There Must Be Some Mistake (5 page)

MY INCARCERATION
at Chantal's ended shortly, and I returned to Forgetful Bay, where Chantal and I still saw a fair amount of each other. We were at my condo one afternoon when she noted that I had my ex-wife's things in one of the bedrooms, which she found odd years after the divorce.

“It's a den,” I said. “She jammed it in there for storage. I never said anything about it.”

Chantal said, “I see,” and changed the subject. “So when did you turn into an artist? You always want to be an artist?”

“Everybody wants to be an artist,” I said. “My brother said that.”

“Not really,” she said. “I wanted to be a swimming actress, like Esther Williams. Sit around poolside in Hawaii and such.”

“There's an art to that,” I said.

I explained that I had started painting in my twenties, in Houston, showing in local galleries. It was an accident, really. I got tired of architecture school, and it seemed you could catch up on art quick reading the magazines, so I did that ceaselessly and got way too much attention for my trouble—group shows, one-man shows, invitations to museum shows. “I won a few prizes at regional shows—Tulsa, Oklahoma City—and I was always in the art section of the newspapers in pieces about Houston art. I'd be in there promoting some exhibition. I was young. It was fun. There I'd be at an automobile graveyard or in a gallery alongside a ten-foot sculpture of stacked-up tubes from huge truck tires.”

“Your sculpture?” she said.

“Uh-huh. Tire tubes were an important part of my work. Along with tape on walls, dirt on the floor, and so on.”

“And cars, too, no doubt,” she said.

I told her I made up stuff about my pictures being a demonstration of respect for cowardice, something I said had afflicted me since childhood, and I started writing on the paintings about the life of a coward. “It was interesting. Something people hadn't done too much back then, defining yourself in negative ways. So that was the story. It was maybe half true.”

“My daughter's an artist,” Chantal said.

She'd told me about her daughter who was a crazy child, the kind you can't control but can't give up on, either. A terror who was 90 percent hardship. “I want to hear more about her,” I said.

She shook her head. “Sometime, some other time.”

“Whenever,” I said.

“You're not a big listener, Wallace,” she said. “I miss her, though, but it's not like every day. I remember her when she was a pleasant kid. She was funny. She liked me.”

“Probably still does,” I said.

“Probably still missing,” Chantal said. “Like always.”

She went silent then, and I didn't know what to do, ask her questions or let it alone. I decided to let it go, so we sat up in bed and watched TV, and pretty soon she had the sound low and the closed captions on, and when I looked over, her eyes were shut down.

I stared at the screen and considered how much of a coward I had been, as a child, as a teen, as a young man, and what it meant to be a coward, how it fit into adult life. I didn't have answers and I didn't care that much anymore, anyway, though it had been confounding at the time. It was more than just made up, and I was surprised that it had come up with Chantal so readily. I had not always been intrigued by cowardice. As a kid a coward was the worst thing you could be. Kids taunted one another about it, like it was the measure of something. I was never brave or much interested in bravery, and I'd always weaseled out of every confrontation I could, which made good sense to me then. I had a few fights as a kid, but only when my imagination failed me and I couldn't beg or explain my way out. I didn't see the percentage in fighting, at least that's what I told myself, and maybe that was the problem. I mean, you knew a fight was going to be over quick, each fighter would cause some damage, usually not a lot, and most of the time nothing else would come of it. We lived in the suburbs; we weren't in gang country or anything. There were girls to impress, reputations to build, but that could be done other ways, so where was the payoff? Anyway, that was my interest in cowardice. My memories were littered with examples of little things that didn't amount to much but always had something in common, a discomfort with throwing and taking punches, fear of being caught doing something that would bring punishment. I was afraid of my teachers catching me without the homework, girls catching me doing stuff that was uncool. I guess it was a little cyclone of fear, my adolescence. I navigated grade school and high school using a battery of poses. I was the profoundly sorry offender, the guy who would apologize for anything, whether or not an apology was warranted. I could also do the puffed-up victim who seemed wild with barely contained rage, but that one was risky, even if it was a good setup for the elaborate apology if rage wasn't working. Sometimes I was a devil-may-care guy, or a deliverer of grace, or a font of good sense and kindness, or a temple of reason. All these were postures.

This coward angle was an art game, an idea about which I talked with other artists, gallery owners, newspaper art critics. It worked for me.

After a time I started taking the project seriously myself, thinking that I might begin a set of paintings as memoir, with scrawled notes about my father, who was not a coward but a bully, a small man physically but wickedly smart, with a nasty mouth on him, who had used wit and something like charm to find a wife and start a career as a renegade architect, very early setting himself apart as a modernist when modernism was not yet in middle age, and who built a successful practice outwitting and out-arguing more conventional men, until his practice of demanding perfection on the building site in matters of dubious importance earned him a reputation as a foolish pedant whose demands on tradesmen so often cost them money that in the end they would not bid his jobs. This left him with no one to build his remarkably modern designs—a flaw in the program, architecturally speaking.

At home my father was distant, busy, a clumsy parent who was at once demanding and unforgiving. For my older brother Raleigh, our father was a terrifying great figure on a hill, an oracle, a hander-down of tablets on which were written the unwritten rules by which we lived. A horrible tyrant. For the later child the father was less a threatening figure than an annoying one, always requiring work when play was wanted, always starting a project on a precious Saturday, always ranting in a minor key about the ignorance of the fools he had to contend with, this last becoming a well-worked shtick both of us children learned and which served us in later life, along with sci-fi X-ray eyes and the power of contempt not quite expressed.

As a kid in the Catholic grade schools, I was already adept at posing as the offended, the embarrassed, the wielder of ridicule, the victim of misunderstanding. But when I actually got into a fistfight with a guy named Michael Bono on the playground, got him eventually into a headlock, I couldn't bear to throw him into a convenient truck-sized hole filled with rainwater for fear that he would report to the nuns that I had started the ruckus by flipping him off. The damage from such a report quickly calculated as more profound than fighting only to a draw, I threw him not into the hole but to the soft dry grass alongside the hole, just as Sister Mary Grace arrived on the scene.

“It's a good thing you did not throw him into that water, Wallace,” the nun said.

In fifth grade I got into an argument with a teacher who detained me after the final bell. She threw an eraser at me. I picked it up and threw it back at her. This was the error of bravado, for she embellished her report somewhat, adding that I had called her a “cocksucking slut,” which I had not called her. And yet this became the heart of the matter in the eyes of the nuns who streamed out of the convent like so many ants the better to look me over and tsk and tsk and click their little black beads. Quite naturally, the nuns believed the teacher, and thus I received the stereotypical Catholic-school punishment of being placed in the convent, in solitary but air-conditioned confinement, in a dark room off the convent entrance, alone from eight-thirty in the morning until three in the afternoon every day for six weeks.

“Ah-ha!” Chantal said when she heard this. “All is revealed.”

“My assignments given to me each morning,” I said. “My parents accepted my guilt as fact, though I told them otherwise.”

“Brutal reality,” she said.

“Years later I made a tentative entrance into the world of young women,” I said. “Marked by playful grabbings in the pool, gropings in the dark garage, until—”

“Yes?” she said.

“Until at long last, in high school I first found home with a putatively promiscuous Italian girl from Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls high school of poor repute near the railroad station downtown. At the conclusion of a sexual act which found me so busy retracting myself from the scene of the crime that when the moment of moments arrived I whistled Dixie into the green plaid of her school uniform, my first partner, the sweet Valerie d'Angelo, berated me for an extremely safe but somewhat unsatisfying experience. I swore to her that this was intelligent design, not anxiety.”

“That's a big hello,” Chantal said. “Absolutely.”

Chantal stayed over that night, sleeping on top of the bedspread fully dressed, with a beach towel as a blanket. That's the way she rolled, she told me the next morning when I commented on it. I was up at seven with her, having slept all of two hours by that time. We had coffee on the deck.

“I'm sorry I faded on you,” she said. “It's not that I'm not interested, I get tired early.”

“Not a problem,” I said.

“Where's your daughter? I thought she came to see you. Didn't you tell me that?”

“She's in Houston, in the Heights someplace. I've never been there. I should go.”

“You should,” Chantal said. “Is she studying architecture?”

“Yes, but it's early yet,” I said. “It's an odd course of study. Not much in the way of the liberal arts. I did almost four years and could not go on.”

“You were at Houston?”

“I was at Washington University, Saint Louis, for the first year, but that summer I met this girl in Houston, and by the end of the summer I couldn't imagine living without her. I transferred.”

“'Twas ever thus,” Chantal said. “But you continued with the architecture.”

“I did. Until the fourth year, when my professor thought it would be good for his students to do a parking garage—real world and all that. By that time I was more interested in art, so instead of designing a parking garage for six weeks, I prepared a multimedia presentation, a barrage of light, sound, image, a noisy catastrophe about sensory overload. Multimedia presentations in architectural school were decorous, quiet, and sulky, a single screen, stately transforming images, moving music, evocative shadows—the presentation of a mood being sought in the design. I had seen some good ones, art-house lyrical, but that wasn't my idea.”

“You who went your own way.”

“I wasn't much good at art-house lyrical. I was OK, not great, at ordinary drawing and painting. I mean, I could do that Chuck Close thing with the grid over a photo, where there are hundreds of little squares and if you get them approximately right, then your overall picture looks approximately right, but it took forever and what was the point?”

“Renaissance,” she said. “Landscapes, the wonder of perspective.”

“Yeah, and I thought those guys had great eyes.”

“They had those, too. Didn't you listen to the museum recordings they give you?” she said.

“I didn't,” I said.

“Didn't you read that Janson textbook, whatever it was?”

“I did not. Weighed too much.”

“Cute. You weren't a figurative painter anyway, were you?”

“Too slow,” I said. “When I started making paintings they were after some old pictures by Lester Johnson, big abstract heads, sloppy outlines in black, slapped on five-foot squares of Masonite. Day to day I played the role, dressed like painters whose pictures I'd seen—paint-spattered shoes, paint-dribbled shirts, paint-stained hands.”

“A perfect replica,” she said.

“So anyway, I did this multimedia deal with sounds—natural stuff, industrial sounds, jazz, sound collage, Steve Reich, Art Ensemble, Cage and Feldman, Ayler, Sun Ra, factory sounds, found sounds. I mixed a long piece with radio and television clips, the moon landing, assassinations, Cronkite, Wallenda falling, Elvis dying,
Rocky Horror,
Nixon in the helicopter door, and vocalizations of great beauty. Coupled with hundreds of slides of similarly miscellaneous origin, and that was it. I had the professor sit in the center of the classroom, shot the slides and film right at him from the corners, blasted him with the sound.”

“Bet he loved that,” Chantal said.

“He did not. The show lasted forty minutes. When it was done he left without a word. Days later I learned that he'd flunked me and I was out of the School of Architecture.”

“Ta-da!” she said brightly. “Achieving a goal. The better to become a fine artist.”

“I took a year of classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, and thereafter begged the university to let me into the art department, which was chaired by a delicate-handed older German still-life painter whose name was Schröder, a painter whose attitude toward contemporary art was something less than welcoming.”

“The looming shadow of a German hand.”

“OK,” I said. “I'll quit. Thus ends ‘The Story of Me.' Let's go somewhere, do something.” I got up, headed for the door. “I think I need to go to the store. Target. You ready?”

“Way too early,” she said. “It's a thrill a minute here. What could be as fun as this? C'mon. There you were, on the threshold of a great career. Very much of the moment, artwise, up to here with art magazines, art ideas, and the lengthy exposition of same that monthly graced the pages of the then-triumphant art journals.”