Erasure (41 page)

“Nothing yet. I haven’t seen any books. How often are we supposed to meet, on the phone or otherwise?”

“They’ve left that up to us,” Harnet said. “But I have a plan. I suggest we talk in three weeks just to compare preliminary notes.”

“We should meet in a couple of weeks to see if anything great has shown up,” Hoover said. “I hear Riley Tucker has a book coming out. And Pinky Touchon.”

“You know, somebody got a picture of her the other day,” Tomad said.

“Who?” Hoover asked.

“Touchon,” Tomad said. “In was in the Chronicle. It seems Pinky lives here in San Fran and no one even knew.”

“I heard it’s a big book,” Hoover said.

“I heard that as well,” said Sigmarsen.

“In a couple of weeks then?” I said.

What some people would have you believe is that Duchamp demonstrated that art could be made out of anything, that there is nothing special about an
objet d’art
that makes it what it is, that all that matters is that we are willing to allow it to be art. To say,
This is a work of art,
is a strange kind of performative utterance, as when the king knights a fellow or the judge pronounces a couple man and wife. But if it turns out that the marriage license was incorrectly filled out, then the declaration is undone and we will say, “I guess you’re not husband and wife after all.” But even as it’s thrown out of the museum, what has been called art, it is still art, discarded art, shunned art, bad art, misunderstood art, oppressed art, shock art, lost art, dead art, art before its time, artless art, but art nonetheless.

I’m reminded of the parrot in the house, which when he hears a knock at the door says, “Who is it?” The man knocking answers, “It’s the plumber.” The door remains closed and so he knocks again. “Who is it?” the parrot asks. “The plumber.” Knock, knock. “Who is it?” “The plumber!” This goes on until the crazed knocker breaks through the door, falls onto the carpet below the parrot’s perch, has a heart attack and expires. The residents of the home return to find the man stretched out on their floor. “Who is it?” the wife asks. The parrot says, “The plumber.”

The question is of course, does the parrot answer the woman’s query? And of course he does and he doesn’t. He’s a parrot.

Rauschenberg: Here’s a piece of paper, Willem. Now draw me a picture. I don’t care what it is a picture of or how good it is.

de Kooning: Why?

Rauschenberg: I intend to erase it.

de Kooning: Why?

Rauscbenberg: Never mind that. I’ll fix your roof in exchange for the picture.

de Kooning: Okay. I believe I’ll use pencil, ink and grease pencil.

Rauschenberg: Whatever.

(4 weeks later)

Rauschenberg: Well, it took me forty erasers, but I did it.

de Kooning: Did what?

Rauschenberg: Erased it. The picture you drew for me.

de Kooning: You erased my picture?

Rauschenberg: Yes.

de Kooning: Where is it?

Rauschenberg: Your drawing is gone. What remains is my erasing and the paper which was mine to begin with.

(Shows de Kooning the picture)

de Kooning: You put your name on it.

Rauschenberg: Why not? It’s my work.

de Kooning: Your work? Look at what you’ve done to my picture.

Rauschenberg: Nice job, eh? It was a lot of work erasing it. My wrist is still sore. I call it “Erased Drawing.”

de Kooning: That’s very clever.

Rauschenberg: I’ve already sold it for ten grand.

de Kooning: You sold my picture?

Rauschenberg: No, I erased your picture. I sold my erasing.

The books began to arrive, boxes of them. At first I could not open a single one, but was taken by them as objects. The covers were all so attractive. The jacket copy made each one sound great, blurbs from established literary icons told me why I should like it. The fat books were praised for being fat, the skinny books were praised for being skinny, old writers were great because they were old, young writers were talents because of their youth, every one was startling, ground-breaking, warm, chilling, original, honest and human. I would have found refreshing:

Jo Blow’s new novel takes on the mundane and leaves it right where it is. The prose is clear and pedestrian. The moves are tried and true. Yet the book is not so alarmingly dishonest. The characters are as wooden as the ones we meet in real life. This is a torturous journey through the banal. The novel is ordinary but not insipid, pointless but not meaningless, savorless but not stale.

Jo Blow is a middle aged writer with a family and no discernible special features. He lives in a house and is about as smart as his last novel.

So, I opened the first book and I loved it. Actually, I enjoyed reading. The book sucked. But I did enjoy reading it and so I read another and another. I read three in one night and the better part of the next day. All three were sterile, well-constructed, predictable fare. I decided that perhaps I was jaded. I was familiar with novels the way a surgeon is familiar with blood. I would have to contact my innocent, inner self, the part of me that could be amazed by the dull and commonplace.

As I was leaving the house to visit Mother, the telephone rang.

She said, “Wanna fuck?”

“Linda?”

“How’d you guess?”

Linda Mallory.
I considered her name. And as she spoke, saying things that I could not remember because I was not listening, I realized that my life was in need of a gratuitous sex scene. My mind required a new source of guilt, as Mother’s failing condition had justified her placement. And even as I decided to pursue that guilt, I also sought to assuage it by reminding myself that Linda very much was using me. I caught in her stream of language that she was in Washington.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“What?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the Mayflower again.”

“I’ll be there at seven. How’s that for you?”

“That’s fine,” she said, skeptically. “Monk? This is Monk Ellison, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Seven.”

“Seven is great.”

Mother’s incontinence had become more pronounced and though she seemed strong enough to move herself around, she chose not to. When I arrived, the attending nurse and an orderly were changing the sheet while my mother lay in the bed. She was uncovered from the waist down and while the orderly pulled away the soiled sheets, the nurse wiped the mess from my mother’s skin. I turned away and stepped back into the corridor, still seeing Mother’s head rolling toward me and her vacant eyes pointing my way. She was so far from the woman who had told me once that listening to Mahler made her see colors right before she cried. “I see autumn in the fourth symphony,” she said. “Ashen greens giving way to reds and ochre while the sky darkens and the night feels cool.” The same woman whose shitty ass was being wiped by a woman who didn’t know who Mahler was had said that.

Linda Mallory was the postmodern fuck. She was self-conscious to the point of distraction, counted her orgasms and felt none of them. She worried about how she looked while making love, about how her expression changed when she started to come, whether she was too tight, too loose, too dry, too wet, too loud, too quiet and she found need to express these concerns during the course of the event.

“Does my hair look nice splayed out across the pillow?” she asked.

“It looks fine, Linda.”

“Am I moving all right, too fast, too slow?”

“Move however it feels good to you.”

And so I suspected she did, as she screamed into my face, startling me somewhat and my reaction must have shown, because she said, “Was that too loud? Was I ugly? Oh, my god, I can’t believe I did that. Oh, my god.”

“It’s okay, Linda. Are you all right?” I asked.

“Why, don’t I seem all right? Did you come?” She leaned after me as I rolled off her.

“No.”

“I can’t believe I screamed like that.” She turned to the nightstand and grabbed a cigarette, lit it.

“Don’t worry. So, you screamed when you came. That’s good, isn’t it?”