The Ask

Fourteen

Bernie fed, bathed screamlessly (perhaps for fear of Sioux pain), read to, sung to, and tucked in, I poured a glass of Old Overholt, turned on the TV. It was not often I had the run of the remote this early in the evening, but after a few moments I stopped clicking and settled in with a romantic comedy from the late nineties, the rare thing Maura would have maybe lingered on, caught up in some memory of watching this movie with old friends. It was strange to sit here and watch it alone. A few years, or even months ago, I would have scoffed, begged Maura to pop up the dial for some punditry or playoff scores or a breakdown of cavalry tactics in the Crimean War.

This wasn't just some macho reflex. Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day, I always said, because I believed in Art (I harbored a secret capital, like a secret Capitol), but don't ask me to endure the corporate weeps. When it came to cinema, I sold out my aesthetic principles only for zombie flicks, monster mashes, jelly-tentacled beasts who lived in toilets, slurped out our kidneys the hard way (watching Bernie get born, that angry purple mango plunging out of Maura, only further lubed my oozing worldview, my drippy grid), or else those special-ops terror soaps, the nutter mullahs and Glock minuets.

I'd never conceded to the rom-com pone, the coffee bars and turtlenecks, all that greeting card ontology. We were all garbage eaters, but there were too many varieties heaped. The idea was to limit yourself to one or two, or else you'd become an American.

But just like one, I'd cheated, changed. Or maybe it was just the way of things, in line with the theory that the older men get, the more they become old women. Now I preferred the feces the wardens of our souls dolloped on the fem trays. Just a little more texture. I couldn't remember if I'd seen Caller I Do in a theater, but I'd watched it piecemeal over the years. B.B., Before Bernie, Maura and I spent frequent Sundays on the sofa, shades drawn, soaking ourselves in the healing springs of bad television.

This particular movie took place in Hollywood's New York, a wonderland of pensive latte-sipping and meaningful strolls through Central Park. The city looked crisp, exquisite. The citizens lived like simple millionaires. Our principals were a lonely man and a lonely woman, each with a buffoonish, homely sidekick who would have been thought attractive in real life, and a fascinating, but finally unfulfilling-because there was nobody to "share it all with"-career. They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene. Sucked into the vortex of high formula, a slow sob rose in my body. Just like porn or bang-bang, this was the pure stuff, concocted for the baser circuits, the lizard board.

Now the climax arrived, the charmingly improbable half-nude chase through the gallery district of Dumbo, the couple finally reunited in embarrassed ecstasy as pretentious art aficionados punctured their skeins of cynicism and cheered (had they just exited the latest Billy Raskov exhibit?). The sob rippled up, burst in my throat. Maura and I had already found each other. The desperate, emboldening quest for love, the beautiful, electrifying unknowingness of it all, was forever gone. (Unless we divorced, started over, which would surely be disastrous. She'd find happiness with some curt, sporty banker. I'd live in the laminated basement of a Cypriot retiree near the airport, never talk to a woman under seventy-five again.)

"Fucking pussy," I wept, sipped my drink. "Fucking pussy-hurt pussy."

They sped the credits but I did catch a name. The governor's daughter. An early producing gig. Maybe a favor from one of her father's liberal Hollywood foes? She'd gone on to become an important person in the business. Once, I'd watched her hold up a statue, make a speech on television about film and justice. I thought she might apologize to the nation for stealing my Spanish knife.

Good old Constance, she had hid behind the others that night the governor's daughter claimed her nine-tenths of the law. Her black pigtails doubted me, indicted. Constance knew it was my knife. I'd shown it to her in my room, under the blue light. But that night at the party she made no sign she remembered. She just stood there in her tank top, pink with tequila and summer, watched me squirm. Maybe she believed I had it coming.

Maybe I did. The previous spring I'd been briefly inhabited by the ghost of Roger Burke, sneaked around the whole semester, cheated on Constance every chance I got. The hate in me was huge, but I had always wanted happiness for Constance, still did, years later, when a thick cream envelope arrived in the mail, the names of her mother and father in fancy ink in the corner. Maybe getting hitched wasn't the most Marxist thing to do, but she had found somebody she loved enough to hire a calligrapher. I tossed out the envelope unopened, didn't need to know, for example, the name of the groom, or the wedding site. I had no intention of seeing these people again until I could boast of an accomplishment beyond my failed attempt to sell wallet-ready oil portraits of people's children online. Yes, this had been my home business.

Everything went off, went bad, or so I told myself, though I knew my crucial role in the spoilage. I had skipped my last meeting with Sayuri Kuroki behind Scissor Kicks. Even then I could feel myself doing the dumb thing, as though I wanted to guarantee I had memories to haunt me, feared I might lack a good reason to wince. I should never have worried. I could still picture Sayuri standing there near the Dumpster in her denim jacket, fiddling with the scrunchies on her wrist, maybe worried I'd been knocked off my BMX by a lumber truck. Though maybe she never reached the rendezvous, either.

Constance, I'd just turned abruptly away from her, seeing something better in whatever Lena's adulterous hunger could deliver. I'd almost let Maura drift off a few times, too, before Bernie reversed the inertia. We'd been together off and on for ten years, Maura and I, had tried very hard not to be the love of each other's life. It was like the stupid movie, without the cute bits.

Not one of the cute bits, for instance, was the night we had a foursome with that lascivious couple whose Greenpoint loft, perhaps because of the hillocks of cocaine on the coffee table, we found ourselves the last to leave. After some preliminary dialogue that wanted so much to parody the clunky verbal vamping of vintage porn, but had veered into grim, jaw-grinding consequentiality, Maura and the other woman had stripped and entangled themselves on the bed, all pinches and strokes and theatrical licks. Even through the fog of powders and booze, the sight of them aroused me and I turned to grin at the other guy. He smiled back, held up a palm for a louche, almost Wonderlandish high five. I shoved my tongue in his mouth. Really, I just meant to be friendly, to complement the writhings beneath us, complete the servicing circuit, but suddenly it seemed I'd broken the sacred swinger's code.

"What the fuck," the guy said. He pulled away, wiped his lips. Then he stuck himself in my wife, glared as he pumped.

"I'm not into that," he said. "You had no right."

I crawled off to the coffee table, decided then and there I had no fondness for Greenpoint.

So, things hadn't always been perfect, or even hygienic, but Maura was my love. I wanted to ravish almost every woman I saw on the street, regardless of age or body type, but if I ever did picture myself not married to Maura, never did another woman hove into view, just a taxing still-life: a handle of chilled domestic vodka and sick-making amounts of Korean barbecue.

But now I kept thinking of Constance and Lena, those early confusions. I got up and made my tipsy way to Maura's desktop. I'd kept tabs on Lena before. She taught painting at a state school in Connecticut now, must have been near retirement. I hadn't run a search on Constance lately. Soon I had a photograph of her up on my screen. I'd entered-the invasive quality of the word was not lost on me-the website of an elite girl's academy in New England where Constance served as headmaster.

She looked older, of course, glancing up from her tidy and morally instructive escritoire, her pigtails gone, her still-black hair shorn with sour elegance. It was hard to detect the plump, glowing, self-righteous coed in this dour professional. I had no doubt she was still a feminist. Marxist was debatable. But maybe she was waking up the rich girls to the crimes of their kin. Wasn't there a tradition of that in such places? She did look wiser, happier. But I grieved for her lost radiance, which is just to say I was weeping for myself again.

Lena was another story. Lena shook me with old shame. Lena was another name for my failure to become what I'd once believed I already was. But tonight, strangely, when I thought of her, a different face floated past, a background ghost.

It was one of the last times Lena had visited my campus studio, a corrugated shed near the biology labs. The room got good light, but whenever I opened a window the stench of burnt rats wafted in. Often I'd light a cigarette, let it smolder for the stink, but this day Lena stood there smoking, studied my canvases.

I'd gone in a new direction. It hadn't turned out well, but I thought there was an idea there, a gesture, I could salvage. I'd be graduated in a month, was headed into the savage, supercilious world. This was my last shot at an uncompromised critique. Though of course it would be compromised. But only by lust.

Still, who knew? It was easy to forget Lena was also an artist, that she hadn't been put on earth just to mentor me. She made it easy to forget. She didn't linger in her past, and her triumphs were in her past.

"Thoughts?" I said. "Feelings? Pangs?"

Lena stood with her hand on her head, cigarette between her fingers. She singed her hair often this way.

"I think you've lost your mind, Milo."

"Shit, really?"

"No, not really. Finally. You were close, but now you've gone crazy. Controlled crazy. They're funny and sly, like always, but they've got this turmoil now, too. A newfound urgency. God, listen to me. That stuff in the corner, is it wax?"

"Rubber cement. Treated. I treated it."

"Treated it with what?"

"Trade secret."

"For what will you trade the secret?" said Lena, put her cigarette in my ceramic frog ashtray, and slid her hand into my shirt.

"I thought we weren't going to do this anymore."

"Do what?"

"We weren't going to… Oh, fuck you."

"We weren't going to fuck me?"

While we made love on the paint-caked workbench, I watched the cigarette burn in the clay lip of the frog. Why couldn't she just crush the damn thing out? The smoke curled up to the cement ceiling and Lena had an orgasm, or some approximation thereof, and I pulled out, spilled myself on her belly and the tails of her striped button-down shirt, a man's shirt, maybe her husband's. It felt good to do that, like that eureka moment when a child discovers just how, precisely, to be a shit. Lena's face flushed and she blew at her bangs. There was something sulky, unlikable, about that upgust of breath, but I couldn't pin it down. I had the sense I couldn't pin it down because I was too young, and suddenly felt my youth as a form of impotence. I snatched Lena's wrist, turned her toward my paintings.

"Now," I said. "Tell me true."

"I already told you, Milo. I don't lie about this stuff. I'm not that desperate."

"I think you are."

"You little bastard."

"Please, Lena. Who's going to tell me?"

I could see her soften. I was just a dumb, scared boy. I was also a demon, junior precious division. Lena lit another cigarette, sank into a squat.

"I don't know, Milo," she said. "You have talent. It doesn't seem to be outrageous talent, but who knows about these things."

"Compare me to Billy Raskov."

"I don't do that."

"Sure you do."

"Okay, fine. I know you think you're a better artist than Billy Raskov, but you're just a better draftsman. That's something. But there are mentally handicapped people who draw and paint with far more technical skill than either of you. So, like I always say, it all comes down to how much you need to inflict yourself on the world. You're good enough. If you kiss the right ass, you could certainly make a career. Get some shows. Teach. Like me, for instance. I'm not a failure. I'm in a very envied position. You have some big-dick fairy-tale idea of the art world, so you don't understand this yet, but hanging in, surviving, so you can keep working, that's all there is. Sure, there are stars, most of them hacks, who make silly amounts of money, but for the rest of us, it's just endurance, perdurance. Do you have the guts to perdure? To be dismissed by some pissant and keep coming? To be dumped by your gallerist? To scramble for teaching gigs? It's not very glamorous. Is this what you want? You're good enough for it. You're not the new sensation, but you're good enough to get by. But you have to be strong. And petty. That's really the main thing. Are you petty enough? Are you game? Are you ready to screw me again? You must be."

Lena reached for my crotch. I swatted her hand away, stumbled out of the smoky shed. The sun was high and warm, the grass lush, spongy. Some students talked beneath the portico of the biology building. There was a humming sound, which I tracked to a vent in the bricks. The stench of the experimental dead blew out of it. I thought of the rats and guinea pigs and gerbils in their cages, studied my hands.

Soon I would not remember what Lena had said. Already it seemed kind of jumbled. Lena just really made no sense. Past the biology building, on a bench beneath some poplars, I could swear I saw Purdy. Was that Purdy? Yes, absolutely, it was Purdy, on a stone bench with a woman I did not know. She was pretty and sat straight with her hands on her stomach, as though protecting it, and she looked up at Purdy, who seemed to be laughing, laughing incredibly hard, so hard that even from this distance I could see a vein rise in his neck. Though maybe Purdy wasn't laughing. Maybe he was shouting. I had never seen Purdy shout.

What the hell had Lena been talking about back there? Loopy slut. But she had a good eye for my work. Couldn't deny that. Funny and sly, she'd said. With a newfound urgency. Wasn't that the gist of it? It was Art. I was an Artist.