Ugly Behavior (4 page)

Perhaps it was unkind of me, but for a moment I thought he was
trying to suggest I was going to be much more interesting as well.

I don’t know what more I can say with any certainty about those
days. It was such a long time ago. Tommy was never seen again. Dad and I
returned to the ranch. Dad continued to paint, in fact creating much of the
work he is most famous for, beginning with the re-worked and completed “Saguaro
Night.” I discovered my own vision, if you can call it that. With all the
saguaro, the low-lying mesas, damaged landscapes, the dark skies, the feral
pigs and other creatures, people have pointed out quite correctly that my
vision owes much to my dad’s. And after years of living here in the desert, so
do my attitudes.

I was no beauty, before. When I look back I think the major thing
attracting men to me had been my lack of standards. The scar along my jaw isn’t
so terrible—in fact from most angles it’s barely noticeable. But what my
father had so awkwardly implied, that it might make my face more interesting,
turned out to be mostly true, I think. So I keep my chin raised higher than
normal just to show it off. I’ve even been known to use makeup to highlight its
shape, the aesthetic beauty of its line.

Dad died in 1984, his heart disease catching up to him one
afternoon in front of his easel.
 
I
didn’t find him until the next day—when he didn’t show up for dinner I
just assumed he was too involved in a painting to stop. I wasn’t supposed to
disturb him, even if he went missing. That was the rule, the artist’s special
rule. Unlike a normal person, he didn’t have to show up for dinner. It’s
possible I could have helped him if I’d found him in time. I don’t know; who’s
to say?

The first major retrospective was held in 1989. I was there,
introducing many of the paintings. They gave me a show on the side as
compensation. It worked out for me; I’m not sure I’d have a career today if not
for that show.

It was the first time more than a handful of people had seen the
completed “Saguaro Night.” It created quite a stir. I showed them where the
damage had been, and how the repair and subsequent paint-over had created a
fracture line that led the eye through the marching saguaro and to the lone red
figure on the other side. Although clearly embarrassed, a couple of people
timidly offered the observation that that fracture line was reminiscent of my
jaw line scar. Bullshit, of course—people see what they want to see.

“The magic, Mary, comes in how sometimes only a few tentative
brush strokes of the right color, in the right position within the composition,
make the painting what it is.”

I hear that advice of my father’s, and other bits of aesthetic lore,
every time I stand in front of a canvas. And in my father’s work, no painting
bears the truth of that advice better than “Saguaro Night,” and the few
brushstrokes making that running, burning figure.

Those first few months out of the hospital I painted constantly,
rarely taking time to eat or sleep, it seemed, rarely seeing my father, who was
busy with his own creative firestorm, working on “Saguaro Night,” and other,
similarly dark paintings. Occasionally he invited me into his studio to see the
progress he’d made on the painting. This was unheard of for him, and showed, I
think, how sorry he was for what had happened. Additional evidence of this
sorrow came in the form of late night rants to no one, drinking and stumbling
around outside, wandering off into the hills. Screaming and cursing. Sometimes
in the morning I’d find him stinking and out of it, lying in front of the door,
and I’d drag him in. We never spoke of that. It became just another part of his
artistic process, a stage in his “research,” and therefore off-limits to
conversation.

There was no red figure in the painting for the longest time. Then
there came that night when the
Javelina
herd barked
and squealed and just generally went crazy. And in the distance I heard my
father screaming back at them. And in the distance I heard more screaming. And
I looked out there into the dark Sonoran desert night and saw that he had built
a fire out there. He had set fire to a saguaro, which raised its spindly arms
in agony and tried to run away.

I’m not sure when he returned, but I heard him working in his
studio all day, and he slept most of the next day, and the day after. That’s
when I slipped into his studio and saw that the red, running figure had been
added, and that now the painting was complete.
 

On that second day of his sleep I saw the birds circling a distant
spot of desert. Remembering what we did for the
Javelina
,
that poor dumb pig, I grabbed a shovel and headed in that direction. But I did
not want my father’s help, preferring to leave him to his dreams.

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.”

— Paul Laurence Dunbar

Something iffy had slipped into his face. Of course it was
probably just a matter of looking too closely. An occupational
hazard—K.T. was always looking at things a little too closely. Couldn’t
see the forest—actually hadn’t seen a forest in years. Couldn’t see a
face for all its pixels. He stared into the mirror, ran one finger down his
skin from right eye to lower cheek, fascinated by the way the skin tones
changed, the crinkles vanishing then reforming, new lines appearing, and
everything just taking a few seconds too long to spring back into shape. A loss
of elasticity, a decrease in flexibility. Signs of age as sure as the whitening
of his scraggly beard hair and the bluing of the flesh under the eyes. A mask,
wasn’t it? K.T.’s old-man mask. Sometimes he considered shaving the beard and
getting some sort of tribal tattoo across the lips and around the chin to
replace it, maybe make the dark under the eyes a permanent, deeper mark.
Something bold to mask his age. But he suspected that much tattoo on facial
skin would be a painful process, and he didn’t have the time anyway.

Instead he threw cold water on his face and turned away from the
mirror. He didn’t think many people liked what they saw in the mirror. Always
this discrepancy between the face they imagined and what appeared on the
screen. Like listening to your voice on tape: the words and the particular
pattern of speech might be yours, but the voice wasn’t yours at all. You
sounded better, you looked better, in your head.

Except media types, actors, announcers. They spent their lives
making the face and the voice match what they imagined, what someone else
imagined, what they read in the script. K.T. figured he of all people should
envy such control, but he didn’t. There was comfort in the discrepancy between
image and substance. Rightly or wrongly it suggested depth of character.

In any case, nothing to have an anxiety attack over. His favorite
saying of late, he’d posted it at the top of his web site. Of course people who
were compelled to remind you there was nothing to be anxious about often
suffered from raging anxieties. He could feel the nerves playing with the muscles
of his face like spider hairs. Damn, but he was a mess. Nothing to worry about.
No big deal. The face was a mask and the mask was just a few cells deep,
nothing more than a thin layer of electrons.

He made his way back to the screen, fatigue causing him to bump
into things, sending stacks of old magazines tumbling onto discarded pizza
boxes, stray clothing, unopened mail. He hardly noticed. He owed a new client a
picture by midnight, and one of his few prides was that he never missed a
deadline.

The assignment was another creepy one—he seemed to be
getting a lot of those lately. A drawback of advertising on, doing most of your
business through the web. Photo Manipulations Inc. There was always some fool
wanting him to graft a young starlet’s head onto a naked body, but that was
more idiotic than creepy. He’d accept their credit card, though—who was
he to say? They were just images, after all. They couldn’t really hurt anybody.

But fellows like this new client—and they were almost always
male, very few women appearing to need his services—what they wanted
couldn’t exactly be called pornographic, he supposed, but pondering the whys
and wherefores of their requests to any degree always filled him with unease.
The best he could do was lose himself in the technical aspects, leave the
philosophizing to the alternative news groups. Wet images, dry images, women
covered head to toe in a stew of nameless food items. Everyone seemed to have a
special interest.

But it was all just a shim of electrons, a thin peel of a mask.
Nobody died, they just got older, more set in their ways.

The new client had sent him a snapshot of a young boy, six, maybe
seven, a little stocky, reddish hair, his back turned to the camera but his
face twisted around to see who was behind him. Smart kid. It pays to know who’s
behind you. Only a hint of anxiety in the kid’s expression but still plainly
there, especially at the higher magnifications.

The other photo the client sent was that of a fat sow suckling her
young on a bed of straw and gray, lumpy mud. K.T.’s assignment was to replace
the sow’s head with that of the young boy.

What K.T. was being paid for, of course, was to make it look good.
It wasn’t supposed to look as if someone had grafted a boy’s head onto a hog’s
body. Skin tones and textures had to match, color blends had to be seamless.
There had to be some hog in the boy and some boy in the hog. Despite your good
sense, you had to believe your eyes. You had to believe that a creature such as
this in fact existed.

He was almost done with the project, and even though he’d been
staring at the image constantly over the last day or so, seen it even in his
dreams, he still couldn’t stand to look at it. So he looked at the picture and
yet he didn’t look at the picture. He looked at pixels, he manipulated bits and
bits of bits, but he could not bring himself to look at this picture.

He had performed one additional manipulation, unasked-for, but
which he knew from experience the client would want, even though he might not
have the right words to ask for it. K.T. had tweaked the areas around the eyes
and the mouth to make the boy’s anxiety more pronounced. No additional charge.
A boy sow down in the mud, suckling his young. Completed. He didn’t know what
the client would do with such an image. He didn’t want to know. He emailed a
low-resolution sample, let the guy know how to download the higher quality
version from K.T.’s site.

The rest of the evening K.T. worked on his web site, scanning
images from magazines and newspapers, adding elements to aspects of his own
face already in electronic storage. His web pages contained samples and
descriptions of his business, price lists and submission information, but the
deeper you went into the site the more personal it became, until finally you
arrived at K.T.’s personal newsletter, Mews, and a gallery of images he’d
created, including many self-portraits. He’d tried to explain in several
different ways in the newsletter that the multitude of self-portraits on the
site was not evidence of some runaway narcissism, but simply to avoid the
emotional and legal complications inherent when you manipulated the faces of
other people without their permission.

The title Mews had been a spur-of-the-moment invention, risking
silliness in its multiple meanings. He lived in a complex called Dogwood Mews,
meant to emulate an old English neighborhood with its facing townhouses and
cobbled courtyard, the dogwood at its center in fact a sculpture of a tree out
of wire and
fibrewood
and plastic laminates, the
woodgrain
a photographic image bonded to melamine. There
were also word plays: “News” which he watched constantly but never seemed to
believe or understand, the muse of inspiration of which he appeared to have
very little these days, the musings of solitude which he had in plentiful
supply, and finally the mews of complaint, the pitiful whining of a homeless or
tortured cat, scratching and puking at the door. He’d originally included an
image of a tortured cat as part of the masthead, which had outraged some so
much he’d finally removed it. He kept explaining in his emails to these cat
fanciers that the image had been manufactured, that he tortured images not
animals, but many didn’t seem to believe.

Most who bothered delving into these deep recesses of his site
were more interested in his self-portraits than animal rights issues, however.
Here his image suffered skinning, marring, evisceration, zombification,
pixilation,
posterizing
, inversion, hue saturation,
spherization
, castration, immolation, all the tortures of
the damned, and yet the only fallout for his physical being appeared to be
intensifying fatigue.
 

Sometimes he recounted for his readers/viewers the steps involved
in creating such personal disaster, but most of the time he was content to let
them view the images without the technical background. People made assumptions
about him on the basis of these images and sent him offers of aid both
financial and psychological, long confessions, virulent diatribes, veiled
threats, and more than one marriage proposal. He posted several commentaries
suggesting that perhaps they interpreted too much, that an image took on a life
all its own once manipulated, divorced from its original source, it’s all just
electrons, folks, charged particles and vapor-thin appearances and cosmic dust,
but the outpouring had showed no signs of a decrease.