There Must Be Some Mistake (6 page)

“
Artforum
and beyond,” I said.

“You toiled away, working on great heavy stones to produce unsatisfactory lithographs, working on small paintings and large, your clumsy hand an affront to the German master.”

“Now you're having too much fun,” I said.

“You pick it up from there.”

“Did it again,” I said.

“The multimedia?”

“Sort of. I set up a special problems course with the German master and turned in a four-hundred-page book of xeroxed articles and essays from art magazines, the selection of which I contended was a substantial scholarly essay on contemporary art, the required product of the course. The German master was not persuaded. I was excused from the Department of Fine Art.”

Chantal clapped, slowly, lightly, rhythmically. “Bingo!” she said.

“Thereafter I sat in local bars drinking endless mugs of beer and talking with my fellow painters, and I was as happy as I'd ever been. Making art was immediate, soulful, satisfying in a way nothing was before. It was a revelation. Changed my life.”

“And now,” she said, waving her hand toward the sliding door behind us. “All the way from Wiesbaden, Germany, your old art professor Hans Jürgen-Jürgen!
Hier, kommen-zee, Professor Jürgen-Jürgen!
”

And then she would not stop laughing. Laughing and giggling, sort of intermittently, like the wiper blades once we got in the car and realized that it had started raining outside. Rain and fog all the way to Target, where we went to buy some Bounty paper towels. “Giant rolls,” she said. “I am buying a twelve-pack of
rollos gigantes
equaling, as you may know, eighteen
rollos regulares.
The better to wipe this old egg off of your sweet artistic face.”

I KEPT
thinking about the past. The past was, in many ways, more interesting than the present. I spent nights remembering people and events and circumstances, stuff that had happened, what I'd done and who I'd done it with in the years before I got settled at the design studio. It was all fragmented, came and went in a disjointed, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't way, but Chantal made me want to remember, not so much for enlightenment, but for the simple pleasure of recalling times that seemed gentler and richer.

At dinner one night in Galveston I told her about New York. How, kicked out of art school, I moved there planning on making art. I'd had fifty copies of a CD titled
Special Problems
pressed. This was the audio part of the architecture school fiasco, and I sent it to all the art magazine writers and critics I could find addresses for. I arrived at La Guardia, took a cab into the city. A friend from Texas was subletting a loft on Greene Street. The loft was small, grubby, and stocked everywhere with the owner's furry sculptures, which loomed in the space like Bigfoot penises. I set out to get a job in a gallery, since I'd done that work in Houston. I had another friend in New York, an ex-teacher, Zin Wang, who had made a small splash with his postsurrealist figurative painting, extraordinarily out of time but happily well received at a SoHo gallery where his pictures were often, but not always, painted on shoes and similar, displayed in ancient frames. Zin had a flat in the West Village and a wife from Brazil and wrote occasional articles for
Art 1,
an already failing art mag. I got a job at Sara Goldman Gallery, helping her hang shows, manning the desk when she was out, answering the phone, keeping the place tidy. Sara was a pleasant middle-aged woman with a taste for sixties art who thought I was cute, in a scruffy, out-of-town way.

“From this beginning,” I said. “I waded through the New York of that moment, meeting some painters, showing in a few group shows at independent galleries.”

Our food was delivered and we began to eat. Chantal motioned with her fork, rotating it in my direction. “Go on,” she said.

I told her I was sitting in the front room of Sara's gallery late one afternoon and in walked this pretty blond woman, all Dick Tracy'd in suede head to toe. She looked rich and she looked young. We had on show a couple privately owned Flavins, an Alex Hay yellow pad, a Larry Zox piece, and a few second-tier concept pieces. Douglas Huebler, I think. It was summer in New York. Nobody was showing anything.

So the woman said, “Are you Webster?”

I thought I should call Sara, because this woman looked like she was married to two doctors and all three of them loved art a great deal.

So she said, “I'm looking for Wallace Webster.” Instantly I switched from Wallace the Meek to Wallace the Bold, and I said, “Yes? And who might you be?” But I thought I should not be talking to this woman, whoever she was. She was from another planet.

“I am Plastique,” she said, and there was an accent, not an extreme accent, but it took me a minute to get that this was
Plastique,
the art-pop singer, who was, at that time, very underground and hip, and she had come to find me. I was thinking: God is great.

So in a few minutes I had locked the gallery and we were in a cab headed downtown and she was telling me she had gotten my CD from a friend and she liked the noise. At the restaurant we ordered, we talked, and she proposed that I back her at some club where she had a gig the following week. I could not see how that was going to work, but I was so flattered that I was unable to say that. I was afraid her noise and my noise were not the same noise. We got through the meal, and when I was paying the bill I got some change from the waitress and left ten dollars and the silver on the table.

Before the waitress returned, Plastique snatched the change off the table. “Never leave this,” she said to me. “It's uncouth. It's demeaning.”

It was like eighty-four cents or something, and I hadn't even thought about it. Outside the restaurant she dropped the change in a plant by the door and I could tell she had lost some respect already. We went to a loft off Houston belonging to a woman percussionist who introduced herself and handed me a guitar. A couple scabby-looking guys loitered in the background. They were clearly there for my audition. For about five minutes I scratched around on the guitar, which was plugged into an old Fender amp, trying to look serious about my scratching, but I knew this wasn't the noise I was good at. I thought about trying to explain that my noise was composition based, that it was produced by sifting hours of tapes and other sound sources, that there was a lot of dubbing and overdubbing involved, that I could prepare something for them in a few days, that this guitar scratching really wasn't
me.
But they were already, like, looking at each other, pushing their hair around mightily. Moments later Plastique signals me to stop and takes the guitar, then walks me to the door, her arm through mine.

“You had frozen under the harsh gaze of celebrity,” Chantal said. “You did not measure up. But it was only the first test!”

“I had failed already.”

“Let's get some dessert,” Chantal said. She waved at the waiter, who came rushing at us as if we were on fire. “Could we have the dessert menu?”

“We have no dessert,” the waiter said.

“Is that design or circumstance?” Chantal said.

“The first,” the waiter said.

“Fruit?” Chantal said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, that will do,” she said. “A selection of your best fruit, please.” And the waiter vanished. “Plastique did not remain long in the limelight, as I recall. Wasn't she Swedish or something?”

“Norwegian,” I said. “Or Icelandic.”

“Somewhere chilly,” Chantal said. “Iceland, of course. It figures. They're always entertaining. Do go on with the story.”

“There's not much more,” I said.

“You were young at the time? Twenty-something?”

“Two,” I said. “Maybe four.”

“It was an embarrassing moment,” Chantal said. “But these were not the keys to your future as a fine artist, certainly.”

“I was wounded,” I said.

“Still,” she said. “The show must and all that.”

“I began to take on a slightly jaundiced view of celebrity at this time,” I said.

“Known to the trade as the Cornball Defense,” Chantal said.

“Sort of, I guess. Jeering as denial of desire. I waved hello to Bob Dylan, who I saw on the street in the Village, as if we were the best of friends and Bob had forgotten, the plodder.”

“Noble work,” she said.

“I had an intimate interaction through a shopwindow on Madison Avenue with a very attractive actress whose black push-up brassiere was very much in evidence as she shopped for blouses. This involved pointing and other gestures.”

“Well done!” Chantal said. “You were scoring at every turn.”

“And then there was the thing with Paul McCartney,” I said.

“Oh, ick,” she said. “Don't tell me.”

I explained that I felt odd about adopting this conflicted mode of interaction on the street but concluded it was better than slinking along in silent admiration of the celebrities that forever patrolled the town. This approach/avoidance, always making jest of the celebrities, fit exactly my view of myself as a coward, fleeing genuine expression of feeling, contact, intimacy, even friendship. Why must I jeer at them? Why must I make them the butt of my private jokes, jokes I was sure no one else would find humorous in the slightest?

“I wondered,” I said to Chantal, “how I could become a famous artist in New York if I was always making embarrassing public jokes about the kinds of people New York was so proud of.”

“And you determined then and there to stop such displays as unbecoming a young man with goals,” she said. “Yes?”

“Exactly,” I said. “I lived for several years with a young woman named Candy Roberts, a manager from another gallery, and continued showing in various exhibitions such that my name was always linked in articles about indie art with the other unheard-of people. What was clear was that New York was, for practical purposes, a small town, and the art world was tiny, powerful, and well financed. The world that I had imagined from reading art magazines was real, but more maquette than full-size sculpture.”

At this point the fruit arrived at the table. It looked like Del Monte Mixed Fruit. We stared at it for a few moments. “It's, uh, fruit,” Chantal said.

“Yes. I think so,” I said.

There were two bowls of the fruit, one for each of us.

“If we only had some Oreos,” she said.

“Exactly.”

She fetched up her spoon and moved on the fruit. “Continue,” she said, munching delicately.

“I got tired. Eventually I was asked to write a piece about the new art for a magazine, and at about fifteen thousand words I ran out of steam.”

“Thank heavens,” she said.

“That was the beginning of the end. Within weeks I discovered that Candy Roberts was sleeping with my old friend Zin Wang, and within days of that Candy and I agreed to terminate our arrangement. In short order I quit my job, packed my belongings, and left. One was surprised at the relief one felt looking from the bridge en route to La Guardia back at the city skyline in the lowering evening light. Knowing one would not return.”

“The end of an era,” Chantal said.

“I talked my way into a job at a junior college in Houston. Later I met my first wife, Lucy, at a store where I'd taken my boots to be repaired. She was a folksinger with a lovely voice. We went to clubs; she sang. We entered that world, by good fortune produced Morgan, enjoyed life. I changed schools a few times, swapping up to universities, and I began showing work at Houston galleries, again. Notoriety, again, but no sales. The locals were still walking with knuckles firmly in the dirt. I talked the dean into letting me take a graduate degree with a minimum of hassle, giving me credit for time served, as it were, and made a side deal working with Point Blank. So things were going well, and I figured we were set.”

“Not to be, I guess,” she said.

“Lucy got sick and died. Bang. Six months door to door. I'd heard of it happening, but it was something to watch up close. We'd been married seven years when she died. Six and a half were splendid.”

Chantal gave up on the fruit. “That's the worst story,” she said. “That's awful.”

“I kept putting one foot in front of the other. It was strange, her not being there, not on earth. I was on automatic for a year or two before I could even begin to function in the normal way. I shut down.”

Leaving the fruit where it lay, we left the restaurant and went over the causeway and headed up the Gulf Freeway. It wasn't unpleasant out. We got off at Dickinson and stopped at a gas station for ice-cream bars, a quality dessert, got back on the freeway, and went all the way to the League City exit before cutting across to Kemah. On the drive I told Chantal about Diane. How I'd met and married Diane after she enrolled in my advanced painting class. We had an affair, which was not specifically precluded in the e-handbook at the very modern school where I was teaching. Soon I was more valuable to Point Blank if I worked full-time, so teaching went out the window. Eventually we got a house in southwest Houston. Our life got smaller and more routine, even with Morgan in tow. We rented a bay-front condo I found one rainy night when I wanted to get away and drove down to Kemah for no good reason. Eventually we bought the place and moved there, thinking to enjoy life on
Low.
But the sourness that was creeping into the marriage seemed to ramp up. The whole world seemed to have gotten cruder, uglier, and less satisfying. At home the days got longer. The marriage was strained. We knew each other too well. We kept up the routines for a while, but when even those began to break down we divorced.

“That's the short version,” Chantal said. “I recognize that.”

“It's enough,” I said. “You get the picture. After the divorce people started looking strange to me. I worked at home. I was already keeping bad hours—up when everyone was asleep, asleep when everyone was up. Spent my spare time on the Net. The usual waste, though sometimes interesting. I joined Facebook, diligently reported my status, and made one thousand four hundred friends. I considered these things: When is thinking carefully the same as cowardice? When is avoidance cowardice? Is it cowardly to evade and dodge, to leave by the side door, to step out of the way? Is it fear that makes a person behave ‘properly' and in accordance with one or another code of conduct? Must one seek always to attack and destroy an enemy? Must one regard the other as the enemy, always? Is ‘settling for' something less than what you aspired to a kind of cowardice, or is it pragmatism or just good sense? Must one always pretend to be the hero? These and other questions preoccupied me as I motored through the second decade of the twenty-first century, widowed, divorced, alone.”