The Made-Up Man

by Joseph Scapellato

27

  Stanley Continues to Recount Aunt Abbey’s Birthday Party

  My brother said, “This might be an unforgivable thing to say, but I kind of hoped it’d be easier on Dad now that Busia’s gone.”

  I nodded. “It isn’t.”

  We clunked our cups together in salute to Busia. We wanted to miss her, which was something like missing her.

  Our dad returned, hot-faced with fury. He’d been yelling. “The bastard’s hiding in the bathroom,” he said. “When you have to piss, piss on him.”

  I had to piss. The back door led right into the kitchen, which was so crammed with antique cooking utensils and decorative nonfunctional pottery and half-completed acrylic-splashed canvases that the effect was of a space in which it was hard to tell what was meant to be art and what wasn’t, which was the state of every room and hallway in the house, which Aunt Abbey said was the point of the art that mattered the most: to create the sort of space we used to see everywhere we went but had been taught by time and economics to un-see.

  “We need help re-seeing,” she’d say, “re-seeing everything. Starting with the self.”

  Aunt Abbey slid a tray of kolaczki out of the oven. Stand-up fans whirred. It was cool in the kitchen, but my aunt was as red and sweaty as if she’d been sunning on the roof. She waved me over.

  I asked her if the bathroom was occupied by the enemy.

  She offered me an apricot kolaczky. “Around here, what isn’t?”

  We each ate one. They disintegrated, their sweetness subtle, then full, then lasting. The bottle of Chopin had vanished, which made me feel like I’d passed a basketball right between the legs of Uncle Lech to Aunt Abbey. I scratched my beard, hoping she’d comment on it, and asked about her birthday, how she was feeling.

  “Forty-one,” she said. “The forties. The decade of the unveiling of your limitations, of the polishing of them. Of trying to position your limitations into bridges that reach beyond themselves.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  She said that after journeying through one full year in the forties she could clearly see the thirties sealed off behind her. In those thirties wound a number of named paths that she would not be taking with her life, named paths that ended in roles that she would not be playing. Although American optimism demanded that one meet this situation with denial, it was fact, and facts of this order were best understood when impaled on shining pins and stuck to one’s chest. “When you turn thirty next spring,” she said, “you’ll feel what I mean, a little. Only less severely, less serenely. Help me find a spatula.”

  We searched the vases, parting their bouquets of colored pencils and wooden spoons.

  My father had eleven years on my aunt. This gap gave their brother-sister conflicts a buried father-daughter fault line. To my brother she was Auntie Big Sister, friend and family, and to me she was that, too, but in a truth-telling-babysitter sort of way, the cool semi-stranger I wished would take my parents’ place for more than one night at a time. As a teenager I found ways to ditch my mom and dad’s separate family gatherings and I never saw her. I graduated. She heard, probably from my brother, that I wanted to move to the city—she knew a landlord with a cheap place in Edgewater nine blocks from her even cheaper place in Edgewater—so she met me there and I signed the lease. For the next six and a half years I trudged through undergrad, scraping up courses at community colleges and UIC, while my aunt made art and wrote grants, managed galleries and local co-ops, and dated a diverse ecosystem of men. Once a month she’d text me on a weekend—“I regret to inform you that you have canceled your plans for the day”—and take me to an opening or an experimental six-hour play or a bookstore poetry reading or a protest downtown, and afterwards we’d order mixed drinks at arty bars or PBR tallboys at not-so-divey dives, and she’d force me to try sushi or Nigerian fried goat or Bengali sweets or real-deal Chinatown Chinese, and if we talked about our personal lives, she’d knead the surface of our circumstances until they surrendered stimulating big-picture questions, deep feeling, deep thinking, as if all it took to find the work of art in anything was an act of careful framing. Whatever we did, wherever we went, she’d show me favorite sights, “unintended auto-masterworks”: a stately tree trunk’s slow absorption of the meshing of a fence; a lone bike wheel U-locked to a gate, rusting in streaks, sheaves of ivy twisting the rim into an urban wreath; a flattened rat, rug-like, its spinal cord and pelvis mysteriously intact, risen somehow to the top of the pelt; the drawing of a two-lane street chalked by kids onto the sidewalk, concrete signifying concrete, the city itself at the center of their play. I graduated. I worked a job I didn’t like. When I told my aunt I was thinking of applying to grad school, she turned a walk through the Northwestern campus into a surprise meeting with the chair of the anthropology department. He seemed to think it was a date. Her hair shone, rayed with silver-gray by her early thirties, but her face, figure, and carriage were youthful, and this supposed contradiction pulled the crank on a wheel of charm that induced men and women between the ages of twenty-one and seventy into offering to buy her drinks.

  I was there the night she said yes to a middle-aged artist named Lech.

  He bought me a bourbon, too, to make me stay.

  They talked performance art, politics, lactic fermentation crocks, and “the male impulse versus the female impulse” in American cinema. They debated which Polish traits were most invisible to Poles and which Polish-American traits were most invisible to Polish Americans. This first stage of their flirtation was almost entirely intellectual, as if they both preferred to pretend that they were bodiless. Every now and again, Lech looked me in the eye and solicited my opinion, but when I gave it, he didn’t listen to my words, he listened to how I said them. I didn’t like this, and I sensed my aunt’s urge to be alone with him, so I slid the bartender money for the next round and stood up to go. The man who would become my uncle rose to protest or to fake-protest, but stopped before he spoke, paled, and sat back down. Then he fell to the floor. We called an ambulance.

  My aunt looked in on him the next day—he’d suffered (or fake-suffered) a blood clot.

  A week later he proposed.

  28

  Stanley Recalls the First Year of Aunt Abbey’s Marriage to Uncle Lech

  After a one-month engagement, they married. My dad and my mom and my brother and Busia and I didn’t go—our invitations arrived a week before the wedding. The wedding was in Kraków.

  “The man is a thief,” said Busia.

  My dad smiled. “What do we do, call the cops?”

  “No,” she said. “Sever his hands.”

  We were making pierogi at my dad’s. My dad fed the dough through the press, Busia cut the pressed strips into circles, and my brother and I packed, shaped, and sealed the circles into pierogi. We made two kinds, like always: potato with browned butter, and pork with onions and mushrooms and cabbage. Outside, falling snow whirled across the yards of the subdivision. A father and a son one house over rolled up a family of snowmen.

  “That’s not enough, Ma,” said my dad. “We’d have to pop out his eyeballs, too.”

  “And probably cut off his ears,” I said.

  “He doesn’t get to keep his nose, does he?” said my brother.

  My dad and my brother and I were laughing. Nobody had really wanted to go to the wedding.

  “Man is a beast that laughs,” said Busia.

  My dad woofed.

  Busia kept cutting circles and slapping them onto the table. “Work,” she said.

  My dad growled and snarled.

  “Get the muzzle!” said my brother. “Get the leash!”

  My dad grabbed my wrist and howled.

  I grabbed his—I howled right back.

  After the wedding, Aunt Abbey moved out of her Edgewater apartment, where she’d lived for over a decade, to my uncle’s apartment-and-studio in Pilsen. Her spontaneous invites to art events slowed, then stopped. I emailed her about gallery openings in Edgewater and Rogers
Park, thinking she might like to pop back to the old neighborhood, and I texted her about festivals in Pilsen and Bridgeport, thinking she might find the South Side more doable, but she responded too late or not at all. I didn’t hold this against her. She was reshuffling.

  Nearly a year later, she texted: did I want to do a bike tour of Pilsen murals? I rushed down. We rode around the neighborhood and saw a dozen stunning murals on apartment buildings and abandoned factories, on underpasses and auto repair shops. The guide, an achy old man, provided layers of historical and cultural context, including anecdotes about the artists, almost all of whom he personally knew.

  Afterwards my aunt and I grabbed tacos from Carnitas Don Pedro and devoured them in the shady dugout of a baseball field, in a park near her place. Kids at the edge of the outfield jogged through soccer drills. An elotes lady rolled her clanging cart across Eighteenth.

  My aunt was more trim and toned than I’d ever seen her, but had a staggered stare, like she’d been socked by a ghost. She wore a loose T-shirt and a pair of paint-speckled shorts, which meant that she’d come straight from painting, but she was loaded up with new jewelry, all of it amber, richly whorled necklaces and bracelets and rings. Every piece looked like an imploded galaxy. We discussed the most spectacular mural we saw, a garage-door work that depicted Aztecs imprisoned in a burning space station. The artist had been up-to-date on archaeology—one of the figures’ faces, modeled on the knife-tongued god at the center of the iconic Aztec sun stone, had been painted a super-glossy black. Although the sun stone had long since lost its paint by the time it was discovered, a very recent study had made the case that the god’s face had been black, or perhaps unpainted. He was dying, the archaeologists argued. He was being killed by an eclipse.

  Our guide had positioned the mural as a critique of Chicago Public Schools. The artist, he noted with melancholy pride, was his niece.

  “His niece has vision,” said my aunt. “If I had just half her vision, I’d be twice the artist.”

  I wondered if our guide had ever wanted to be an artist. “The way he talked about his niece,” I said.

  “I’ve seen it many times before,” said my aunt. “He’s a person who at one point told himself that he wanted to ‘Be an Artist.’ What he was truly telling himself, though, was that he wanted to ‘Be the Idea of an Artist.’”

  “I don’t see much of a difference,” I said. “You need the idea. The idea takes you to the thing itself.”

  “But if you anchor yourself in the idea, you’ve anchored yourself in wanting. Not in the work. Once you’re there, if you’re not careful, the wanting will replace everything. You’ll start to want to believe that the idea can replace you—that it can complete you. It doesn’t matter what the idea is, the Idea of an Artist, the Idea of a Partner, the Idea of a Family. You’ll steer yourself into a cloud. You might not notice right away, but when you do, on your own or with someone’s help, it’s over. You fall out of the sky.”

  I said I didn’t follow.

  “I left Lech,” she said.

  She shifted to sit cross-legged on the bench.

  I was too surprised to know what to say.

  She said that Lech was everything she’d wanted in a partner-in-art-and-in-life, so much so that when she was with him, she was without space, without mystery. “Being without space, being without mystery—for an artist, that is not sustainable. Such conditions cripple the process.”

  To me this sounded like the cover page to a more painful truth. But what I said was that I was sorry to hear it. I asked her how she was holding up.

  A plane surged overhead, gray and low, descending.

  My aunt stared at the ballfield. She seemed to be weighing what it would do to our friendship if she were to tell me more.

  I asked her where she was staying.

  “I’m moving out at the end of the week,” she said.

  I gathered up the taco wrappers. When I stuffed them in the dugout trash can, I accidentally displaced more garbage—two handfuls clabbered out and into the dirt, mostly plastic cups and straws and snack bags. I gathered that up, too.

  My aunt said, “Tell me about your girlfriend.”

  Ro and I had been together for a month or two. Everything was easy.

  “Plenty of space and mystery so far,” I said.

  I didn’t mean for it to come out sounding flippant, but it did.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said, smiling without smiling. “You don’t believe what I’m saying about art, about love, about me and Lech.”

  I said I didn’t know much about them as a couple.

  She asked me if I was ready to know.

  I said that if she wanted to tell me, I’d listen.

  She told me about Lech’s first major project, a logistically complex piece he’d put together ten years ago when he lived in Poland. The title translated to Nothing About Us, Without Us, a phrase associated with a sixteenth-century legal ruling that granted democratic powers to Polish nobles. Over time, however, the phrase had attached itself to something else, the “nothing” and the “without us” coming to signify a particularly Polish frustration with the fact that at certain moments in history the nature of the nation’s existence had been determined by foreign powers. Lech hired a young artist, and with his permission, the artist’s friends, family members, and long-term girlfriend. The project’s intended duration was one month. Lech began to implement “interpersonal partitions”—one by one, the people closest to the artist were phased out of his life, symbolically and concretely, collapsing his “metaphysical borders.” They stopped returning his calls and meeting up with him. Lech covertly removed meaningful objects from the artist’s apartment: framed photos, favorite shirts and mugs, old sketchbooks, gifts and notes from his girlfriend. Week by week, the methods increased in intensity; the important people who had pulled out of his life passed through it again, but on the edges, and without acknowledging him. The project ended three days early with the artist’s death from an overdose.

  “He had selected the young man, in part, because of his addiction to pain meds, which he’d developed after complications from a vasectomy,” said my aunt. “Lech felt that these factors could not be more metaphorically apt.”

  After Nothing About Us, Without Us, Lech left Poland. Not because of the artist’s death, or the artist’s family’s lawsuits, but because of the national art community’s failure to respond, positively or negatively, to the piece’s exhibition. Poland was not the place for performance art, he decided.

  “Am I a human person who can love a human person like that?” said my aunt.

  She twisted off one of her two amber rings. It was thick and sleek, the inside inscribed with words I couldn’t read.

  Then there was his near-death experience with the blood clot, she said, which, by his own account, had driven him to up the scale and the stakes of every subsequent project, which, she admitted, had led to upsetting moral questions.

  “Am I a committed artist who can admire—and live with, and work with—and see with, and know with—a committed artist like that?”

  She plunked the ring into the trash can.

  “I used to be sure I wanted to be. I used to be sure I was.”

  She popped off one of her two amber bracelets and one of her two amber necklaces.

  “His English is perfect,” she said. “The accent is a performance.”

  She balled up the bracelet with the necklace and dropped them into the trash can.

  “I’m moving out at the end of the week,” she said again.

  Two weeks later I texted. No response.

  A month later I called. Nothing.

  Two months after that she sent out a group invite to a combination birthday/housewarming party at her and Uncle Lech’s new house in Rogers Park. It was the first that any of us had heard about this move.

  “I was mistaken,” she said when I arrived.

  None of her amber jewelry was in sight.

  “You fo
und mystery and space again,” I said.

  She smiled: a real smile.

  “I gave it up,” she said.

  She seemed happy.

  I hugged her.

  29

  Stanley Recounts Uncle Lech’s Proposal at His Aunt Abbey’s Birthday Party

  “I attended T’s show last night,” said my aunt, opening two drawers at once, searching them for a spatula. “T is the single most committed young actor I’ve seen this year. Everything about her is rooted. She is a root. She roots into the soils below the soils, the richest, rarest earth.”

  I checked the cabinets under the sink: detergent, rubber gloves, mannequin heads. My aunt was right. I’d never thought about T in those terms, but onstage, it was her stability that stood out. Everything in her expressions, movements, and speech suggested dimensions of depth, even when she spontaneously rehearsed, practicing her lines and blocking in the bedroom or on walks through the neighborhood.

  “Outside of the stage, as well,” said my aunt. “A deep ease.”

  T had loved talking to my aunt. We’d all gone to lunch a few times, and the two of them had interacted like friends reuniting, not like strangers getting to know each other.

  I continued to act like nothing was wrong with my life: I rummaged through a wicker basket piled with cookbooks and obscene finger puppets.

  My aunt discovered a spatula in the pocket of a smock.

  She flicked it about, as if it were wet.

  This was the time to tell her that I had proposed to T, that T had said no and moved out, that T and I were on a break.

  “After the show,” she said, gesturing with the spatula, encouraging herself to talk, “T invited me around the corner with the cast. She let me buy her a drink at the bar. We shared a joint in the alley. We discussed a few things.”

  I stopped.

  The look my aunt gave me wasn’t sympathetic, but it said, Sympathetic.

  Then it said, Apologetic.

  T might have told her everything.

  It hurt. I tried not to show it.