call it? Enchanted. A victory just to be with him, moments when he wasn’t with anyone else. Why had that meant so much then? The five of them had split the bill without her, even though everyone was a dancer and poor, and Izzy had arranged to be out that night. “But call if you need me,” she’d said, clearly worried that Jack would not come. Deb couldn’t remember thanking them. She wanted to call them all now.

“God, Gar, how’d we get to be so old?”

“Flattering, thank you.”

“It’s just being back around all this stuff. This incredible, ugly pitcher.” Its ugliness had made them laugh the first few times they’d used it. At one point she’d tried making it into a vase, but Jack said it ruined the flowers. “How many summers ago were we all cooking dinner together here?
Cutting the ends off snap peas
or something.”

“Long time.”

“Being in this house—We’re even in our same seats.”

Gary shrugged. “It’s where I sit.”

“And this is where I sit, and
that’s
him, where he would,” nodding at the empty end chair between them.

Deb turned twenty-six in her rattling apartment over the subway with all the lights off thinking, Come. Please come. Where are you.
Where are you.
Whereareyou. Jack made it, just made it, the way he
just
did a lot of things. It was eleven-something when he rang up from the street. He hadn’t showered since Chatham and brought the beach in with him. Later, after he left in the small early hours—their affair gave her so much new time, blue morning time she used to sleep through—Deb stayed very awake in bed and stared up at the ceiling, dragging the soles of her feet up and down the mattress, feeling the grit of him everywhere. Now she was forty-one, nearly forty-two, and a little thrilled to be away from New York, and from Jack.

She was pressing the nails of her left hand into the dark wood, engraving small arcs in its waxy surface. “Someone should have dropped this pitcher a decade ago.”

“Ugly things don’t break,” Gary said over his gear.

She would always know Gary, regardless of how long they’d been apart. She knew how he took iced tea. With sugar, sunk mostly to the bottom. Gary was a little bit of a place to come back to.