IN & OZ: A Novel (9 page)

The group stood in reverent silence, their funhouse reflections dim in the tarnished titanium of this last car, shaped like a torpedo with high rocket fins. In the hush of the museum, the memento mori moved Mechanic to thoughts of his own dead parents, and how blueprints for this stillborn future must have been created at about the same time that his father, who had never intended to be a mechanic, had opened his garage. Living under a bridge as Mechanic’s father and mother did, whenever someone’s car broke down it would coast downhill and end up at their door. Usually owners of the broken cars simply asked to use the phone. Sometimes they would ask his father to have a look-see at the engine. Eventually, the increasing business brought on by the ever-more severe cost-cutting measures at the plant forced him to put up a hand-lettered sign listing fees for various repairs. He never returned from his next layoff, having metamorphosed during it into a full-time mechanic.

Following the group into the art gallery of the museum, Mechanic had all of this in mind, taking in the succession of company calendars that hung there depicting the evolution of the factory with its ever-more modern train loads of coal and trees at one end, acres of completed cars at the other, plumes of PROSPERITY issuing from each of the factory’s many smokestacks. One photo showed a heraldic shield fashioned from the oranges, greens and browns of autumn—Trees in autumn, Mechanic and the others realized, once they were close enough to see that the heraldic shield was actually an aerial view of a forest that had been cleared in such a way so that the trees left standing would form a corporate logo the size of a small fiefdom. There were other portraits of inheritance: an unbroken lineage from the painting of a long-bearded founding father, all the way up to a studio photo of a smiling, great-great-great CEO-grandson, posing with his movie-star wife as if the more money earned, the more attractive the people making it became. There was no other art. And looking at this art history, Mechanic saw how if his parents had not lived under a bridge, neither he nor his father would have been a mechanic. Had his parents lived under a bridge that crossed a river of water instead of a river of chemicals that sometimes caught fire, he might have grown up a fisherman. And it astounded him to think that something so central to his being could be so arbitrary—Could it be the same for whole cities? Whole nations?

Tours through the Historical Society and Gun Club always ended on the top floor of the mansion, the ballroom. There, he, Composer, Poet (Sculptor), Photographer, Designer and the other visitors were invited to imagine (and mourn the passing of) the fabulous parties that were once held there, the ballroom situated so that the picture window at one end looked out onto the future that would become OZ, while the picture window at the opposite end had been aligned to give a clear view of the factory’s main smokestack, rising like a brick phallus from the abandoned work-houses, slag heaps and assembly lines below, “A still-living monument,” the guide said, “to the family’s wealth, power, birthright, and legacy.”

$1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00. . . .

If he ever rubbed a headlamp, Mechanic thought, and a genie appeared to grant him three wishes, he would ask of the genie the answer to three questions:

Question 1: Life.

Question 2: Death.

Question 3: Stuff.

Question 3: Stuff.

Question 3: Stuff.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

After that night in the bar, Designer thought about all Composer had said. Thought a lot about commerce being a language, as he had said. And whether or not all things could be said in every language, as he denied. She thought a lot about whether the language she used shaped what she said, but mostly she fretted about the difference between what it made her and what he said was Art.

She sat in the living room of her condo, looking at furnishings she had picked, she thought, to be an expression of her self, but now seeing how she could be an extension of them, living within a spread from
Condo Beautiful
or some other high-end magazine devoted to the art of tasteful living. How could those magazines—products themselves—not have modeled her space, and therefore her vision, and therefore her thoughts, and therefore her work, and therefore herself? Her chrome love-seat came from a celebrity shoot in
Celebrity Living
; vases that looked like a single sheet of folded snow came from another magazine, as did candle holders that could have been huge chrome tears, her white-leather sofa, white rug and all the rest of her furnishings all eloquently saying the same thing: money. As composer said they would.

She’d even picked out her white dog to match the rug, she remembered, as it trotted into the room. It sat before her and looked up as if to ask, Could putting something in her condo that didn’t come from a magazine make a difference?

She sat up straight.

The dog’s ears cocked, eyes on her.

Something that couldn’t be bought from a magazine, or even a catalog? Would breaking up the monolithic style of her decor crack open a new way of seeing? In the instant that the rut she’d been in materialized before her, she was also sure that she’d stumbled upon a way out.

But what could she possibly get that didn’t come from a store
and
that could shake up her work?

She snapped her fingers when it came to her: Art!—as Composer had said all along.

The next day after work, she swung by the gallery district of OZ, and stepping into the first white-walled, hardwood-floored space, she tingled with expectation. A gallery, she saw, was far different from a store. The ratio of merch to clerks was just the opposite of a store, with there being very few works of art on the bare walls, and lots of clerks, impeccably groomed in sleek black dresses, and paid, apparently, to do nothing more than lounge around, filling the gallery with their hip hairstyles and lean beauty.

The art didn’t have any prices. Or rather, everything had a price. It was just that determining the price of something as unique and ephemeral as art could only be a matter of discussion—not looking at a tag—in a language with a way of speaking all its own. In order to buy a work of art as opposed to a product, she learned, the gallery owner (shopkeeper) and the collector (shopper) would talk about everything but the price—the saturated colors in the clown’s outfit, for example, or the fine modeling that the artist employed in rendering the tear beneath his eye—how real it looked!—until an agreed-upon price would emerge from the fog of language like a dove that a magician might produce from a pile of scarves.

Not knowing anything about Art other than that she would know it when she saw it, she went from gallery to gallery, viewing their wares until suddenly there it was—A huge square canvas, painted blue with a yellow swirl. The swirl seemed to spiral down into the center of the painting like the eye of a hurricane seen from above, its intense yellow arms feathering out into the powder-blue background. Even though the chalky, Easter-egg colors formed a pleasing composition, she could tell this abstract painting was a work of Art and not just a pretty picture, as Composer might say, because try as she might, she couldn’t understand it. And in the end, she didn’t really even care to look at it that much.

Sure enough, the minute she got it home, it began to complicate her life. Here in her condo, the painting was much larger than it had appeared in the open space of the gallery. Her dog growled at it. She took down the designer mirror she’d had hanging over the fireplace, and put the painting up in its place. Seeing it from the couch, her dog cowering in her lap, the painting so big and dominating that she felt it was looking down its nose at her and her apartment as if they were unworthy of its presence. She put the mirror back up and hung the painting on the opposite wall, but trapped between the painting and its mirror image, the concentric swirl gave her a spinning sensation, the swirl itself seeming to rotate like the pinwheels used by hypnotists to gain control of a person’s mind until she could think of nothing else.

The only place to hang the painting in the bathroom was across from the toilet, but the blue water, the yellow swirl seemed like a potty joke here. In her bedroom, while laying on her bed and looking at the painting framed by the V of her open legs, it reminded her too much of a bull’s-eye, so she moved it back to its original place above the mantel.

Being a designer, she soon found a way to make the Art seem less like a dominating sneer, though. She placed some asymmetrical flowers beside it on the mantel—in a vase that matched, and therefore drew the eye from the blue background of the painting. In
Elegant Living Illustrated
, she found a pair of pillows for sale that had beadwork in a color and pattern that matched the painting exactly and put these on the couch. A lamp from
Elegant Interiors
had the squarish proportions of the painting, as did the end table from
Modern Living
that she placed it upon. As time passed and she grew accustomed to the painting and the other new merch in her condo, she found it harder and harder to say which was product and which art. And one day, trying to remember why she had gone out and paid so much for the painting, she clapped her hands together and laughed to realize that she’d found a real answer to the question that had sent her out on her quest. And she had the painting to thank.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

That night, Mechanic arced the last weld on the bouquet he was making for Designer. He tilted his helmet up to admire his handiwork, licked his lips, then hit the START button. The enormous orchid of metal groaned; the fenders he had hammered into petal shapes shrieked the scream of sheet-metal being separated by the Jaws of Life as they opened in bloom: the hundreds of side-view mirrors that he had salvaged from smashedup cars of Her design rose pistil-like from its center. . . .

Waiting to be pollinated. . . .

Excitedly, he closed up his garage, then set off to find Composer so he could add the last missing bit: a piece of music that would play from the orchid and speak of the difference Composer had been so eloquent about that night in the tavern, a piece of music, or silence, so eloquent that Designer would know that how things worked was at least as important as how they looked—if they didn’t, in fact, comprise a whole, a single beat, an infinite slide-whistle.

He found Composer alone in his hole. Before he could even get the request out, though, Composer said, “She wants me to compose a piece of music for her.”

“Who?” Mechanic asked happily. The moment he asked, though, he saw the grim expression on Composer’s face and held his breath, dreading but unable to believe what he knew would be the answer.

“Designer,” Composer said. Mechanic felt his body become a crash-test dummy, the wooden heart inside of that dummy another dummy with a dummy’s heart and all of them broken against a wall. By the time his body had warmed enough for him to resume breathing, Composer was saying, “. . . and wants me to compose a piece of music that can be whistled by the grill of the automobile she is now designing.”

“A piece of?—Of
audio
music?” Mechanic finally managed to get out.

Composer nodded. “There’s more. She’s convinced her company to create a Department of Automotive Musik Engineering. They want me to become its Maestro and Chief Engineer.”

Mechanic wanted to think this was a joke. It was the only way his mind could register the barely recognizable quacking he was hearing. “Then you?—And HER?—Would work together?”

Composer looked away. The two of them were silent a long time, feeling the blackness of the hole deepen.

“And you?” Mechanic asked. “What do you think?”

Whereas once Composer would have answered with a sneer at what
they
considered music to be, now he shrugged. “Overnight I would have a worldwide audience,” he said. Overnight I would be paid. And paid well for my work.”

“But it would be your work, not your music,” Mechanic said. Composer again fell into the silence of the justly-accused, and the stillness allowed the ghosts of hundreds of smoky conversations to drift up around them. As from a far away place Mechanic heard a ghostly
Yankee Doodle
—with Composer’s voice at its edge gushing over the utter genius of the Mallarmé arrangement with its last phrase containing the entire melody the way a Russian nesting doll contains a smaller duplicate of itself
. “Halve the note and double the beat and place the song within itselffff,”
Composer’s specter sang to the tune,
“And sing a song about itself that’s caught up in its singggggg-inggggg. . . .”

That song saved my soul, he’d always said, claiming that it taught him the truth about all music. And life: that it was only by paying the strictest attention to music, and not by pandering to the masses, that a musician could discover a subject grander than music. Remembering his claim now, Mechanic spat back at him, “Then Le Petomane was just a story? A fairy tale, meant to amuse drinking buddies?” Again Composer looked away, cut to the quick this time, and for a moment, Mechanic regretted throwing back in his face the French vaudeville performer who was able to fart at will and with such force that he would begin his act by blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Through the course of his performances, Composer would always say whenever the subject of artists prostituting their work came up, Le Petomane would spread and flex his buttocks to play musical scales, folk tunes, light opera, till at the end of each evening, he would ask the audience to solemnly rise as he farted out
La Marseillaise
. “So great was his popularity, a shining beacon and logical end for all artists who aspire to an audience,” Composer would conclude, “that he earned one hundred times more than the dozen top opera singers of the day combined.”

“I’ve only come to see that there’s another lesson in
Yankee Doodle
,” Composer now answered somberly: “That a penny whistle can lighten the human heart.” Looking up from his clasped hands he added, “And what’s so wrong with that?”