Wakefield (6 page)

“Bingo!” The woman stops sketching, offers him a charcoal-covered hand. “Noir. It's my name.” She gestures to the model, who shifts lazily and reaches for a cigarette still smoldering in an ashtray on the floor. “Rose, my model.”

Wakefield sees Maggie huddled with a tall ballerina in a red tutu and fur slippers. The band gets louder, feedback upchucks through the speakers, and Wakefield's anxiety spikes. This demonstration of artistic life in the middle of nowhere is typical of every small town these days: the need to flaunt a difference has spilled over into something beyond the family. Does the Devil make them do it? The Devil is easily bored, but what could he really have against so-called normality? The “normal” family is, after all, the source of what the Devil enjoys most: anxiety, mental illness, violence, evil thoughts, fear, and social unrest. What the Devil hates are attempts to escape the quotidian horror of ordinariness. These escapes into art, into otherness, must give him headaches because they might, just might, lead to innocence. Neither he nor Wakefield believes that this particular exercise of esthetic difference is going to transcend anything. But before the sneer has time to settle on Wakefield's face, everyone's holding a lantern, a flashlight, or a candle, and Maggie motions him to join her at the front of the line with the ballerina.

Behind the stage a creaky medieval-looking door slides open, and the procession files into a small room. The light of the candles, lanterns, and flashlights illuminates what appears to be an old-fashioned electric chair: the ballerina sits on the chair and snaps a blinding Polaroid of herself. Maggie attaches a collanderlike contraption with dangling wires to the ballerina's head, and in the light of the second Polaroid flash, Wakefield notices that the ballerina is wearing nothing under the tutu and she is shivering, from either the cold or her mock electrocution.

The crowd claps and cheers, and they all move on to another room, where a long dining table is heaped with platters of eyeballs and guts. A chant begins and the nearly naked ballerina crawls into a coffin. Her friends dump the guts and eyeballs on top of her. More Polaroids. They journey on, crawling sometimes, through other chambers furnished with procrustean beds and iron maidens, through a ghost-filled swamp, through a gallery of life-size statues of serial killers (“Most of them come from the Midwest,” Maggie explains). Wakefield trails the flashing Polaroid and rustling red tutu, and knows for certain that the photos will be duly displayed in a soon-to-be-mounted art exhibit at City Hall, the same City Hall from which the Company manager responsible for the sculpture fiasco has retired, making way for a dynamic young politician who has the initiative to, among other things, mount art shows in the halls of government in the hope of stimulating tourism in connection with the famed
Typical Family
debacle. And thus, Wakefield reflects, the Republic moves forward.

If you've lived a long time like the Devil has, or a short but well-read time like Wakefield has, you, too, might be made queasy by such kitsch. If you've seen the, let's say, real Inquisition and had fresh eyeballs full of genuine fear garnishing your plate of brain tartare, or if you've studied Baroque depictions of the suffering of martyrs in the museums of Europe, this kind of display would certainly embarrass you. The genuine item, or the “authentic” if you like, never descends to the level of self-parody and kitsch.

But this is a special time in History. These are the days when the President's penis stars on television every evening, a celebrity in its own right. It takes a lot to make shocking art when everyone, including the political leader of the greatest nation on earth, has become an artist. An artist who uses nothing more or less than his own dick! The philistines declare, of course, that the President is an accidental artist, or perhaps only a medium for the artistic ambitions of others, but be that as it may, there it is! The Presidential penis itself, not in the symbolic form of a scepter, or as the prayed-for virile instrument of a king, but as a dick, pure and simple, has joined a gallery of celebrity dicks caught in the glare of publicity!

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp shocked the art world with a urinal, and claimed that bicycles and sewing machines were art because they were simple but one couldn't make them at home. How true. The public is interested in the President's penis, Wakefield speculates, because it is simple, and there is only one President. And yet, there
is
a penis in every home (well, in nearly every home, excepting the norm), but the home penis is sub rosa, not a celebrity. Fashion designers, who invented supermodels, are using musicians and actors in their advertising more and more. Self-starvation, cheaply available heroin, and digital cameras can make anyone look like a supermodel, and the market cries out for something different, for something that, as Duchamp stipulated, cannot be made at home. Musicians and actors possess that something, namely talent. And the President, whatever one might say about him, is a talented man, a unique and powerful personage whose penis is a powerful and instantly comprehensible statement.

The problem with this artlike spasm in Typical is that it's so “artsy,” so contrived, so gentle. These people probably don't even believe in the Devil, thinks Wakefield. They think he's just a Halloween costume for the kids. When the procession returns from the tour of grotesque chambers, the lingerie model, who had not joined them, is smoking a cigarette on the stage, chatting up the guitarist, who gazes unabashedly between her legs, proving to Wakefield that the only constant currency is sex. But not even sex, he corrects himself. The
promise
of sex, for the sake of which you will buy something, do something, sacrifice something. Sex is the reward of earning power, of sophistication, of understanding Art.

Now, just when it seems that there might be an end to the evening, there's more. The procession has only been leading up to a campy wedding. The bride is wearing a blood-stained wedding dress, the groom a knife-punctured tuxedo and a top hat with an arrow stuck through it, and both bride and groom are male. An official wearing a prison jumpsuit and holding a staff crowned by a monkey head intones: “I now pronounce you husband and wife, please take turns.” Maggie gives away the bride. “Take her. Please,” she says.

Wakefield is not amused. It is all so sweetly pop and wholesome, this transgendering in mid-America. He knows that most of the folks fooling around here tonight will be in his audience at The Company tomorrow. The Company encourages “creativity” and tolerance: one can take one's partner to the Christmas party, and same-gender couples can kiss at midnight on New Year's Eve. Wakefield will speak to them about money and poetry (with a detour in art), he will be paid, then he will fly to a big city to make another speech with the same title but, hopefully, different content. After that he is supposed to go west for a rather more mysterious gig. His agent received a request from a Western art collector for Wakefield's
presence
. The agent reported that this collector would pay his fee simply for being at a
party
. He signals Maggie, who's seated on the bride's lap drinking red wine from a bottle, his desire to leave this party. She jumps off, bottle still in hand, and walks toward him.

“Maggie,” he asks in the car, pronouncing her name for the first time, “who decorated all those torture chambers?”

Maggie laughs. “The Jaycees. That's their Halloween haunted house. The rest of the year it's a playhouse for the artists who have studio spaces in the building.”

Wakefield isn't paying attention to the answer: he's thinking, Will I have sex with Maggie? It's an important question because the answer might determine the shape of things to come. On the one hand, he's attracted and thinks the feeling is mutual. On the other hand, he feels none of the enthusiasm that Ivan Zamyatin would bring to such an encounter. For Zamyatin the opportunity would be accompanied by childlike curiosity and genuine warmth. Without those ingredients, Wakefield feels some disingenuousness. He can imagine very well Maggie's generous body and the comfort he might find in it, the weight of her breasts on his chest and the pulse of her. It's a thought he's sure she must share because she turns on the car radio, as if to banish it, and a song on the oldies station illustrates his dilemma. It's the Clash's “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

“I didn't find the wedding all that funny,” Wakefield finally says.

Maggie looks disappointed. “I thought it was quite sweet. Neal and Bob are both friends of mine.”

“Wasn't it just a mock ceremony?”

“No, they're a real couple. We worked on this for months, we discussed the arrow through the hat for days. Neal thought it might look like he was wounded in the head in some way, like he was crazy to get married, but Bob said that it was Cupid's arrow. Bob's mom is a hippie, she said that it was an Indian arrow and it symbolized the fact that all white people carry this guilt-arrow in them. I just thought it looked cool.”

Wakefield feels bad that he's let her know that he's read the entire evening as an art event in no way connected to real life. How could he have not understood, after their symbolic little war over the meaning of family, that the community's belief in the power of Art was quite real? Have to show some respect for such quaint beliefs. Especially if you want to get laid. Dufus.

“I thought it was just, like, let's get dressed up and have a party,” he says lamely. “You know, an entertainment,” he says, digging his hole a little deeper. “Like a happening, maybe …”

Maggie does know about happenings, and is very disappointed in Wakefield. She studied art in college! The man has just witnessed the most fabulous wedding ever concluded in the town of Typical, and he can't see past the art to the heart. Her friends had thought long and hard about how to affirm the most basic of life unions in terms that would expose the town's hypocrisy while confirming essential human values. Wakefield is being paid to deliver his insights on money and poetry (with a detour in art), but he's failed to see that art and life can be connected, that it all meant something, especially in a place like Typical.

“I've had too much red wine,” she says, suppressing her anger, “but I'm surprised that someone so knowledgeable about art can't see the serious meaning under the costumes.”

“Sentiment is not ‘serious meaning,' Maggie. Just because they're a real couple …” Wakefield's argument trails off. He gave up looking for meaning in art a long time ago. The relationship of art to reality is complex and delicate, depending on whether one spells it with a capital A, or whether one uses it as a noun or an adjective, and myriad other factors that he's given a good deal of thought to but aren't easy to explain now.

The subject of tomorrow's lecture seems suddenly uncertain, even cruel. They won't understand what he's talking about, and he can't rethink his entire view of art and life to fit the profound soul-needs of a company town. Sleeping with Maggie seems out of the question. He has offended her.

“Your friends' wedding was terrific, I'm sure,” he stammers. “I'm just so jaded about weddings.”

Maggie softens. Familiar territory. “Me, too,” she admits. Aha, he's human, after all. Still, she drops him off at the Bavarian castle and says good night with the engine running.

“One more thing,” Wakefield says as he exits the car. “Do you believe in the Devil?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Maggie says firmly.

Wakefield dropped out of college when he was twenty to travel in Europe. The theme of this Grand Tour was ghosts, and he hoped to locate some in their ancient haunts.

In Paris he attended lectures on architecture at the Sorbonne. The lectures were like baroque palaces, elaborate and endless. But with a certain kind of literary Paris firmly in his head, he wandered at night through the streets, communing with the souls of old buildings. The reality (even at night) didn't quite fit his mental map; instead of morphing into the image established by centuries of art and literature, the nocturnal streets and the (rare) citizens of Paris who braved them appeared dull, gray, and postmodernly underwhelmed by the past. It also rained continually and Wakefield could barely afford coffee. After a month, during which he caught both a nasty cold and gonorrhea, he declared Paris exhausted, her secret places inhabited only by tourists and bourgeois spirits. Wakefield sipped his last overpriced espresso at a counter in Gare du Nord, remembering Baudelaire's curse on boredom: “Habitually we cultivate remorse, as beggars entertain and nurse their lice.”

Office workers rushed past, hurrying home to their discontented spouses. He overheard an American woman complaining to a friend about her French husband. “I wouldn't even mind him fucking around,” she said, “if he were more considerate. But he expects me to iron his shirts, cook his food, and take care of his children. If I complain, he runs to his mother, and she scolds me for upsetting her ‘darling baby.' Imagine!”

“Oh, I know,” the friend nodded, looking at her watch, “they're all mama's boys!”

Wakefield's study of architecture was not focused on the technical; the mathematics involved in engineering were beyond him, and he was a sloppy draftsman. His true interest lay in architectural aberrations like Ludwig of Bavaria's overwrought castle and Gaudi's bizarre “organic” cathedral in Barcelona. He was attracted to the hybrid, the eclectic, and to structures so deformed by use and time that they were no longer recognizable. He traveled through Europe in search of ghosts and their ghastly habitats.

“Modern architecture,” he told a girl named Judith with whom he spent one night in a youth hostel in Padua, “particularly Bauhaus, repels me. It is so transparently, defiantly revealing. I like postmodern ideas, but the buildings themselves are too light for my taste, too ‘jocular,' too disrespectful of the history they try to subsume.”