by Jeffrey Ford
THE SCRIBBLE MIND
When I was in graduate school, during the mid-eighties, I’d meet Esme pretty much every Sunday morning for breakfast at the Palace A down on Hepson Street. The runny eggs, the fried corn muffins, the coffee, and our meandering conversations carried all of the ritual of a Sunday mass minus the otherwise grim undertones. There was a calm languor to these late-morning meals and something that had to do with the feeling of home.
We’d gone to the same high school, grown up in the same town, and vaguely knew each other back then—friends of friends—but we’d moved in distinctly different social orbits; hers somewhat closer to the sun. Six years had passed since we’d graduated—I hadn’t had a single thought about her—and then one day, late in the summer, just before my first semester at the university was about to start, I’d left my flop loft in the seedy First Ward and ventured out for some groceries. I was walking down Klepp Street, and I noticed this good-looking girl about my age walking toward me, talking to herself. She was tall and thin, with a lot of black curly hair, and dressed in an orange T-shirt, jeans, and cheap, plastic beach sandals on her feet. She was smoking a cigarette and mildly gesticulating with her free hand. The fact that she was talking to herself made me think she might be crazy enough to talk to me, so I frantically ran through a few icebreaker lines in my head, searching for one to snag her interest. I immediately got confused, though, because the T-shirt she was wearing bore the name of my high school along with the distinctive rendering of a goofy-looking lion. As we drew closer, I saw her face more clearly and knew that I knew her from somewhere. All I could muster when the moment came was “Hi.” She stopped, looked up to take me in, and said, without the least shock of recognition, “Hey, Pat, how are you?” like I’d seen her the day before. Then I realized who she was and said, “Esme, what are you doing here?”
She invited me to come along with her to the Palace A to get a cup of coffee. I’d been pretty lonely since arriving in town, what with classes not having started yet and knowing no one. I couldn’t have ordered up a better scenario than running into her. We spent an hour at the diner, catching up, filling in the blanks of all the years and miles we’d traveled. She’d been at the university a semester already, but whereas I was there for a master’s degree, she’d already gotten one in mathematics at a different school, producing a thesis on fractals and chaos theory, and now was going for a second one in art. Coincidentally, art was my major also, and I admitted, with a whisper and a tinge of embarrassment in my voice, that I was a painter. This admission on my part deanimated her for a moment. She cocked her head to the side and stared at me, took a drag of her cigarette, pursed her lips, and then eventually nodded as if she could almost believe it. Paint, of course, wasn’t her thing—all of her work was done on the computer, plotting points and manifesting the rules and accidents of the universe in shape and color. This stuff was new back then and I had no way to conceive of what she was talking about, but the casually brilliant way in which she discussed Mandelbrot sets and strange attractors interested me almost as much as her hair and her smile. When I told her I liked the paintings of Redon and Guston, she laughed out loud, and although I knew she was disparaging my chosen influences, I was enchanted by the sound of it, like a ten-year-old’s giggle.
We parted that first day after making plans to meet for breakfast on Sunday. Even then, although I knew we might become good friends, I suspected things would never go further than that. As fascinating as she was, she had a distinct aloofness about her even when she was staring me straight in the eye and relating the details of her mother’s recent death. It was as if a scrupulously calculated percentage of her interest was held constantly in abeyance, busy working the solution to some equation. In addition, I had, at the time, an irrational, Luddite inclination that there was something morally bankrupt about making art with a computer.
The semester began, and I soon discovered that abstract painting was still the order of the day at the university. Most of the professors had come of age in their own work during the late fifties and sixties and were still channeling the depleted spirit of Jackson Pollock; second-and third-rate abstract expressionists tutoring young painters in the importance of ignoring the figure. The canvases were vast, the paint applied liberally, and the bigger the mess the more praise the piece garnered. From the start, I was somewhat of an outcast among the students with my crudely rendered cartoon figures frozen in drab scenes that bespoke a kind of world weariness; a mask to hide the fact that I felt too much about everything. I was barely tolerated as a kind of retarded mascot whose work had a certain throwback charm to it. Esme, for her part, was on similar footing. No one understood, save the people in the computer science division, how she made her glorious paisley whirls, infinite in their complexity, or what they represented. The art crowd feared this technological know-how.
I’d done all of my excessive drinking, drug taking, and skirt chasing as an undergraduate, and now I threw myself into the work with a commitment that was something new for me. When I think back to that place I had on Clinton Street, I remember the pervasive reek of turpentine, the beat-up mattress someone had put by the curb that became my bed, the dangerous mechanical heater with its twisting Looney Tunes funnel going up through the ceiling that portioned out warmth by whim, and the bullet hole in the front window I’d covered with duct tape. I worked late into the nights when the neighborhood crystal meth dealer met his clients under the lamppost across the street in front of the furniture warehouse and after the other tenants of my building had turned off the flames under their relentlessly simmering cabbage pots and fallen from minimum wage exhaustion into their beds. Then I’d make some coffee, put Blossom Dearie low on the old tape machine, and start mixing oils. Each brushstroke carried a charge of excitement. The professors who dismissed my work still had valuable secrets to impart about color and craft and materials, and I brought all of these lessons to bear on my canvases.
The months rolled on and in the midst of my education, I also gleaned a few insights into Esme. Outside of our booth at the Palace A, where the conversation orbited pretty strictly around a nucleus of topics—her diatribes promoting an electronic medium and mine concerning the inadequacies of abstraction; a few catty comments about our fellow students’ work; the lameness of the professors—she proved to be something of a sphinx. With the exception of her telling me about her mother’s bout with cancer that first day, she never mentioned her private life or her family. Anything I learned on that score came through sheer happenstance.
After class one day, I was talking to this guy, Farno, another painter in the graduate program, in the hallway outside a studio and Esme walked by. I interrupted my conversation and said hi to her, and she said, “I’ll see you Sunday.” When I turned back to the guy, he was shaking his head, and when she was well out of earshot, he said, “You know her?”
“Yeah, we went to high school together.”
“So you must have fucked her,” he said.
I took a step back, surprised at his comment, and said, “What are you talking about? We’re just friends.”
“I don’t think she has any friends,” he said.
My sudden anger made me silent.
“Listen, don’t get upset,” he said. “I’m just trying to warn you. It happened to me just like all the others. She’ll come on to you. You go to dinner or a movie, things wind up back at her place. I mean, she’s charming as hell, brilliant. You think to yourself, ‘Wow, she’s great.’ You can’t help but fall for her. Eventually, it’s off to the bedroom. She’s aggressive, like she’s trying to fuck the life out of you, like she wants to eat your soul. Then, either the next morning or occasionally even late at night, you’ll wake up and she’ll be crying and then yell at you like a kid pitching a tantrum to get the hell out. I’ve talked to some of the others about her, both guys and girls, even some of the professors. She’s whacked.”
“Well, we’re friends,” I said in her defense and walked away.
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Later that week, on Sunday, when we went to breakfast, that guy’s story was circling in my head like a twister, but I kept my mouth shut about it. Since I’d never gone down that road with Esme, instead of thinking her crazy because of what I’d been told, I just felt, whether I should have or not, kind of bad for her. While all this was going through my head, she was giving me some rap about how chaos theory showed that the universe was both ordered and chaotic at the same time. I could barely concentrate on what she was saying, my mind filled with images of her fucking different people in the art department like some insatiable demon. Finally, she ended her explanation, making a face rife with dissatisfaction for the indecisive nature of creation, and asked me to pass the sugar.
In the next couple of weeks, the indecisive universe dropped two more revelations about her into my lap. I was in the university library one night, looking for a book of Reginald Marsh’s Coney Island paintings, when I found myself upstairs near the study carrels. My department didn’t think enough of me to grant me one of these. Department heads doled them out—like popes might grant indulgences—to their favorite students. I knew Esme had one, though, courtesy of the computer science people, and I knew she used it from time to time. I walked along the narrow corridor, peering in the little windows on the doors. Most of them were dark and empty. Eventually I found hers and she was in there, sitting at the desk.
In front of her was a computer with a screen full of numbers. To her right, on the desk, was an open book, and, with her right hand, she was intermittently flipping through the pages and working the computer mouse, her attention shifting rapidly back and forth from the page to the screen. At the same time, on the left-hand side of the desk was a notebook in which she was scribbling with a pencil to beat the band, not even glancing at what she was writing down. While all this was going on, she was also wearing earphones that were plugged into a boom box sitting on the floor. When she turned her attention to the book, I caught a glimpse of her eyes. The only way I can describe her look, and this isn’t a word I’d normally think to use, is avaricious. I was going to knock, but to tell you the truth, in that moment I found her a little frightening.
The second piece of the puzzle that was Esme came to me from, of all people, my mother. I’d called home and was chatting with her about how my studies were going and what was up with the rest of the family. True to her mother-self, she asked me if I’d made any friends. I said I had, and then remembering that Esme had come from our town, I mentioned her. When I said her name, my mother went uncharacteristically silent.
“What?” I asked.
“Her family…sheesh.”
“Do you remember them?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember her mother from the PTA meetings and such. A block of ice. You didn’t want to get near her for fear of frostbite. And the father, who was much more pleasant, he was some kind of pill addict. At least they had a lot of money.”
“She’s okay,” I said.
“Well, you know best,” she said, obviously implying that I didn’t.
Esme’s condition, or whatever you want to call it, haunted me. I don’t know why I cared so much. To me she was just a breakfast date once a week—or was she? She was fun to talk to and I enjoyed meeting her at the Palace A for our rendezvous, but when I started to find myself thinking about her instead of thinking about painting, I made a determined effort to ignore those thoughts and dive back into my work.
One Sunday afternoon in my second semester, somewhere right at the cusp between winter and spring, we were sitting in the diner celebrating with the steak-and-egg special a positive review of my recent work by my committee. I held forth for Esme on the encouraging comments made by each of the professors. When I was done, she smiled and said, “Pat, that’s terrific, but think how much weight you put behind what they say now. I remember a few months ago when by your own estimation they were fools.” That took a little of the wind out of my sails. Still, I could undeniably feel that my paintings were finally coming together and the creativity just seemed to flow down my arm and through the brush onto the canvas. I knew I was on to something good, and nothing Esme said could completely dampen my spirits. Instead, I laughed at her comment.
She got up to go to the bathroom, and I sat paging through the catalog of a spring show that was to hang in the university gallery and would include some graduate student pieces and some by well-established professionals. I’d been asked to put a piece in that show, and I was ecstatic. When she returned, I was looking at a page with a reproduction of a painting by the artist Thomas Dorphin, the best known of the artists who would be at the opening.
“What’s that you’re looking at?” she asked as she slid into the booth.
“A piece by that guy Dorphin. Do you know his stuff?”
She shook her head.
“It’s kind of like that Cy Twombly crap, only it looks three-dimensional, sort of like a mix between him and Lichtenstein.” Twombly had done a series of pieces that were scribbles, like a toddler loose with a crayon, on canvas and the art world was still agog over them. The painting by Dorphin was also a scribble, only the line was rendered with a brush and the illusion of three-dimensionality; instead of obviously being a line from a crayon, it appeared to be a piece of thick twine. The technique was pretty impressive, but it left me cold.
“Let me see,” she said.
I turned the catalog around to her and she drew it closer.
She looked at it for about two seconds, and I noticed a nearly undetectable tremor of surprise. Then her complexion went slightly pale.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
Still clutching the catalog, she slid out of the booth and stood up. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a wad of bills, too much for what we’d both had, and threw it on the table.
“I want you to come with me to my place,” she said, looking a little frantic.
Immediately, I thought that my time had come to be fucked like she was eating my soul. I got nervous and stammered about having to get back to work, but she interrupted me and said, “Please, Pat, you have to come. It won’t take long. I have to show you something.”
I was leery, but she seemed so desperate, I couldn’t refuse her. I nodded, got up, and followed. I’d never been to her apartment before; it was only two blocks from the diner in a renovated warehouse on Hallart Street. She walked in front of me, keeping a quick pace and every now and then looked over her shoulder to make sure that I was still behind her. When she glanced back at me, I smiled, but she made no expression in return. At the rate we were walking, it took only minutes to get to the front door. She retrieved her keys and let us in. We took an old freight elevator to get to her place on the fifth floor. As we ascended, I said to her, “What’s all this about?”
“You won’t believe it,” she said and then flipped open the catalog to the page with the Dorphin on it for another look. She stared at it till the elevator reached the fifth floor.
If order and chaos existed simultaneously in the universe, her apartment was one of the places where order hid out. It was a nice space, with a huge window providing a view of the river in the distance. There was a big Persian carpet on the floor with a floral mandala design. The walls were painted a soothing sea green and hung with framed pieces of her fractal art. However it was done, the lighting made the room seem like a cozy cave. After being there for no more than a minute, I felt the tension just sort of slough off me like some useless outer skin. On the desk, next to a computer, was a row of sharpened pencils lined up from left to right in descending order of length. I had a sudden flashback to the crusted dishes piled in the sink back at my place.
“Beautiful,” I said to her as she hung up her jacket.
“It’s okay,” she said absentmindedly. “Stay here for a minute, I have to look for something in the bedroom.”
In her absence, I went to the nearest bookcase and scanned the titles. My gaze came to rest not on one of the many volumes of art books,
but upon a photograph on the top shelf. It was in a simple silver frame—the image of a severe-looking middle-aged woman with a short, tight permanent and her arms folded across her chest. She was sitting at a table in front of a birthday cake, its candles trailing smoke as if just having been extinguished. The woman’s jaw and cheekbones were no more than cruel, angular cuts, as if her face had been hacked from granite with a blunt pick, and her eyes stared directly through mine and out the back of my head. I surmised she was the Snow Queen of the PTA my mother had told me about.
When Esme emerged from the other room, she called me over to a card table near the back of the apartment in front of the window. The sun was bright that day, and I remember squinting out at the view of the light glinting in diamonds off the river just before taking a seat across from her. In addition to the catalog, her cigarettes, an ashtray, and a lighter, she laid on the tabletop what appeared to be a plastic Mylar bag, the kind that comic book collectors keep their treasures in. From where I sat, it looked as if it held only a sheet of white 81/2 x 11 paper.
She lit a cigarette, and while clamping it in the corner of her mouth as she returned her lighter to the table, began speaking. “Remember the 7-Eleven back in Preston?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, it was the only place in town that would sell us beer.”
“I think I remember seeing you in there,” she said. “Well, if you made a right at that corner and headed down toward the municipal garage, do you recall that little day-care center on the left side of the road?”
I couldn’t really picture it, but I nodded anyway.
“I worked in that center the summer after senior year. It was one of those places where parents drop their kids off when they go to work. Mostly toddlers, some a little older. I liked the kids but there were too many of them and not enough of us.”
“Never work with animals or children,” I said.
“Not if you mind wiping noses and asses all day,” she said. “It was a good introduction to chaos theory, though.” She paused, took a drag of her cigarette, and shook her head as if remembering. “Anyway, one day near the end of the summer, about an hour before the parents came to pick the kids up, I was sitting on a tiny kid’s chair, completely exhausted. I was so motionless for so long, I think the kids kind of forgot that I was there. They had the dress-up trunk out, and hats and masks and old costume stuff was flying all over the place.