by Edan Lepucki
Unlike the others, Seth’s movie didn’t open with a title. Just his name in dark-blue letters, floating there before it disappeared. People cheered and I smiled—he had a crowd.
On the screen now: a table, or something else made of wood. It was shot up close so that you couldn’t tell what it was. The hurrahs from the audience dwindled away, as if everyone had agreed to be quiet in order to hear the movie. But there was no sound. Of course there wasn’t, I thought. There was only the plane of wood. The occasional wobble of the camera.
And then: a hand. Seth’s. I recognized those nail beds. He held a medicine dropper and he began to drip water onto the wood. Tiny drops of water, freckling the surface, fleck, fleck, fleck.
This went on for a minute. Then another.
People began to shift in their seats. Someone coughed. It reminded me of the movies they had in museums, playing on a loop in a small dark room. How people would peek their heads in for a second before turning away. Those rooms were almost always empty.
On the screen, Seth’s hand kept dropping the water.
A door opened and shut somewhere. Someone else coughed. The kid in the row in front of us moved around in his seat, obviously bored. I wanted to turn to Karl, to see what he thought, but I forced myself to keep my eyes on the screen.
Did the water feel exploited, I imagined writing to Seth.
I kept watching. His hand moved out of the frame and reemerged with another dropperful of water. The water formed into a tiny puddle, and then a larger one. And larger.
I realized I was holding my breath.
Plink, plink went the water. Seth’s hand moved out of frame once more. When he returned with a white cloth instead of the medicine dropper, I exhaled. I watched as he wiped the water away, all of it. There wasn’t even a streak remaining. And then the film went black. The end.
Karl leaned over and whispered into my ear, “What did that mean, you think?”
I had no idea. I felt hollowed out and elated. It didn’t have to mean anything. It wasn’t my movie. It didn’t matter what I thought.
—
Seth had ducked out of the screening before it was over and we couldn’t find him anywhere. I was worried, but Karl wasn’t. “He’s simply playing up the enigmatic artiste thing.”
“What if his feelings were hurt?” I said. “By how people had fidgeted during his film?”
“That was the whole point! It was boring! Wait—wasn’t it?”
He had me laughing, and in the car, outside my building, he kissed me, only once, but slowly, and then he pulled away. He said he’d like to take me out again soon. I agreed.
An hour later, I was drinking wine, in my pajamas, watching the ambulances down below.
“Mommy?”
Devin stood at the lip of the hallway, his hair mussed from sleep. He reminded me of Seth. Not how he looked, but the fact of him. I would give him everything I had. I would rescue him from every dark place. It still wouldn’t be enough. I would do it anyway.
“What’s the matter, honey?” I asked.
“I’m scared.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said.
As he listed why I was wrong—ghosts, thunder, monsters—I picked him up and carried him back to his room, his legs circling my waist, his arms around my neck.
I can admit, now, that my own mother used to carry me like this, I imagined writing to Seth. Just because I don’t remember doesn’t mean she didn’t.
“It’s all right,” I said, talking over Devin as he continued to list all that was unsafe in the world. “I’m here. I won’t let anything hurt you.”
ARTFORUM
Critics’ Picks [online]
Esther Shapiro
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
For all its promises to democratize and disrupt, the Internet is often as oppressive as it is liberating, particularly for women and other marginalized voices. Feminist artists have been interrogating this contradiction for at least a decade, from Ann Hirsch’s tongue-in-cheek experimentation with the inevitable sexualizing of any female who dares to set up her own YouTube channel, to Kit Daniels’s recent series of photographs of teenage girls she met through a “questionable” (Daniels’s word) open casting call on Craigslist. Into this spirited discourse steps Esther Shapiro with her first solo show, Dick Picks at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a set of fifteen photographs of male genitalia that were initially emailed or texted to the artist herself. By enlarging these images to 40 by 50 inches and displaying them without frames, Shapiro emphasizes their amateurish nature. These were obviously shot and sent with cell phones, and without much forethought. Such carelessness reminds one, by contrast, of the coiffed and studied selfies that young women post to social media every day, either as an act of self-empowering image control, or as a surrender to the male gaze and porn culture—or both. Dick Picks calls to mind Thomas Ruff’s nudes, likewise culled from the web, as well as the work of Richard Prince, particularly his appropriation of strangers’ Instagram shots, including those of Suicide Girls. The difference is that Shapiro is a woman and her subjects are not. Though certainly sensational, her adaptation of these male self-portraits manages to transcend labels like scandalous or pornographic because the artist was the very person—the woman—to receive these images, often against her will; she was compelled to witness them whether she wanted to or not. And now so are we. When viewed from this feminist perspective, many of these photos take on a violent, even gruesome, tone, while others, enlarged to the point of being blurry, are abstract and painterly, their sexual bite rendered harmless and tender. Of course, this is Shapiro’s doing, and she and the viewer both know it. Herein lies this young artist’s gift.
—Pauline Deck
ERIN HOSIER, my fierce and funny agent, believed in this book from the very start. Thank you, Erin, for meeting me in the rain in Beverly Hills all those years ago, and for being not only my advocate but my friend too. Thanks are due to everyone at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner, especially Arielle Datz, and to the wonderful Amy Schiffman at Intellectual Property Group.
Everyone at Hogarth/Crown: you are a joy to work with! I am deeply grateful to my editor, Lindsay Sagnette, whose passion for this novel inspired and motivated me (and sometimes caused me to cackle with delight), and whose insights and line edits made this a better book. Lindsay, you get it, you get me, and it has been a privilege learning from you. Special thanks as well to Molly Stern, Rachel Rokicki, Kevin Callahan, Lisa Erickson, and the (already) legendary Rose Fox. Thank you all for making me feel at home.
I would like to thank the Ucross Foundation for the time, space, and community it provides artists and writers. It’s heavenly.
I’m not a visual artist, but I’m lucky to know so many brilliant ones in real life. Thank you to the following painters and photographers for their guidance: Charlie White, Tei Blow, Christine Frerichs, and Tanya Hartman.
Lyssa Rome was generous with her time and knowledge about speech development. Thanks, Lyssa. This novel was also informed by Andrew Solomon’s compassionate and profound book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity; the parents Solomon writes about are patient, accepting, and tenacious, and reading their stories was what first made me imagine a fictional mother who doesn’t possess those qualities.
No one else has a better writing group than I do. The Hugging Party—Yael Goldstein Love, Kate Milliken, Lydia Kiesling, Kara Levy, and member emeritus Lisa Srisuro—thank you for reading sections of this book and asking the tough questions. You’re all so smart and sexy, I can’t stand it.
Thanks to my fellow staff writers at The Millions, and to my students and colleagues at Writing Workshops Los Angeles, especially director Chris Daley, who works harder than anyone I know. And a shout-out to my former classmate Tom McAllister (@t_mcallister) for the Titans tweet!
Mike Reynolds, Madeline McDonnell, Kristen Daniels, and Susan Straight all offered wise and encouraging feedback on this manuscript—thank you (and
I owe you). For their friendship I’d also like to thank Diana Samardzic, Kathleen Potthoff, Molly McDonald, Douglas Diesenhaus, Rachel Fershleiser, Carrie Neill, Allison Hill, Paria Kooklan, Julia Whicker, Josh Yocum, Deena Drewis, Umbreen Bhatti, Ryan Miller, Tali Horowitz, Heather Lambirth, Anna Solomon, Neelanjana Banerjee, Darcy Vebber, Ann Holler, Catie Disabato, Cecil Castellucci, Meaghan O’Connell, Rumaan Alam, and Tess Taylor.
People often ask me how I’m able to write with two young children. My answer is this: childcare. Thank you to the people who cared for my kids so I could write: André Julien and Anna Baldwin at Greenhouse Childcare; all the teachers at Hearts Leap North Preschool, most especially Adriana DeVost and Andi Roncajolo; and Miriam Herrera. Miry, thanks for taking such loving care of my gnome.
I love getting the chance to publicly thank my family, because, well, I have the best family in the whole wide world. Thank you to Bob Lepucki (aka my personal location manager), Keitha Lowrance, Margaret Guzik, Mitchell Guzik, Lauren Lepucki Tatzko, Heidi Cascardo, Sarah Guzik (aka my personal Millennial reader), Asher Guzik (aka my personal plants expert), Kam Brown, and Art Brown.
Finally, I want to thank my husband, Patrick Brown, and our two beautiful children, Dixon Bean Brown and Ginger Dean Brown. Patty, thanks for reading and re-reading this book, and for everything you do for me and our family. It’s a pleasure being your dog.
EDAN LEPUCKI is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel California, as well as the novella If You’re Not Yet Like Me. A contributing editor and staff writer at The Millions, she has also published fiction and nonfiction in McSweeney’s, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Cut, and elsewhere. She is the founder of Writing Workshops Los Angeles.
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