Anthropology of an American Girl (52 page)

Today Sara Eden is there. She has just arrived from Washington, D.C., for a family reunion, so she is driving out with us. As Mark escorts me to the car, Sara steps out and moves toward me. I’d forgotten how beautiful she is. I hang my head slightly, feeling ashamed.

She kisses me hello and her fingers make a circle around my wrist bone. “You’re white as a sheet. When was the last time you saw a doctor?” she whispers sharply once Mark is out of earshot.

Mark drives south down the cobblestoned Mercer Street; he likes to take the Manhattan Bridge straight off of Canal. The architecture in SoHo deceives. Loading docks and freight elevators allude to industry, though there no longer is any. Behind the cast-iron façades, abandoned factories have been gutted and sterilized to make loft apartments. No one cares to think too long or hard about the long-term consequences of the loss of American manufacturing. Except my father, whose first job was at Shuttleworth Carton Company, a die-cutter on West Broadway, and who complains that moving industry to where it can’t be seen isn’t stopping industry. He always says that we’re still polluting the same goddamned planet.

“Every idiot thinks they’re entitled to flushing toilets and a space station future, but nobody can make a cardboard box anymore,” he would lament when he and Marilyn walked west to SoHo to see me. “If we keep sending the dirty work overseas, what happens in the next depression?”

My father is always talking about the next depression like you can set your clock to it, though if it’s coming, no one in New York seems concerned.
They’re there to get what they can for themselves for as long as possible before cutting out to
follow their dream
. Chiseled blondes in Agnès B. miniskirts, hip Asian girls in obtuse shoes from Tootsi Plohound, and gray-haired gallery directors in tortoiseshell eyewear sell transparencies of Jesus and close-up photos of genitalia and elysian landscapes in oil copied off of overhead projections. At openings, girls with body-painted breasts serve drinks but fail to hold anyone’s attention. Faces whoosh at you as though ejected from fireplace bellows saying,
What a fabulous show!
During lunch, people swarm the pay phones like flies on fruit, waiting peevishly to call their answering machines, the latest
must-have
devices. They bang in numbers with lightning-fast accuracy, desperate for messages, for recognition, for distinction among the masses.

Lately I’ve been thinking of Cuba. I imagine it to be the last original place. All you ever hear of Cuba is,
There is no freedom there! Television is state-controlled!
Yet for all the supposed freedom in America, there is a confounding deficit of ingenuity in terms of thought and taste. Style is dictated by the controlling influences and concerns of a mass marketplace. People are trained to be dutiful consumers—we all want the same stuff, not because it’s good or useful, necessary or lasting, but because we allow ourselves to be convinced that we can’t live without it. We forgo all logic of quality and durability.

If you travel internationally, you will feel shocked by contemptuous talk of America. To hear your fellow citizens characterized as barbarian shoppers who know nothing of love, food, health, and religion, but everything of lawsuits, fast food, and guns, is to experience a national fidelity of which you may not have thought yourself capable. And yet, you’re at a loss for a convincing defense. It’s difficult to refute the accusation of misapplied liberties when rifles are sanctioned but public breastfeeding is not.

At least in Cuba, television doesn’t pretend
not
to be state-controlled, and supermarkets don’t stock pre-decorated cakes. In the United States, supermarkets carry pre-decorated cakes, walls and racks of them viewable through specially molded plastic flip lids. There are probably factories where women and children labor without protection and bathroom
breaks to make lids for those cakes, and that place is undoubtedly governed by exactly the sort of despots Americans vilify. It’s impossible that all the supermarket cakes are purchased and eaten—where do they go when they expire?
Do
they expire? Why do we need so many? What is so psychologically valuable to the American public about the idea of excess and its obvious corollary—waste?

Sara has been to Cuba through an international program. She says I would love it.

“Don’t say such things,” Mark says as he pulls onto the Manhattan Bridge. “You might not realize it, Sara, but Castro makes prostitutes of his women.”

“Most
men make prostitutes of their women, Mark,” Sara says pointedly.

Mark might not be wrong about inequity in Cuba, because Cuba is a dictatorship. Then again, Sara cares about equity and Mark doesn’t. So, his attack on Cuba is insincere but valid, and her defense is sincere but incomplete. Talk is funny; it’s like a volley with no one getting anywhere; it’s better not to bother trying. If it’s blasphemous to imagine running away to someplace different, I remind myself that we are a nation of refugees, and so it would not be so very un-American to reject one orthodoxy for another in pursuit of more pertinent freedoms.

“It’s beautiful, Evie,” Sara says fearlessly. Was she always so unafraid of him; I can’t recall. “It seems untouched by time. Everybody sings.”

Quite often in summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ross will go out to Los Angeles to conduct business. During those weekends, the East Hampton house loads up with chic yuppie strays. Consuela loses dominion of the kitchen to heavyset debutantes with sweaters wrapped around undulating waists, and perfect Bordeaux-colored toenails poking out of high-heeled mules. They assemble tuna shish kebabs, chug Chardonnay, discuss diaphragm sizes, and play house to the combed-down boys on the patio. There’s always this squall of perfumes and constant talk of fat. I never knew until then that cherries were so fattening.

“Everything has a fat content,” Mark’s cousin Luce says with a wink.
“Everything.”

Mark knows they don’t like me. He misses no opportunity to force them to endure public displays of affection. He defers to my judgment on the most mundane matters and calls me his
better half
. Frequently he will grab me and break into an impromptu slow dance. The girls flick mascara-crusted eyes over pink drinks with paper umbrellas that perforate rows of fattening fruits, and they watch us scornfully, thinking foul thoughts of what it is I must do to make him condescend to want me. At the lavishly set patio table, outfitted with Mrs. Ross’s best crystal, linen, and sterling, Mark interrupts any prolonged conversations I might be having with other men, saying things like, “I worked too hard to catch her, Aaron. I’m not about to lose her.” If it’s suggested that we join the others for the nightly skinny-dipping, Mark laughs loud. “Forget it,” he’ll say. “I’m not sharing.”

Despite annual overhauls, the Ross house is essentially the same as the first time I saw it, big and breezy with bound copies of entertainment and fashion magazines in the bookshelves along with the complete works of great authors such as Dickens and Twain and Austen, which are not really books but trompe l’oeil containers for stowing valuables. Of course, classic law texts and journals line the coniferous-green walls of Mr. Ross’s office, but they are of little interest to me as that room is too dismal to visit. Even when Mr. Ross uses it for private phone calls, he drags his armchair out into the hallway. It is the only fixed space in an ever-changing décor.

“What the hell happened here?” Mr. Ross demanded of his wife after one particular renovation. He’d just returned from L.A. to find vines stenciled and painted on all the walls, connecting room to room. “Are those supposed to be leaves?”

“Blakely calls it Byronic,” Mrs. Ross replied matter-of-factly. Blakely is the decorator.

“Byronic!” Mr. Ross removed his jacket at the entrance and stepped tentatively into the living room, looking skyward into bogus foliage. “It looks like Pan might skip through!” He loosened his tie. “Now you listen to me, Theo. An East Hampton home is a country home, and a country home should have a country atmosphere. This place looks like a Lily Pulitzer whorehouse!”

Mark won’t let Blakely near the cottage. He knows I like it as it is, serene as an attic in Europe, with the lambent tread of light coming everywhere at once like little footprints of little animals. He turns off the central air and we lie in front of fans, and through the parted shutters pieces of the beyond blow in—rushes of pollen and random butterflies and flower petals like baby bonnets. At night when the moon is high, I see them skate down the stray prongs of light, and I pretend they are fairies, dancing.

It’s the Friday before Washington’s birthday. The art studio is empty; I am alone. To my right is a pile of contorted tubes, and fresh paint dots line the tray I use as my palette. Today’s paint looks pulpy and alive alongside the scraped and raked stains of old paint. I light candles and turn up the volume on the music, Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly
.

On the canvas is a female figure, a face and bare shoulders. She first arrived before Christmas, and I examined her as though I’d discovered a dead bird in the house—I tilted my head, wondering where she’d come from, and how to get rid of her. Her body is like living resistance; it cuts across the canvas in two directions and in multiple fields, like stop-motion photography or time-lapse film. The muscles of her chest and shoulders are pronounced as she leans to escape the frame, though her face contradicts her body by addressing the foreground. She connects with the observer despite risk; that is, the risk of exposing her leap as a leap to nowhere. After all, she is trapped in paint.

Yet she has lessons. In revealing intention, she admits the possibility of failure, so she is courageous. Despite her imprisonment, she clings to the idea of freedom, so she is faithful. She reminds me that faith is better than hope. Hope is blind expectation; faith awaits nothing. It is a means of preserving the self, regardless of outcome. With faith, every day of constancy is itself a good day.

In the first review of the new term, Don Matthews, my teacher, told the class that my figure’s story was one of “entrapment and emancipation, a discrepancy not unlike that of Jesus on the cross—wood and
flesh, bondage and deliverance, defeat and triumph.” It made me think of how Jack used to call the crucifix
the perfect corporate logo
. Don was an older version of Jack, if Jack happened to be an irritable art theorist from Dublin with round gold-wire eyeglasses and a full-time job teaching at NYU. It would be good if Jack had a teaching job and glasses. Apparently he didn’t even have five dollars. The most recent news I’d heard about Jack was him hitting up Denny for cash on St. Mark’s Place. When I asked Denny if he knew how to find Jack, he looked at me and said, “It wouldn’t be a good idea right now, Evie.”

I look at my painting once more before preparing to leave the studio. Though I rendered what I thought I saw, the image bears no resemblance to the model used by the class, or, for that matter, to the paintings of the others. For a while it looked like stacks of color until it looked like a woman; then you couldn’t see it the first way anymore. Sometimes you perceive a secondary figure in an image, like the etching of a cube that changes orientation when you blink or the goblet that is obviously a goblet until it is two faces kissing. Sometimes you get stuck in the subordinate state, and that is stranger still, because you recall most clearly that there was an original way of seeing, yet you can’t return to it. When people talk about
seeing like a child
, they are referring to a state in which the eye and mind are fluid, and can pass easily from specificity to ambiguity. Like when strings of letters look like shapes, not just words.

From a dented El Pico coffee can, I select the black handle of a putty knife and drag it through the wet paint. “I’m sorry,” I say to the figure, saying the words to her that no one ever says to me. And my knife moves. Horizontally, one side, the other, dissecting with new oil the meringue cliffs and ponds of paint that have comprised her image. My hand makes olive lines, repeating, crossing over, bars, and between these, I use a rust color, integrating the two tones, corrupting them, marrying them. Yes, marriage—a corruption—a gain, a loss, a twisted sort of balance.

The room blackens; two hands mask my eyes. The hands are scented like soap from a recent washing. “Don’t move,” Mark whispers into my ear, holding for a minute, kissing the back of my neck. He pulls away and hits the light switch. The fluorescents creak and yaw in their casings, then surge to life. Mark always sneaks up on me. Don Matthews calls him “the ferret.” Don didn’t tell me this directly; I overheard him.

Mark gasps. “Evie! You ruined her!”

I like how she looks. She seems to have satisfied some pressing desire. She adjourns contentedly into paint, defenseless to the very nature of herself, as if only that which made her unique and which gave her substance has the genius to deprive her of continuance. She’d just been so—locked in.

“Consider the importance of process,” Don once said to me. “There is no end greater than the means. Buddhist monks spend days and weeks making sand mandalas, grain by grain. They drop streams of colored sand through the tapered ends of these minuscule funnels to create magnificent patterns intended to graph the order of the universe. At the end, the mandalas are just swept away.”

The painting was nothing. Just paint, just canvas, just work in time. And the time, in turn, is a fragment of my existence. If I had not been living with Mark or taken that class or gotten to know Mr. Matthews, the image would not have materialized—at least not through me. And of course, if she did begin in me, then she hadn’t vanished at all. She’d simply withdrawn, the way turtles’ heads squirm back into shells.

Farewell
, I say. In my mind I say it, then my wrist arcs to obscure her entirely.

Mark sighs, exasperated. I wonder what he could possibly think he’s lost. She seems so exclusive to me. I would not want to hang her at his home. Or at Brett’s. Brett bought two other paintings of mine, one of rooftops and one of a bird’s nest. Whenever we go to Brett’s loft, I avoid the bedroom. If Mark forces me to go in, I see the paintings and I end up thinking,
Oh, babies, poor babies
.