Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  During the course of my reveries, Fred had metamorphosed. I became aware of this and hushed my thoughts in hopes of catching up with his discourse. I had to listen very carefully, because what he was saying now was a little bit hard to believe. And I think other people in the room were having trouble believing it, too, judging from the hushed murmurs and small movement in the crowd. What Fred was saying was that WANSEE and CeMArt’s partnership would extend beyond the generous funding provided for the current exhibition of American paintings. It would become somewhat more permanent. WANSEE was unveiling a new venture, and if anyone in the room wanted a treat, she would navigate on over to CEO Vincenzo Bamberg’s recent TED talk, a discussion of the coming of a new mode of networked collective life, the so-called smart city. Such “technologically responsive” communities, with their “miles and miles of fiber connectivity” might (here Fred cited a recent Economist feature) bring about global compliance, if not actual peace, before the end of the century. And Fred was more delighted than ever to proclaim that a satellite version of a newly conceived CeMArt franchise would be included in each of the “smart cities” WANSEE planned to construct in the coming twenty years, and WANSEE was planning quite a number of cities, where mankind would surely take refuge not just from everyday inconvenience and security issues posed by fundamentalists but from approaching environmental collapse. Adding a museum to these model cities was a way of engineering a more satisfying user-generated experience, of “retaining complexity,” as Fred put it. Fred tacked on a winking pleasantry to the effect that he himself was not a fanatic or an ideologue, but he did know a next-level business opportunity when he saw one. And he was sure that by sharing information freely we could eventually work out a version of the data-driven economy that would be to everyone’s liking, from artists to stock analysts and back again. The applause that followed this speech was dense and prolonged.

  The throng thinned a little and retired to the edges of the room. There was a fresh round of hors d’oeuvres. I took a few steps forward and very nearly caught Fred’s eye. I say “very nearly” because our eyes did touch, in that nonphysical way, but this was only because Fred’s gaze was on its way to meet that of another individual a few feet to my right, a tall and slender woman, who from the back appeared fairly young, pleasingly dressed in dark clingy things. This was not Fred’s girlfriend, for Fred’s girlfriend was not much taller than me and had black hair; this was someone else, a Mediterranean blonde with delicate features. But from the way Fred moved to meet this someone else, to touch her hands and place his face in proximity to hers, I felt certain that they were more than friends and had been so for some time.

  I swallowed. I really wasn’t sure that I could do this anymore. Anyway, I basically already didn’t exist here so it wasn’t that hard for me to leave. I was even kind of drunk.

  I at last experienced my fantasy of descent in the copper elevator, was restored to street level, walked a few blocks, and descended once again. The C roared up, a broke-down, 1990s affair.

  When I got home, I was feeling pretty dejected. Frederick had won, and he had very possibly won not just the museum but the entire coming century. It seemed to me that there was very little point to most of my work, such as it was. I was a functionary. The institution functioned. You might have thought that this kind of realization would inspire rage, antifascist fervor, something. It didn’t. I felt, in the throes of game loss, like a diminutive pyramid of feces deposited by some museum patron’s fur-baby Chihuahua.

  Torpor ensued. It was all I could do to force myself to get out my laptop and return to Paul’s files. I went into the folder titled “etc.” Here there were three documents with the file extension “.txt.” These were titled “PLAN.txt,” “work.txt,” and, appropriately enough, “morework.txt.”

  I began with “PLAN.”

  This was a series of notes, a sketch. Paul was, I guess it’s fair to say I was horrified to find, not so much at work on a conspiracy theory of the Department of American Objects but, gasp, on a great American novel. I almost started screaming at the computer. I mean, in fact I may have spoken aloud, “YOU’RE DEAD AND ALL YOU HAVE TO GIVE ME IS THIS?” But I regretted it instantly. I silently begged forgiveness. Memento mori. Anyhow, I like novels.

  thursday

  [ 17 ]

  “Compose a novel,” began Paul’s “PLAN,”

  in which a poet speaks. He does interesting things you wouldn’t expect a poet to do, like holding down a job. This is done to make him seem plausible. And to help us see through him.

  Behold the poet at his labors: he is composing a long poem about the history of art. It is a history about all of art, not just fine art but anything humans have made with a certain smiling, translucent attention. It isn’t a real history, since he is a good poet. At any rate, it is not a narrative. It is a task. Soon anything we might have known about him will be replaced by these gestures.

  This will take place gradually. Day by day, the poet will adopt the past as his own.

  The poet is living in a kind of house located inside a museum. The house is a ruin, though very clean and perfectly restored. We don’t know how the poet got inside and there’s no explanation of how no one ever catches him or how he eats or where he sleeps or how he travels between these rooms, which are on occasion separated by entire centuries.

  The poet doesn’t have a real person’s history, a personal story—at least, not anymore.

  All he’s ever wanted is to be the greatest American poet who ever lived.

  Not an easy task. But he is a real soul, a true soul, and that’s the thing that has to be conveyed. The poet is authentic. That is the whole reason for the novel, why he is talking to you here.

  He is an open door.

  This was the end of the document. I considered sardonically retitling it, “A_scintillating_tale.txt.”

  Whatever one might say about Paul, never let it be said that he was not interested in himself! Yet there was an eerie vacancy at the center of this elaborate vow to self-portraiture, and it complicated the literary navel-gazing. “He is an open door.” Perhaps I had even already seen this in Paul; the door swinging easily on its hinges as a diverse crew of available identities swarmed on the other side.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING I got up and puttered around the house, waiting for my heiress biography to be conveyed by UPS. Even if all was lost, I wasn’t about to let this doubtless juicy hagiography just be kicked into limbo. I planned to be there to sign for it. And so I was.

  “Have a pleasant day,” the man told me.

  But it was going to be a long and extremely unpleasant day. If I was interpreting last night’s tea leaves correctly, it might even include Nicola di Carboncino’s announcement of retirement, which, one presumed, he could now proffer without worry or shame, knowing that Frederick Lu’s plans to catapult CeMArt into next-level relevance had been broadcast to the public. I, on the other hand, could have the pleasure of contemplating the reduction of something I had believed was a proverbial mountain into a proverbial molehill. My agonizing love for Fred would shrink in importance in direct proportion to his rapidly gestating greatness. This would be fun.

  If I cared to, I could additionally compare myself to Frederick Lu more objectively. I could think about his achievements, and then I could think about mine. Or I could just stop thinking about my achievements and only think about his.

  I got on the train. I decided to allow myself to be distracted by Will to Beauty. I stared into its florid cover. The book had, after all, been written with just such an end in mind (i.e., distraction), particularly when it came to people of my gender.

  Alice Gaypoole Wynne was born in 1895. At this time, she was just Alice Marguerite Gaypoole. Her paternal grandfather had been a banker, and his son, her father, was also a banker. Alice attended the correct cotillions, came out when the time was right, summered overseas, learning how to buy dresses and look at art, as well as the inverse, in Paris, to which libertine c
apital she would return from time to time.

  She met her husband, William “Willy” Wynne, at a sports club in the Hamptons when his horse bit her on the upper arm, causing her to vociferously cite the famous designer whose creations she was wearing, “I declare, that mare has a taste for Fortuny!” Willy was smitten and asked for the hand attached to that witty arm a mere month later. Thus Alice was brought up and married well and living in all the correct ways by the time of the Battle of Gallipoli, but she still had to get through the rest of her life. This was going to be the hard part.

  Somewhere along the way, Alice realized she enjoyed not just buying paintings but also making them and so began to practice art. A resourceful secretary Alice had employed shortly after her marriage, a woman by the name of Mabel Styke (pronounced “stick”), convinced her to start up an exhibition space if she wanted to meet au courant artists, and this, then, was how the Elysia Club came into being. The biography attempts to reduce these events to a minor detour in Alice’s existence and is not particularly forthcoming as to reasons for the unusual name.

  Of greater interest is a sculptor and art critic Alice encountered by way of the club, an attractive blade by the name of Otto “Boy” Pastt, who swept her off her feet with poetry and spaghetti dinners, bringing her just a bit closer to the common man, or so the biography opines. Boy became her first lover. Boy was not, however, faithful. This led to clashes between the paramours. Boy claimed that Alice was married and therefore owed her husband certain services. Why should he then be denied the company of alternate ladies? Alice, enraged, banned Boy from the club and tried—successfully—to have him fired from the staff of a publication unimaginatively called The Journal of the Arts. But Alice’s revenge had side effects. Boy’s expulsion became cause for general mutiny from the Elysia Club, and in late 1930, Alice and Mabel Styke were forced to close it down. The biography tries to make this seem like an entertaining farce and lingers over letters testifying to Alice and Willy’s tearful reckoning regarding the state of their union and subsequent reconciliation.

  I was at my stop. I closed this torrid account of heiress life and dragged myself out of the car. People seemed particularly violent to me this morning, and I almost lost a toe to a certain determined stomper in a beige raincoat and large bow-shaped barrette. I brawled my way up to street level and walked against the wind. Everything felt like it was farting purposefully and precisely into my eyes.

  In the museum, in my office, I checked email. I remembered, or rather saw on my calendar, that I had planned to meet Cate for lunch today. Because of waiting for Will to Beauty to arrive, I was pretty dramatically late to work. It was almost eleven A.M. The office felt more populated than it had on the previous day, but things were still slow. There was another potentially oppressive email from Bonnie, this time with a link to Paul’s obit.

  I needed to do other things, but I also couldn’t seem to not take the bait. Besides, I was becoming increasingly desperate for personal information about the man and poet. I clicked.

  PAUL CORAL, PRIZE-WINNING POET AND FIXTURE AT CEMART, DIES AT 57

  BY TESSA ZHUK

  Paul Coral, a poet and expert in the history of American art, whose formal style and skill with lush description won him a devoted following, a Taft Prize, and numerous grants, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 57.

  His sister, Lacey Coral, said he died of an apparent overdose of antidepressants prescribed to him as sleeping aids. It is not known whether his death was an accident or a suicide.

  Mr. Coral arrived on the New York poetry scene in the early 1980s, at which time he also began working as the registrar in the Central Museum of Art’s Department of American Objects. His first collection, “The Telephone,” was selected for publication in the prestigious Oberlin Press Series in 1984. Isabelle Crave, writing in the New Republic, hailed Mr. Coral as “a brilliant craftsman and philosopher-poet of the soul’s decor.” Coral published only two additional collections in his lifetime, but he won a critical following, especially among artists and other intellectuals, who were attracted to the brilliant interplay of form and thought in his work. The poet Sadie Beckett, one of his most ardent supporters, called him “a direct line back into the material spirit.”

  Paul Anthony Coral was born on July 22, 1958, in Rochester, NY. His father, Lars Smitey Coral, was an engineer with Kodak and his mother, Ellen Smith, a homemaker. A successful student, he was accepted into Dartmouth College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in the History of Art and Architecture in 1980 and wrote his first poems. After graduation, he drove to New York City and presented himself to Cal Winters, then chair of CeMArt’s American Objects department and one of the museum’s most beloved leaders. Mr. Coral’s self-presentation was so impressive that he was instantly accepted into training to become the department’s registrar.

  Over the years, Mr. Coral grew to be known not only for his work within the museum but for a style of poetic narrative that, with mysterious meditative clarity, led readers into unforeseen landscapes as well as to startling conclusions. In “Wednesday,” the narrator enjoys a stroll on the grounds of a house that seems to contain all of American history, or, at least, selective and haunting parts of it.

  A female spirit

  held an anchor over his heart

  as if the arbor were

  an albumen carte de visite.

  Elsewhere, Mr. Coral pursued more specific histories, such as that of the city of his father’s birth, including its slow adoption of New York State’s 1799 statute for the abolition of slavery, not fully accomplished in Schenectady until 1827. His lyric essay on the subject, “The Pines,” whose title evoked the Mohawk origins of Schenectady’s name, was excerpted in Granta and appeared as a full-length collection in 2001. In 2002, Mr. Coral was awarded the Taft Prize for this book.

  His other poetry collection was “Superimposed Worlds” (1994).

  Mr. Coral never taught formal poetry courses but gave well-attended readings and lectures from time to time at several universities, including the University of Iowa and Columbia University. In addition to his sister, he is survived by his former wife, the writer Ella Voss, most recently author of the novel “Philip Crystal.” Ms. Voss, who remained a close friend of Mr. Coral even after the end of their marriage, said, “We have lost a great poet. But harder for me than this is losing a true friend.”

  I found a link to a review of Voss’s most recent book. Philip Crystal was about a boy (the “Philip” of the title) growing up in a fictional suburban community in western New York, a pseudo-Rochester, where many of the men work for a single industrial entity, Halex, a thinly veiled version of the Xerox Corporation. It is the late 1970s, and the company has expanded exponentially during the preceding decades, making millions for its investors and lining the pockets of management and various research departments, while also transforming substantial amounts of local land into industrial zones. The corporation has also recently designed a state-of-the-art research facility within the neighborhood where Philip and his family live. Philip’s father, a Halex employee, struggles to keep pace with his colleagues, suffering from the attentions of inappropriate women and an affection for alcohol. The Crystal household is a fraught place, where the parents politely ignore each other and Mr. Crystal is seldom home in the evenings. Philip and his older brother, Jason, are left to their own devices. Jason, the elder, is able to provide access to certain material pleasures associated with cold war teenage life, but things turn sinister when Jason falls in with a circle of boys who go in for more perverse recreations. (Here the novel was compared to Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.) Though the review was unwilling to give away the book’s culminating cum shot, its terminal glance into the face of evil, the denouement seems to include Philip’s witnessing of an event that will scar him—and probably the reader, too—for the rest of his life.

  I clicked the window closed and shivered. It was time for lunch.

  I was going to mee
t Cate at a diner called The Green Light. It was overpriced and on Madison but our options, especially re: atmosphere, were limited in this area so we did our best.

  I have known Cate for something like fifteen years. We met the second week of freshman year in college and since this date have maintained an allegiance that is nearly perfect in its combination of mutual understanding and respectful distance and/or easygoing neglect. I never feel that I need to act in elaborate ways to keep up the friendship, which is pretty much all anyone can ask.

  Cate is a tall brunette of Argentine and French-Canadian extraction, and she is fancy. I’m not exactly sure what it is she does to make her money, but she calls herself an art consultant and appears to be in business for herself. Our continued acquaintance probably has something to do with the fact that our lives have run in complementary though not identical tracks. Sometimes I do get the sense that Cate finds me useful from some professional point of view, but I have yet to discover what this point of view might be and therefore have difficulty taking offense.