The Bend of the World: A Novel (4 page)

Um, I said to Lauren Sara.

Be cool, she told me.

How many paces have we walked? I asked her, but she ignored me. I glanced back at the Cathedral, which was dark, but it seemed to me that either light or the sound of chanting was rising up from the steep roof of the chapel.

I feel nauseous, I told Lauren Sara.

Yeah, she said.

She was wearing a red fur coat that had belonged to my grandmother and then to Katherine, my ex. It looked like the costume of a doomed tsarina fleeing on a doomed train. Who knows where Nana had gotten it; I imagined she’d had lovers, and I imagined one of them had given it to her, because it wasn’t the sort of thing that any of my rich, cheapskate relatives ever would have bought for anyone, least of all his own wife. Nana had given it to Katherine; they all thought I was going to marry Katherine; I thought I was going to marry Katherine: Katherine from Montreal, an inch taller than me, a body as carefully designed and perfectly balanced as a set of German knives, studying environmental law, crazy about fashion; well, I know, how bourgeois can you get?—how predictably of your own class and background?—how dull and how foolish, really, to pursue something that’s destined to fail by its own appropriateness?

Well, very. But I did. And then, about a year and a half before I met Lauren Sara, she stomped into my apartment, and keep in mind, Katherine didn’t stomp, ever, and accused me of cheating on her. Now, I had cheated on her, but I was pretty sure that she didn’t really know that I’d cheated on her; I denied it so extravagantly and convincingly that I made myself cry a little bit; then she cried, not because I was crying, but because something about the fact that I’d convinced myself in that moment of the truth of my own denials confirmed for her the very thing that I was denying; then she said something embarrassing like, Wasn’t I good enough for you? And I think I said, like, No, baby, I think maybe it’s that you were too good for me, which was simultaneously true and the dumbest thing that I have ever said in my life, before or since. (In fact, it hadn’t had a thing to do with her; I’d been drunk one night at Gooski’s, and a girl with an apartment across the street had invited me up to smoke a joint after they closed, and I’d come home super-late thinking I only smelled of weed and beer and cigarettes. I’d assured myself she hadn’t noticed.) Then she said something in French that I didn’t quite catch.
Comment?
I said. Fuck you, she said. In English. Then she left the apartment and went down the stairs with me blubbering and apologizing to the back of her head all the way down. Then she stalked down the icy walk to her car. It was the last winter anyone could remember when it had really snowed in Pittsburgh, and the last thing she’d done before she ducked into her car and drove away was to shrug off the coat and drop it unceremoniously into the dirty snow along the curb.

We’d defriended each other, of course, and quickly passed out of each other’s electronic lives, but sometime afterward, when a change in privacy policy had left all of our everything temporarily exposed to everyone else on the whole of the Internet, I’d actually stumbled across her page: she’d never finished law school, but had gone back to biology; there were photos of her, tan, a little more muscled, dressed like a college girl, on a beach somewhere with a lot of other bright-toothed assholes, tagging birds or something, including one pic that briefly stopped my heart: Katherine smiling at some Indian guy, a huge, beautiful, almond man with the arms of a Vedic warrior and perfect long hair drawn into a tight bun on top of his head; he was smiling at her as well, and his hand was on her bare knee.

What’s up, honey? said Lauren Sara.

I’m thinking about my ex, I thought.

You look great in that coat, I said.

9

Of course Tom was the first person we saw in the museum. We came up to the bright back entrance to the contemporary galleries, a stepped sculpture garden surrounded by glass and fronted by a little turnaround driveway where loud valets hustled silent, expensive cars to and from departing and arriving guests. I suppose we saw other people first, but he was the first with whom we interacted, and of course the first words out of his mouth were, Oh My God Are You Two High?

Your boyfriend fucks dudes at the Y, I answered.

What? he said.

Only a little, Lauren Sara said.

Don’t worry, I said. My grandmother’s a big Jew around here. An older couple on their way out overheard and gave us all a killer look.

You’re really high, Lauren Sara told me.

I’m the unitary consciousness, the world matrix, I told her.

Okay, let’s maybe get you a snack.

You guys are assholes, Tom told us as we headed into the party.

Assholes are like opinions, I said. Everyone’s got one, and everyone’s is just his opinion.

We’d missed the art, or the performance, or whatever it was; it occurred to me that I should not have said Jew in proximity, physical or temporal, to a happening or enactment or deconstruction or whatever it was by a dude whose work consisted, as I understood it, of dressing up in Nazi fetish gear and, well, doing something. On the other hand, I was a cultivated philistine; if art was just another commodity, then an original sensibility required deploring it. In any event, I wasn’t in any state to enjoy a performance, less yet to enjoy not enjoying it. I need a drink, I said.

10

Someone once said that the way to enjoy a Russian novel is to treat it like a party, to stop fretting over the interminable parade of unfamiliar names and just enjoy the interaction, content in the knowledge that after a few introductions the important, recurring characters will stick. I found that advice quite useless, because I found parties to be like nothing so much as long foreign novels, interminable scenes of interactions between interchangeable personages with whom I was just familiar enough to be aware that I’d forgotten them. And at least no one in Dostoyevsky ever remembered me or knew my parents or called me Pete.

A dozen handshakes and half as many Petes and we were at the bar. I ordered a beer, figuring with the idiot logic native to all intoxicated people everywhere that the combination of high calories and low alcohol content would set me straight. Lauren Sara got a gin and tonic, which, given the state I was in, smelled like a newly disinfected bathroom.

This party sucks, I said.

We just got here.

Be that as it may.

It was your idea!

You made us miss the Nazi.

She rolled her eyes at me. He’s not a Nazi. He’s very important.

The one doesn’t preclude the other, I said, but it sounded less clever than I’d intended it to sound.

The hall was two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide and three stories tall. We ended up at a high-top at the end farthest from the entrance. On our right, the wall of windows looked out over the courtyard and down to the entrance. The courtyard was full of stunted locust trees. There was a crowd around the bar that thinned toward the edges of the room. A DJ was playing music that would appeal only to twenty-year-olds, and, to be fair, there were a few of those interspersed among the generally older crowd.

Lauren Sara asked me why I was always so mean to Tom, and I replied that he was a horse-faced faggot, and Lauren Sara said that just because my best friend was gay or whatever, that didn’t give me the right to talk like that. I laughed; she wasn’t exactly the type to take offense at a racist joke or to be bothered if you made fun of fat people, but she lived in a big, tumbledown house at the edge of Bloomfield, a graying structure on the precarious edge of a precipitous hillside, whose residents were an un-census-able menagerie of boys and girls and trannies and boyfriends and girlfriends and Differently Gendered Other Amorous Individuals and their occasional dogs and cats and reptiles and their stupid fixie bikes forever clogging the front hall and the porch, and she took offense, through some bizarre transitive property of group identification and moral sensibility, to anything that smelled like homophobia; imitate black women on the bus all you like, in other words, but don’t say fag.

I didn’t really have anything against Tom. I only thought he was annoying. He was Lauren Sara’s age and a curatorial assistant at the museum; they’d been friends since college, having met in some art class or other; he viewed everything and everyone as inferior. He had grown a mighty tree of cultured resentment from a mustard seed of rural Pennsylvanian gay angst. A little gay boy from Wilkes-Barre, he thought the whole world was déclassé. How he ever managed to trick Julian into dating him was beyond me, Julian, who looked like an Olympic swimmer and did something vague and highly remunerative for PNC Bank—a dummy, yes, hardly more than a grown-up frat boy, but by our standards rich and by anyone’s standards hot.

Lauren Sara said it was because Tom had a huge dick. I said that might be so, but given what I knew about Julian, that seemed like a sundry detail. She told me that I didn’t know shit about fags and that the muscle dude was always the bottom. I later put the question to Johnny, who told me that it was the first time any woman I’d ever dated had been right about anything.

Later I’d had another beer and the effect of the mushrooms had faded to nothing more than some strange colors around the edges of my field of vision and we were talking to Tom and Julian and Tom’s boss, Arlene Arnovich. Arelene was a small woman with a bob of high-gloss black hair who seemed taller than she was. She was friends, of a sort, with my grandmother. She had asked what we’d thought of Steinman’s performance; I said it had been very challenging, which was something my grandmother had taught me. Never say interesting, she said. Say challenging.

Oh yeah, how so? Tom said.

It just challenged, you know, I said. It had a lot of challenging notions. Lauren Sara cracked up and had to spit some of her drink back into her cup, and Arlene smiled thinly, thinking, I suspected, that I was somehow making fun of Tom, whom she regarded with the amused and irritated expression that you see in people who own small dogs, and Julian stared after one of the caterers; Tom noticed, and clutched his arm proprietarily.

Personally, I thought it was shit. We turned.

Oh, Mark, said Arlene.

He was tall, and his girlfriend reminded me of Katherine, only more so. He had wavy black hair that swooped from his forehead and around his ears and to the nape of his neck. His nose was a little too big for his face, but it gave him a martial quality, aquiline, like a Roman. In her high, very high, heels she was of equal height, also a little birdlike, or at least very aerodynamic, her dress hardly more than a slip, her thin neck held by a strand of pearls that were so proper compared to her dress that they seemed all the more obscene. She stood like a dancer, back arched and a little splay-footed, simultaneously graceful and awkward, formal, a pose you’d praise as natural in a sculpture, but in a real human a little weird. Like him, she had long hair, although hers was drawn severely back and done up in a tight and elaborate knot in the back of her head. It was the color of corn silk, although her eyes were very dark, and when we were introduced, she held me in her gaze a little longer than necessary, until I dropped my head. Then she laughed; it wasn’t audible to anyone but me; it could have been my mother laughing at something foolish I’d done when I was a little boy, which is to say: that one soft, brief sound carried the possibility of a hidden wellspring of affection, and right away I had a crush. She glanced at a thin, expensive watch on her wrist and touched her nose with the back of a long finger. He was wearing a thin black suit and a gray tie—almost the same outfit as my own, but of such obviously finer quality that the difference was more pronounced than if I’d been in a T-shirt and dirty jeans.

Arlene, Mark said. Then he glanced at us as if surprised to discover that we hadn’t scattered at the sight of him. Maybe he smirked. Everyone else, he said.

They introduced themselves. Mark and Helen. He caught my eye and held it briefly with his own, and I swear I saw something flicker across it, like a nictitating membrane, like a bird of prey, like a crocodile.

So you don’t like my show, Mark, said Arlene.

Mark doesn’t believe in art, said Helen.

I believe in it. I just don’t approve of it.

What about artists? asked Lauren Sara.

They should all be destroyed, Mark replied.

I laughed.

What’s so funny? Tom said.

Nothing, I said. Well, it’s from
Jurassic Park
.

Tom snorted.

What’s your name? Mark asked me.

Peter.

You and I, Pete, we’re definitely going to be friends. It sounded like a threat.

You disapprove of art, Arlene said, and yet here you are.

One has to observe the proper forms. This is a very important institution.

Whose very purpose you reject.

Well. He shrugged. I like the dinosaurs.

Yeah, said Lauren Sara. The dinosaurs are cool.

I’m sorry, Mark said. I didn’t catch your name.

Lauren Sara.

That’s two names, said Helen.

Tom was doing his best to make it clear to Arlene that he found Mark repugnant. So what would you do instead? he asked.

Instead of what?

You’re in charge of the museum. What’s the first thing you do?

And Mark looked at me again, winked, vertically this time, and then said to the group, so plainly and forthrightly, so casually and without hesitation that it was impossible to believe he didn’t really mean it: I’d burn it to the ground.

11

Helen laughed. He was joking. We all thought, Oh, thank God. We all laughed. Mark laughed.

But look, he said, it’s true, also, that I find all of this—here he gestured broadly, perhaps at Jergen Steinman, just then putting a crab cake into his mouth and bending his head to listen to something Mildred Gold, an ancient photographer whom my grandmother referred to as the Dowager Artist, was saying to him, or perhaps he meant to encompass the whole museum, the galleries and halls of sculpture, the courtyard and the café—more than a little tedious. Then he was off. The problem, he said, was that at some point artists abandoned any real attempt at crafting arresting images and sought instead to turn art itself into a kind of social and political and philosophical commentary that had theretofore been more in the realm of literature and the theater. And wasn’t that really part of the problem, the comparative intellectual poverty of the so-called visual arts, including their laughable bastard brother, performance art, when you compared them to writing and theater. Anyway, look at an artist like this Steinman character, Mark said. It’s all very clever, but any second-rate nonfiction normative history of the Second World War had more profound insights into the nature of fascism than some clown in a costume-shop SS outfit prancing around a museum and declaiming a bunch of puerile nonsense that he just ripped off from Adorno. I mean, Mark said, I read one of his little manifestos, and it’s basically a barely literate recapitulation of the whole No Poetry After Auschwitz thing, which is hardly even interesting as an aphorism, let alone as some kind of thesis on which to base an entire performative persona. What could be more ridiculous? It would be like saying there can be no rock-and-roll after My Lai, no, I don’t know, no fine dining after 9/11. What is the relationship of these things, the one to the other? The problem is that these artists, coming as they do from a fine-art academic background, studying as they did mostly in what are effectively conservatories, came up among a pack of basically undereducated art world hangers-on as well as a few scam artists whose principal interest is merely making these things into salable commodities. What they lack is any kind of analytic and philosophical framework within which they can make any kind of meaningful commentary on the you’ll-pardon-the-expression way we live now, less yet a sufficient historical reach and grasp to speak meaningfully about the enormities of the twentieth century, or about neocolonial American foreign policy, or about man’s relationship to nature, or about the soul . . . the wider the focus, the more profoundly self-regarding is their work; meanwhile, even Hollywood is more insightful; the latest giant robot movie a work of infinitely greater complexity and ambition than anything you are likely to encounter in a museum; the biggest summer superhero flick more spiritually profound than anything you’ll find in the New York galleries. The artifacts of contemporary culture are as fake as the Native American beadwork you buy by the road in New Mexico. The museums, he said, might as well be casinos.