Among the Ten Thousand Things (5 page)

At the studio, Jack had a long leather couch. No shower but a basin he could lean into and wash as far as his armpits. When a piece was going well, he was there all hours, through the night. He’d fall asleep on the swivel stool, hunched over the drafting table sometime near morning. When his head and his hands were running on all cylinders, it became impossible to scrape him out.

That had happened more often in the early years, when he was hungry and everything was on the rise. For a while he lived and worked the way he’d imagined doing while at RISD, five or ten pieces always going at once. So many ideas, he’d only had to go out into the world, among the ten thousand things, and there they would be. He saw strange symmetry in everything. It felt like stealing.

More recently he had begun to ask why, and, what for. At least to wonder. He sometimes caught himself standing idle and oafish among the fuel tanks and torches, unformed sheet metal, sharp dust crowding everything.

He was standing like that now.

He walked to the big window and tipped it open as far as it would go, breathing in the mild midday air. No. He would not not work.

It would go against the grounds on which he’d married. Family was meant to make things easier. He’d seen other artists, rivals and friends, how they struggled when they were alone. Forgot to eat. Lived in their studios, gave up their homes. Or the homes became the studios. They got too thin or too fat, too everything. They drank and didn’t exercise, except with girls they brought home from other people’s shows, and even then it was only an hour, two tops, before the girls pushed out from under their heavy arms and wriggled away. Drugs and they never knew what day it was. His painter friend Richard stopped taking the medication that kept his hair in his head, either couldn’t remember to, or it conflicted with the drugs he was on already, Xanax and Percocet, Valium, special K. Those he never forgot. Richard had been taking SSRIs for twenty years without a prescription. What he paid for in place of health insurance.

Jack had had it with the benders, had his fill of them by age forty. The sad and unglamorous truth that he knew and people like Richard didn’t was that it’s no good living like the art you’re trying to make. Art is work. It is getting up early and working until you are tired and after, and it is surrounding yourself with things that keep you in a healthy state. People. Life on a schedule. This was why Richard the painter was bald and Jack still had a thick head of hair.

So: He would not not work. Only he couldn’t start any real project until he knew the consensus on his last. That was another thing he’d developed these last few years, a reputation. His reviews were read now, and it made him careful.

There was one job he could do, a commission from a university out west. The director of facilities at the art school there, a woman, had given him almost totally free rein. The director’s name was Jolene, but call her Jolie, and she laughed at simple questions like they were good jokes. That and the syrupy twang of her disembodied voice had him thinking she was fat and flushed easily. He’d told her the name of the piece he was chewing over:
Sculptural Improvisation.
Jolie had laughed. It would be in braised bronze. “That sounds just right,” she’d said. “Just right for the space.”

He’d been getting more commissions, more attention from better galleries, steadily over the last nine or ten years, ever since the controversy, the September series he’d made, also bronze, in 2002. You’d know it. Even outside the art world you’d have seen it. Three pieces. There was the man sitting, bent over and hugging his knees. There was the woman crouched, eyes closed and arms out, hugging an empty space. And there was the other man falling, presumed falling. He was upside down, his head twisted as though just pressed against something. His bronze suit was rippled and rushing, filled with metallic air. They were put out in Bryant Park. By the fourth day, two of the three had been vandalized and had to be cleaned. By the sixth day, they were covered in tarp. Then they were carted away.

Jolie would use terms like
site specific
about
Sculptural Improvisation
’s size and position in the surrounding quad. Jack foresaw university tour guides noting how Shanley’s piece forced the visitor to “
acknowledge the space
.” They would talk about the movement of the thing, even though there wasn’t any. Sometimes with these big pieces he felt he was pissing all over everything, marking territory. Very few people know anything, and the ones who do don’t know much. Students would meet by it, sit on its low bend in springtime and wrap its ends with scarves in winter. Maybe screw on it the night before graduation.

He started the circ saw but kept stopping, thinking he heard his phone. It was impossible to hear, with the machine going and his earplugs in besides. But he swore he heard it, worming its way into his ear, that phantom tone.

The September series turned out, years later, to be how he met the girl, a graduate student at NYU who wanted to interview him. For her thesis, she said. Censorship in art. Probably won’t even be published, she told him. “I can come to you.” She didn’t have a Dictaphone or anything like that, so they recorded the interviews on his computer for him to email to her later. She kept coming, and eventually he stopped sending them. She was the kind that goes around all day with buttons undone and doesn’t know it. She kept coming.

In the studio now, he tried not to think of her, but it was hard, the number of times he’d had her there. He tried at least not to think of her by name.

His first marriage had been fucked from the start, but this time, with Deb, he’d married the right woman. He had.

Marrying Deb, having the kids, all that was right. It was he who’d gone wrong, or the world. He’d felt it these last few years. Something to do with the Internet and jihad and all the natural disasters they’d been having: There was a buzz in the air that made it harder to move forward, a feeling that they were living in a time with no future. And then there had been that girl, in her see-through blouses with the breasts under them, soft and pointed up like curious things. With her full lips and full ass, and how did she stay so full when everything else every day was being depleted, when—

Listen, look:

It’s not like I killed anybody.

That was it. Jack did not really, in the end, believe he’d done anything so wrong. With the girl he’d been careful to make no promises. He’d encouraged her to date. Deb would need time and patience to forgive him, but here, alone with his tools, he could feel he was forgiving himself already.

True, it was hard on the kids, but that was why he wanted to explain to them, explain how much it was not about them. Maybe that was the painful part, that not everything in their parents’ lives could be.

The girl was a channel that let him be a better man at home. Like a soldier, I do on the outside what I need to keep the inside safe. That was the truth of how he felt, something to be kept down and buried deep.

(But what stays buried? Even heavy things have that way about them, of always coming to the surface—
especially
heavy things do—and when it did happen, when it did all come out, that Jack had been sleeping with a woman who was not his wife, not once but many times, a woman who loved him or thought she loved him, everyone knew. Deb, the kids, their grandmother. Even the building knew, because of something Simon said in the elevator, when a neighbor woman from the top floor had asked how is everything, and Simon, who was meant to make his answer about school, Model UN or SAT prep work, had said that his parents were getting divorced and that probably they would be moving.

Actually it was not so bad as that. Worse too, but also not so bad, in that it hadn’t been totally Simon’s fault. Because there, on the elevator bulletin board, where the co-op posted its newsletters and petitions against nearby construction sites, where tenants pinned lost socks from the laundry room, tacked
there,
for all to see, was a piece of paper, slightly creased.

Across the top, in red pen, like a bad mark from a teacher, the words:
PLEASE do NOT drop TRASH into the SHAFT.

Simon didn’t know how the page got wherever it had been, or who had found it, but he knew what it said, approximately. Approximately, he knew the words.

So he hadn’t had to look at it very carefully, not like the mom from 16B, who’d smiled at him before leaning close to the board and squinting to read. She bent further forward in the stretchy pants she always wore, purple and made of something like crushed velvet, gloving her body in a way that embarrassed him.

Simon hung back against the wall, squeezing the elevator rail behind him, and watched as her features crowded together in the middle of her face. Her size and her boy’s haircut made her elfish. He thought of a
Peter Pan
they’d seen one summer on a family trip to the Berkshires.

“God,” she said. “Gosh, that’s horrible. They shouldn’t have that up in here.” She sucked the air between her teeth and tried to share a cringe with him.

Simon stared blankly back and watched her become awkward about the words they’d been confined with, she and this person who was still more boy than man. Her eyes clocked the door, though it was closed, had been closed, the floor already lurching up beneath their feet. “So, you must be all done with classes.”

“Almost.”

“Bet you’re pretty excited.”

“Uh-huh.” Simon paused. “Actually I haven’t thought about it too much, since my parents have been splitting up? I don’t know if you—? No no, it’s totally fine. I mean things got pretty rough but, it is what it is. Better this way.”

As he spoke the neighbor woman did too. “Oh,” she said, “No, I,” “Gosh, I had no,” and “Well.” She spoke to bridge the gaps, to keep him going. She could not have stopped him anyway; Simon could build his own bridges. Or could sink his own ship. Whatever the expression.

“Happens, right? We’ll probably be packing and moving all summer, so but that’s fun. I wasn’t going to go to camp anyway, this year.”

“I’m sorry.” New light fell on her face, light from the hall. The elevator had stopped. They’d reached his floor. “I’m going to write to your mother,” she was saying, the moment that Simon, one leg out the door, lunged at the board, tearing down the page and sending the tack flying.

He watched 16B’s face, all surprise, as the elevator closed. His mother could probably not expect any note.

In the hall he reread the message along the top of the page. The
S
in “SHAFT” was the fancy, curling kind. And “TRASH” was clever, how it could mean two things. Someone had taken the time.

He took the page to his room and closed the door, though it was not yet three—he’d skipped his last two periods—and no one else was home. These were the words that he guessed had embarrassed 16B:
Spread. Tits. Cum.
Also, maybe:
Open. Fingers.

He folded it five times, bent it a sixth, and buried it in his underwear drawer. Hard to say why he’d taken it at all. Not to protect his parents, their privacy. And Simon’s words to 16B shouldn’t have meant much, shouldn’t have reverberated very far. Shouldn’t have but would; he knew they would, enough for their next-door neighbors to hold vigil for signs of cardboard boxes in the stairwell, to wonder where the support beams were, to calculate the dimensions of new living rooms when their two apartments became one.)

In most of them, Jerry and Elaine fell in love. More recently, Elaine and George had been falling in love, and that had been more interesting. Elaine and Kramer would never fall in love. Kramer was not a very well-rounded character. He was not very
dimensional,
as her father would sometimes say about art. Kay’s middle name, Ellen, was very like Elaine’s name, Elaine, a fact that Kay liked about herself.

She didn’t know how it started, only she was sure she didn’t know it was a thing until later, when she found the forums. By then she’d seen all the episodes, which were on every day after school, sometimes two at the same time on different stations, and she’d already written a few herself, though she had recently learned that her formatting was not yet in the standard way. But in the beginning she thought she’d invented it. And in a way, hadn’t she? Invented it to herself. The best was that she could write them anywhere, whenever she was bored, and become not bored.

She wrote them in the back row of math, or she wrote them in the back row of history, or she thought up new stories on the bus ride home with her head bouncing off the window that rattled and her knees pressed against the fake leather seat in front of her, torn in places and patched with tape.

Now in her room after dinner, while her brother played Xbox in the living room and her mother did dishes, Kay wrote ideas in the notebook where homework was supposed to go.

There was a crashing sound in the kitchen, a plate breaking. “Shoot,” Kay heard her mother say.

Kay went to bed without finishing her homework. Deb came, as she had been doing these last few nights, to sit with her daughter in case she cried, which mostly Kay didn’t. She’d been going to bed earlier each night because it was taking her longer to fall asleep.

For her mother Kay had always been the more difficult, difficult because she would not make herself so. She would not speak up as Simon did, and so it was impossible to know what she thought and felt, how much she understood. Deb knew that adults were always underestimating what an eleven-year-old understands, but she was too far from that age to remember how much.

She had tried. “It’s okay,” she’d said that first night after Simon had gone to his room (part of his
prerogative,
those days, to be always the first to leave). Sometimes a married person meets someone new, someone they think is nice, or exciting, and sometimes they’ll make a mistake. Lots of married people, women too, but mostly men, lots of them do this. “But it doesn’t mean anything. And it isn’t about you.”

And Deb left her daughter to sleep, not knowing that she’d said the wrong thing—so easy to do when you are a parent. Where she’d gone wrong, it was just a word, how could she have known. What she should have said: It doesn’t mean
everything.

Instead she’d said that it didn’t mean anything, and Kay had lain awake picking paint blisters off the wall, trying hard to believe that the things her father had done were okay. If this was the world that was waiting for her, it would be a good idea to stick a toe into it now, let her body adapt to such a future, which was cold, not at all a place she wanted to be.

Everyone does these things.

You know what was a lie, then? Television was a lie.
Friends
and
Everybody Loves Raymond,
where married dads didn’t have sex with other women. Maybe they did and just never talked about it. Too obvious to get its own episode.

When she was little—Kay’s stories often began this way, with the old people in the room always shouting, “You’re
still
little”—but when she was little, maybe four years earlier, Deb brought home a DVD of
The Little Mermaid
from a peddler down by Battery Park. Only it wasn’t the version she’d seen before: Here the Ariel was blond, and her name wasn’t Ariel but Marina, and instead of Sebastian the crab there was a dolphin named Fritz. It was the original fairy tale, not Disney but Hans Christian Andersen, and in the end Marina turned to foam, was happy to turn to a clear, fine sea-foam so that she could float or buoy or do whatever sea-foam does near her prince. Kay had cried at the television, “Don’t they know kids are supposed to watch this?” (Adults loved that part of the story, that she’d said that.)

If that was a fairy tale, what was
Seinfeld
? She knew she’d been watching something, not the truth, but not something entirely foreign. Life wasn’t like television, but did it have to be so different?