Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  She got out the wooden box of pastels Milton had given her one day, at random—“Here. Want these?”—three tiers of chalk, almost all the gradations of color.

  She would be the model and the artist. It would not look like a bunch of sticks.

  A week or so later, Bay Farm’s spring break, Maude talked to Weesie. It had been a very long time. They hadn’t seen each other since the Father Penleigh and blue hydrangea day the past August, and now it was spring again. There had been a postcard from a skiing vacation, with amusing descriptions of Swiss people and, before that, in September, a discussion of their respective courses. (“Concepts class! Oi-oi- oi.” As Maude had described some of the artwork involved, Weesie said, sounding both humorous and as if she thoroughly expected her implied command to be obeyed, “I think that’s a little too far out.”)

  Then, radio silence. In the first year, Maude had made the mistake of calling Weesie and catching her distracted, preoc-cupied, and uninterested. It was better to wait. When Weesie called, Maude told her news.

  “So it looks as if I’ll be going to like a regular college next year.”

  “What? No more”—and Weesie put on the spooky voice kids used if they were saying The Twiiliight Zone—“Concepts class.”

  “No more Concepts class. I hope there’ll still be concepts.”

  “So where?”

  “Sarah Lawrence.”

  “Sarah Lawrence!” Weesie screamed. “Sarah Lawrence!” she screamed some more.

  “What?” said Maude.

  “Guess where I’m going.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  They had to spend a while screaming together.

  When they had calmed down enough, Maude said, “We can be roommates.”

  “Roommates!” said Weesie in her excitable way, as if room-mates were a high-camp notion.

  “I mean, if you want. I don’t think I have to have a roommate. As a junior.”

  “Junior! Oh-my-God. Life is so incredible. Life is so incredible. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? A junior.” As an afterthought, Weesie remembered to say, “Of course we’ll room together.”

  “Oh, great. I’ll fill that in on the”—Maude adopted Weesie’s intonation—“housing form.” They giggled. “I’d rather be a freshman, really . . .”

  Still, freshman or not—fresh or slightly spoiled—when Maude hung up the little white Princess phone that she would soon be returning to the phone company, she hardly knew what to do with her happiness.

  15.

  WANDERING AROUND THE tiny, empty house while Milton was out, and knowing that she would not be stuck there forever—that she would never live there again, in all probability—let Maude appreciate its jewel-like quality, with the squares of color glowing out of the blackness. It was not unlike the afghan that lay over the arm of the black couch, squares of concentric color within bright color, each outlined in and joined by crocheted black. She had never had trouble loving that.

  She was thinking about what she’d do for the final Concepts class. It was a self-imposed task. Bruno wouldn’t care and the class wouldn’t care if she did nothing, which was what most of the class would do. Why not, if an empty gallery, presented as a show, could still make a splash, even though it had been done. For her, though, showing the empty gallery again was like telling the same joke over and over. It lost its punch.

  Outside the wall of glass, redwinged blackbirds rose from the field in a group, the heartlifting vermilion on their wings flashing as they swerved up and disappeared. From the cracked patio behind the living room to the row of houses visible on the far side, the field was soft with wildflowers—buttercups, clover, the first pinks, tiny at the end of the stiff blades that were their stalks, and the dandelions that so angered the other homeowners. The field was slated to be shaved and tamed that summer into an official park, with playing fields and metal swings.

  She’d been thinking about an ethnography of the artworld but couldn’t come up with a way to present it elegantly—the affine group of the men who could sit in the bar night after night, who knew the right things to say, the right people to know. The glossary—visual verbal linear dialectic Wittgenstein Gertrude Stein Duchamp. A glossary of forbidden, uncool, embarrassing words: feeling expression beauty universal transcendence. The forbidden qualities of prettiness, decorativeness, lack of sophistication, traditional craftsmanship.

  Though the atmosphere of the artworld might be a perpetual sixties, in art, it turned out, not all that much was allowed. At first conceptual art had seemed to bear out the atmosphere of freedom. Visual art at that point forbade all narrative elements—anything except color, form, composition, mass, any representation at all, even of emotion. Visual art was to be scientific, to make progress, in the exploration of its pure components. Maude put Milton as a dot on that timeline. But conceptualism, in its way, wasn’t much different. It was just that its mandate was to reduce art to its intangible elements—the framing that turned whatever was framed into an object of commentary or contem-plation, whether it was a urinal, a soup can, or the knowledge that the artist was listening to your footsteps and masturbating under the gallery floor. It was still about what made art art.

  But the artist covertly under the gallery floor, under your feet—it did give you a feeling. And something else they talked about at the bar, in class: blurring the line between art and life so that art wouldn’t be something framed, on a pedestal, apart, but something lived; and, likewise, your life could be redeemed by becoming, itself, art. How exciting that was. How—romantic. Hence the boxes of nail parings and pubic hair, the exhibited electrocardiograms and medical charts, the videotapes in which an artist comes and goes, doing dishes and forgetting his keys but not talking of Michelangelo. As process, okay. As product—maybe pretty boring.

  She could imagine acceptable things she could make. Wearable sculptures of coiled twine or strips of rag or feathers, in non-body shapes; cubes covered in real growing grass; rooms with a grass floor, or filled with artificially made fog—if possible, a cloud floating in the middle of a room. A joke about containing the uncontainable, nature; about the puniness of artifice. Ungrandiose, antigrandiose art. It would appeal to the senses; it would be beautiful, in fact. And, therefore, probably uncool.

  For, above all—so it seemed as she stared abstractedly out at the soon-to-be-paved and replanted field—art had to be exclusionary to succeed. It had to make an in-group and an out-group. She had even seen a gallery piece about that, this year, done with masking tape on the floor. The way art could do this was by special knowledge, the kind of initiation where you betrayed nothing (no goofy handshakes or pins and insignia). It was straightfaced but never earnest—you just wore shades. The work couldn’t be too accessible or easy in its appeal. It must not be for everyone. You had to be one of the initiates. The knowledge required had to change frequently, be an ever-moving target. And that was what was wrong with traditional art—with representation. It was a magic no one really understood, and it was powerful magic, with deep effects; but anyone could learn to read it in two seconds. Everyone could like it.

  You would think, she thought, that people could stop worrying about being cool once they got out of high school.

  This ramble of thought was interrupted by the clank and clatter of the front door, and Milt was there with her, unavoidable, throwing his raincoat onto one of the red kitchen chairs. “Well,” he said, as if she had asked a question. He’d been in the city, she knew. “They’re dropping me.”

  This was not going to be good. “Who?” she said. If only she’d been in her own room when he came in. She couldn’t help it: she wanted to hide.

  “The gallery,” he said bitterly, as if it were her fault, and as if she ought to know.

  “Your gallery? Your gallery is dropping you?”

  “I’m not selling well enough.” His hands and shoulders made a wide W of a
shrug. “They have better uses for their space.” He looked at her face. “Don’t worry. I can still pay your tuition.”

  “I wasn’t even thinking about that.” A stronger feeling over-came her fear.“Daddy—I’m so sorry.”

  “Aagh”—he made his classic tossing-away gesture—“it’s just fashion. That’s all it is. It’s just fashion.”

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right,” she said as he loped past, on his way upstairs to his studio or bedroom. “Oh, Daddy. You’re a real artist.”

  He paused at the bottom step. He didn’t look at her, and she saw he couldn’t. “Thanks, honey. Thank you, Maudie.” He looked at her quickly. “I never thought you liked my work.” He took one step, disappearing into the walled stairwell, so that just his voice was in the room: “You’re good to me, kid.”

  16.

  Thought I heard somebody call my name—thought I heard somebody call my name; painting a picture, across the amber sky, of love, and lonely days gone by . . . The “Somebody’s Gonna Miss Me” song kept going through her head, the song from her brother’s record, stolen from his room to play at Bay Farm, the first time Danny smiled at her, in the pop hovel. She thought of how the list of graduates was called from the dais in the refectory for each senior to come up and get his or her diploma at graduation. My name will not be called. I will not hear someone call my name, she warned herself: don’t hope. Don’t kid yourself.

  Painting a picture, across the amber sky, of love, and lonely days gone by. Bay Farm graduation was in three weeks. She was going to go. It was her graduation, her class. She wouldn’t miss it. She had had to ask someone when it was.

  The drawing for Danny was rolled to go into a picture cylinder. With only its back showing, the rolled-up picture looked like a big, dirty diploma. She slid the dirty diploma that was her mirror image, her other self reflected and caught, into the mailing tube and taped on the label. Danny Stern, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. It wasn’t much of an address. She hoped it was enough to get the thing there.

  If not, after all, it would come back.

  He had it anyway, whether he knew it or not. Her real self, some essential aspect of herself, her loving self, what there was of it, had stayed with him. She dug her bare toes into the yellow rug from Africa that looked like sunshine on the floor. She had tried to wrench that self away for her own freedom, but she couldn’t, not with Bruno, anyway. She felt as if Danny watched her, even now as she sent him this coded message of herself, in a tube. She needed someone to see her.

  If it were actually her graduation, she thought, she’d invite Stand. Who’d done a pretty good job of seeing who she was. Stand had gotten into a better college, a real one, but it turned out he wasn’t going to go. He was doing construction work with an uncle’s company and making huge amounts of money. More than Milt made at his most successful. He said he couldn’t be bothered with college.

  Three weeks later, on the morning of Bay Farm graduation, Weesie called, “just to make sure you’re coming.”

  “Of course I’m coming.” Not that it had been mentioned between them before.

  Some things never change: Maude asked what Weesie would wear.

  Just a summer dress, apparently. Maude planned to wear the white net antique thing from her first year—Miss Havisham in her wedding dress, carrying the torch for Bay Farm.

  “It’s hot,” said Weesie, meaning the dress had sleeves (even if they were net, transparent, and as substantial as spider web) and that she disapproved. She had moved on. You wouldn’t catch her in that old Pucci, dated and embarrassing in 1970. Already an antique dress was hippieish in a discredited back-to-nature, back-to-the-old-ways way.

  “It’s good hot, not bad hot,” said Maude, meaning not sticky oppressive heat but the kind that makes you want to lie in the sun.

  “It has sleeves,” said Weesie, coming as close as she was going to to mentioning sweat.

  Why, Maude wondered, was Weesie always so sure she was right, so that if you differed it meant you didn’t, in some crucial way, get it? She felt her usual helplessness and inferiority. Then she didn’t. She turned around and mentally looked at Weesie instead of feeling Weesie’s disapproving gaze on her. This was a weakness in Weesie, a blind spot. Weesie’s disapproval didn’t mean Maude should disqualify herself. Maude didn’t have to accept the rule of her judgments. It was possible that the tribe of better people could accommodate both of them. “Well, I’ll be the one who’s sweaty, not you,” said Maude finally, as if exempting Weesie from responsibility.

  The dress, probably from the teens of the century, was a little tattered, a little yellowed. But still beautiful, Maude thought, examining the effect, that afternoon, in the Oz-y mirror, with the tan of her shoulders and upper chest dark through the white net, above thick white embroidered flowers. She pinned her hair up. She remembered how the girls had insisted she get the dress, because it was so her, and yet it had made a fence around her as being too special. Well, maybe it was like her—different after all and a little the worse for wear.

  She had had to ask Milton to drive her. When they got to the car, he went to the passenger side. She had gotten her learner’s permit in Drivers’ Ed at the community college, but still had no license, from lack of practice. This was unexpected gracious-ness. He handed her the keys and faced forward. This is so normal, she thought, though really it wasn’t—her in her elderly costume, driving her father, who had pulled her from school, to her non-graduation. She wondered: by dragging him there, did he think she was trying to rub it in? She maneuvered the little stick-shift down the trafficless streets of once-identical houses, to the commercial strip and, nervously, onto the highway. “You can go faster,” said Milt in his imperturbable way. He certainly wasn’t hoping she would crash.

  There was a big silence on the way. She wanted to ask about Seth, about what went on between them—Seth and Milt, Seth and Nina—about why they so totally left her out. But she couldn’t. It would make everything horrible again. Milt seemed, momentarily, almost to approve of her, and she knew he would consider it an attack if she asked any questions on that subject. She knew how precarious and provisional it was for him to accept any feelings in her that were independent of his wishes—to allow room for any of her desires at all.

  At school, Milt did not get himself over to the driver’s side but got out with her.

  “Are you staying?”

  “Sure,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion—as if it really were Maude’s graduation. “I’ll find your mother.” Milt and Nina were on better terms with each other than Maude had managed with either of them. They were in it, so to speak, for the long haul. When Milt had his show, Nina had even helped with the invitations, addressing envelopes. Sometimes Maude heard him talking to Nina on the phone. Never Seth. She imagined Seth communicated with and through Nina. Seth had always hated Milt. He’d wanted Maude to. But she didn’t. Part of her did, but she didn’t. This was who they were. Maybe everyone’s family, if you scratched the surface, was as weird. Maybe this was normal.

  She strolled with her father to the refectory very much as if it were. As he spied Nina with her Rod, he bent to peck Maude on the cheek and loped off toward them, as if embracing your estranged daughter and attending her non-graduation with your ex-wife and ex-wife’s lover were also the most ordinary thing in the world.

  It was still sunny at this June evening hour, after Bay Farm dinner. The Pughs had come only for the climax of the day’s events, the handing out of diplomas. Milt seated himself with the faculty and staff, down one side of the refectory, next to Nina. Maude sat with the students, facing the dais, in the main body of the old barn, under its high, beamed vault. There were lots of unfamiliar faces—two years’ worth, all the freshmen and sophomores, though there was a certain generic Bay Farmness to them: a complacency about being there and, naturally, the Bay Farm look of long hair, cutoffs, or fabulous, fanciful versions of elegance and polished dress. Time mi
ght make new cultures, but this was still Bay Farm culture. The kids were the same blond and Nordic gene pool too—high WASP—with a smattering of Jews, Catholics, and black kids, the groups that got the preponderance of abundant scholarships the school prided itself on.

  There were a few alumni around, as there always were at graduation, recent graduates who still missed the place, and possibly always would. She noticed a particularly attractive young man, dark, like Danny, but older. He must have felt her eyes on him, because he turned and looked at her quizzically, tilting his long head to one side. Her face heated as if she’d been caught in the act, and her eyes pricked as she smiled at him and almost instantly looked away. It was Danny. His smile was so exactly the same that she didn’t see how for a moment she’d mistaken him.

  The commencement speech began—by the Senator uncle, from a liberal northern state. The headmaster came up afterward, shook the Senator’s hand and thanked him, leading some more clapping, and began the roll call. In Bay Farm’s egalitarian no-grades way, there were no valedictorians or any of that kind of thing, just Abbott, Beals, and so on through Wells and Zapan-dreou. Louisa Agatha Herrick. Weesie got up in her to-die-for simple French cotton frock. Maude watched to see Weesie’s expression when she unrolled her diploma. Meanwhile the names went on, mounting into the P’s. Steven Michael Pearl. Francine Shaughnessy Perkins. Now: Ellen Susanna Raines.

  The person next to her made a joke. Maude took pride in turning and smiling, her eyes maybe suspiciously bright, but that could be just ordinary sentiment. Almost everyone was a little teary.

  She’d kept hoping. She’d held on to the stupid fantasy that special dispensation would be made.

  After Zapandreou, there was prolonged clapping, stamping, whistling, and shouting. The headmaster held up his hands for quiet, but finally shot his hands to the side in exasperation and gave up. As people around her stood, Maude looked for Wee-sie, to congratulate her and other old friends. At the borders of the crowd, seniors were shrieking and jumping up and down, embraced by family and classmates.