Chapter 33 2012
Swipe down the illuminated screen of your phone to get a sense of his work: aerobics girls set against celestial clouds, retro nudes with marigolds flowering from orifices, a long, tanned leg becoming a nuclear missile.
It’s not bad, kind of interesting, and you think you understand the project more or less.
The eighties are in again, the new flavor of nostalgia.
Maybe it’s political—after all, dissatisfaction is in the air.
But there’s something in his stuff that makes you feel good, magic superimposed onto ordinary lives.
Maybe you’ll buy one. Not now, because who has time for that, but at some later moment.
The followers are increasing, so maybe you’ll consider, if he becomes a bit bigger.
Art is a commitment.
That’s what Sebastian tells himself as he plunges into Sadie’s attic for his ritual trawl through the stacks of magazines and report cards and class photos and Christmas cards from decades ago.
Paper dolls. Nancy Reagan. Michael Jackson.
Leather. Sex. Whitesnake. A photo of his grandmother.
Glamour and grunge. Unlivable, sure, but when you think of it as time travel, you can forget the chaos, all the space it is taking up in their lives.
After all, this was once his mother’s house.
Score. Time magazine, Brooke Shields, those eyebrows, that hair.
He swipes it and stumbles back down the stairs to the bedroom that has become his studio, unmade bed pushed to the corner, clippings organized into neat Tupperware boxes, a large piece of paper taped to the wall, sticky brushes and a small armada of Elmer’s glue bottles at varying stages of emptiness, translucent skeins wisping off orange beaks.
This is his largest project to date: a giant mosaic of his mother’s face composed of everything she might have encountered in her life, things that he supposes would have made her feel something.
Faces of people from her work, faces of celebrities, Barbie dolls, hair products, fast cars, sunsets, Meat Loaf.
Lola. Sadie. Himself. It’s amazing what you find when you take apart a face.
Scissors travel over glossy paper in a severance that has come to feel like prayer.
He is beginning to realize that no masterpiece—no magic clue—will clarify her, will clarify his existence within his family.
His mother’s giant, half-finished face looks down at him with a single green eye.
He has been working off of one of the nudes—she is covering her breasts, turning away slightly from the camera, her ribs articulated.
A scar on her stomach. Was that from him?
Or another surgery? He drifts his hands over the scraps that he has organized in a spectrum: varying shades of blush and deeper pinks that will become the cheeks, and a mountain of dark brown: coffee cups and grizzly bears and leather jackets.
What to leave in, what to take out. The process used to feel like detective work, like he was getting closer to a kind of truth, but now has started to feel like deconstruction.
The choice is overwhelming. He’s been stubborn really, never asking his father about his archival work, even if he can imagine the excruciating answer (there’s content and context, and really it’s as much about understanding historical value as anything…).
He sighs, steps back, examines the blank spaces of her face.
Like it or not, Al was also a part of her life.
He is beginning to feel stupid about avoiding him.
About everything he used to believe. Nobody is getting any younger.
Prompted by Tillie, undoubtedly, Al has begun to send encouraging messages about the work Sebastian posts.
It’s embarrassing, really. But also, kind of sweet.
He takes his phone out of his back pocket, snaps, uploads a photo: WIP.
He used to fantasize, when he started this account, that someone would see his work, someone like Orson Grey, and recognize a familiarity, and claim him.
Stupid, now, he can see. As an artist, you have to train yourself to see what is real, not what you want to be real.
He is trying to evolve. Still, the most rewarding thing remains the reactions; everyone sees something different in his work.
Lola
Do you want to come visit?
The text from last night eyes him, marked red for unread, a zit demanding to be popped. Fuck.
He understands she is doing more school, endless degrees.
Avoiding the real world. No point in telling her that.
There are lots of things he doesn’t tell her.
Like about trying LSD or what girls he sleeps with.
He assumes she doesn’t sleep with anyone; she’s a nerd after all, and not the one-night-stand type.
She’d have told him about anyone serious, wouldn’t she?
Are you close? someone asked him recently.
Are you close to your own heart, to the insides of your pockets?
He wasn’t sure how to answer. She will never not be a part of him.
But she doesn’t come back for Christmas anymore.
He does not know what she eats for dinner on lazy weeknights, or what music she listens to, or whether her friends are good people, or how she feels about her life.
Seb
Wish I could afford it $$$
The truth is, having sold a few works, he’s doing better than ever, cash-wise. But it would be painful, wouldn’t it, to hope that this time she might change? Probably she’s only interested now that his art is getting a bit of attention. Maybe he’s finally worth her time.
As the sun dips at last below the house across the road, he goes to the kitchen, peels the dried glue off his fingernails, runs his hands under soapy water for a while.
“Ready?” Sadie asks.
“Let’s do it.”
On the side table by the television is a folder full of papers that he is going to help her understand.
Since Sully’s laid her off after her knee injury, money has been thin.
Someone has to figure out how to get her on benefits.
Sebastian cracks open some beers and begins dissecting the impenetrable language.
“Okay, you’ll need to fill your name here.” He’s figuring it out as he goes along. Why isn’t this the kind of stuff they teach you in school? How many years did he spend pretending not to use his calculator for long division?
“What do I put for this?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe non-workplace-related injury?” That sounds right. More convincing than “Slipped in Stop and Shop. Took down a tower of greeting cards.” For a week after, he kept saying: My Condolences. Objectively it was both hilarious and not at all a laughing matter.
“Lola texted me,” he says.
“Really!”
“She wants me to visit.”
“Aw, that’s so great.”
“I don’t think I’m going.”
“Are you kidding me, Sebastian?” Sadie stares at him. “I can’t even say what I would do for one more day with my sister.”
Seb
you know what
screw it
lets go
To promote Al’s new book, Colonial Worldviews and Imperial America, the college museum has invited him to curate an exhibit, and Tillie has come.
The book made a splash in certain circles, and the show is at least likely to interest the geriatric alumni who donate to the institution.
It’s the sort of thing Susie would have peered around, not bothering to read the meticulously written (and occasionally witty) captions, focusing on the glitzier (if less historically interesting) pieces, making him laugh, asking questions that she thought were stupid but were actually brilliant.
God, he still misses her.
But here is Tillie, quietly, thoughtfully engaging, nodding in a way that acknowledges his work.
Pausing in front of a shrunken head, acquired (stolen?
gifted? obtained through deceit?) by the East India Marine Society.
People come just to see it, a novelty, grotesque and unimaginable.
It annoys him, sometimes, that most people view the quotidian as disposable, unworthy of record.
That it is the dramatic, the rarefied, that gives shape to our imaginings of the past. But the fact is: the head supports the rest of the exhibit.
And so, it feels justified. Still, he cannot think about it as ever having been a real person, someone who loved and belonged. It would precipitate an unraveling.
“Does it bother you,” he asks Tillie in a low voice, “that sort of thing?”
Tillie thinks about this seriously before saying: “Of course. But you can’t write off everything with a problematic history.”
She’s right. He’d be out of a job if the public were to reject wholesale the country’s checkered past. For who could bear to look at the treasures of imperialism if they were thinking about the costs?
He hovers for a moment, rereads his caption. He had thought it sensitive, at the time that he wrote it:
“The EIMS received the head of an embalmed Māori Chieftain as a donation from William Dana. Out of respect, it was displayed under a veil.”
It’s obvious now that it is insufficient. That the perspective is wrong. That he has framed it as an object when it had once been a thing with a soul. That it deserves not a caption but an elegy.
When they’ve finished their circuit and polished off a few glasses of cheap prosecco, they head around the corner to one of Al’s mainstays, a dimly lit Chinese joint with white tablecloths and fried things on metal trays.
Over time, Tillie has learned to push him, gently, artfully, toward the limits of his comfort zone.
Nearer to, but never quite over the line. Mostly, he appreciates it.
“Crab Rangoon?”
“What is it? Cream cheese?”
“I think you’ll like them.” She smiles. That’s generally enough to get him to commit. “So I was thinking. I mean, I can’t help but be aware. It’s almost fifteen years.”
He looks desperately for a waiter. “Yeah.”