Babylon and Other Stories (7 page)

There were three days left of life in the suburbs; afterwards, it would all vanish. From her bedroom window, Iz could already see it starting to disappear, color bleeding from the edges of parks and elementary schools, asphalt thinning in driveways. This was in August, and all the neighborhood came out at dusk to walk their dogs in the park across the street. When Iz was in her room painting she kept the window open and could hear them calling their pets, names echoing in the twilight, like those of lost children. All the dogs ignored their owners. Off leashes, they danced and spun in the center of the park, barking and biting, threatening to bring or, again like children, come to harm.

Iz was leaving. School started Tuesday, and then she would not look back; she would never come back, either, except possibly in the very distant future, when she was either rich or an aristocrat. But until Tuesday she had to wait and, today, had to go shopping with her mother. In order to survive their trip to the mall, she was treating it as a sociological expedition, a journey into the heart of America. Also, she was pretending to be French. She would address silent queries to her mother:
Please, could you tell me what ees Orange Julius? Eet ees not in my dictionary.
Seen through this lens, American culture was fascinating.

“Izzy, are you ready? Is that what you're wearing to go shopping?” Her mother stood on the landing outside Iz's room, adjusting the straps of her purse and wearing a light blue seersucker dress. She was of a generation that did not choose to leave the house in slacks. She was of a generation that used the word
slacks.

“It's hot, Mom. I'm wearing shorts.”
Please, what ees the difference between slacks and trousers?

Her mother, who didn't know she was French, who thought Iz was from Newton, Massachusetts, sighed and shook her head. “Well, you're all grown up now, so do whatever you want,” she said, in a tone that meant just the opposite. Iz's wearing shorts to a public place and going off to study art against her father's wishes—he thought she should major in business or computer science or both—were to her equally incomprehensible actions. She always sighed and shook her head. And it drove Iz crazy, this failure to discriminate between tragedies.

Her mother was in her element in the shopping mall; she responded to the filtered light and Muzak like some kind of specialized plant. At home she was mostly quiet and withdrawn, obeying Iz's father's barked, alcoholic commands; she spent a lot of time sitting in armchairs, reading thrillers under isolated pools of light. But once they got inside the mall she drew herself up to her fullest height and took a deep breath. Iz lagged behind, watching packs of teenaged boys pick up teenaged girls. The boys, white kids from Chestnut Hill, were wearing huge, baggy jeans and hundred-dollar sneakers. The girls' hair was sculpted up above their foreheads like a wall of defense.

“Excuse me, but isn't your name Samantha?” one of the boys said, lying in wait outside of the Gap.

“No.”

“Oh. Well, what
is
your name?”

At the black map of stores, Iz's mother hummed and pointed. She was wearing a shade of nail polish called One Perfect Coral. Iz had no nails to speak of; shards of oil paint were visible beneath what was left.

“Now, let's see,” breathed her mother. “We are … here.” She pointed to the red dot labeled YOU ARE HERE.
Vous êtes ici,
said Iz to herself.

“And we want to go … here, I think. Is that all right, Izzy?”

“Whatever, Mom. I don't really have an opinion.”

“Oh, don't be ridiculous,” said her mother. “Of course you do.”

By the time she left for school, Iz owned three color-coordinated outfits she would never wear: angora sweaters and corduroy skirts, Shetlands and kilts, clothes her mother must have seen on the front of New England college brochures. At school she wore jeans and a man's button-down shirt every day and slept whenever she could in the studio. Her roommate was a girl from Houston who wanted to be an accountant or else marry one. She was the daughter Iz's parents should've had. She wanted to stay up late and make brownies and talk about life; she wanted them to gain the freshman fifteen together. Her name was Shirelle, like the all-girl group.
Excusez-moi, could you tell me please, what ees a Shirelle? Eet sounds like a kind of, how do you say, mushroom. But eet ees not a mushroom, ees eet?

Iz was now Izabel and she was still from France. She had toned down the accent and was telling people that although she was American she'd grown up in Europe, and would ask them to explain simple things.
What
ees mac-and-cheese, please? What ees gangsta rap? Ah, oui, le rap des gangsters.
It had become a game that gave so much protection she couldn't let go of it. She was mightily disappointed to discover that the people she met at school were from backgrounds just like hers, from indistinguishable suburbs all over the country. They sat around talking about TV shows they all remembered from childhood, as if this represented some kind of shockingly universal human condition, and held contests to see who could remember the most theme songs, or even the most lines from
The Facts of Life.
“You take the good you take the bad you take them both and there you have the facts of life, the facts of life.”
Please, who ees Mrs. Garrett?

She escaped to the studio and stayed there whether she was painting or not. Sometimes she just sat around reading books about Greek mythology. She was fascinated by the stories of gods and women, of rapes and transformations. Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan. Apollo turned Daphne into a tree. She was sketching out a whole series of paintings where the women turned around and began lustfully attacking the gods, who promptly ran away, terrified by the women's desire. The men, meanwhile, were turned into objects from the modern world of America, Kit-Kat bars and McDonald's golden arches. Apollo became the Lone Ranger, and Zeus became a 1970 s Corvette, his head sticking out in front, like a hood ornament. Her fellow artists thought this was a real critique.

Only one of them, Wade, thought it was bullshit. Short, dark, wiry, and intense, he was very hairy and always had five o'clock shadow, and he walked around the communal studio dropping art terms into casual conversation,
contraposto, chiaroscuro.
He was from New Jersey but said he was from New York. Supposedly his parents owned a gallery.

“Well, I mean, look, I like it, I do, I think it's clever, I certainly think it's very glib, very facile. I just think it's possibly a little
bit too self-conscious, you know, the self-flagellating American artist?” This was what he said of Izabel's sketches, standing with one hand holding the other elbow, motioning with his thin, hairy fingers.

“Excuse me please, what ees self-flatulating?”

“Flagellating,” said Wade.

“Oh,”
Izabel said, smiling apologetically.
“Excusez-moi.”

In class discussion, Wade's remarks were articulate and penetrating and difficult for her to follow. Sometimes the professor, a short, rotund man with a plummy, not-quite-British accent like Cary Grant's, would abandon the pretense of speaking to the whole class and converse with Wade for a few minutes, both men serious and collegial, holding certain things to be understood between them. The classroom was dark, windowless, and hot, and Izabel frequently fell asleep during their discussions. Nevertheless she liked the dense, enclosed air and felt she continued to learn even when asleep, through osmosis, the art slides imprinting themselves on her brain, translucent and colored, like stained glass.

Wade drove around the ivy-walled campus in an old Toyota that had been crumpled in some accident and was missing all the windows on the left side. The whole left side of the car, in fact, was wrapped up in plastic and taped together. It looked like somebody's refrigerated leftovers. He asked Izabel to a movie and drove there talking the entire time, his thin fingers jerking and pointing. The art world was like the Roman Empire near the end, he told her, in that it had stopped responding to the world and responded only to itself, speaking its own decadent language. When he asked her if the situation was different in France, Izabel shrugged.

“I get it. I get it,” said Wade, grinning, and tapping his fingers
against the steering wheel. “The true artist cannot be moved by these considerations. Okay, I see, the artist creates outside of the institutions that sponsor him—or her, as the case may be. Well, okay, fair enough. I mean, I understand there's a certain legitimacy to that point of view, but personally I think it's sort of naïve in this day and age. I mean after the eighties you can't really think the art world exists outside of a context of politics and commerce, can you? I don't think anybody can, not even you.”

“Not even me?” Izabel couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic. Feeling out of her depth, she turned to look out through the cloudy plastic. “Don't people in America fix their cars?”

After the movie they drank coffee while Wade continued to talk. He held passionate views on many subjects, and Izabel was amazed by the sheer number of things he found to say. As he spoke he leaned very far over at the table and pressed his hand against his forehead, as if trying to contain all the furious activity inside his brain. After a while she became convinced that this was, in fact, what he was doing. Whenever he asked for her opinion, which wasn't often, she shrugged. The shrug, she decided, was her best weapon. She couldn't really follow all that he was saying, not because it was necessarily so difficult, but mostly because it was so rapid and exhausting. Her mind wandered. She looked at Wade's hand pressed up against his head and started thinking about one of the Barbie dolls she'd had as a child. Ballerina Barbie came with a crown sticking out of her blond hair like a tumorous silver growth. It looked all right when she was dancing, but when she was just hanging out it seemed ridiculous. Izabel had once tried to remove the crown with a pocket knife, but it wouldn't come off and eventually the doll was hospitalized in a shoebox. She never recovered. She had a hard life compared
to regular Barbie and Ken, whom Iz kept together in another shoebox and who engaged constantly in passionate, violent lovemaking. They did nothing else, had no other hobbies or jobs.
Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie.
After the ballerina's operation, Ken and Barbie came to visit, sighing condolences, but then rapidly stole away to squirm and bash their plastic bodies against each other. They only ever had one thing on their plastic minds. While Wade spoke to Iz, she decided to work on a series of paintings in which Ken and Barbie reenacted the romances of Greek mythology. She would tell the class,
I call thees one “Ken Appears to Barbie in the Form of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.”

That night it turned out that Wade, too, only had one thing on his plastic mind. Back at the studio, they looked at some of his canvases, which were enormous, geometric and monochromatic. Izabel had no idea what they were supposed to be about.

“It's a post-Rothko thing,” Wade said, and put his hand on her breast. His eyes were hazel, his expression as intense as a sideshow hypnotist's. Izabel couldn't help laughing, but to her surprise this didn't make him stop or even blush. He kept his hand there and started moving it around, and then she quit laughing, and they stayed together in a dark corner of the studio, behind a stack of stretched-out canvases.
Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie.

In class they were studying eroticism in art. Everyone was working on being mature about it. They were looking at fairy tales and oil paintings, woodcuts, each detail laced with meaning, the importance of flowers and the angles of wrists. Professor Edelman was isolating the elements of the erotic, cataloging them with his plummy voice and his red laser. He had a dry wit and parchment skin to match it, and Izabel wondered if he could even imagine the physical realities, as opposed to their artistic representations:
herself and Wade each night in the studio after everyone else had left, the messiness of their fluids and sounds. The professor pointed in the dark at women facing sideways, huge breasts projecting outward like crescent moons, their nipples like rocks. These breasts weren't just breasts, they represented the fertility of the earth. This was art, where layers of meaning were contained beneath the obvious. It was its own language, just like Wade said.
Zee language of love.

By October, Wade would not leave her alone. He stood behind her and talked to her while she painted. She was trying to find the exact fake-flesh color for Barbie's breasts. Barbie was trapped in a prison, locked inside, but the prison was the regular kitchen of a suburban American home, with a red-checkered tablecloth on the table. Ken's head was vaporously visible in the steam rising from her bowl of chicken noodle soup. Her breasts leaned toward him precipitously, and tiny chunks of chicken hung from the non-separated strands of his hair. Barbie was looking at him with a complex swirl of emotions—shock, confusion, a terrified desire—that Izabel was trying to convey within the limited range of expression afforded by the trademark Barbie smile.

Shirelle had moved down the hall and was now rooming with a girl named Kelly. When Izabel went back to the dorm, to change clothes, she sometimes saw them in Kelly's room, the door open, watching movies under a poster of a Georgia O'Keeffe flower, eating microwave popcorn and giggling. Wade was following her back to the room by now. Professor Edelman had come to regard them as a couple and had given them to understand that he approved. A favored pair, they'd been over to his house for dinner and called him by his first name, Marius. After class, they'd routinely have coffee or a drink in his office, the two of them slouching in front of his desk he sat behind, surrounded by shelves of
papers and books and incunabula, pictures tacked up everywhere, a scholarly collage. He and Wade would discuss personalities of the art world while she stared at a pornographic Mesopotamian piece directly behind Marius's head. It had dawned on her that Wade and Marius were the same person, just a few years apart: Wade was what Marius had been as a young man, and Marius was what Wade would become. In either case they were equivalent; it was a transitive property of men. She could see Wade at forty and at sixty, still intense and thin and profusely hairy, though his hair would turn salt-and-peppery and start sprouting out of his nose; he would still gesture with thin fingers in support of his many points.