Can I call you Shayana, Miss Subramanium? Miss Subramanium is, after all, a mouthful, and so formal considering I am technically old enough to be your mother. As for Miss S.-well, I’m hardly one of your little charges.
There was a time, Shayana, when I wore my era’s equivalent to your dreamcatchers and rebellious T-shirts. I had aspirations. I was giddy with my own sexual power-a simulacrum of power fed by the illusions of youth and a type of wan beauty, but power of a kind nonetheless. Every day brought a new opportunity for adventure. Did I imagine then that I would spend the bulk of my days, year upon year, in a small office cubicle with an Excel spreadsheet on the monitor in front of me, a photograph of a laughing girl on a portable potty as my screen saver, and on my desk a miniature inflatable punching bag (a Secret Santa gift from my colleagues) of the existential figure from Munch’s The Scream? Not for a moment. I was going to be an artist.
I had an advantage over my fellow students at the art college-I could see voices as colours and shapes, and without the aid of any psychotropic. As long as someone was talking, I had a palette to work with. The nasal Upper Canada monotone of my life-class instructor produced oddly compelling anorexic oatmeal-streaked buttocks and breasts (you may imagine how this annoyed the model, who was rather voluptuous and rosy hued, but the sketches earned me instant recognition as an iconoclast). My roommate’s throaty smoker’s laugh gave me a series of large canvas magma flares in reds, oranges, and basalt. The melancholy-flecked sound of my Estonian landlady talking to her daughter over the telephone, a small umbral gem.
Recorded voices, digitized voices, mediated voices didn’t have any effect. This synesthesia only worked “live.” Walking along a crowded street was quite literally a psychedelic experience. “Your voice is damaged swimwear,” I told a stranger waiting for a bus, a pimply-faced teen whose girlfriend poked him in the ribs with her pointy little elbow before he could respond. “You sound like fresh cement,” I said to a waitress midway through her recitation of the daily specials.
I was flying, that’s what it felt like. Until the day I came across a man whose voice I couldn’t see.
Have you ever had a demon lover, Shayana?
Forget bad-boy musicians or beautiful vampires. I’m talking about the kind of man who turns his dirty dishes over and, when both sides are used, throws them out in a way that is both ceremonial and completely nonchalant, and has you utterly, utterly convinced that this is a “philosophy.” A man who adds not one but three umlauts to his name for a devastating Teutonic effect. I’m talking about a terrifying and destructive charisma.
He was famous for a time, and then infamous. This was the mid-eighties, when money flowed towards the neoexpressionists like blood from an unstanched head wound. Basquiat. Fischl. Salle. Schnabel. He was the unacknowledged leader of the neo-geo movement, a concerted assault on the neo-expressionists, whom he deemed hopeless-and dangerous-Romantics. (A danger to art, that is.) You may have come across his name somewhere recently because of the unresolved court case, in a Vanity Fair or an Interview (although your periodical tastes may run more towards Us and Hello!-to each his or her own, I always say). There is a Facebook group, Mephisto’s Muses, devoted to his memory. (I’ll leave you to judge for yourself the degree of collective self-absorption involved there.) Did he have a disarming grimace? I honestly can’t remember.
I’m going to tell you a story, Shayana, and don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t immediately make sense. Good stories seldom do.
Once upon a time a young woman encountered a man. It doesn’t matter how they met. One moment she was up in the air, the next she was falling to earth but didn’t care. The man was not what anyone would call handsome or young. His hair was stiff and matted, his belly soft, his breath sulphuric; his eyes had slits for pupils, like a goat’s. But when he spoke, all she could see and hear was his voice. She could feel his voice, she knew she could find him anywhere through echolocation. It was as if she had become a bat. A small, needy fruit bat.
He said her name often, and every time he did so it was as if he were pinning her to a corkboard, each pronouncement of her name a kind of claiming. Why did he want her so? This went on for some time, this living blind in a cave with only his voice for company, seldom venturing out in human form.
Near the end of that honeymoon period, they were in someone’s basement den after a long night of flitting from club to club. How he loved the clubs! The body heat, the insistent beats, the obliteration of the senses, the fawning recognition of slinky creatures. The light above the billiard table was bothering his eyes. Unscrew the bulb, he told her. And she did, with her bare fingers, barely flinching while onlookers caught their breath. By this time he had formed a habit of patting her on the head when she did something that pleased him, as if she were a loyal pooch, no longer stroking her mouse-brown fur, her leathered wingtips, no longer content to stay in their cave. He was spending more and more time with a woman who kept a steppe wolf in her laundry room. The wolf mistress, she realized, even then, was the kind of woman she could never be.
I can grant you any wish you want, he told her that night she burnt her fingertips. Did he actually say this or only imply it? Had she invoked him, her demon, like Theophilus or Faustus, or even poor Robert Johnson down at the crossroad? She had been content living blind, eating fermenting plums, breathing deep, the world just brief flickering shadows on the moist walls of a cave when he lit his bong. What was left that she could wish for?
To be an artist or to be a muse-that was what tore her in two. The spell she was under led her to believe being his muse would be the more fulfilling of the two. And they lived happily ever after. Or so it would seem, for a time.
So you see, thwarted artists can be anywhere, Shayana. There is artistry to Georgia’s rages, to my husband’s carefully cultivated philistinism, even to your straining T-shirts with their incoherent stage heroes and faux satanic symbols. There is an artistry to how my dentist scales my bicuspids (yes, he does his own scaling). And when he talks to me, sticking to strictly technical terms as he cups my collapsing jaw in his smooth nitrile-glove-cloaked hand, I can almost hear colours again. (I think he could help you with your overbite, I really do. I am willing to do this, to share. You only have to say the word.) My umbral masterpiece hangs above the bidet, to my husband’s discomfort, a reminder of how much has been lost and how much has been gained, and of the almost incalculable distance between the two things.
Just let me ask you this, Shayana. Can we honestly say any of us really have our feet firmly on the ground?
Sincerely,
Anne (Georgia’s mother)
INVESTMENT RESULTS MAY VARY
Dan and Patricia O’Donnell are always searching for the best of everything. Here they are now. Patricia-her long, dark hair tied back in an impossibly sleek braid, hair pulled so tight her eyebrows look as if they’re about to boomerang around the room-partially reclines on what appears to be a chaise longue. Dan leans against an old-fashioned radiator by an open window, one loafer-clad foot crossed in front of the other, looking like one of those guys in high school Nina always wanted to hump on the leg like a crazed standard poodle. You know, dry-humping away, knees locked, eyes bulging, just to get that self-satisfied smirk off his face. Dan and Patricia’s teeth are preternaturally white, boraxed incisors gleaming. Their ceiling soars above them at least sixteen feet. A crudely painted saddle-a swollen lily, Georgia O’Keeffe-inspired, over the seat-vies for wall space with pressed-tin skeletons dangling on wires. The single orchid in an intentionally crooked raku vase on the edge of a spotless glass table screams wabi-sabi pretensions with twice-weekly maid service.