“Where is it?”
“You sure you’re ready?”
“Just show me it,” I said.
Back in the main room, he pulled the dividing curtain open like an impresario. A section of the space was marked off with black electrical tape, forming a sort of stage. At the back of the stage, on the wall, was a photograph, eight feet high and perhaps twice as wide.
My first thought, as my mind scrabbled to postpone recognition, was to wonder how he had mounted it. And then the picture careened into focus, the images slamming into my mind.
The photograph showed a battlefield: a wide dusty-beige expanse of ground under a dusty blue-white sky. It was like a hundred of the works I’d just been looking at stitched together into a single coherent scene. Bodies, mangled or burned, lay in impossible positions, ripped open, missing vital parts, visible in stunning detail. A shattered and bloody arm hung in a bush. A foot with part of a leg was propped on some rubble. There was blood—raw streams and dark lurid puddles of it—crimson and rusty, a study in red—and what I took to be guts, though I’d never knowingly seen human guts. Some of it, thankfully, was concealed by oily smoke that billowed and ballooned across the brown dirt and the flat sky like charcoal scribbles in a Cy Twombly.
And then there were the faces. The parts of the faces.
The objects lying on the studio floor were easier to look at only because you knew they were false—made by hand or machine from plastic or foam, paint and glue and God knew what else. At least, despite the real forays into flesh by Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, and others, I presumed they were fake. Even so, they were revolting—pink and oozing, blackened and bilious green with specks of yellow and white. A bloated, blasted torso extruding slimy strings of viscera. A leg split open from thigh to ankle, with the bone sticking through. A pink seashell-like ear. A white hand. My eyes skated across the surface, unwilling to settle. Look, I told myself. Look!
That was my job.
“Wait a sec,” McManus said. He spun himself to the sound wall and hunched over it, pressing buttons, turning dials. From all corners of the room, like a sudden wind from hell, the sounds of human wailing and groaning swept through the space, increasing in volume, pain, number, and intensity like a vise tightening or a migraine blooming. Wanting to run, I stayed where I was, the sound clinging to me like an odor, abrading my skin, invading my synapses so that I couldn’t think. McManus was watching me: his handsome mask, his totem arm, his shiny leg, and his leg of flesh. Here was a man who had lifted himself from the ashes and literally remade himself. I stood still, pretending attention. Was this art? Was it obscenity, propaganda?
Was it a hostile, manipulative scam?
“There you go,” he called. “The full sensory experience! Every channel engaged, every receptor on the body enthralled. The pores on your skin blazing with sensation.” He wheeled himself over to where I stood, drenched with sweat as if I were melting. It was true, it was a full sensory experience. My body was a drum, my heart a fist pounding on a locked door, my breath a ragged sheet flapping on a line. The noise was so loud it was hard to breathe—my pursed lips sipped air like a rabbit sipping water from a bottle—and like a rabbit, caught in an open meadow by the yellow eye of a hawk, I stayed very still and prayed to be invisible. This was lightning, this was acid. It was a single engulfing flame.
The cool metal of McManus’s chair grazed my thigh. I could smell him—him and his work, indistinguishable: perspiration and burning plastic, hard steel and salt and pot. The pungent oceanic stink of whale’s breath. “I doubt you saw anything like this at the Midwestern Museum of Art.”
“Is all your work about war?” I asked, taking a step sideways.
“War is just an occasion,” he replied, “not a subject. My work is about the human body. It’s about abjection. You know. The gossamer line between beauty and decay.”
17.
THE MOMENT I GOT BACK from his studio, a droning started up in my head—a steady buzz of narration refuting McManus’s work point by point in favor of Celia Cowry’s. Where he was bombastic, she was modest. Where his work was brutal and merciless, hers was characterized by restraint. His work literalized pain while hers transfigured it, opening to personal response, ambiguity, grace. If there was something else, something in what he did that stirred me, I pushed it away like a spiderweb or a dream. I kept my back to it as I sat at my desk researching Celia Cowry online, full of curatorial purpose. Busily I sketched the galleries on a pad and made notes. In my mind’s eye, certain works materialized to fill certain spaces. When I looked up, Agnes was standing in the doorway dangling a key from a rabbit’s foot, a silken oblong of fur fitted with a metal cap attached to a chain. I had won a similar trinket at the Vernon County Fair when I was ten by tossing a Ping-Pong ball into a goldfish bowl. “Here’s your key.” She crossed the room like a fat black chess piece gliding across a board. “I apologize for the delay.” She dropped it onto my desk where it clanked against the metal surface. Four little leathery stubs lurked in the dull ivory-colored fur.
I reached out a finger and touched the severed foot. “It’s real.”
“Alena got it from a fortune-teller a long time ago.”
The long lifeless fur was softer than skin, softer than silk. Faintly electric, it was warm to the touch in the cool room. I stroked it, thinking of the human hand in Battlefield III, paper-white. I imagined Alena’s hand stroking this dead rabbit’s paw in years gone by. Was it a rear paw or a front paw? In my mind’s eye I saw a rabbit standing up, wearing a dress, like Peter Rabbit’s mother. In my mind’s eye, Alena’s hand shimmered the same ivory color as this fur, her fingers long and sensitive as a puppeteer’s. “Alena believed in fortune-tellers?”
“Only the real ones,” Agnes said. “She could always tell.” She peered around the edge of the computer screen. “What’s that?”
“Just browsing.”
Agnes leaned in. “That’s Celia Cowry, isn’t it?” On the screen, the ceramic shells looked lifeless, like real shells taken up from the beach and dried out.
“I had a studio visit with her. I’m following up.”
She nodded, her hair, now maroon-inflected, bobbing forward and falling smoothly back into place as if it were a helmet of fine metal. “And today you had a studio visit with Morgan McManus. What did you think?” She stood over me like an iron Hofstra sculpture of a woman, and though the light from the window cast her shadow behind her across the rug, I seemed to feel a chill.
“He doesn’t suffer from an excess of subtlety,” I said.
She looked at me with her cold eyes. “War isn’t a subtle subject.”
“It’s not. But maybe a shout isn’t the best way to handle a subject that’s already screaming.”
“If Celia Cowry took war for a subject,” Agnes said, “probably the only way to tell would be from the wall text.”
“Thank you for the key,” I said.
“Don’t thank me. It’s my job.” She turned to go. On the bright expanse of the desk top, the rabbit’s foot lay like a drowned thing washed up on a blazing shore.
“Agnes.”
She paused.
“How did McManus lose his arm and his leg?”
“He fought in the first Gulf War.”
I wanted a more detailed answer, but I nodded. “And is that all he ever makes art about?” I asked.
Her fleshy black shoulders stiffened. “Some things you don’t get over,” she said. I knew she was talking about herself as well as him, drawing a closed circle around them—and Bernard too—from which I was excluded. I longed to be old enough for something irrevocable to have happened to me.
When she was gone, I got up from the desk and went to the door, which she had left open. Sloan, staring into space in her sleeveless yellow dress, looked up, and we both startled. Her spine straightened and her fingers reached for the keyboard: the spine that had be
nt so her hair fell across McManus’s chest. The fingers that had caressed his stump. I shut the door.
Crossing to the desk, I picked up the telephone and dialed Celia Cowry’s number. In the long interval while the phone rang, I had plenty of time to arrange my words. Instead I sat numbly, listening to the regular buzzing that we call a ring even though there is nothing bell-like about it. Maybe she was out, or napping—maybe trying to nap, wishing she had unplugged the phone. Maybe she was working, her hands slippery with clay, the buzzing—ringing—phone driving her ideas out of her head, so that the very fact I was calling was detrimental to the art I wanted to support.
Then a click. Her clear voice leaped into my ear. “Hello?”
I grasped at my words, managed to mention my name, hers, the museum’s, then blurted it out: I wanted to do a show.
Celia’s voice was queenly and pleased. “I could tell you liked the work,” she said.
I sat up straighter in my chair, tugged at my skirt. Was this what artists said when curators called offering shows? Surely not. But what did I know? “So you’re agreeable?”
“It’s appropriate. You’re a museum by the sea, and I’m an artist of the sea. Of calms and currents and hidden depths.”
“Good!” I said. “Wonderful!” I managed to tell her about the timeline, how short it was, how we would need to get started immediately.
“Come whenever,” she said. “I’m here. Predictable as the tide.”
A jolt of terror and delight went through me as I hung up the phone. I picked up my new key and rubbed my fingers through the rabbit fur, slipped it into my pocket. The room felt too small to contain me, so I went to the door and flung it open, to announce what I had done. I’m organizing a show of Celia Cowry! I would say. Please prepare the contracts! Or maybe, I’ll need the contact information for her gallery.
Her gallery. Should I have called them first?
There Sloan sat, typing in her yellow dress, frowning slightly as though I were not there.
“Sloan,” I said.
Slowly, making a show of her reluctance, she looked up, her nose twitching, her eyes bored. I couldn’t see Agnes, but I imagined her in her office, listening.
I should tell Bernard first, I thought. Before I tell anybody else. “Is the newspaper here?” I asked.
“It didn’t come,” she said. “Do you want me to call?”
“That’s all right. I can read it online.”
“I can go check again if you want. Maybe it showed up late.” Her cool tone gave the lie to her obliging words.
“That’s all right,” I said again. I shut the door. I looked out across the shark’s-fin desk to the blue bay beyond the dunes. An artist of the sea. Did people really say things like that about themselves? It seemed they did. Could that, perhaps, be the title of the show?
Or maybe Celia Cowry: Hidden Depths—was that better?
I had to call Bernard. He would be glad, proud. His approval would sing in my ear. I picked up the phone.
Of course, I probably should have discussed Celia Cowry with him first—before I called and offered her the show.
Suddenly my arm was heavy. I should have called him. Of course I should have. The knowledge poured through me, cold and slow as vodka from the freezer. I put the phone down. I wanted to scuttle out of the building and disappear somewhere, but Sloan was sitting outside the door like a warder.
Slipping my hand into my pocket, I felt the rabbit’s foot. Out the window, the ocean lay as placid as a quilt. I had to calm down. What, after all, had I done? Just my job! I hadn’t killed anybody. Surely Alena hadn’t checked all her decisions with Bernard.
And anyhow, what did he expect, disappearing like this when I was so new, leaving me to be juggled among Agnes and Sloan, Barbara and Willa Somerset? Between Chris Passoa and Morgan McManus? And it was true that the time was short, that we needed to act more or less immediately. I had acted. Bernard had hired me, and I was moving ahead. I touched the key, squeezed the silky paw, my new talisman. Now that I had begun, the only thing to do was to keep going. Bernard would be here tomorrow, I would talk to him then. In the meantime, I turned to the computer, careful to keep my back to the invisible shadows, and began to type.
For Immediate Release
The Nauquasset Contemporary Museum is pleased to announce its official reopening with the presentation of Celia Cowry: Hidden Depths, the first mid-career survey of the work of this acclaimed Cape Cod artist.
Cowry (b. Kansas City, Kansas, 1965; lives Falmouth, Massachusetts) works with the natural forms of the land she has made her own: the sea and shore of Cape Cod, which has been her home for two decades. Exquisitely rendered and deceptively simple, Cowry’s work in ceramic sculpture uses the curved geometries of shells—their whorls, spirals, and concavities—together with mirror images—imperfect doublings—to suggest the liminality and exigencies of human relationships. Deeply sensual, alert to the particularities of texture as well as form, this art is also deeply and complexly political, suggesting the ways race informs identity, family life, Cape Cod history, and the American experience. Cowry’s small, deceptively quiet sculptures demonstrate that politics in art can be both subtle and emotionally rich, and that beauty still functions as a generative value in the work of today’s most passionate artistic producers.
When I checked the outer office again, Jake was sitting on the couch with his legs stretched out across the carpet, his cornrows bouncing, talking to Sloan, who slouched at her desk, and Agnes, who stood in her office doorway with one hand on her ample hip. “That’s cold,” he was saying. Press release in hand, I had been headed for the copy machine, but as the three faces turned to me at once—freezing a little as if I were the one who was cold, as if I had a chilling effect—I changed my mind.
“Hey,” Jake said. “How was your studio visit with McManus?”
They were looking at me, Cerberus-like with their three heads. “He’s obviously very talented,” I said.
“So you’re going to give him a show? I mean, the guy is a legit hero! And his art is totally radical. Guernica for the war on terror.” Jake’s knee, lightly furred with golden hair, jounced with conviction.
“You’re comparing Morgan McManus to Picasso?” I said.
If my question took him aback, it was only for a second. “I’m just saying,” he said.
“I’m not as enthusiastic as the rest of you,” I said. My press release had grown damp in my hand. I took a step backward, shut the door. On the other side I could hear Jake say, “He’s going to be pissed.” I stayed very still, but I couldn’t hear anything after that. Perhaps the women, understanding the office acoustics better than he did, had shushed him. Still, I was sure that they were scheming. I could feel their collective will like a weather system moving through the office, pressing against the door. On one side, me and my press release; on the other, the trio of them with their shared history and their local expertise and their clear sense of what they wanted. Their sense of what the Nauk owed McManus, of what Alena would have done.
I sat at my desk—at Alena’s desk—with its dull gleaming surface. My flushed body buzzed, it was hard to sit still. The Arno prints on the walls and the Akari light sculpture on the floor and the shell arrangements by Andy Goldsworthy on the table pulsed, communicating silently among themselves. Alena had organized every detail here, her spectral presence hung in the air like a scent. I laid my press release on the surface and smoothed it with my palm. It wasn’t much, but it was what I had.
It’s painful, even now, to recall being young enough to think art that glimmered as quietly as a glowworm—no matter how good—was the right choice to relaunch a small museum that the world had already mostly forgotten. Poor Bernard, what a shock it must have been! From where I sit now, in our little office, I can hear him chatting up an energy-drink magnate in the next room. His voice rises and curls, a warm current of
air in the bright gallery where we have mounted a show of work by a young painter: naked men crossing bridges and riding on the backs of helicopters, men turning into birds or angels, their muscles and arteries visible beneath the scrim of skin. The painter isn’t gay, but his collectors mostly are, and Bernard allows them to make their own assumptions. It’s just business. If someone offers you a $10,000 check in exchange for a two-by-three-foot piece of canvas marked with pigment—that is, for a literalized dream—wouldn’t you do your best to keep them from waking up? It’s our job to perpetuate the dream of art, not to go around sticking pins into balloons.
In Venice, that palimpsest of experience, Bernard chose me for my innocence. That fact should make it easier for me to forgive myself, but I don’t. I might have been brought up in LaFreniere, Wisconsin, surrounded by new cornstalks pushing themselves out of the earth, but I had lived in New York City. I had a master’s degree. I had revered Andy Warhol, but apparently I had learned nothing from him, nothing at all.
That evening I went home at the usual time, tried to settle down. I ate some dinner, swept the floor, watched the news—or rather, turned on the news but couldn’t sit still to watch it. The day looped and relooped in my head: McManus slouched in his black Jeep. McManus pressing my hand into his thigh. The dizzying sensory turbulence roiling through his studio—roiling, still, through me. Celia’s voice on the phone saying I could tell you liked the work, my press release damp in my hand. I put that hand in my pocket now and stroked the silken severed foot as the newscaster squawked on about an Amazonian bird sighted in a local marsh and the most popular summer ice cream flavors. When the phone rang, I was afraid to answer it. Who could it be that I would possibly want to talk to? Bernard telling me he was staying away another week? Celia Cowry saying she’d destroyed all her work and was starting over? My mother wanting to know how things were?
Alena: A Novel Page 18