by Jay Fox
“What are you looking at?” she smiles coyly. “You do know that I'm almost twice your age?”
“Does that really matter?” I ask as I break the stare and chuckle to the floor.
“Flattered, kid, but you're really not my type.”
“What is your type?”
She smiles. “The type that doesn't try to engage in these sorts of things when there's about one hundred people ready to barge in through an unlockable door at any minute.” She turns her head to look and quickly returns her attention to me. “Plus, I'm not one to start anything that I can't finish.”
I nod without that sharp aching sensation that more often than not accompanies rejection, take a drag off the cigarette, and make my way back to the taupe, leather chair, which exudes yet another cloud of dust as I plop back down. There are no ashtrays around, not that this matters. “Another time?” I ask.
“If you play your cards right…” she begins with that same smile that evades qualification with nothing short of guile, “…No.” Ouch. “I'd much rather hear why you care about Mordecai's work so much? Is it the money?”
“You know about that?” deflated.
“You think I didn't want to cash in?” she laughs. “I tried to get him over all the time, but Willis refused to call him. They had a falling out over something—I don't know what. He didn't like to talk about it. He said it was nothing, but a woman can always tell.”
“I see.”
“So where did it come from, then? Why are you so interested in him?”
“I'm not in it for the money,” with asperity—sudden, explosive, and instantly regretted. “I mean,” I backtrack, “That's not my only reason for doing this. Maybe it was initially, but now it’s something more.”
“There are no ends without means,” she replies with that unshakable candor. “So why do it?”
I don't know how to respond. There really is no good reason. A side of me wants to say something about Sisyphus in an effort to sound profound, but that reference has become somewhat banal. The truth is that I haven't thought of the why—the reason, the purpose—all that much; there doesn't seem to be a need for a reason or a purpose, just a direction.
I don't know what it is; I don't have a ready name by which to address the need. I know it does not go by any name so great as truth or wisdom. Even “ambition” is indulgent enough to invite dubious eyebrows. I have not set this goal for myself because I believe the identity of the artist needs to be revealed in order to subsequently solve some great mystery concerning the human condition. It is just something to do, a reason to wake up every morning with the feeling that there is something not only worth accomplishing, but something that tangible, too. Jeff is of the opinion that I seek the unattainable because he considers me a pessimist—and a pessimist with an impossible goal before him will never be ashamed of his failure. Tomas looks at it as something with which to preoccupy his time. He has openly projected this sentiment onto me, though my rebukes have always felt more emotional than logical. Maybe I do share this orientation more than I am ready to admit, but I don't really know. The more plausible explanation seems to be that I have no idea what I am to do because for the first time in my life I am confronted with a myriad of forks in the road that all hold their own pros and cons. Who the hell am I to decide which is the best route for me?
My entire life seems to have been a perpetual attempt to mollify others, to respond to the responsibilities imposed upon me by authority figures draped in cloaks of varying opacity. Some stood before me with clear orders and demands; others continue to hide in the shadows with potentially nefarious aims, their shibboleths including “self” and “status” and “success” and “individualism” and “wealth” and all of the prizes adjunctive to these things, all of the glittering commodities that hide the fact that there is no purpose or serious worth inherent in them, something so anathema to what is considered normal these days that an entire industry has been created simply to sell this meager truth (the face of Tyler Durdin is on the cover of People, after all).
Had it ever mattered what I want to do, not in the sense of the choice of where to eat lunch or what topic I wished to explore for a paper, but in the more universal context? It was a question that was asked so infrequently that I had forgotten to pose it to myself, a question that never seemed relevant to the “real world” in which I was, am, expected to enter. To mature, in the sense of our market-oriented world, means less the cultivation of personality or character or even integrity, and more the honing of a skill that can be used within a framework of exploitation: an ability that will be useful to a corporation, which believes that, by providing one the venue to employ their skill, they are entitled to the majority of the wealth created by that individual's labor. And yet to renounce it? Is that not the ultimate in juvenile idealism? No, one must do the adult thing: Submit and complain until you reach the age when you can spend your days getting drunk and accosting young idealists, telling them to follow their dreams, even if you know that they won't and that your disheveled condition makes you look more like a waif than a sage with the type of phronesis the young unknowingly crave. Still, it's only then, only during the ashen twilight between retirement and death, that you realize how foolish it is to think it foolish to want to skip that middle and patently unnecessary step of life, a step plagued by compromises, which, both in the metaphorical and literal sense (though one could debate the extent to which either is applicable), come to be seen as constituents of a protracted suicide, the fractured evanescence of youth discarded one shard at a time until there is nothing more than a pallid shell participating in a drudgery that only a slave would welcome.
Though it would be a fallacy to cite Truth as my sole motive, I am uncertain of the other forces or ideals stoking my ambition. I only know that this endeavor most certainly lacks in the nobility to which so many heroes are wont to strive. By even my own criteria I thought it quixotic, more than likely doomed to end up in the catacombs of futility. But it was something, a practice that promised no windfall because it was not intended to provide one in the conventional sense.
And I don't know what I'll do when I lose the opportunity to live like that, like this. I don't know what I'll do when I have to wake up and know that my life is to forever be plagued by vanishing seconds and entire days that I won't remember just because they are no different than the ones that went before, the ones that will come after. I don't want to experience life as a conjunction of nostalgia and regret like the old men that hang around the newsstands all day drinking coffee spiked with cheap vodka as they piss away their social security money on lotto tickets while discussing the past with others, who, like them, have abandoned the present. And perhaps there is that element of love that is lacking, too; perhaps that's what we really abandon when we relinquish the present—the possibility of love that is not only tangible, but human. And maybe it's the greater love, too; not the love of self or one other or even a series of others, but the love of humanity and the love of life—the joyful pilgrimage with a completely arbitrary destination, which is perhaps the only thing that real art can ever strive to be.
“Adventure,” I respond with a small lump in my throat.
Daphne nods with a versatile expression on her face. Before having the chance to disambiguate her sentiment, Patrick comes into the room with a baroque stein, a sixer of canned beer with a label that reads beer, and a head full of cocaine (though the latter is only implied by the inflection of his voice).
“Hope you cats are thirsty,” he effervesces as he takes a swig from the stein, which has the word “Castalie” transcribed below a scene from some medieval festival. He then launches into song (¾ up-tempo waltz in E Mixolydian):
The nut-brown ale, the nut-brown ale,
Puts down all drink when it is stale!
The toast, the nutmeg, and the ginger
Will make a sighing man a singer.
Ale gives a buffet in the head,
But ginger under-prop
s the brain;
When ale would strike the strong man dead
Then nutmeg tempers it again.
The nut-brown ale, the nut-brown ale,
Puts down all drink when it is stale!
“There's enough swill downstairs to supply a small army,” he adds as he takes another swig. A can makes its way into my hand, perhaps by means of teleportation. “I think Mongo's polished about half of it off by himself!”
“What is the deal with that guy anyway?” I ask. Daphne stands and starts for the hifi.
“Mongo Blageaux? Oh he's the heir to the Keens fortune and yes-yes that is his real name because he had it legally changed sometime back in the early nineties and-and-um-and I think it means something in some language.”
“That narrows it down,” Daphne mumbles as she looks through the record collection.
“A rather hebephrenic personality, right?”
“Sure.” Caesura. “What the hell does hebephrenic mean?”
“It's another word that means something in another language.” She lights another cigarette.
“And it's not Swahili. Ninasema Kiswahili, lakini sikijui nzuri sana.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah I spent-I spent a few weeks in Tanzania some time back. Actually, no…well…yes. It was Zanzibar to be more precise. Beautiful country. Lovely people.”
“What took you all the way over there?” Daphne asks while examining an Edith Piaf compilation.
“My brother's wife was born there and my whole family went down for the wedding.” He looks to Daphne with wide eyes. She acknowledges the look with a nod before returning to the vinyl. “Her father's kind of a prick, but the rest of-the-her relatives are great.” He turns to me. “So how did the interrogation go?”
Caesura.
“Interview! Interview,” as he slaps his head. “A thousand apologies upon a thousand apologies.”
“Patrick,” Daphne begins as she removes a record for its jacket, “I've told you that I don't really know anything about Mordecai.” She replaces the Bill Evans record with an Edith Piaf compilation. “I've never even seen a picture of him,” she adds as she places the needle on the rotating disc.
“Yes well don't you don't-don't you at least know where he moved after living with Willis?”
“That was more than a decade ago,” she laughs. “I'm sure he doesn't still live in Greenpoint.”
“Greenpoint?” I blurt out.
“Did Esther tell you that, too?” Daphne asks sarcastically.
I nod as the tinny horns on the first track of the album blast through the speakers.
“Well, she's right. He moved…where was it?” She turns to Patrick, who shrugs. “I think he lived on Franklin Avenue.”
“It's Franklin Street up there.”
“Regardless. Willis said he lived nearby Greenpoint Avenue—I remember that much.”
“What about Willis? Do you still have his number?”
“Of course. We still keep in touch even if he can be a misogynistic asshole.”
“A what?”
“Many people like Daphne here believe that he hates feminists. But he-he just hates bourgeois femineminism you know the types who simply want to make men and women economic equals in capitalist competition. He has no problem with some of their claims—the more legalistic stuff that is: reproductive rights and harsher punishments for sex offenders and rapists—especially in cases in which the husband rapes his wife—access to affordable daycare—you know…all that.”
“Or that he doesn't acknowledge the insidiousness of patriarchy.”
“Insidiousness? Isn't that a bit extreme.”
“No. Phallocentricism dominates the very language we speak. At best. In its most insidious form, it assimilates, subsumes…conquers everything that opposes it. You do realize there's not even a word for man-hater, unless one uses that horribly awkward word. Man-hater. It's bullshit. The equivalent is misanthrope. It doesn't mean you hate men; it means you hate humanity. Logically speaking, this means you cannot hate men without hating all of humanity.”
Patrick rolls his eyes. “But about Mr. Faxo. His concern arises because he thinks the very framework of our society is based upon the framework of our economy and that the economy is founded upon the exploitation and oppression of the working class, and that the injustices facing women are adjunctive to this primary inequity, what either he or Mr. Keens or Mr. Fromm—or perhaps all three without knowing that there had been a coinage of the term—called the orientation of domination.” Daphne pulls her phone out of her pocket and glares to Patrick, who seems to be speaking in fast-forward. “I'm not saying I totally agree with him,” he begins with a sympathetic look, “But I do agree that the whole system needs to be changed if we are to avoid alterations that are going to be superficial, thereby leaving the class system, and consequently the system of patriarchal hegemony, in tact. If you make men and women equal without eradi-eradi-eradicating the underlying mechanisms at play it just means that your oppressor can potentially wear a skirt…well in public anyhow. In other words it doesn't strike the heart of the matter. Classism is paramount; everything else is but a tool of division to be used by people in power. He even said in one interview—”
“—That bourgeois feminism has done more to advance the influence of capitalism than both Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater combined. Yes, I read that, too. Not exactly his least idiotic moment.”
“I'm not agreeing with him. I'm just reiterating what he said.” Another roll of the eyes from Daphne. “Now, as to the ethics of revolution…” he begins. “Well…let's not start a discussion upon Trotskyite ethics as of now—we'll be here all night. I'll just say that Faxo was somewhat ambivalent about the idea of apolitical ethics.”
“Jesus Christ, will you shut up for once. Do you have a pen?” Daphne asks after a frustrated sigh.
“I'll just put it into my phone.”
She gives me the number. “I have a second set to play. Do you think the crowd will get restless if I open up with Debussy?”
“What were you thinking?”
“L'isle joyeuse.”
“No. Absolutely not. You may as well try out something by Ligeti.”
“Ligeti? That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”
“Okay, fine, you may as well play Satie.”
Grunt. “What then?”
“What about some of those Monk pieces that you've been working on.”
Her eyes narrow. “The only one I'd be comfortable with is Little Rootie Tootie.”
“Given this crowd, I think that's a hell of a lot better than Debussy—or Satie. Why not open with the whole band?”
“I usually start the last set by myself. What about Self-Portrait in Three Colors?”
“Hum it for me.”
She does.
“No.” He laughs. “Why are so intent on depressing the hell out of everyone here? How about Midnight at the Oasis?”
“Maria Mulder? Are you fucking serious? How about this Handel's Sarabande?”
“Why not just go all the way and play Liebesträume?”
“I know it, too!” she laughs. “Look, I just really want to do a serious piece to start off the set. I’ve been doing it a lot, and…” she trails off. “You're right, though.” She turns to me. “I've been relearning a lot of the classical pieces I used to know because we’ve been doing more upscale gigs.” She turns to Patrick and shrugs. “But you're right Patrick; and when you're right, you're right—Little Rootie Tootie it is.”
There are the eventual platitudes of departure: hands on hands, lips on cheeks, desires unfulfilled. “It was a pleasure meeting you. You have my number, right?” I respond with a slow nod. “Well, we'll be in touch.” We shake hands. It is far more official than it needs to be.
“She's something, isn't she?” Patrick says once she exits the room. “Great pianist. She kind of reminds me of a young Herbie Hancock when she plays with the band—a lot of improvisation, a lot of…let's say…
jeu. Her solo work has become very different recently. Some of it is ambient; some of it is written to emulate the composers of the fin de siècle. She would probably get upset if she heard me say either, especially about the ambient composers.”
“Why?”
“She thinks only hacks create ambient music. She feels the same way about the majority of minimalists when it comes to literature. I can't help but agree with her. If you are searching for essence by muting the cacophony of existence, then you're a theoretician, not an artist.”
“I see.”
We are both quiet for a moment.
“Hold on…here we go. I just love these last three lines,” he begins. Cue Patrick in five, four, three, two, one…
He has an anachronistic voice, one that is deep and heavy on the tremolo. It's not something that you'd expect. Given the circumstances, however, everything here seems not only permissible, but possible too. “That was nice,” I say gingerly. He nods. “So what do we do now?”
“Let's get fucking pissed.”
11
The phone call wakes Sean. He denies this with a languid urgency even as the words stumble blindly through an alien world of syntaxes and semantics that only a moment ago must have made some kind of sense to him. The confused stupor doesn't last too long; soon his voice has become hurried, surly, and lacking in the lexical elements typically found in his dialect of intellectualism—one that is far more pedagogical than pedantic. He lights a cigarette.
“You're going to have to backtrack a bit,” he groans. “You were at an A-R-E party?”
“Yes,” I respond quickly. “Somewhere in south Williamsburg.” It's quite possible that I'm still drunk. I can't really tell anymore. And then there's the problem of my short-term memory, which has become a miasma of conflicting realities. I remember leaving for the train at five because Yevgeny, a man of Herculean stature with a chickpea nose, thin lips, and torpid eyes, suspended his conversation on the etymology on the word “Popsicle” to explain that the hour fell within the domain of the hare, and that this, he felt, assured a swift return home. I don't remember the ride all that well; my entrance into the apartment is quite possibly a memory from a few days ago. It's something of a terrain vague, a region suffuse with the detritus of dream and the fading opacity of consciousness.