The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters

by Chip Kidd

“Look at them. I agree that this is disturbing, but that's because so many people fell for it as a serious work. It's a mess.”

  “I—”

  “Why is it some sort of magnificent achievement that Picasso is so threatened by the female form he has to completely debase it and basic drawing skills in the process? Why does this demand our attention, much less our applause?”

  Misty: Scandalized. Then, “Young lady, these women, whatever they are, are not victims.”

  “Not VICTIMS?” Hims was starting to blow her cool. “Sir, you must know that the models for this canvas were five syphilitic prostitutes, and that its original title was The Avignon Brothel, subtitled The Wages of Sin.”

  He recoiled, as if she had just told everyone his bank account number and present balance. Then, he countered: “Which does not necessarily make it an attack.”

  “No, just the perfect occasion to throw perspective, craft, and respectable draftsmanship out the window,” she responded. “If it has anything like a sense of ‘organic unity,’ it's because this painting has become so familiar it takes on any quality we ascribe to it.”

  He was heating up. “Including the theory that the artist is, absurdly, frightened of the female form. Ridiculous.”

  “Please. The man's a walking castration anxiety. Look at Seated Bather. Ask Dora Maar—”

  “That's ENOUGH!—” His ears were now perpendicular to his head and the color of a cock's comb. “. . . of this.” Debate over. He shot Mills the evil eye and advanced to the next slide. “Let's take a look at Still Life with Chair Caning . . . ”

  • • •

  “I've got to stop doing that,” said Hims, on our way out of class.

  “What.”

  “Flushing my grades down the toilet.”

  “But you were fantastic.” I tried not to patronize. “When he first put it up on the screen, I thought, ‘What a piece of garbage.’ But in five seconds he talked me into liking it. And I still would, if you hadn't spoken up.”

  “Thanks, but that probably says more about your gullibility than anything I had to say. You can see what we're up against.” She slung Baby Laveen over her shoulder. “I don't think Miss Tell will go lightly on my essay answers come the final.” She sighed. “And we've so much more to slog through. How am I going to button my lip when we get to Matisse? And what if he brings up Pollock and Rothko?” She made a face like she was sucking a lime. “Oh, the Truth can be so expensive.”

  We met the cloudless surface world with squints. Mills dug into her bag for her shades.

  “Is all their work really that bad?” I asked.

  “Well, you have to look at things one at a time.” Hims clamped her Ray-Bans onto her elfin face. “I've developed a rather brilliant standard—the Grandma Litmus. It's the perfect way to evaluate any work of art—painting, sculpture, what-haveyou.” She pointed us towards the Creamery and we made tracks. “Now, for Granny Litmus to work, you have to forget anything you know about officially accepted art theory—all the critical stuff, doctrines, movements, museums, and all that, alright?” I nodded. “So: your Grandmother rings you and says she's taken up . . . painting, let's say, and wants you to come over and have a look. So you do, and you go up to the attic of her house and there's a draped canvas. She unveils it and underneath is whatever thing that you want to evaluate. You have to look at it that way, so you can decide.”

  I didn't get it, and said so.

  “In other words, Grandma Litmus forces you to remove everything from the context of what these lamebrains call Art History and judge it for what it is, not what they say it is. You see? Take the Picasso from today—I mean, if Granny painted that you'd have her carted off to the happy house.”

  “Wow, that's pretty . . .”

  “Flawless, I believe, is the word you're grasping for. The mistake most people make, when they see something they don't like or can't understand, is to say, ‘Christ, my kid could do that.’ And they sound like Philistines. But if you say, 'Jeez, my Grandmother did do that,' it changes everything. Just try it next time you're in a gallery. Imagine that Grandma Litmus painted it or sculpted it or smeared it or flung it or assembled it in her spare time and see if it holds up.”

  “Hmm.” I pictured my grandmother in her basement—a gallon bucket of Sherwin-Williams housepaint in one hand and a dripping doublewide brush in the other—standing with triumph in front of one of the De Kooning ‘Women’ that Misty had just shown us. Yikes. I returned to reality—Himillsy holding open the door to the Creamery.

  “God,” I said, “but doesn't it cancel out any abstraction at all?”

  “No, not if you're honest about it. If my Nanna Dodd painted a . . . Klimt, or a Schiele, or even a Mondrian, I'd slap her on the back and run to call the newspaper.”

  I'd have to check those names out. I tried to remember the others—the ones she hated. I said, “It does lend a little perspective to . . . to those guys you first mentioned after class.”

  “Let's just say . . .” She thought for a moment, scanning the flavor board, “. . . that the reports of their depth are greatly exaggerated.”

  • • •

  When Mom and Dad arrived to take me home for Thanksgiving, it was almost frightening to see them for the first time after the longest separation we'd ever had. Presto—two vaguely familiar strangers. I wasn't even sure if I should get in the car. Mom, eyes wet and pregnant with joy, held out a round tin, its lid painted with a scene of a pilgrim merrily waving his musket and terrorizing a turkey. “I made peanut butter dates!” As I got in the backseat, all I could concentrate on was the turkey.

  I knew exactly how he felt.

  “So tell us everything!” was the prevailing theme over the next few days, and I did, almost. Why worry them with talk of things like conspiring to place a pink rubber baby replica in the Alpha Phi rush mixer's punch bowl, or torturing a cat the size of a fire hydrant in the service of Art?

  One tidbit I did give them: they would have liked Dottie a lot.

  • • •

  During the first week of December, with finals five days away, Himillsy invited me to a Christmas party she and Garnett were throwing in his apartment. I was both eager and wary at the prospect of finally meeting GMG. At last I could pull him into focus, to use as a lens on Miss Dodd—to see her from another angle. But I also had to admit: my self-deluding vanity saw him as . . . the competition.

  At five past seven on the appointed Saturday I approached Garnett's building at the west end of town. Mills still lived in the dorms, but Garnett had a place of his own. I couldn't imagine ever being that grown up.

  I rang the buzzer. A moment, then the door was cracked, not more than an inch.

  “Yes?” A worried female voice.

  “. . . Himillsy?”

  “Oh my God.” She opened it the rest of the way. Hims was in her slip, no makeup, half her head in curlers. Manic. “You're an hour . . . early!”

  “But you said seven.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Sorry, here's the invitation.” I pulled it out— her eye-loosening scrawl on the back of an Erbie's receipt. She squinted and held it to her face. Then,

  “Well, I was horribly, horribly wrong!”

  “Do you want me to come back later?”

  “NO!” she screamed, pulling me in. “We're ages behind schedule. Here! Chop these!” My coat was grabbed and in exchange two bunches of carrots were magically produced and shoved at me. “Into sticks! And make yourself a drink!” She slammed the bedroom door. A man's muffled voice responded, not happy. She carped back at him. A little more of this, then silence. I made my way to the kitchen—an open extension off the living room, and from there I took a look around. There was no bar, anywhere, that I could see.

  So I drank in the space.

  And wow, it went down like no slurp 'n' burp ever would. It wasn't lavish, not in the way I knew the word, but it was . . . organized. And stark. A single large poster, the only “art” of any kind, lorded ov
er the room—it was a white field with a jagged black line running from top to bottom down the center, with a black square off to its upper left. At the base, in plain black lettering, it said BAUHAUS. Some other information, smaller, in what I supposed was German, was sprinkled underneath. After a few seconds, its random shapes assembled themselves in my mind and became the extremely abstracted righthand profile of a man's head.

  The furniture was in varying combinations of black leather, glass, and chrome. The floors, wooden, were painted white, as were the walls and ceiling. The proportions were exact—you felt that if anything strayed so much as an inch the whole place would self-destruct. The chairs (they had to be chairs) were at a respectful distance from the coffee table, the couch, each other. This wasn't a revelation by itself, but something made it special. Or rather, some burden had been lifted. I looked for a paper towel to wipe the carrot dirt off my hands. There weren't any.

  But of course: no clutter. No newspapers, no renegade scraps of domestic detritus, no rubber bands, paper clips, coupons, pens or pencils, notebooks, magazines. No knives. Where were the knives?

  I turned to the kitchen cabinets. Where were the knobs?

  This was the Un-dorm.

  I fumbled with the lower edges of the ghostwhite doors. I begged, I pulled, and I coaxed. Were there secret latches, catches, buttons, hidden levers? Nothing. And in the process I left a doodle of dirt from the carrots. I pulled out my shirttail to wipe it away, but most of the marks were too high up. I gingerly climbed onto the counter and unbuttoned my two lowest shirt buttons in order to reach them and—

  “Is everything alright?” Himillsy's voice. I got down and turned. My God. Not Himillsy. This was a . . . woman. Her black satin off-the-shoulder sheath became a stiletto that cleaved the floor with each step. Pure Gertrude Lawrence, as sharp and smart as a Noël Coward lyric.

  “I. I can't open anything,” I said, miserably.

  “Oh, I know,” she sneered, “Garnett designed it all. The apartment is his graduate thesis. Workmen finally left last week.” She made her way into the kitchen, gave one of the drawers a light tap, right in the middle, and it magically popped open. Ta-da. Cutlery.

  Her lids at half mast, her eyes to the ceiling: “Welcome to Utopia.”

  Once we had the crudités all set Hims picked up the tray and said, “Give me a hand with the other hors d'oeuvre?— in the fridge.”

  “Sure.” I opened it and removed a plate with rolls of dried beef and cream cheese impaled on toothpicks. She went to the nearest living room window, balanced the tray on one knee, threw up the sash, and waited for me to follow. “Where're we going?” I asked, as she was halfway through.

  “Fire escape.” Which was big—a terrace, really, made of latticed wrought iron. We set the food on a metal folding table covered with a white tablecloth and already set with punch bowl, glasses, napkins, plates, the whole nine. Brisk out there. We rushed back in.

  “What'll you have?” She opened a panel under the counter that slid out to reveal an entire bar set.

  “Wow, that's pretty great, actually. Um, a whiskey sour?”

  She removed a cocktail shaker and several longstem glasses. “We're not at Phi Sig, let's have martinis!”

  “Okay. What's with the table?” I gestured towards the window.

  “That's where the party is.”

  “Out there?”

  “House rules. No food inside. Not till after dissertation, anyway.”

  “Why have a party at all?”

  Surprised at me. Mock shock. “What? How often does a virgin give birth?” She shook the cocktails into oblivion. On the level: “Actually, quite smart on G's part—a little sneak peak for the cognoscenti—good third of the guests'll be Ark faculty, the rest grad students and a few seniors. Let 'em lift the skirt and have a look.”

  “You starting already?” A man's voice—cutting enough to carve a date into a cornerstone. I pivoted.

  He put out his hand.

  “Garnett Grey.”

  Yes, Garnett Grey was an Architect. Were a psychoanalyst to approach him from behind, tap his shoulder, and say “Humanity,” Garnett'd spin and respond, without hesitation, “Solvable.”

  Not conventionally attractive, but Grey was so self-constructed he became handsome because you knew he was supposed to be—like when you bought it that Superman was flying on TV even though you could see the wires.

  “Dodd tells me you're a freshman. Welcome aboard.” He said it as if he'd just hired me, entry level.

  “Thanks.”

  Hims cringed. “Ahoy.”

  The guests started to arrive, and after thirty minutes I could have sworn I was in the first draft of an Ayn Rand novel. That this little pocket of proto-aesthetes really existed in State's Disneyland of academic banality was more than I could have expected, let alone hoped to get a load of. A stroll down the hallway outside the living room put me under a confetti shower of conversational bits from the Erector Set, all above and beyond me.

  “ . . . the surfaces, the surfaces . . . ”

  “ . . . related to Eileen Gray? The spelling's different . . . ”

  “ . . . ornamental folly. Never get tenure. Refill? . . . ”

  “ . . . ever seen Lever House? Change your life...”

  “ . . . Neutra's the future. I'll have another egg nog . . . ”

  “ . . . trip to Falling Water this weekend. You going? . . . ”

  “ . . . Eames? Tinker toys. No more for me, thanks . . . ”

  “ . . . Phillip Johnson should never throw stones . . . ”

  “ . . . its Broyer, not Brewer. Where's the tree? . . . ”

  “ . . . he's already got an offer from Skidmore . . . ”

  “ . . . site specific? Try a garbage dump . . . ”

  Everyone wore black or white or a shade in between. Were it not for the temperature outside, you'd never know what the occasion was. Not a red or green anything in sight.

  On the way to pee, I couldn't resist stealing a peek into Garnett's bedroom—aha!—an absolute wreck. The Clutter Inferno: a scandalous heap of clothes, books, papers, and underthings. From what I could tell, all Himillsy's. It was the living room's dark alter ego of upheaval. What a relief.

  At around eleven I chanced upon a woman in a Moe-of-the-Three Stooges hairdo and face to match. She was stuffed into a short leather skirt (which she did NOT have the legs for), and ran her hand across the kitchen cabinets like a blind man going over a Brancusi. “An astonishment, really. Corbu couldn't have done better.”

  Garnett beamed. Or did his version of it, anyway: a stony, focused scowl.

  “That's because Corbusier is a blockhead, in more ways than one.” Himillsy eased into the kitchen, steady but on the other side of sober. “Half his Human Storage Boxes are falling apart already.” Her tongue: ready to open oysters.

  Miss Moe-thuzelah: scandalized.

  Garnett looked at Mills the way the Empire State building would regard the corner deli. “Dodd, Le Corbusier is not being judged.”

  Hims: seething, muted. “Well. Excuse the piss out of me. Switched your major to Drama?” She went to the sill, paused on her way to the balcony—one leg in, one leg out—and hissed, “Less is a bore.”

  I followed her through the window, stunned by the realization that I'd have done so balcony or no. Outside it was even colder now, though after a while (and enough liquid insulation) you didn't notice it.

  “Look at that.” She waved her cigarette back at her enemies. “That's a living room for the dead. A Venusian sculpture garden. Everyone's either in the hallway or out here.” Which was only us, actually. Then she grinned, horribly. “Have you seen the bedroom?”

  “Have, sorry.” I moved in next to her, wanting to understand, to advance to . . . I don't know, the next level with her. “I . . . don't get you. You go on about how modernism is crap, but you're definitely a creature of it. It's hard to really tell what you are.”

  “That's because, I'm not much of anything,”
she stiffened and took another sip and leaned on the railing, “besides bored and boring, punctuated by fits of scant self-amusement. And you are . . . ?”

  “Protestant.” I wanted to say so, so much more. Pathetic.

  She clinked my drink. “Jingle all the way.”

  “You're not boring.” I implored, “God, if you're boring then the rest of us are pushing up daisies.”

  “Everything's relative.”

  A lull. Watched our breath bloom and disappear.

  And then she started, as if she were sober, “Look,” and confessing, after a long interrogation. I went hot all over—was she going to say something about me? About what I meant to her? “Those buildings, the first ones, that Gropius did, were . . . unlike anything before them . . . but more important, they spoke to a need for clarity and honest precision that no one had been able to achieve—or, before the twentieth century—even thought to.” A sigh. “To be in one—the Fagus Shoe Last factory in 1911, for the first time—it must have truly sung to the soul and rewarded a spark of true faith in the promise of a, a new ideal. Christ knows the rest of Germany didn't.” She receded into a theater of her own expectation, adoring, then her face fell. “Only to have the floor fall out from under their kneeling legs. The problem is there's a difference between revolutionary minimalism and substituting archival stone with poured concrete that starts to crack before the first photo session is over. In short, the Bauhaus opened the floodgates to a worldwide generation of hacks who decided that details, structural quality, and solid craft were options they didn't need to opt for. That wasn't the intent, I realize,” she scoped out the table for a bottle, “but we all know what they say about good intentions . . .”

  Or any intentions. What an idiot I was. “Yes . . . ,” I offered, weakly. I'd digested very little of what all that was about, except for this: it was rehearsed. If I had any doubts left about what she was doing with someone like Garnett, she just erased them. She needed a worthy foe, always—someone to charge and ricochet off of in order to keep up the momentum. And I would never, could never, be that. Garnett was fuel for her. To burn.