Raw Silk (9781480463318) (8 page)

On the other hand, the gloom of my studio didn’t abate and the work was going badly; toward the middle of the month I had only a scrappy rehash of last year’s autumn designs. So when Malcolm suggested I move into the new quarters behind one of the laminated panels, the timing seemed a bit of luck. I thought Oliver’s objections mere petulance.

“Take a lot of petrol,” he said at one point. It was the first time in my recollection he’d charged me with extravagance.

“We’ll go in one car, then,” I said. “I can fit my schedule to yours.”

“That wouldn’t work. I can’t always know where I’m going to be. It’s hard enough …”

“Look, Oliver, it’s lonely around here.” This was dangerously near the bone, and I raced on before he could pick it up. “They’ve got space for me. What difference does it make to you if I work at the mill?”

He could never give me an answer, and I concluded that he hadn’t one. I don’t suppose he could have offered me territorial imperative unvarnished. I don’t suppose he could have said that he didn’t want to share East Anglian with me, any more than Heath could say he wants the wogs out of Birmingham.

The new block wasn’t bad on the inside. It had north light, lots of it, and a shag carpet that invited you to take your shoes off, which I did. My space was divided from Malcolm’s by a sand-glass partition half the width of the room. We were to communicate through a sliding panel—which as it turned out we never closed—with Mom Pollard, the dyestuffs supervisor, and the secretary Dillis Grebe. Everything was some color of white, even the vast blond drawing board that tilted on its leg at the touch of a silver wing nut. I played with this marvel and wondered if I could work on an angle, like a real artist. At home I had a Victorian schooltable.

“It seems a bit frivolous,” I said.

Malcolm ogled the clinical walls. “Frivolous!”

“No, I mean, I’ve got plenty of space to work at home. I mean, I’ll be leaving a ten-room house to Mrs. Coombe and Mr. Wrain.”

“They’ll love you for it,” Malcolm said. “Anyway, you need company to work.”

I turned to him, surprised. “I don’t exactly need company. But I think I need something to work against. With Jill there I was always fighting for my privacy. When I don’t have to fight for it, I start thinking about things, and I can’t concentrate.”

“Of course, mother; it’s a universal law. Why do you think we’ve got four telephones?”

There was nothing very wonderful about Malcolm’s knowing what I meant, but I’d never have volunteered the same confession to Oliver. Oliver can swivel his attention to anything with instant focus. He can work eighteen hours a day; he never
moils.
I saw it might be very comfortable, procrastinating in the same room with Malcolm.

“I’ll be an unconscionable nuisance,” he promised brightly.

Most of the new block’s decor had been dictated by the architect, but out of some kind of professional tact he had left our interior to us, with the result that we soon had the sloppiest quarters at East Anglian. I tacked up snapshots, portraits of Jill and juvenilia for which the walls at home had seemed in too sacred taste. Malcolm was constitutionally incapable of leaving a blank space blank, so he “did” his walls in innocuous graffiti—telephone numbers, Zen aphorisms, place names he fancied like Pwllheli and Goole. I offered him Two Egg, Florida, and East Jesus, South Dakota, but he said I was a friggin’ immigrant, and the next day my drawing board was a Union Jack. Malcolm didn’t believe in erasers. When he made a mistake he jammed the enemy page up and slung it over his shoulder. Sometimes at the end of the day he’d take a liking to a crumpled sheet, tape it to the skirting, pick up a brush and emphasize its contours into a hunched torso. Then he’d cartoon a face above it on the wall, with a hand reaching up to grasp the windowsill or a leg locked around the doorstop. The Survivors, he called these creatures, which were nevertheless swept out on Fridays while the wall grew dense with amputations and decapitations.

On the other side of Mom Pollard and Dillis Grebe was a further panel that led to drapery design, and beyond that to the Jacquard card cutters, then to woven stuffs, tapestry design and plaids. Someone or other was always coming through to get our opinion of a color, or Mom’s advice on a technical problem; secretaries from Admin came to rifle the files for some mysteriously needed correspondence of six years ago; PR arrived two or three times a week to show us off to a batch of students, tourists or prospective investors. And Malcom
was
an unconscionable nuisance. I raged and railed against the interruptions, fumed at the scum on my pots in the too-efficient heating, toyed incessantly with the wing nut of my drawing board looking for the magic angle that would let me work. I ordered a microscope, on company funds, and procrastinated whole mornings in nearby fields picking specimens for cross sections that I never used. I indulged myself, angry with guilt, to eight coffee breaks a day. I always seemed to be cleaning up yesterday’s mistakes or flailing headlong into some sappy rubble of the idea in my mind, with never any satisfaction, never any sense of purpose. My style got looser, so I could no longer reproduce my brush strokes with a knife in the film, and I had to waste several days learning photographic screening. In short, I’ve never worked so well.

Maybe I’d needed company. From the look of it we were an odd lot—a boyish queer with a mop of dark curls always ready to flop in affirmation, a mountain of a self-appointed Cockney mother figure, a California adolescent of thirty-odd, and a secretary we might have picked up in an Oxford Street boutique. We had among us a fair gamut of domestic worries, and Malcolm, Mom and Dillis had developed a rueful ease at intimacy into which I was absorbed at a single slurp. “You remember,” they’d say, forgetting, of some story shared a year ago. “
You
know.”

Malcolm’s domestic arrangements were at the moment the least troubled example of whatever it was they were the least troubled example of, part of the trouble being that this had no name. He had been whatever he had been, to or with, a King’s College history don named Gary Blenwasser for four years. But what? Married? They shared every aspect of that state except the official seal by which it earns its definition, and the social pressure to keep being it that is the inert cohesive force of marriages when they hit the rough.

“I’m his what? Wife?” Malcolm complained. “Consort?
Roommate
? ‘How do you do, this is my symbiot Gary Blenwasser?’ Let me tell you, there’s little enough to keep a homosexual relationship together without hiding it from the goddam
dictionary.
”

Malcolm had, at fourteen, confessed his bewildering tenderness for other boys to the family GP (“There are homosexuals that like men, and there are homosexuals that hate women; look you learn to distinguish them, m’dears, because you’re dealing with two separate species”), and had learned by the succeeding furor at home that his condition was excludable from the Hippocratic Oath. This experience left him paranoid in the one isolated area, whereas his (what? swain?) Gary was paranoid in a general they’re-after-me-today sort of way, heavy on the historical allusions. Consequently Malcolm and Gary kept their social lives distinct, each among his own professional colleagues, as if they were not prey to the jealousies, anxieties and resentments of a more conventionally cohabiting couple. However, they were in love.

“You poor old thing,” Dillis bitched at him benignly. “Nothing keeping you together but passion, and we have all the glory of the Institution.”

Dillis, whom strangers always took for “the artist” because of her startling eyes and drapable bones, wore the square gold rims that were back in fashion and jersey dresses that slipped around her little frame like glaze. I’d never exchanged a nonprofessional word with her before, and supposed she was about nineteen. In fact she was twenty-eight, and was married to an architectural engineer both sterile and inclined to assign the blame for it. On Migglesly Victoria Gynecological Unit, scungy test tubes, barren test rabbits, the medical community at large or, preferably, Dillis. She dealt with this scourge in a dollybird version of the old muddle-through. “I’m off early today, to the gynecology lab. Gotta check up the charts and take home some kind of proof there’s something wrong with me.”

“Why do you
do
that to yourself?” I asked. Dillis had a rabbit-wrinkling nose that was her only visible concession to emotion.

“Well, I’m not a rebel,” she said. “What options have I got? I either make the best of it or go out and rip up paving stones, you know what I mean?” I knew what she meant. “I like my work all right.” She pumped me for stories of Jill with an open sentimentality, out from under which her feelings burst now and again in a petulant, “But you’ve got her once a month!”

Mom Pollard, on the other hand, lived in a family extended beyond the bounds of reason, with generations insufficiently at gap, where the youngest of one was always younger than the eldest of the following; a renovated farmhouse so compounded of past and future shock that a certain aunt had once administered smelling salts to a twelve-year-old unconscious from sniffing glue. “We got a wog household and that’s a fact,” Mom said.

All the same, I observed once over the coffee and biscuits, we were an effete crew because not one of us worked primarily for money. Dillis and I were here to escape empty houses, Mom a house too full. Malcolm’s Gary would rather have preferred to keep him than otherwise.

“You work for your independence’s sake, “ I said.

“Independence is a side effect,” said Malcolm. “It’s my work. If I did it at home for nothing, it’d still be my work.”

“Maybe so,” I conceded, “but I don’t think it’s mine. I’d never have gone into design if it hadn’t been for Oliver. I wanted to paint.”

“You do paint!” He gestured exasperation. “What is it you think you do? Let’s face it, your best stuff comes off a microscope slide. Your eye isn’t scaled to canvas. You do fine where you are.”

“All right, I understand that, but you’ve got to let me see it as a compromise. Grant me a little nostalgia for the time I was going to shake the world.”

“You Americans. Such a pack of aristocrats.”

“You’d better run that one by me,” Dillis murmured.

“Two things essential to an aristocrat,” Malcolm said, warming up. He sat in a canvas chair, scattering shortbread crumbs every time he took a bite, and flicking them from his trousers with finesse. “Two things: a passion for the best, and an unshakable conviction that the best comes out of the past. Now the past you get all your grandeur from is straight talk and simple truth. That’s your tradition, your empire. That’s your crest: plain folks rampant on a sock in the jaw, argent.”

I saw what he meant. There’s a kind of honesty dead and dying that Truman carried into the presidency in a cracker barrel, but which was daily fare in homes like mine: I won’t do a botch, that’s what it matters.

“Yes, okay,” I said. “My dad is ready to tell you that the difference between stealing a penny and stealing a million bucks is a matter of the number of pennies involved.”

“The only trouble is, when the plain folks lose their wit and the truth’s not simple, you haven’t got much in the way of style to fall back on. You get bald corruption.”

“There’s corruption and corruption,” Mom observed.

“Well, naturally; only if you’re going to exploit and abscond, you might as well know what wines to spend the loot on.”

“You sound like Oliver,” I said.

“Don’t be dumb. I’m not arguing for
convention.
I’m talking about
style.
”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Sorry, sorry.” He waved it aside. “Oliver’s the soul of taste. You see how American you are?”

It was time to go back to work, but nobody cared. Dillis spooned another round of Nescaff.

“Now we’re an underdeveloped country here. Our style’s worn out and we haven’t got anything else to sell. But America is constitutionally incapable of progress. The minute you invent instant mash a hundred of your loyal sons and daughters have got to go canonize the organically grown potato. Puritan communes, with pot standing in for evangelism. That’s not rebellion, it’s just a rerun of the Founding Fathers. It’s the same with you—you spent too much time with Wyeth and Winslow Homer, and you haven’t noticed art’s gone somewhere else. If you don’t need the money, it isn’t work, and if it ain’t on canvas, it ain’t art. Wheeooo!”

“Oh, c’mon, Malcolm,” I protested. “What we do here is craft. I like craft, I respect it. But it doesn’t improve it to pretend it’s something else. We make a useful product that we decorate with patterned trivia. There’s no pretending it’s going to
last.
”

“I suppose,” he said falsetto, “I suppose you think if somebody took one of my Survivors and incarcerated it in a glass case for a hundred years it would come out Aht.” He dropped in octave. “You’re in the art form of the century, mother: mass-produced synthetic cloth, and you’re so reactionary you think you’ve missed your goddamn
calling.
”

“Okay, no,” Dillis put in. “But in a painting, there’s nothing you can’t paint. What Virginia means, you have to sell cloth, so all kinds of subjects are forbidden.”

“Name one,” said Malcolm.

“Genitalia,” Dillis suggested archly.

“Garbage,” said Mom.

“Grief,” I added. “Disease. Corruption.”

“Nn-ooo. The Orientals decorate with monsters, the American Indians hung scalps on their belts. Queen Elizabeth had her sleeves embroidered with twenty-two-carat snakes. Anything’s okay, daughter, as long as you formalize it. A designer just formalizes a little more, that’s all; and the nature of a thing is not in its subject, it’s in the form. Fashion,” he said sententiously, “is the fifth dimension.”

“Oh lord,” said Mom Pollard. “I hadn’t got hold of the fourth yet.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“No, I mean it. Consider what dimension is. You have the line, the plane, the cube, each of which includes and builds on the dimension that precedes it. Now you move that cube, or any three-dimensional object of any degree of complexity, through time, and Einstein tells us we’ve arrived at four. But three-dimensional objects moving in their time frame produce what? Style! A fifth dimension, and this is true whether you advance from dinosaurs to apes or baroque to Bauhaus. If you took my face for a subject,” he lunged in at us to present his cherubic face, “and rendered it as a cave painting, an Egyptian bas relief, a Leonardo, a Modigliani and an animated cartoon, you’d have as illuminating a history of the race of man as you get from any anthropology text.”