T understood what my uncle was up to with his art, and why it had a big draw, but she couldn’t support his approach.
“If your uncle’s subject is ‘America,’” she said, “it’s not an America that most Americans live in, with his ten white men per one white woman and all of them from fucking Poland.”
“‘America’ isn’t his subject,” I said. “His subject is ‘This Is How I Imagine America.’”
“‘This Is How I Imagine America’ is the subject of ‘America.’”
I conceded that this was a good point.
“But that’s not his point,” she said. “His point is that he doesn’t care how his art affects the people that it exploits. When I was younger, I thought an attitude like that was absolutely essential, was how you made real work. Now I know it’s just convenient.”
Near the end of the night Sarah-Joseph introduced T to my uncle. They met in the Country-Western Country room, every wall dense with labeled artifacts.
My uncle looked at T like she was a shelf full of art supplies.
“Your model,” he said, addressing Sarah-Joseph.
Sarah-Joseph gave T a squeeze. “Couldn’t have done it without her.”
“Oh, cut it out,” said T. “The artist does the work.”
My uncle agreed. “The model is nothing.”
Sarah-Joseph laughed.
My uncle pantomimed a scene with his hands. “Here is the artist; here is the nothing. The artist is going to the nothing, is saying: I see? Something? I see? The nothing is doing nothing. The nothing is doing the nothing in the nowhere, with the no one and the no time. Reality. Then the artist: Am I seeing? Am I seeing now? Yes—in the nothing, the artist is seeing the model. Do you understand? The artist is making the model where there is no model. Always. Always the artist is making the art where there is no art.”
“Nope,” said Sarah-Joseph. “That’s not how it works for me. There’s communion between artist and subject, between concept and medium. There’s reciprocity. There’s never a ‘nothing’ that I turn into a ‘something.’”
My uncle’s response was to direct them to three large-format photos taken during the Achy-Breakies’ show at Carol’s. The first was a wide shot of the stage. Every member of the band was playing, except the bassist, a square man who sat on the floor in a state of shame, hiding his face in his cowboy hat. In the second, my uncle, the lead singer, was reaching somewhat romantically toward a lone woman at the front of the crowd, her back to the lens. The final photo was a profile of this woman at what appeared to be the same moment—she seemed to be suffering from a terrible emotional shock, T said, like she was being electrocuted by grief.
“Your model,” said T.
My uncle motioned, with a ceremonial sweep, to the spread of art on each wall. “My model—my model—my model—my model.”
Sarah-Joseph said, “How did you ‘see’ her, how did you ‘make’ her?”
He explained that this woman was the shamed bassist’s sister. Their mother had recently died in a “very preventable accident.” The woman looked the way she did because my uncle had been singing a version of “America the Beautiful” in which he had added lyrics that unambiguously examined her difficult relationship with her deceased mother.
“Many confidential details,” said my uncle.
Sarah-Joseph was taken aback. “Confidential details you heard from her brother?”
My uncle said, “Have you heard what I have said? ‘There is no hearing, there is only seeing.’”
“Never mind, I get it now,” said Sarah-Joseph. “You don’t want to see people as people.”
My uncle didn’t understand, or pretended not to understand, what this statement meant.
Sarah-Joseph ran him through a theory of ethics in art.
An item caught T’s eye. She walked up to what looked like a real article from a real community newspaper, next to the trio of photos. It detailed a domestic disturbance in which a woman had pushed her brother down a flight of stairs. The man had been partially paralyzed, with several broken vertebrae, and the woman had been arrested, with no bail. Police determined that they were both undocumented immigrants from Poland. Deportation was likely.
This was when T realized that with the exception of my uncle, none of the artists depicted in the multimedia installation—the band members, the roadies, the groupies, the manager—were in attendance at the opening.
At that moment, the series curator strolled in, eating a large piece of cake. With her mouth full, she gestured for my uncle to follow her.
My uncle nodded to Sarah-Joseph, who was nearing the end of her explanation. He said, “I am excused.”
24
Stanley Receives an Envelope
“Stop,” said Manny, interrupting me.
He perked up like he’d heard a noise. He was sitting at the kitchen table with my guidebook.
I’d been answering his question—how I “came to occupy this apartment”—and he’d been interrupting with a series of leading questions—“Can I correctly assume that your uncle has a lucrative, legitimate, art-related day job?” and “Surely, in an art community as limited as Chicago’s, T would have encountered your uncle?” and “Allow me to guess: a supposed ‘tragedy’ befell the bassist and the bassist’s sister?”
The purpose of these interruptions was for Manny to demonstrate that he was an expert in the subject of my uncle and the artists, that thanks to T, his best friend, he knew as much about them as I did, if not more.
In this instance, however, Manny’s interruption was an observation.
Then I saw it, also: a large gray envelope had slid under the door and into the apartment.
If there’d been footsteps, I hadn’t heard them.
Manny shushed me, even though I wasn’t speaking. He rose from his chair. He approached the envelope in an I’m-the-adult-here way.
I tore open a bag of chips.
Manny picked up the envelope. I could see but not read its label.
“‘Preview of The Made-Up Man,’” read Manny.
He flipped it over, then back.
I didn’t want him to open it, and I didn’t want him to know that I didn’t want him to open it. But most of all, I didn’t want to care one way or the other.
“In this apartment,” he decided, “I, too, am a guest.”
He unsealed the envelope and withdrew a sheaf of photos.
The first one, he showed off: an impressively Photoshopped mug shot of me. I looked a very long way from repentance. The source photo had been plucked from social media, one of many shots in which I wasn’t smiling. To conform to the mug-shot genre, I’d been digitally edited into holding a placard, but instead of displaying booking information, it displayed a sentence:
YOUR “LIFE” IS IN DANGER
Manny turned to the next photo. He shook his head, amused, and presented another mug shot, this one a highly textured silhouette of a woman. Her features had been mapped over with a chalky black void. It was as if she was a woman-shaped wound sliced into space-time. The placard:
TRUST “NO ONE”
This silhouette, I could tell, belonged to T.
Manny could tell too.
“These are quite ‘meaningful’ in their ‘emphasis,’” he said.
When he flipped to the third photo, he froze. What he saw he didn’t like. His face ticked from embarrassment to irritation, from surprise to confirmation. He shuffled through the rest, three or four more, not revealing those either, then tucked them back into the envelope.
I didn’t need to see the third photo to know that it was of him.
He dropped the envelope onto the table, casually, and sat down. To show that he’d regained his composure—to suggest that he’d never lost it—he sighed.
He sighed again.
He said, “You have yet to tell me the manner in which your uncle offered this job to you.”
“You keep interrupting me,” I said.
“It is to be expected th
at you misconstrue my questions as ‘interruptions.’ ‘Interruption’ is the word that a person such as yourself, in a scenario such as this one, would turn to for deflective comfort. No—my questions are not ‘interruptions.’”
He waited for me to ask him what his questions were.
I didn’t.
He said, “They are investigations.”
25
Stanley Recalls His Conversation with His Brother at His Aunt Abbey’s Birthday Party
“You’re up,” said my dad, giving me a bag.
Along the edges of his bandage the skin of his neck rose, purple-red and puffy. He acted like he didn’t see me notice, like he lacked an injury, a story about the origin of the injury, or a neck.
My brother and I played. Every bag I tossed scored—they slapped the board or punched the hole or bumped hangers in. I don’t know how I did so well. I was thinking too much to be in any Zen-like zone.
My brother started up with the goofy voices:
“Where you get your HGH?”
“Those bags corked?”
I sank three holers.
“They let you play in the unemployment line?”
My dad drank his beer fast and stared into the simmering haze of neighbors’ yards. In the nearest, a boy stared back, pressed against a fence, his hands tight on the handle of a wagon full of toys. He wore a monster mask.
I asked my dad how was work, how was Joliet.
“Work is work. Joliet is Joliet.”
He went inside to pee.
My brother said, “Mom might ‘stay’ in Europe.”
Every summer our mom flew abroad and thought out loud about never coming back. During the school year she taught French and Russian at College of DuPage, a position she annually decided she’d be an idiot to leave.
“Before she left, they were hanging out again,” he said.
He batted his eyebrows and made a smoochy-face.
I said nothing.
We went to the keg. He gave the back of my head a brotherly pat. Once a week he talked on the phone with our mom no matter what, and no matter what on Sundays he took our dad out to lunch. Bolts of guilt torqued in my chest. I asked what had happened to our dad’s neck. My brother said he’d claimed it’d been a work accident. We agreed that this was a lie. Last summer, a growth the size of a screw had been removed from his face. We only knew about it because the before and after were right there, public. If asked, our dad had said, “It’s nothing,” and if pressed, he’d found some silently threatening way to say: Back off. Whenever our dad had a health problem, and avoided discussion of it, our mom liked to say that his behavior was because of his belief that talking about a bad thing he’d dealt with would bring that bad thing back worse. He’d never admit it, she insisted, but this was a family trait. Straight down the line from Busia.
“Don’t think the both of you don’t have it,” she’d say to me and my brother. “You do. It’s just it’s less debilitating.”
My brother asked me if I’d found full-time work. I hadn’t. I’d been working whenever I was needed for our dad’s friend Niko, a contractor he used to use, loading and unloading, doing demolition, hauling bags of the things I’d smashed into trash containers the size of trailer homes. I showed off my fingernails: each housed a mini-sickle of grime.
“Data entry,” said my brother. “Every day we’re hiring. Next thing you know you’ll be manager. Then managing the managers! Then who knows, on to Operations. All you need to be is competent.”
We ate more sausage. The weselna was best, we agreed, but only because there was no warsawska.
“The beard looks magical,” he said. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d grown a beard, but it was the first time I’d kept one for longer than a month.
“I look like a young Dziadzia,” I said.
“You look like a young Busia with a young Dziadzia’s beard.”
I cupped my chin and started to speak but stopped. My brother was right.
Our Busia had lived a very long bad life.
“Look,” said my brother, touching my shoulder, “either you’re not yourself, or you’re a new yourself I’m not used to yet.”
On his face had appeared the encouraging smile that signaled his receptivity to whatever response you were up to making, be it a subject-changing joke, an irritated dismissal, an obvious lie, or the warm-up to a heart-to-heart. The smile was hopeful. You could see your best self in it. My brother seemed content to wait for the day that I chose to make him my confidant, to give him permission to help me crack the hard case that I had shut myself inside. His faith in me made me feel young and dumb.
I’d said to T that who he thought I was wasn’t who I was, mostly.
She’d said: “When’s the last time you called him?”
The handful of times that the three of us had gone for a drink together, T and my brother had enjoyed each other’s company, an enjoyment heightened by playful disbelief—for my brother, that T was my girlfriend, for T, that my brother was my brother.
She’s so smart and beautiful!
He’s so friendly!
It might not add up that this sort of banter would make me feel good about who I was, or who was in my life. But it did.
“Everything cool?” said my brother.
This was when I should have told him that T had moved out.
“Is it the dig?” he said.
When I’d quit the Cahokia dig in May, I was stranded in Collinsville—I’d carpooled down with Dr. Madera and Golnaz. I called my brother for a lift back to Chicago. Otherwise I wouldn’t have told him.
“Only the stupid can be happy,” I said, quoting Busia.
He did her hobgoblin voice: “Life is brutal and full of traps.”
26
Stanley Remembers the Final Family Dinner with Busia
Last June, days before Busia died, our dad hosted her and my brother and me for dinner, which he hadn’t done since the holidays. My brother picked me up after work and we stopped-and-started through the rush-hour crawl to our dad’s condo down in Joliet, in the sapling-lined complex he’d built, one of dozens of new developments springing up on old farmland every year. “Country Lane,” they’d called it.
Busia was sitting at the head of the table when we walked in, critically looking on as our dad poured a can of beer into a glass for her. She was a shaved-down scrap of a woman, cut by personal and historical struggle to a state of existential indivisibility. Whatever weapon you hit her with would break. She was from Warsaw.
The only weakness she admitted to was her breathing: stuttered, gulping. It enraged her.
She’d taken to saying, “The breathing will kill me.”
This acknowledgment of her condition was unlike her.
My brother kissed her on the cheek, and I kissed her on the cheek, and we sat at either side of her. She studied us, one at a time. Her face was a wall at the end of a tunnel.
Our dad set the table. He smelled like he’d been smoking cigarettes in his sleep. Last I saw him, he’d still been quit.
“This is no home,” said Busia.
The condo had a new-construction echo—nothing on the walls, not much furniture. Our dad preferred the on-the-market look.
“Dinner,” said our dad, popping containers of take-out Polish, spooning pierogi, cutlets, and kapusta onto Busia’s plate. “It’s from Old Europe Inn. You like it. We were there.”
She said something in Polish.
“Eat,” said our dad.
She didn’t.
“Eat,” said our dad to me and my brother.
We served ourselves and ate.
Our dad sat at the other end of the table, his plate empty. Busia watched him. She was a riddle, but the answer was always the same: no.
“I went on a date with a Polish girl,” said my brother.
Our dad’s work cell phone rang. When he pulled it out of his hip holster to see who was calling, Busia gestured f
or the paper take-out bag. My brother pushed it to her. She picked up her plate and turned it upside down over the bag, the food plopping and splatting.
“We can get you something else, if you want?” said my brother.
She folded the bag shut.
“For fuck’s sake, it was a fucking work call,” shouted our dad. “I have to work, Ma. I have to work to keep you alive.”
Busia said, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
Our dad snatched her plate and the paper bag and stomped out of the room and into the kitchen. He smashed a smashable object.
My brother hurried into the kitchen.
There was another smash.
Busia sniffed at her beer.
I tried to think of something to say to her. Although I didn’t like who she was, how she treated her family, or the fact that we were related, I respected her in a way that was similar to how I respected certain despicable MMA fighters, back when I used to watch the tournaments—the same qualities that made those three or four fighters despicable people, it seemed, made them extraordinary athletes, and it felt false to hate them for the reasons that made me love watching them.
Busia rolled a fist against her chest. Her breaths stretched and wavered, slowly. She was more pale than usual, which only made her seem more dangerous. I knew better than to ask small-talky questions about how she was feeling and what she’d been up to, or genuine questions about her childhood, what it was like to immigrate, and why she’d never gone back to visit Warsaw, not even once.
In my imagination, Warsaw was a block of leveled walls and buildings, a blasted ring of rubble. Noble broken things were there. But everyone who guarded them was Busia.
I said, “If you don’t want to eat, you don’t have to eat.”
She tilted her head, her old poker-tell for imminent violence. Then she pointed straight up, to indicate the kitchen behind her. “They are bad. But you, you are worse.”
I laughed. “It’s because I’m like you.”
“No,” she said. “It is because you do not know you are an idiot.”
The Made-Up Man Page 5