I Am Having So Much Fun Without You

by Courtney Maum

  “You spoke to Julien about this?” I asked, looking down the hall to see if I could catch sight of the man who had withheld such vital information from me.

  “We did. It’s very unfortunate news, actually. I hope everything’s all right.”

  “Jesus, well, that depends.” What I wanted to ask them was what the hell was going to happen to the money I got from the sale? And who performs energy readings on paintings? And why the hell didn’t they give me back The Blue Bear when I wanted it in November?

  But in terms of energy, it felt pretty important that I not get upset. This was my big opening, and dammit if I was going to let two crackpots dressed like they were just off the set of Miami Vice ruin it for me.

  “Well, I’d prefer to sort the details out with Julien, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Right,” said Dan. “Of course. In the meantime, Amira said it would be very cathartic if you washed it.” He pointed at the photo.

  “Like an anointment,” said Dave. “It will create the mental space necessary for you to welcome the painting back.”

  Well, I’d had it with professionalism. I cracked. “I wanted this painting back months ago. I actually needed it, and you guys wouldn’t give it back to me. And now you’re telling me that—” I stopped to try to calm myself and failed. “I’d like you to take that fucking sculpture out of my house.”

  “Oh, you’ll need to keep Ngendo,” said Dan. “Clearly, she still has work to do within your life.”

  • • •

  They left—taking their holier-than-thou eye rolls and their Kombucha breath with them. I was about to toss the photo of The Blue Bear into the American machine when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Julien,” I said, turning. “Jesus! Why didn’t you tell me about the Bear?”

  My well-prepared ex-gallerist handed me some wine. “What do you want? They only called me yesterday. I didn’t want to upset you. Plus,” he said, raising his glass, “there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. They don’t even want a refund.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  He smiled broadly. “I didn’t believe it, either. I even called my lawyer. They’re going to sign a donation form. So the only thing is, we can’t resell it. But we can donate it or, I don’t know, do you want it back?”

  “Yeah, I fucking wanted it back! Months ago. But what good is it now?”

  “Speaking of,” Julien said, putting his arm around me. “Your wife just arrived.”

  After giving the photograph to Julien for his gallery files, I headed through the body-choked hallway to find Anne and Camille looking at something behind Alice’s desk. I stood there for a while, watching them. Anne had put Camille in a pink-and-wine-colored dress with a butterfly collar and a little pair of black boots. Beside her, Anne was in a camel-colored tunic I’d never seen over a pair of slim pink jeans. Close-fitting and cashmere knit, it hugged her every curve. Through the open space in Alice’s desk, I could see that Anne was wearing my favorite pair of heels: round-toe stilettos in electric blue with an embellished heel of gold and silver chains. She’d put her hair up into a chignon that, owing to her Frenchness, wasn’t strict, but tousled, and she had a simple gold bracelet around her wrist, which danced down her arm as she pointed at something in the book she was looking at with Camille.

  Keeping my eyes on my family in order to avoid locking my gaze with some well-wisher who might try to interrupt me, I made my way to them, bending down to hug my beautiful daughter first.

  “Daddy,” she cried, letting me sweep her up. “You’re back!”

  “No, you’re back, sweetheart.”

  “Mommy said you’re gonna do something really smelly.”

  “That’s right, love,” I said, kissing her again. “Very.”

  With my hand still clasping Camille’s, I stood up and greeted Anne. Her skin smelled like gardenias. I wanted to nuzzle my face against the soft place just above her cheekbone, wanted to let my mouth graze her ear, wanted the din of chitchat and drinking around us to fade away.

  “You’ll never believe what happened,” I said, eschewing how-was-your-vacation questions to tell Anne the big news. “The Continuists were here, the ones who bought The Blue Bear? The guys who wouldn’t let me have it back?”

  “Really?” she said, looking around us. “They’re gone?”

  I nodded at the door. “You know why they came? To bring me a photo of it to throw in the wash. They’re sending it back.”

  “The painting?!”

  “And not because I asked for it. Because it has bad energy.”

  Behind her desk, I saw Alice, who had been pretending she wasn’t listening, raise her eyes.

  “Don’t worry, Alice love, it’s not a business thing. It’s just a bunch of nutters who do energy readings on their art.”

  She waved her hand through the air, pretending she hadn’t been eavesdropping.

  “Bad energy?” Anne repeated, looking nervous. “Do you have to pay for it?”

  I shook my head no. “But I can’t sell it. They’ve drawn up some contract: donation only. So we can keep it . . . if we want?” I flinched.

  I wanted terribly, acutely, to take her hand. I didn’t. We stood there staring at each other, until she took a deep breath. “Why don’t we just focus on tonight? And then we’ll see.”

  “Richard!” said Azar, coming over. “Twenty minutes good? And you must be Anne-Laure,” he said, kissing her. “It’s lovely to finally meet you. And hello there, princess.”

  During the several times I’d brought her by the gallery, Camille had developed something of a crush on Azar, the proof of which was evident in her immediately flushed cheeks.

  “In the meantime . . .” He made an apologetic smile before turning back to me. “Can I steal you? There’s some people—press—I’d like you to meet. If you two want to run in the back there to see the installation, by all means, you should.”

  Azar whisked me away to speak to this person and that one, but my mind was in the back room with Anne. I wished I’d been beside her when she saw the finished installation under the lights, the ominous empty clotheslines with their waiting pegs, and the flag glowing in the background, like something stuck and bled.

  I spoke with a couple of journalists and bloggers while the crowd around us swelled. People were pushed out into the street, drinking and smoking. The reception area was too small to accommodate all of them, but Azar was firm about not letting the “laypeople” into the back space until we were ready to start the washers. Then the party would continue there until the wash was done, and I hung and tagged the items.

  After I’d made the rounds, making progress with my sound bites, Azar made eye contact with me and tapped a knife against his glass.

  “Tout le monde, bonsoir! Merci d’être venus! Now, if you’ll just follow us into the back room, we’re going to start the show!”

  Like any event mixing food and humans, the exodus occurred in fits and starts of people getting refills on their beverages and loading up their plates with extra cheese and grapes. It took a good ten minutes to get even half of the attendees to the back, by which point Azar said he thought that was as good a time as any to start.

  I took my place by the machines and scanned the room for Anne. She was standing in the corner with Camille, looking around at all the people. And then she looked at me. I couldn’t read her face.

  “Thank you again for coming,” shouted Azar above the noise. “I’d like to say a few words about this installation, mostly that we’re very proud to have Richard Haddon here. Richard is a British citizen who spent a great deal of time living in America, and now the poor sod lives here.” People laughed. “And when we agreed to work on this together, the war in Iraq had not yet started. And now it has. What you see before you is a living representation of the absurdity and senselessness that has informed this conf
lict from the get-go, absurdity that will be replicated by the act that Richard is about to undertake, a kind of sacrificial washing of regretted items in oil.

  “Some of you who donated things are actually in this room,” he continued, looking around. “Others mailed them in. And many of the objects were chosen by the artist himself, but each one has a certain relationship to the country it represents, and most call to mind mistakes. On the left, we have America. On the right, the United Kingdom. Richard is going to begin the washes on both machines, calling out each item, and when he’s done, he’ll hang the articles on the clothing lines back there and identify them with dog tags. We invite you to enjoy this space while the machines are running, but when the drying starts, we’ll be putting up a guardrail around it because of the hazardous material. We have masks in the reception area for any of you troubled by the smell, and I’d also like to point out the various exits: one there to the right, and one down the hallway behind you. Again, thank you for being here. Let the wash begin!”

  The swell of the crowd gave me courage, but not quite enough to get rid of the uneasy feeling in my stomach. I would be starting with the American machine and washing Lisa’s last letter. I was going to have to push myself into a dissociative state in order to maintain the nerve to call it out in my wife’s presence.

  Positioning myself in front of the American washing machine, I picked up the first article, and yelled, “Expired U.S. passport; Colin Peterson.” And then I tossed it in. I picked up another item: “Used T-shirt from Columbine, Colorado; Julia Mavis.” I went on like this until people had started chitchatting again, by which point, I wasn’t hollering so much as passionately mumbling. Then there was only one item left to cite. I looked nervously around the room and saw that Anne and Camille were still there in the corner, watching my every move. I swallowed hard and said, “A final letter; Lisa Bishop,” and then I tossed it in, my heart pumping so quickly, my vision became blurred.

  Trying to convince myself that I hadn’t played out of bounds—that the intersection of the personal and the public wasn’t disrespectful when it was art—I poured a full quart of oil into the machine, set it to cold/cold, light spin, and then, after a second’s hesitation, I pressed start. I moved quickly to the British machine, calling out the items with as much confidence as I could muster while I sent out a silent prayer to please not let anything explode while I was standing in front of the Tricity Bendix.

  When I finally turned around, I wasn’t surprised to find the room half emptied, with pockets of people paying only a cursory amount of attention to what was happening in the spinners. I scanned the room of fickle art lovers for my wife. In the corner where she had been, Julien stood now, entertaining Camille. And then I realized why. Anne was coming toward me, an agenda on her face.

  “So,” she said, with a look that squashed any hopes I’d had that my installation might have impressed her.

  “This is quite a crowd.”

  “Anne,” I said, “it wasn’t, it was just that I—”

  She held up her hand. “Just one thing, I don’t want to ruin this—but you still have her letters?!”

  “I got rid of all of them,” I managed. “Except one.”

  Anne’s gaze followed mine to the Whirlpool machine. Her lip twitched. “You destroyed it.”

  I nodded. I watched her expression turn from hurt to hurt less to bemused.

  “Well.” She sighed, walking away from me to trail her finger along the washing machine’s glass window. “You think the stuff in there is going to make it? Did you sign an insurance rider in case it blows?”

  I assured her that I had, and joined her by the machine, close enough to touch her. A groom and bride in front of a toxic cake.

  “Oh,” she said, pointing at my cuff. “You’ve got tapenade on your shirt. Or, um, gas?”

  I scratched my nail against the stain while I struggled for something to say.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I have to tell you something.” I watched her swallow. “I don’t know how long I’ll stay with Camille tonight. I mean, we’ll stay for the drying portion. But I, uh, have to tell you something else.”

  Her tone gave me goose bumps. It wasn’t like Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud to use colloquial interjections. “What?”

  “Well, I went on a date, Richard. Or, two dates, actually. I guess.”

  My limbs were noodles. The din around me swirled.

  “We didn’t say anything about dating,” I gasped. “I thought we were just giving each other space!”

  “Well, nothing’s happened yet. I mean, you know.”

  “You went on two dates!”

  “I was just trying.” She looked nervously around us, and when she spoke again, it was a whisper. “I feel like I have to know.”

  “Anne,” I said, reaching for her. “Please. It’s Thomas, isn’t it. It’s that guy.”

  To my horror, she blushed.

  “It’s not important who it is. But I felt like I should tell you.”

  “But did you have to tell me here? Christ on crutches,” I said, faltering. “I’m going to be sick.”

  “I’m not doing anything. I just needed a nice time.”

  “How many nice times?”

  She swallowed. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No!” I said. “Yes. No! We need rules about this! I literally had no idea that . . .” I noticed a man watching us. I glared and he fell back into conversation with the people he was with. “I just didn’t think that we were at this point,” I whispered back. “I wished that you had said something earlier. I don’t know what this means.”

  “I’m not sure you get any input on what I do or don’t say. Or when. Listen,” she said, flustered. “It was wrong for me to tell you here, but it’s also not a big deal. Yet. I just wanted you to know that I’m not sitting around making pros and cons lists. To really work through this, I have to know . . . I have to know my options.”

  “I can’t hear this,” I said. “I can’t take this right now.”

  “I know,” she said, taking my hand. “I’m sorry. I guess I just felt, when I heard you call out that letter . . .” Her fingers were cool. My palms were sweaty. I wanted to collapse.

  “Let’s pretend I didn’t say anything,” she said, giving my hand a tepid squeeze. “You can throw my little confession in the wash.”

  “Please don’t sleep with him,” I begged. “Please.”

  She could have countered by saying that I had no right to ask her such a thing, but instead, she pulled away from me—crossing the room to gather up Camille and disappear out of sight.

  The extent to which I’d misjudged our progress astounded me. With the positive energy and buzz around the opening, I thought we’d have a talk that night, that maybe she’d say she missed me, that we could do dinner alone soon. And when she’d said she couldn’t stay long at the show with Camille, I’d been so far gone in positivity that I thought she might suggest that I stop by the house after the opening, and that maybe—sweetest maybe—things would progress in such a way that I’d never make it back to my apartment. In a state of profound disbelief and disappointment, I started transferring the slick mess out of each machine to the body bags.

  Azar made a second announcement, this one for the drying portion, which drew a larger crowd. Humans are always keen to gape at devastation.

  Alice was on hand to help me operate the engraver. As I hung each item, she punched a description and the donator’s name onto a dog tag, which I draped around the peg to hang over the corresponding thing. Most everything had survived, curiously, although the photographs and posters had become barely recognizable surfaces of gasoline and ink. The stuffed animals were horrifying, which meant they looked like art, and Lisa’s letter had been reincarnated into a ball of greasy pulp. If I had a pair of fake teeth to add to it, her final missive would have looked like a tera
toma.

  The drying portion was a protracted process involving latex gloves and the careful transfer of the ruined articles into giant bins. As soon as something was hung, it started to drip. A boon I hadn’t thought of before was that all of the soiled articles looked like they were dripping blood. Even before I was finished, the cameras started going off behind me. One person even hooted. I thanked the faceless cheerleader for restoring a small fraction of my pride.

  Several people in the audience had donned protective face masks, spurring the photographers to take pictures of the crowd. While I was answering some questions for a Finnish journalist, Anne came up and announced that they were heading home. Camille was at her side with her nose pinched.

  “I know. It’s like a gas station,” I said, going to ruffle Camille’s hair and then stopping myself when I realized that my gloved fingers were covered in gunk. “But what’d you think?”

  Camille was too distracted by the Finnish journalist’s conspicuous lack of eyebrows to compliment her dad.

  “I’m sorry for interrupting,” said Anne to the journalist, “but we really have to go. Congratulations, Richard.” It came out sweet and sad.

  “Jesus, will you call me?”

  Anne looked embarrassed that I’d asked this out loud. “Honey, say congratulations to your papa?”

  The minute Anne and Camille pushed their way out of earshot, the journalist was on me. “Is that your wife?”

  I watched Anne kiss the people she knew in the crowd good-bye.

  “Well,” I said, peeling my ruined gloves off. “She was.”

  22

  BY ALL the benchmarks that the art world possessed, the show was a success. I got great press in Text zur Kunst, BOMB magazine, and Art Forum, along with a lengthy write-up from Lisa’s former employer, the Herald Tribune. I was even contacted for an interview with The New York Times, for which I had to have a professional head shot taken for the first time in my life.

  By mid-April, the situation in Iraq had become an absurdist, ghastly mess. When the bronze statue of Hussein fell, massive looting started and continued unhindered by the foreign forces there. In a crystalline revelation of its international priorities, the United States sent troops to guard the Oil Ministry and nothing else, leaving Iraq’s National Museum to be stripped bare of its “cultural inheritance”—the inheritance of something foreign and thus unimportant, belonging as it did to the great dark realm of the “other.”