Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

Every casual remark became telling. If someone said she really loved his wall reliefs, he assumed she hated the mobiles. If someone asked why he had made a certain choice in his work, he assumed it was a veiled dig that it had been the wrong choice. If someone said Lyndon was a genius, he assumed he was being ridiculed.

  Whenever another artist got a coveted exhibition or a good review or an award or grant, he was rent with jealousy. He wished his friends ill will. He thought everyone detested him, and why shouldn’t they, he was prickling with so much self-loathing. Everything about the city began to irritate him: it was so crowded and hostile, no one had any manners, all the noise, the traffic, buses screeching, music blaring, the endless construction projects, the honking and sirens, always there were people yelling, the fucking homeless and crazies, every sound making him jolt. He never went out anymore. He had occasional thoughts of suicide.

  He wanted to stop being judged. He wanted to stop being expected to come up with something new and brilliant every year. He wanted to stop having to measure up to his early success. He wanted to stop being so afraid—of failure, of not being respected or liked, of performing badly, of making a fool of himself. He wanted it all to stop. It’d be such a relief to stop, he thought, to disappear, go someplace where no one knew him, do something simple and unambitious for a living.

  Alvin gave him an escape. He had a client who was building a house in Sagaponack, and he intended to install one of Lyndon’s wall reliefs in his living room. Except the wall relief didn’t quite fit the proportions of the house, a little too large for it. The client asked Alvin to ask Lyndon if he could purchase just three panels of the sculpture rather than all four.

  “You think this is decoration?” Lyndon asked. He told Alvin he had always been skeptical about his qualifications as a dealer, and now he knew those reservations had been warranted. He told him he knew nothing about art, and called him a charlatan, a huckster. He told him he was no better than a furniture salesman, just looking to make a quick buck, but money didn’t buy integrity, and said he no longer represented him.

  Lyndon left New York, and on his way home to Watsonville from San Francisco, he pulled off Highway 1 into Rosarita Bay for coffee. He saw a real estate circular about the farm for sale at a bargain price—it was a time when family farms were routinely being foreclosed. On a whim, he took a look and bought it, attracted mostly by the enormous gambrel barn with its white pine siding, cedar shingles, and copper flashing.

  For a couple of years, there were a few letters from dealers and curators, inquiring about representation and shows and exhibitions, all of which he never answered, tossing them into the trash, and then the letters abruptly stopped coming. It was both comforting and depressing to realize that he could drop out as he had and, in the end, not really be missed.

  A footnote in art history, Laura Díaz-McClatchey had said. The waitresses cleared the plates from the table and gave them cups of hot green tea.

  Why had he quit? Laura wanted to know. What could he tell her? That he had despised the person that he’d become? That he’d turned into a complete raving, megalomaniacal asshole?

  “It wasn’t anything dramatic,” he said to her.

  “You don’t want to talk about it.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t like me anymore,” Laura said. “I’m being a snoop and a nudge. I’ve offended you, and now you won’t want to get ice cream with me for dessert.”

  “That ice cream is pretty fabulous,” he said. He turned up his palm—a gesture of concession. “I just got tired of the scene. It would have been nice if the work had been its own reward, and you could somehow remove ego from the equation. It would’ve been nice if you could just make things, follow the original impulse into infinite variations, and not have to finish them for the sake of a show. But that wasn’t the case. I got fed up with it. I wanted a normal life. An average life.”

  On the way to the restaurant tonight, after parking his pickup far down Main Street, several blocks already closed off for the stages and booths for tomorrow’s festival, Lyndon had walked down the sidewalk and found another paper airplane, stuck in a bush. Folded on the same lined school paper was the message: “The Third Noble Truth is that the cessation of suffering is attainable. With you around, I DON’T THINK SO.” From his earlier research on the Internet, Lyndon knew that the Buddha had said suffering could be ended by acquiring dispassion—freeing yourself from attachment, getting beyond the self—and that was precisely what Lyndon had been unable to do as an artist. He’d been unable to let it—let anything—go.

  “You don’t regret it, leaving when you did?” Laura asked.

  “No. I don’t think about it all that much, if you want to know the truth.”

  “What about your obligations as an artist?”

  “My obligations?”

  “What you were doing was important to a lot of people.”

  “It wasn’t any great loss to mankind when I stopped making art.”

  “You stopped sculpting entirely?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Why?”

  “Let me ask you, what went through your head as you started a sculpture? What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anything.” These sorts of discussions were invariably difficult for him. People expected him to reveal something profound, but the reality was always much more prosaic—or simply impossible to articulate. “I’d just be conscious of a…I don’t know how to explain it.” He thought of the sensation that had run through his body after Laura had given him the massage. “This energy,” he told her, not believing the words were coming from his mouth. “I’d start a piece, and I’d just see it flowing in front of me, like it wasn’t solid matter anymore, but viscous, with a life of its own.”

  She nodded. “Like ki, Japanese for chi,” she said. “That ability, that gift, it doesn’t just disappear. You can’t just turn it off with a switch.”

  “Well, apparently I did.”

  He paid the check. It was a rather hefty check. He understood this protocol of dating, though, regardless of the date’s outcome (not entirely pleasant, by his estimation, but perhaps salvageable)—that she would offer to split the bill, and he should say thank you, but refuse—and while the waitress took away his credit card, Laura excused herself to go to the bathroom, after which they planned to go to Udderly Licious for dessert.

  At the table, Lyndon was staring out the window when he saw Sheila walking by. He sucked in his breath, trying to summon invisibility, as if a large predatory beast were slinking past him. She kept going, head down, preoccupied with jotting a note down on a clipboard—she must have been overseeing the preparations down the street for the festival. Lyndon breathed out, heart hammering, and gulped from his glass of water, only to have Sheila backtrack to the window and peer in at Lyndon.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked after she came into the restaurant. She glanced at the empty chair across from Lyndon. “Are you on a date?”

  He didn’t know what to say. “It’s not really a date.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s just a dinner. A friendly dinner.”

  “With your masseuse?” she asked.

  “Sheila, it was a spontaneous thing. I didn’t really—”

  “Did you tell Hana she could go to Berklee?”

  “Absolutely not. I said she should go to Stanford first and then see how she feels.”

  “You have some nerve,” Sheila said. “God knows why, but she listens to you, and now she has it in her head she’ll transfer out in the spring. You have no right, Lyndon. This songwriting thing will be her ruin. It’ll break her heart. How could you do this to her? To me?”

  “She’s an adult, Sheila.”

  “She’s seventeen.”

  “It’s not a matter of growing out of it.”

  “You mean she has to get it out of her system, like you did? Like Steven? Fall flat on her face a
nd be humiliated? Then she can hole away on a pathetic little farm with no prospects of solvency? You’ve never been a parent. You don’t know what it is to want to protect your child from pain. Thanks for telling me, by the way, that your brother’s visiting you. I thought you no longer spoke to him.”

  “It wasn’t my idea for him to come,” he said. “He sort of foisted it upon me.”

  “Were you going to introduce me to him?”

  “You know, I’m confused, Sheila. Didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to see me anymore? I think, actually, you were very explicit about that. Am I still obliged to tell you everything?”

  “Like you ever did,” she said.

  “Are you going on a date with Ed Kitchell?” Lyndon asked.

  She looked at him, slack-jawed. “What did you say? Who told you that?”

  “Are you?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “I think it is. I think it’s very much my business. Don’t do it. Don’t go out with him.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “He’s a dick, Sheila,” he told her. “He’s only trying to get to me through you.”

  “That would be the only reason he would want to ask me out?”

  “Are you really going to see him?”

  “Maybe it’s just a friendly dinner, a spontaneous little happenstance.”

  By happenstance, Laura returned to the table from the bathroom then, and Sheila turned to her, and then turned to Lyndon, the three of them held in an abeyance of shared terror for a moment, and then Sheila picked up Lyndon’s glass of water, pitched its contents into his face, and left the restaurant.

  Lyndon was no longer in the mood for ice cream. “Could we just call it a night?” he said to Laura.

  But to his embarrassment, his credit card was declined, and he had to give the waitress another one, and he and Laura had to sit there for a while, water dripping off his head, before they could depart, watched by everyone in the restaurant.

  “I guess that could have gone better,” Laura said on the sidewalk.

  They exchanged quick goodnights and went their separate ways.

  Could this weekend, Lyndon thought, get any worse? As he approached his pickup, it looked a little funny to him, something off about it. He slowly grasped that it was parked lower to the ground than it should have been, and when he bent down for a closer look, he saw that his tires, all four of them, were completely flat. There was also something on his windshield—a parking ticket. He had misread the hours on the posted signs restricting access for the festival. The officer of record who had issued the ticket was Lieutenant Steven Lemke.

  Laura, driving by, spotted Lyndon sitting on the curb and offered him a ride home. He didn’t have much choice. All the service stations in town were closed, and when he’d called the auto club from the pay phone on the corner, they’d said it would take over an hour to get a tow truck over the hill.

  “That woman is a menace,” Laura said as she swung onto Highway 1. “You ought to get a restraining order.”

  “That might be difficult,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “She’s kind of connected, politically, in this town.”

  “I’d be careful if I were you,” she said. “She might try to hurt you.”

  “She’s not that crazy,” Lyndon told her.

  “Look what she did to your tires.”

  She had a point. Instead of a truss nail, Sheila had cut his tires this time with a knife, a hunting knife with a very sharp clipped blade, maybe a bowie, by the looks of it.

  They didn’t say much else on the drive to the farm, all pretenses of a romantic future between them now evaporated. As they bumped up the dirt road to the house, Laura gazed at his barn. “Is that your studio?” she asked.

  “The shed’s my welding workshop,” Lyndon said. “The rest is for tractors.”

  A sound—like a shotgun blast—cracked the air, and Laura flinched. “What was that?” she asked.

  Near the bluff, Ling Ling was laughing raucously. Standing with JuJu, she was holding what looked like a white bazooka over her shoulder.

  “Spud gun,” Lyndon said.

  “What?” Laura asked.

  He and JuJu had built the potato cannon a few months ago, using pipe cement, duct tape, and PVC for the five-foot barrel and combustion chamber, into which they’d embedded a barbeque spark igniter.

  From Laura’s car, they watched JuJu fold over a green glow stick to activate it, stuff it into a potato, and jam it down the barrel of the spud gun with a broomstick. He unscrewed the end cap from the combustion chamber, sprayed Right Guard deodorant (the best fuel vapor, they’d found) into it, screwed the cap back on, and gave the cannon back to Ling Ling, who lifted it onto her shoulder and aimed it toward the ocean.

  “Fire in the hole, little fishies!” JuJu called out.

  “Fire in the hole!” Ling Ling yelled. “Spuds away!” She pressed the igniter, and flames flashed out of the barrel, the recoil making her tip back. The potato hurled out into the night sky, arcing almost two hundred yards, the glow stick wobbling fluorescently like an errant tracer bullet before it disappeared into the water. Ling Ling and JuJu whooped and high-fived. The spud cannon had a range of a quarter of a mile. The day before, Lyndon had fired a potato at The Centurion Group’s helicopter, which Ed Kitchell had had the nerve to steer down for a flyby, and Lyndon had nearly hit him.

  “Friends of yours?” Laura asked.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Can I see your barn?”

  “There’s nothing to see.”

  “You’re still making art in there, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Lyndon said.

  “What you told me before,” Laura said, “that you just want to be average, that’s bullshit. That’s a luxury of choice only artists who’ve been successful can afford, and it’s insulting to those of us who haven’t.”

  “You’re an artist?”

  “I was. A painter. I was awful. A teacher convinced me early on I didn’t have what it takes. It killed me to hear that from her, it really did, but now I’m grateful to her. It saved me a lot of unhappiness, years I would’ve wasted when I could have found something else to do to make a contribution, like being a curator. So quitting like you did, with all the talent you had, with everything you could’ve still accomplished, especially for artists of color? I don’t care what the circumstances were. So what if it was hard? So what if you were miserable? So what if you got a few bad reviews and your dealer was an idiot? So what if you were saddled with identity politics? So what if the art world was pretentious and filled with mean-spirited, backstabbing jackasses? Quitting was a betrayal. It was selfish. It was an act of cowardice.”

  Lyndon opened the door and started to get out of the car, angry. Laura Díaz-McClatchey knew nothing about art. No wonder she had failed as a curator. She had never been a real player. Her drab clothes were the first clue. She would never be anything more than small-time.

  But then he turned back to her and asked, “How do you know she was right?”

  “Who?”

  “Your teacher. How do you know she was right about you? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe you should have kept painting.”

  “My stuff was crap. I kept making this series with a little girl in a pinafore and patent leather shoes. I don’t know why, but I was obsessed with her. I always had her flying, and I gave her two heads. They were ghastly.”

  “You might have gotten better,” Lyndon said.

  “I wasn’t gifted.”

  “You could have still worked at it. Who knows what might have happened?”

  She shook her head. “I wasn’t ever going to be good.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I didn’t want it enough.”

  “That’s my point,” Lyndon said. “You have to want it. It’s pointless unless you want it.”

  AT ONE-THIRTY in the morning, he shook awake JuJu, who was curled up in bed w
ith Ling Ling. “Time to monkey around,” Lyndon whispered to him.

  JuJu smiled and said, half-lidded, “Semper fi, dude.”

  In Lyndon’s workshop, they prepared for the nighttime assault, applying camouflage on their faces and toking up. “We need to figure out a plan,” Lyndon said.

  JuJu pulled out a list from his pocket that itemized all the supplies needed for each room. “I’ve got everything packed up in the trunk of my car.”

  “How long have you been working on this?” Lyndon asked.

  JuJu sucked up the smoke in the bong and eked out, holding his breath, “Days.”

  “Seen Woody tonight?” Lyndon asked.

  “Nope.”

  “His car’s in the driveway, but he’s not in his room,” Lyndon said.

  All weekend, he had been so anxious about Woody meddling in his affairs, yet Lyndon had hardly seen his brother during his stay on his farm, and now, despite himself, he was getting a little worried about him. Woody had left the house in the morning while they were all still asleep, presumably had returned in his SUV this evening while they were out to dinner, and had ransacked Lyndon’s kitchen, leaving a mess, empty cups of yogurt and cans of beer and potato chips and bread crumbs lying on the counters. But that had been hours ago. Where could he be?

  “Someone might’ve picked him up, given him a ride,” JuJu said. “Maybe he’s on a date. Maybe he got lucky.”

  Lyndon repacked the bowl in the bong. “With who?”

  “I don’t know, maybe he met someone. Stranger things have been happening,” JuJu said. “Lyndey, has everything felt weird to you lately? I have this overriding sense of coincidence, of synchronicity, all of a sudden—a vortical, Yoyodynean, realismo mágico imbrication of fates. Something’s shifted in the cosmos, and everything just feels wondrous and right and kind of amazing. You grooving on that, too?”

  “No.” He didn’t see convergence; he saw chaos, anarchy, his carefully constructed world flying apart.

  “Struck out on your date, huh?”

  “Shut up, JuJu.”

  “You came home pretty early. Things didn’t click with her?”

  “It was just a friendly dinner.”