Читать книгу MacArthur Park - Andrew Durbin - Страница 9

1

The room where we gathered was pink. Or the first dusk light that filled the room was pink and everything in it—a table, walls of books, several handsomely framed antique maps of New York State, even the members of “the project,” each tottering in their expressive blankness and dressed in uniformed shirts and shorts of white linen—was bathed in a soft pinkness. We were late. Simon, my sort-of boyfriend, and I had pulled into the small New York town at the base of the hill, near where the project lived, about half an hour after we were due. We parked the car in the town’s small, crowded municipal lot and followed hand-painted signs to a path dimpled with orange salamanders that wound into a thick stretch of trees, and continued for about quarter mile up, into a clearing at the hilltop. There, the steel face of the central building of this project—an imposing, Brutalist cube, designed by the artists Helen Hunley Wright and George Wright in the early 1990s—stopped us at the end of the path. It stood in defiance of its otherwise rustic surroundings, glinting meanly at dusk.

The building was divided into three distinct parts, with each section built of a different material (brick, steel, and wood) that formed a capital T-shape. The back of the house opened onto a porch elevated by stilts fifteen or so feet off the ground with a generous view of a weedy field that ran down to the Delaware River between the hydraulically fractured counties of Pennsylvania and the untouched ones of New York, and where a small number of dumpy cottages lurched in the grass for the residents of this artists’ colony. In summer the field was thick with gnats.

Inside, we joined the other guests and residents in the living room, where Helen was midway through her introductory remarks, after which she welcomed us into her large kitchen that opened onto the porch. The dinner, Helen explained to all of us who were gathered around her, would be held here, under mosquito nets in the prettiest evening you’ll find outside of the city. “What a story this place will tell,” she said.

Near an array of copper pans that hung from the back wall, an old astrological chart of the Sun and its nine planets (including Pluto), each celestial body’s orbit traced in a dotted line, distracted me from what Helen was saying. In it, the Earth was a grim, faintly blue ball on yellowed paper, the Moon nothing more than a small thumbprint-sized smudge to the upper right of our sphere. Helen was saying something about how happy she was to have us in her home. Also, that this place, whatever this place was, was a different kind of art community.

I want to show you that. To Simon and me: Good evening, boys. And hello.

She spoke with the rehearsed confidence of someone who knew a routine that would never change. Guests, pink light, sunset. She was smaller in person than she appeared in the images of her that I had found online, though her features were kinder, less hardened than in the black-and-white photographs that were taken during her East Village years two decades ago, when she lived on east 11th Street and “knew people,” mostly people who were now dead. Her hair—speared by two silver sticks—jiggled in a tidy, gray bun at the top of her head as she talked about what she and her project did. Clapping her hands together, she outlined for us, in brief, the rich history of what she called the “project” or the “community,” which was not “her” project or “her” community, she clarified, but one that belonged to many, “so many.” Founded in 1992 with her ex-husband, the artist George Wright, the project has provided artists, writers, and musicians with a space to broaden their practice beyond the art studio or the writing desk for some twenty years: instead, they farm, harvest crops, churn butter, build. She explained, in slightly dated artspeak, how the artists at the project work with each other and the materials of the earth in “open space” rather than the studio, the gallery, the museum. She talked about moving beyond “normative” art production, with a requisite, if odd, reference to Bourriaud. Then she concluded this speech with a smile, wide as the view behind her: “And we are so glad you’re here. So. Let’s have a quick tour while there’s still some light.”

We toured, trekked across the campus, trooped behind her through the gnat clouds, and trudged toward cabins and workshops and farming sites and other makeshift structures that evinced various green initiatives. Ever a host, she made small talk with each of us, including me:

Why are you here? Who do you know? Are you interested in applying to work with us? How long have you and Simon been friends?

“Oh not long, six months.” Helen wore all white, too, though her uniform differed in kind from her monkish residents in that it appeared to be a custom if incredible zoot suit, the ankles discolored with mud. No, I didn’t plan to apply.

Presenting the project’s well, she told us that the community had taken an active, let’s even say aggressive, stance against fracking. They organized and attended protests on both sides of the state border. In Pennsylvania, it was legal; in New York, not—and they hoped to keep it that way. They wrote and distributed pamphlets about climate change, the problems with natural gas, and the benefits of green-energy efficiency. These efforts had been met with both frustration and success. Yoko Ono tweeted her support. The Governor of Pennsylvania did not. She snapped her fingers when she made a point about water rights. She liked to make points, and spoke with the self-assurance of someone who had always made points, good points, even if the meaningful context of peers in which making such good points mattered had long ago dissolved around her into a force field of nodding residents. Her charm, buoyed by her enthusiasm for an issue I felt strongly about myself, lulled me into an appreciation for the thoughtfulness with which she addressed her relationship to the land, her knowledge of the composition of the soil that enabled them to grow the modest crops they did, her attention to the health of that crop yield, her earnest love of people, all people, the people here, the people there, the people who did things, the people who did nothing at all, such that I didn’t question her or her project’s authenticity—or integrity. Doing this, living on a mountain somewhere in New York’s woodsy upstate, seemed like the right move, if not for me, then at least for these activist-artists who had long wearied of the studio and lack of sales.

“This is great,” I whispered to Simon, though I couldn’t say what it was that I found so great: only that Helen, play acting the fearless leader, made a good case for paying attention to her and her cottony crowd. He gave me a look of really? “It’s funny. I don’t know about great, though,” he said. As he’d made clear in the car ride over, he had misgivings about the project, but after years of visiting the mountain for dinner parties, concerts, performances, and bonfires, he thought of Helen as a friend, as his neighbor, and as an important part of his stretch of the state, even if she remained to him, this boy who spent most of his time in the city, a rural curiosity.

Tiny field of legumes after tiny field of corn, “But it is hard to imagine the appeal of this to artists, really,” I admitted to him.

“Sort of. ‘Relational aesthetics,’ is what they call it.”

“So crazy that she just … That that’s it.” The term and its aesthetic prerogatives—art composed out of (and into) public social relations rather than the privacy of the white cube—had long since fallen out of fashion, at least in New York. And, in any case, I didn’t think anyone had ever used that term with much seriousness, except for the critic who coined it.

“I know.”

He nodded to Helen, who was coming over to us to give Simon a hug, hi, sweetie. He introduced me again: “You know Nick’s a writer,” he said. “He writes about art.”

She smiled. “Do I know your work?”

“I don’t think so.” I was too obscure, responsible for only a few reviews here and there, and nothing substantial.

“Who do you write for?” she asked, with a stiff smile.

“Oh, just some art magazines. Frieze. Artforum.”

“Well, now,” she said. “Tell me about it.” In fact, I had been trying to write an essay about the sculptor Greer Lankton, who, based on some cursory research into Helen that I’d done on the ride over, I suspected she had known in the eighties since they showed at the same gallery, Civilian Warfare. Lankton, who died in 1996, was best known for her strange doll-like sculptures of celebrities and downtown personalities. They were arresting in photographs but I had yet to see any in person since they had fallen into relative obscurity.

I jumped in: “You showed at Civilian Warfare … Did you know Greer Lankton?” I asked. “I’m actually writing about her work. Or at least trying to.”

“I did, I did. That’s so wonderful! Greer was a great artist,” she said, walking us down the field toward what would be the last part of the tour, a visit to a large compost heap surrounded by chicken-wire fence. “One of the best artists I ever met, someone who really focused, loved what she did.” She ticked off a few biographical lines about Lankton: that she had lived with the photographer Nan Goldin, had struggled to sell her work (and relied on David Wojnarowicz to do so early on in her career), her long-term relationship with her partner Paul, who now manages her estate. I’d read about most of this before, but Helen added new, personal weight to Lankton’s story. They were facts, facts that didn’t just come from the few books or essays I’d tracked down that mention her, but were spoken by a person who had known her, who had been her friend and who had had dinner with her, gone to her openings. But she offered little else: “Did you know her in the nineties?” I asked.

“I didn’t, no.”

The pink light, waning into the steady, dark blue of night, consumed us. Simon grinned as I got hooked on Helen’s line. “You going to move here?” he asked as we arrived at the Big Compost. I elbowed him. With her back to the heap, Helen told us that the humid pile behind her was the most essential part of the entire project, though she didn’t clarify quite how so, except that it provided both a literal site of recycling and a kind of metaphor for life on the mountain. I watched Simon as he listened intently, this pretty, half-French (through his mother), EU passport-carrying, though thoroughly Americanized boy with black curly hair, someone I didn’t really know all that well in the end, someone whom I’d met at a party, though now we were sleeping together fairly regularly and so we did sort of know one another, at least in the sense that we knew one another’s desires, but was that enough to be up here, visiting him—for the first time—at his parents’ upstate house? It felt serious. Was serious. I ran my eyes up and down him while Helen went on about rotten vegetables decomposing in un-fracked earth. Life eats itself up. The lumpy mound was flecked with bits of food, plants, much of it smeared among the piles of dirt shot through with grass and weeds, like streaked sprinkles baked into a cupcake. I turned away from Simon to stare at it. “Without this we’re nothing,” she said. She got animated as she gestured toward it, Mickey conducting the mops. Sure we got it.

That weekend, Simon and I had gone up to his parents’ place in Phoenicia with two of his closest friends, Zachary and Julia. In the car, we rarely strayed from the surface of our lives, and our conversation dwelled on the easy politics of pop and film. Julia liked Taylor Swift. Zachary did not. Julia felt Taylor’s celebrity was premised on the emptiness of white feminism, which was funny to her. Zachary didn’t understand. I nodded along in nervous agreement with both, unsure what position to stake among them (Simon, who was driving with strained focus on the road, had no opinion); I still didn’t know the three of them very well. Or they didn’t know me. To break the ice over lunch, Simon suggested we go to Helen’s place. “What is that?” Zachary said.

“It’s an artist’s residency.” Seeing Zachary’s drawn face, “But different. They’re having a dinner tonight that we’re invited to. It’s run by this woman, Helen Hunley Wright. She started it with her husband, George. He’s an artist.” He turned to me: “Do you know his work?”

“Sort of,” I said, though I didn’t know much at all, only that he was famous, and that his practice consisted mostly of complex installations: a series of tar-coated pinwheel-like structures on which he hung also-tarred objects so mangled in their production as to be unrecognizable, though occasionally they took the form of animals (cats, crows, a pig split in half); elegant arrangements of reproductions of furniture from the colonial period; excavated trees he deposited in the gallery; cabinets of organic detritus he’d collected on a beach in the South of France—all of it intelligently defended in press releases and in articles written by critic friends. Nineties stuff. He was an artist whose subject was “the environment.” I’d never heard of Helen.

“Anyway, they have these lecture nights over the summer. It’s like $30 and it comes with a meal and a party afterward. You can even stay over, if there’s room, so it might be fun. Cute boys, Zachary.” It wasn’t that Simon was interested in art—in the city, he had nothing to do with it except at those moments, usually in nightlife, when it intersected with parties and his own vaguely defined career as a stylist—but, up here, there was seldom anything to do. Helen’s was the closest to fun in the area, and the only place that attracted anyone in their mid- to late twenties.

Zachary rolled his eyes. “We’d rather go swimming,” he said, and so he and Julia did, about twenty miles up the road in a cold river near an abandoned lodge for summering Jewish families in the mid-century. Julia had wanted to go with us, she told me upstairs after lunch while we unpacked, but she’d agreed to accompany Zachary to ease the burden that his foul mood would’ve otherwise placed on Simon if he’d been dragged to Helen’s. “Are you sure?” I asked.

She lied: “Yes, of course.”

“Get ready, Nick,” Simon called from downstairs, where he and Zachary were putting away the dishes.

“Wish you would,” I said to Julia, whom I wanted to get to know better.

“Next time. You and Simon will have fun.”

Are you sure? “It’s really fine.” I conceded: she would go to the river.

Julia had been to Helen’s before, anyway, and had loved it. “What?” Zachary said when she said she’d visited in the past and even liked it, characteristically envious that she and Simon had gone and done a thing without him. “Well, I never get invited to anything, so that’s no surprise, I guess,” Zachary said before pulling away from the remaining dishes he was washing to fume upstairs, bitter until Julia escorted him out of the house for their swim. His jealousy was absurd, even banal, and he knew we knew that, which made him firmer in his belief that he had to feel this way about it. This, I had learned, was what he always did. He was captivated by his own emotional impermanence, that he entered and left the room as present as smoke unless he focused himself, usually through the prism of his sexual desire, long enough to condense into simpering human form. What little enthusiasm he could ever muster for himself or others was usually short-lived, and disappeared as he inevitably devolved back into a kind of ongoing self-loathing. He was, moreover, a frequent liar, someone who loved to lie, even if the lie was unnecessary: “I used to sleep with him,” Zachary told me once about someone on tv. Julia shook her head and mouthed No because no.

Julia too seemed ever poised to vanish before us, as if the lines that distinguished her from the world were fading. She was lanky, with long black hair that framed her pale, triangular face, and she often appeared distant, even indifferent to the conversation around her, though this remove lent her a certain liquidity, in speech and movement, like that of an octopus quietly spilling across the sand as it jettisons itself forward, tentacles and voluminous head billowing in the current. In this, she was ever the escapist—quite literally, sometimes, as at night she was always the first to leave the bar, disappearing before saying goodbye to any of us. Likewise she was stone quiet most of the time, giving her the necessary space for thoughtfulness (contra Zachary’s usual, talky rush to poor judgment) when she expressed an opinion, and both Zachary and Simon hung dutifully on her every word.

Her mother had apparently survived a small plane crash in Canada early on in her pregnancy, and the shock of their tandem survival revised Julia’s family into tentative life, as if they lived only by chance. Three years ago, her father went out the windshield on a freeway in Michigan. Bad luck follows some with remarkable persistence, and it did so with Julia, all the way to her would-be love life, which she skirted through a devotion to Simon. They spent much of their time together. (She had boyfriends, though she committed to none with the same intensity as she did to her friendship with Simon.) He kept her as his closest confidant, but she read this intimacy as some more fundamental connection, one above friendship—and perhaps even romance, though she was no fool and knew that he would never “fall for her” (and I don’t think she ever fell for him either). Rather, she seemed to view their friendship as a sibling-like alliance, truer than one conditioned by sex and desire. Love of Simon purified her and, in a way, her love purified him. They believed, foremost, in one another. For Simon, we all fell into a disorganized line that began with her, then Zachary, and then me, though my place was peculiar since I was the one who was sleeping with him. I was no threat to her, or at least not in a way that led her to any animosity toward me, and we got along well.

She wanted to become a writer, did write, or at least was making various much-discussed attempts to do so. What do you want to write about? I asked. “My friends.” I understood: but what do your friends look like in fiction? She wasn’t sure what I meant by the question. “I’ll send you a story sometime,” she said.

I was curious so I pushed her to do so since I imagined she might possess, in her fiction about her friends, a skeleton key to Simon. She stalled for months, but eventually sent me the draft of a novel that began: “Our friendship was over.” Whoever it was that she included in this “our” was not entirely clear, though the primary character besides the narrator seemed to be based on Simon, and the book wobbled along a narrative arc that carried him from café life in New York to South Carolina, where the narrator retreated to a small coastal town for some unclear reason. She had never been to South Carolina whereas I had, since I was from North Carolina, and when I pressed her on why she had chosen to write (unconvincingly) about the low country, she balked and said, “Let’s talk about the ending instead.” It concluded abruptly, with the Simon character appropriating a small fishing boat that he took out into a storm in a quasi-suicide attempt, though what would become of the character was unclear. Before that, not much happened, which didn’t bother me as a reader, though the flicker of events that composed the book never achieved a clear picture. Perhaps that wasn’t what she wanted. She asked me for my thoughts, but we never got around to talking about them. Her prose was flinty, coldly pretty, and smart.

Zachary and Julia were, in a sense, two runaways. Both refused their pasts and rarely discussed what their previous lives, the ones before New York, had been like. Zachary was dopey, though he was from an “upper middle-class Republican” family in New Hampshire, people who were “big on Romney” in the 2012 election, so I always wondered how lost he could be given his northeastern pedigree and the financial security his “big on Romney” parents provided him. Simon, who knew much more about them than I did, wrote off their reluctance to divulge anything personal to me as nervous insecurity.

“They don’t know you yet,” he said. “Let them get to know you.”

Simon was “wealthy-ish,” his word, but he minded that people suspected that he was well-off, as I had when we first met, and he often downplayed his background by constantly mocking “rich taste,” which was, at bottom, his taste. Despite assurances that he was like everyone else who was “struggling,” he never managed to lose his prim, boarding-school manners nor his upright and boyish tone, which he often deployed with me early on in our relationship. This moneyed affect irked me, the performance of a class difference between us that seemed to cryptically matter to him. (My parents were what passed for working-class in the postindustrial south, my mother a school teacher and my father an accountant.) I’d roll my eyes, and eventually he took the hint, dropping the attitude, though certain vestiges remained several months into “our thing.” He called me “darling” in that obnoxious way gay men sometimes do. Rather, he forced himself to call me darling, appending a smile to each use of that word like it was a gift he was offering me, a quarter he placed in my open hand that I could finally spend. For most others, he repressed these tics with charm and good looks. He was handsome and smart and I liked him, whether I was his darling or not. When I said stop calling me that he said OK, and did. He went with honey.

With them, I felt like no one, a flat type that they could fill with their ideas of the person I ought to be, the person Simon ought to date. For Julia, this meant I was an upwardly mobile writer who might someday be responsible for some decent novel (that I was, up to that point, a poet who sometimes wrote about art, “like Frank O’Hara,” seemed not to factor into her picture of me), and therefore I was a Person of Interest, someone to know. Zachary, who was much more suspicious in general, made me even more of a blank: a harmless fuck that Simon used to bide his time until what, he wasn’t sure. To him, I was not someone who would alter Simon in any meaningful way. Knowing this, I wondered what Simon was to them. And who they were to him. I had hoped going upstate would allow us to clarify ourselves to one another.

Simon’s house was a modest two-story built in the early forties. It sat on top of a hill amid tall, uncut grass. It had never been renovated, and it sagged under its own weight, accumulating dust and grime with each passing season. While the house technically belonged to his parents, who had needed somewhere to park cash in a real-estate holding, they never visited (they lived in, and never left, the Upper West Side of Manhattan)—and so it was mostly Simon’s. He had convinced them that a house in upstate New York—far from the flood zones of the coast—was the safest bet for their money. After the purchase was completed, they spent a weekend at the house and never went back.

The floors sloped oddly with the land. The appliances, held over from the previous owner, were long out of date and no longer practical, almost comically old, but Simon kept them because he couldn’t afford not to. A total modernization was out of the question, his father had insisted, mostly because they never went there and even Simon’s stays were too infrequent to justify the amount it would cost to start over. In any case, Simon maintained his faith in things, especially old things, including the house, and he thought of it as a gift he liked to honor by sharing it with friends whenever he did make the trip upstate. Zachary, who came infrequently, was flippant and complained about the cold water. Julia considered any home of Simon’s hers.

“Bye, bye,” Zachary said. Julia rolled her eyes and followed him out. They would borrow Simon’s car, and we would take the Jeep his father kept at the house.

Simon went upstairs to change before we left for Helen’s project. I sat on the porch and waved Zachary and Julia off.

I could not make myself belong to them. Though we were “dating,” Simon and I didn’t fit easily into the mold of a couple. We went out a lot, but he didn’t like books all that much, especially poetry, and only seemed to care about art because it was something that one was supposed to care about, while they were things that I liked because they were what I did, write poetry, write about art, so he refused readings, openings, dinners. We went instead to clubs and gay bars, Julius, the Cock, Spectrum. Drugs made him horny and break the code of indifference we swore to one another in public, want to kiss me whenever we passed each other at the bar or the backroom. He had mentioned, after one speedy night of a vial of “good” cocaine from an uptown dealer who prided herself on “blending in” with the local set—her local set, so the manor-born of Madison Avenue—that he thought of me as “his” boyfriend. His real boyfriend. I hadn’t at all.

“Really,” He said. “You don’t? Why not?” I couldn’t say, mostly because I refused to allow my feelings to cohere into some notional, if provisional love. To do so would have been to court a calamity. I just wanted to have fun. He was crushed but high enough to carry on fine without my agreeing with him. We were sitting in front of his computer as dawn set loose its pale colors against the dark silhouette of the city. A video of David Bowie and Cher from sometime in the seventies played on YouTube. It was an improbable but gorgeous duet, their two wraith-like figures flickering in the bad transfer on the screen, rumored to be so high on “good” cocaine themselves as to have no memory of their performance once it was done and yet, in Bowie’s steady canter, there was an almost totalizing sense of the memory that he had performed this before, that this song, like all the events to which a song belongs, was an act of memorializing a previous song that had already been sung, a past performance, the last rosary bead before the next he threaded through his fingers, all the same, so what was remembering it, it’s a continuous, unending loop. There was no song outside that song. Bowie had the sharpest teeth it was like he was sucking the blood out of the air. Cher was crowned with a dome of orange hair.

“Not really,” I said. “But I like you a lot.”

The project, conducted with a steady rotation of artists who lived on Helen’s land (some for only a few weeks, some for a few months), worked along the line of relational aesthetics, as Simon said, insisting that anyone who lived there discontinue their normal work or “practice” for the benefit of the community, which was never ours or mine, but was itself to be considered a work of art (though Helen didn’t use that phrase, “work of art”) that had no single author, and so none of the artists who greeted us were actually artists anymore. Instead, they were farmers, cooks, cleaners. They said this with a pride I admired but didn’t believe. A few told me they were writers, but no one wrote anymore since there was so little time to do so. “I used to write experimental poetry,” this guy told me. He’d relieved himself of that burden by cleaning toilets. I got it. In any case, it didn’t seem, as we peeked into the almost bare living quarters of the residents, that there were any pens or paper or computers, only a scattering of science textbooks and magazines, including predictable stacks of old copies of National Geographic in several cabins. They were cut off. Everyone had the cheerful daze of a member of a cult, their zealotry betraying no expression other than radiant pride for the gorgeous landscapes they’d worked themselves into, together, the tripartite home, the cottages, the white linen, Helen, the food, the view of Pennsylvania, the visitors, all of whom were to gather in a barn set off about fifty yards from the big house to listen to lectures on art and a climate that we would someday no longer recognize as our own. It was all so much for them, these true believers in the cause of not-making-art. In the cause of stopping. And they appeared to want nothing else. A man conducted Simon and me to the barn after we’d strayed from our tour. Pointing to the entrance, “The lectures,” he said, “will begin shortly.”