Читать книгу MacArthur Park - Andrew Durbin - Страница 11

3

I woke up halfway through the third (and final) talk—delivered by a somber Canadian environmental activist-artist, a de-feathered buzzard draped in a large anti-fracking t-shirt, whose latest project involved dropping bags of an invasive, destructive ant species into the ventilation shafts of branches of Deutsche Bank, thereby shutting them down for days at a time—and went out for a cigarette I bummed from the woman sitting next to me. “I’ll come with you,” she whispered.

Outside, she moved to the other end of the barn to call someone. I was drowsy, stoned on the fresh air that rippled in a light breeze through the night. The rear of the main house, where the residents were setting out dishware on the porch, lit the slope of the field. There were about twenty visitors in attendance, maybe twenty residents, too, not counting Helen, and I wondered how she would fit all forty of us around two medium-sized tables. I dragged on the cigarette.

Two residents, a man and a woman, stopped setting the tables and peered inside the kitchen, seemingly to check whether anyone was paying attention to them. So, from my distance, finally, a plot, forming movie-like up the hill, with me its lone audience member about thirty feet away. The man, with sandy blond hair, leaned in to whisper to the woman, who stood across the table from him. Another woman came out and the man pulled back, though slowly, and the three stood together with rigid formality. The new woman pointed into the kitchen, put her hand on the man’s shoulder, and directed him back inside.

What was this? Everything about the project suggested two levels: the first the story Helen told us, and a second, the one that was truly taking place, organizing these elements—the residents, Helen, their collective politics, whatever those politics were—into actual, if cryptic, meaning. As a visitor, I couldn’t quite see what was happening or what this place meant, either to Helen or to its residents, nor whether it did what it said it did. I had no reason to believe otherwise, Simon had nothing but good things to say about the project, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off, like I’d entered a room in which all the furniture had been moved just slightly, leaving behind a psychic imprint of the previous arrangement that suggested things were amiss. I had never been in this room before, but this was not the way it was supposed to look.

I dragged on the cigarette again, finishing it: a plot against what? The woman on the phone came back over with a sympathetic look, and retrieved two more cigarettes from her bag, one for herself and one for me. I took it and borrowed her lighter. Overhead, the stars constellated in bright hieroglyphics, caught in the clear white band of the Milky Way that fell faintly across the dome of the Earth like a sash. The house lights went out, as some of the residents were busy dropping mosquito nets around the porch, and the glow of the table candles set in. The thin sliver of a crescent moon hung in the sky like a tilted, archaic smile.

Inside the barn, the sound of clapping broke the mumble of the speaker. Claps. A pause. More claps. A definite “Thank you, thank you.” Another round of claps, likely because Helen had come to the stage. I put out the second cigarette in the dirt and went back into the barn as the audience members were rising from their folding chairs to leave. Standing before the crowd, Helen tapped the mic, “Excuse me, excuse me.” Everyone quieted or fell to a whisper and there was mostly silence, except for the mute shuffle of feet on hay as people quietly stretched, their attention strained with hunger. “So we’re almost ready for dinner. If you want to make your way to the house, we’ll be serving everyone on the porch. Please do not, and I’m very serious about this,” she added, “do not sit with a friend.”

Simon came over. “Guess we do it alone?”

“You have to sit with me,” I said.

“No, it’ll be more fun if we don’t!” The crowd pushed us out of the barn. “I’ll see you at the bonfire,” he said.

I took a seat between the blond man whom I’d seen talking on the porch (“Hi, I’m Jeff,” he said, taking my hand with both of his) and another woman named Cecilia, who had ignored Helen’s plea and was sitting with her droopy-eyed husband, Ron, his face bloated and red from the sweaty lecture his wife had forced him to sit through. Across from me, the woman who had been whispering to Jeff introduced herself with her full name, Melissa Halpern, hi, and started: “So what brings everyone here?”

I didn’t know what to say besides my name: “Hi, I’m Nick,” and stopped myself there. I wanted the residents to set the tone for the evening given that this was their territory, their “story to tell,” as Helen had put it. I swished my wine glass while Jeff introduced himself to Cecilia.

Taking my silence as her cue, Cecilia, frozen in a look of permanent disdain, recited her full CV, including curatorial work, editorial work, museum work, major-donor-liaison-whatever work, frequent travel to Europe for work, and so on. She told us that she went to Europe a lot, mostly France, where she “has an office in Paris” because she was very interested in the art scene there (she named names, dealers, artists, fairs, something about the board of the Palais de Tokyo), until it seemed she’d run out of work things to tell us about and, when I started to say that I occasionally wrote about art as a way of introducing myself to the conversation, abruptly turned to her slumbering husband and never looked back at the three of us again. “I’m a writer, that’s what brings me here,” I started again, though that wasn’t, in fact, what had brought me to the project. Nevertheless, it gave me a role to play.

“What kind of writer are you?” Marissa asked.

“I’m a poet, but I write other things.”

A poet, ahh, they said. They liked poetry, both read it often, though nothing very new, they assured me. Jeff liked Byron. Marissa said she enjoyed T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore.

“Do you have a book?” Marissa asked. She was grave, a serious person who took other people seriously, with eyes that seemed to record rather than see, as though everything around her were being carefully cataloged for later reference. She pinched her glass at its stem and pushed it back and forth on the table.

“I’m working on it,” I said. In fact, I didn’t have a book, or even much of a manuscript. I had only begun to publish in the last year or so—a few poems, reviews for art magazines, an occasional essay, including one on Hurricane Sandy that I suspected could make for a longer project. Otherwise, the book I was about to describe to these strangers was nothing more than a half-formed idea, but one that might, in this instance, give my visit—and my role in the dinner conversation—some purpose. I was a writer, after all. Shouldn’t I have a book?

“What’s it about?” Jeff asked.

“It’s about the weather?” I’d never said aloud what the subject of this nebulous, unfocused writing project was until then. It—if it could be said to be anything at all—hadn’t taken shape yet, but I supposed that was right, it was about the weather. Or rather, this tenuous idea (“It’s about the weather?”) presented itself before me and made immediate sense as my subject. My poems, essays, and short fictions, the things that I hadn’t published but was grouping together in a single “Untitled book thing” folder on my computer, were about disaster, hurricanes, and storms. In these texts my sense of weather had enlarged to include the turbulent atmosphere of human events, the ways in which we face or avoid crisis, the ways we skid toward crisis, helplessly, together and alone. Crisis, the mom of us all. I didn’t know if it was a book or not, but maybe now it was one, finally.

“Sounds interesting,” she said. “Is it non-fiction?”

I wasn’t sure. “I’m thinking it’s a novel or something.”

“Cool,” Jeff said.

Residents carried out plates of risotto and large wooden bowls of spinach salad dressed with cherry tomatoes from the garden. At this, we dropped the subject of my work. Marissa and Jeff explained that they were both from New York. (Marissa was a journalist and essayist and Jeff was a painter.) They hadn’t known one another before joining Helen’s colony, but they’d become close almost immediately despite the project’s insistence that people not develop “exceptional” friendships or “alliances” that might disrupt the whole, whatever the whole might be—neither answered with any clarity when I asked how friendship might disadvantage the group. We haven’t disrupted anything, they said with a wink. Are you two together? I asked. Of course not, Marissa said. I couldn’t tell if this was some coded language they were letting me in on, and so I attempted code myself and asked what the gossip was, miming scare quotes with my fingers as I said gossip. A potent energy zipped between them, like a toy racecar speeding up on a roundabout track, and whatever combustible desire existed between them was so obvious it was almost insulting to hear them openly deny it, even if I was a stranger.

“Gossip?” Jeff asked.

I thought, how stupid, yes, gossip. Like what’s going on between everyone, who is sleeping with who, anyone leave suddenly in an unexplained rage? Or, more delicately: “Do people ever leave early, can’t handle these particular rules?” I was drinking too much—and too fast.

Marissa shot me a suspicious look, so I pulled back and wished I hadn’t finished my risotto so quickly, leaving me with nothing to do. Jeff distracted himself by opening another bottle of wine before saying, “Not really. Why?”

“Just curious.” Hadn’t they been the ones who’d almost confessed or at least hinted at some secret romance to a stranger? Had I taken my curiosity too far?

What had they been doing on the porch? Or what had they been saying? I wanted to ask, but I hesitated to confess that I had snuck out of the barn before the end of the third lecture.

“I’m interested because, like, I don’t know much about this place.”

“Why’d you come?” Marissa asked.

I considered this—whether we were all still playing a game that I was suddenly losing—and decided to excuse myself with the truth: “My friend Simon knows Helen and he thought I’d be interested in what she was doing up here.”

“Are you thinking of applying for the residency?” Jeff asked. “You can’t be a writer here,” he joked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I could give up writing.”

“Give up your book about the weather,” Jeff said.

“The weather is so amazing here,” Marissa insisted, her tone becoming friendlier. “You would have material for years.”

Two other residents approached our table carrying dirty dishes. The dinner is wrapping up, they told us, can we take your plates? Marissa understood. She grabbed our empty risotto bowls, stacked them, picked up our silverware and left, adding flatly, “I’m on dessert duty.” She followed the others into the open kitchen.

“Is she OK?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, she’s got dessert tonight, which means she’s on the cleaning shift, too. It’s the worst part because you work while everyone gets drunk.”

“Terrible!” I said. He laughed.

Simon sat at the opposite corner of the porch. He was in deep conversation with two nonresidents—an older gay couple who’d been on our tour—whom he’d said he thought were very attractive. They were. Fit and probably in their mid-fifties, both had wind-swept gray hair, commercially beautiful faces and looked like models for men’s shampoo, though it was hot and the air was still, so their perfection was slightly askew in the aftermath of the sweaty afternoon. I was jealous, in a way, though I knew I had no reason to be. But this was why we struggled with one another, even at this early stage of the relationship, and I was largely to blame, since I was animated by both indifference and jealousy, a competition of awful feelings that trended in a narcissistic, downward spiral that moved me away from Simon. Work on that, he told me, when I once told him that I was upset that he had kissed someone else at a party. This was our trouble. Perhaps Simon would fuck or want to fuck these older men because we weren’t boyfriends. What would I do in the mean time? They all laughed together and I turned back to Jeff, who was getting up to help another resident struggling to clear the table. “Be right back,” he said.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the New York Times, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram apps until Helen sat down opposite me with a bottle of wine. “No phones,” she said, refilling my glass. “That’s our rule.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just waiting for …”

“This?” She handed me back my glass. I took it, raised it to hers.

“So you’re a writer,” she said. “Simon told me that you’re working on a book?”

I nodded, “Yes, I guess so.” I tried out my new theme on her: “It’s about the weather.”

“We’ve had so much difficulty with that. What kind of weather are you writing about? Good weather, I hope?”

“All kinds, maybe good. Mostly bad, for now. I just wrote something about Hurricane Sandy for a magazine. I think that’s the start.”

That, the storm, was already a year and a few months back, though it continued to stalk us with the frequent news that the city was not prepared for the next one, or any one for that matter.

Helen’s cheeks were flushed a rosy, drunken pink. Tipsy, she coughed up a “hmm” as though she were preparing to make a speech. She topped off my already-full glass.

“George and I had had a home on the Rockaways before Sandy,” she said. “Did you know that?” I shook my head no. I knew almost nothing about her life. OK, well, she said, let me tell you about my house on the Rockaways.

While she spent most of her time upstate with her residents at the project, Helen had two additional homes in New York, one on the Lower East Side and another in Belle Harbor. She was seldom at either, except in the summer when she would spend occasional weekends at the beach house with a few close friends, a dwindling group of artists who had once been force-labeled East Village Art and were subsequently dismissed by the critical establishment after they’d become passé and before any enterprising grad students could dig them up. They were George’s friends, too, but he rarely—if ever—saw them. “George is never in New York anymore,” Helen said. “He’s famous now,” with a faint pfft. Though they rarely spoke, she used to allow him to stay at either home whenever he was in town unless she was there, of course.

What I knew of George, his bullying, difficult personality seemed his most distinct trait, and the one that had cost him the most friends and institutional support. In the absence of much interest from the contemporary art world after the late nineties, he’d decamped to France to bum around their patron system. In Paris, he worked out of his apartment in the ninth arrondissement, where he kept a large studio on the ground floor of his building, making occasional work for his American and French galleries, though his exhibitions were less and less frequent on this side of the Atlantic. “He never goes out,” Helen said, “which nobody minds because he’s an asshole.” She was ready to talk. He was a monk in an order of one. Few appreciated his pieties, though many admired his dense, research-heavy art and he remained a respected antique, someone whose death would likely prompt a major reevaluation of a body of work most had taken for granted or simply forgotten about. Being alive, puttering about western Europe, would provoke no such reconsideration. Still, George was smart, knew how to work obscurity to his quiet advantage, and his work conveyed this genius with an unapologetic charisma unique to male artists who have never been told a firm no.

“How do people get together?” Helen asked, tacking on a dramatic sigh to her odd rhetorical question. I considered my wine.

Despite their years of agreed-upon silence, Helen still loved him, sort of, she said, and she thought fondly of her time with him. But their relationship, beginning when he was her professor at RISD, eventually “stopped making sense.” George liked Paris. Helen New York. George did not want a regular rotation of residents at the project. Helen did. George preferred to summer in Sainte-Maxime, a French resort town. She preferred upstate. She hinted at infidelity. I guessed George liked to sleep with young girls, picking them up at the beach while they lounged topless on the white sand. A charming, befuddled man, I bet that he had a certain academic attitude that somehow construed itself into sex appeal, one that made it easy for him to find undergraduate girls to bring to the hotel room while Helen had whiskey on the resort veranda and practiced her French with sleepy locals.

Once, I imagined, on their final vacation together, she came back to the room and found him with two sixteen-year-olds. Refusing the invitation to a fight, this very last one, she packed her things without saying a word while George shouted at her because this was her fault, her stupid jealousy, very quaint, Helen, very quaint of you. She waved him off, idiot that he was, and left for a nearby hotel, a blue cube deposited in the green hills outside this town on the Med, and a tabernacle to the lost and dispossessed, where one goes when one is starring in a movie about the fuck-up of a lifetime. She did not want to cry but she did. She scolded herself in the room for coming with him to France when she had known their marriage was ending, for trying to restore whatever had been between them, for thinking that France would remedy anything. She hated France, really. But France is easy to hate. She was terrible at French, even after a year of private lessons. He didn’t ask her to stay when she called the next morning to tell him she was going back to New York early.

She went over the course of these events in her head. On the veranda, a waiter had mentioned to her, cryptically, “Madame, I believe your husband has been upstairs for some time.” What a very odd thing to say. She hadn’t understood so she went up to her room on an impulse, what she later realized was the lizard part of her brain issuing its animal warning of betrayal in the den. Ah. How long had the waiter known, how many girls had he seen accompanying George to their room while she read Middlemarch in the open air, before he felt some vague moral responsibility to nudge her to face facts? I’ll keep upstate, at least, she assured herself. She rubbed her eyes until her vision blurred, then stepped in the shower for forty-five minutes while the hot water ran cold.

George would never have the energy to maintain the nascent colony. In their divorce settlement, he argued for nothing, which was itself a painful gesture, since it conveyed to her that there was nothing from their life that he wanted to keep.

Years later, Helen told me, Sandy carried away the beach house and, with it, a substantial archive of her works, including many of the project’s early written materials and some financial papers related to the deed on the project’s land. She also lost her diaries from the second half of the nineties along with letters that detailed her early relationship with George. (Her eighties notebooks were safely upstate, in a box in the basement marked “Unpublished journals 1978–1989.”) In many ways Sandy erased her—and ever since she’d felt like she was etching herself back into the picture. A month after the storm, an upstate newsletter ran an article about her loss. They published a photograph of Helen at the site of the ruins, taken by her neighbor a few days after the storm had passed, standing in a splintered pile of broken furniture. In the rubble, she recognized nothing of her past life. The fragmentary parts of what had been hers were foreign to her. In the image, gray clouds hang low over the blasted coast. She told the reporter she would not rebuild and she didn’t.

“We were stupid not to think that would happen, to be honest,” she said. She poured us both another glass. “I was here, freaking out, when I saw what was happening downstate.”

Her eyes darted this way and that as she recalled the galloping fear she felt as she lay prostrate on her bedroom floor upstate. If she was lying or exaggerating about something, which she might have been since none of this had come up in my admittedly cursory research of her, her home and all that, her voice quivering at moments with a distinctly false note, did she mind its easy verifiability? Did it matter? Crisis gives us shape, the contours of sympathetic form, whether we call it forth or not, whether or not it happened to us as we claim—or remember—it did. I decided not to tell her about my own experience in the storm, which amounted to nothing more than that of a casual, removed observer, standing safely from afar, my face briefly lit in the white fire of the power-plant explosion. Was that even true—or had my mind added that detail later, to place myself among accountable things since I was otherwise left in the abstract space of someone else’s apartment, just at the edge of disaster? I could have said anything about my past. It seemed, in any case, that one condition of the mediated present was not simply disaster itself and its immediate and obvious effect on a given reality, measurable in loss of life, loss of capital, loss of property, but the peripheral warp in the communications systems that had become central to our lives: stray tweets, hashtags, Facebook posts, news alerts, text messages, all of it evidence that something is happening, something often on the edge, in some close or far elsewhere, whether you are “in it” or not. A jittery, closed-circuit paranoia of an “event,” where it remains unclear who’s there, and whether it is even happening as it is said to be happening, given the diffuse authority of the speakers, the tellers of disaster. Helen was “in it” as I was “in it,” even if our relationship to “in” differed so substantially, both between us and between others and us. I was “in” the storm, but in a luxury apartment. “In” being a function of privilege, one’s “in” never quite resembles another’s, and I did not trust Helen’s description of hers—as I did not trust my own. She was elsewhere, as I was elsewhere, and this gave the lie to our shaky stories.

Whatever her politics, whatever her responsibility to her community, she seemed, to me, driven by untruths.

Last month, in June, she had spent two weeks at Sainte-Maxime against her better judgment to work on a memoir about her early years and the founding of the project. She told me it would be her story of this place. “There are many stories of this place, as there are for any place, but mine will concern the land, which I’ve been researching for years, including the Irish family that first purchased the property in the late 1870s.” She hadn’t told George she was going to France, but part of her expected she’d run into him on the beach. Never happened. While she was once again practicing French on the veranda at the hotel of her betrayal, he was in Bern, installing a show at the Kunsthalle there. He emailed her an invitation to the opening and the dinner with an offer to pay for her flight to Switzerland, but she didn’t check her inbox until the day after the show opened. She would have gone.

“George is a sweet man and I love him dearly but I don’t want to see him again.” Around us, the candlelight rippled as the residents rushed to clear away the remaining dishes for bowls of homemade vanilla ice cream, coffee, and more bottles of wine.

“I hope you like ice cream,” Helen said.

“I do.”

“So tell me about your book. How far along are you?”

After her story, I couldn’t imagine how I would explain what I was writing since I had no idea what it was yet. “Not very. I have a few chapters,” I lied.

“Are you enjoying it? It’s hard writing a book, as I’m learning.”

“It’s OK.” Marissa placed a small bowl of ice cream in front of Helen and me, and lingered a few seconds, as if to eavesdrop on our conversation. There was nothing to hear. Helen wanted to know more but I told her I didn’t have much, if anything, to report. “I’m far from done,” I explained.

Simon came over and said hello to Helen as she rose to discuss the project’s evening plans with Marissa. “I’ll let you two catch up,” she said. To me: “But let’s talk at the bonfire. I want to hear more about this book of yours.” She put her hand on Marissa’s back and steered her into the kitchen, where together they waved everyone around them to organize the cleanup.