Liebau’s house was a huge A-frame, with a small yard area in front and on one side, from which all the stumps hadn’t yet been cleared. Underneath the porch steps I could see two generators, one working, one evidently being repaired. I knocked; Farber appeared at the screen door, and let me in.
The great room was dominated by a wall of masks, hung haphazardly, in a variety of sizes and aspects. They were tribal, made of painted wood; more than that I could not say about them. They stared across the room at a wall of sagging bookshelves. On the north side, a vast picture window looked straight into the face of the woods; on the south, a large woodstove with iron doors. Above us, against the south wall and behind the chimney, was a sleeping loft. In the middle of the room, the two men — Professors Gradison and Liebau — sat waiting for me at a low table, cross-legged on a couple of pillows laid on the floor. They wore old wool sweaters, work pants, boots, and their time in prison did not appear to have slimmed them down at all. They did not get up.
The masks are beautiful, I said, lowering myself on to a leopard print cushion across the table from them. African?
From New Guinea, Liebau said, in a reasonable enough tone of voice. I did my doctoral research there.
And Mr Liebau, you built this place yourself?
He gestured to his colleague. Jack and I, he said. With some help from friends who had different sorts of expertise. Hooking up the generator, digging the well, and whatnot.
You’re not survivalists, are you?
Not yet, Liebau said.
Gentlemen, thank you for seeing me. I may as well get right to it. You and your organization seem to have locked yourselves in a kind of death spiral with Palladio, the place where I work. It’s gone on for a long time now; and it’s reached the point where the toll it’s taking on everyone concerned, on the work that we all want to do, is enormous.
(I knew I was flattering them with terms like organization, but that’s just what I wanted to do. I wanted to give them some opportunity to claim victory.)
I’m here to resolve our differences in an amicable way. Your lawyer, I imagine, has already told you that we’ve gotten the gallery itself to agree to drop the charges against you, but now, what with all the publicity the trial’s gotten, the judge says no. So now it’s between us. Nothing is off the table.
The door to the kitchen swung open. A young, attractive Asian woman brought in tea, on a beautiful hand-painted tray, and silently departed. She wore slippers. I tried not to let my surprise show.
You’re not here to resolve anything, Liebau said. You’re here to make us disappear. Mal Osbourne is not troubled by our disagreeing with him. He’s troubled by the fact that our disagreement (he held up his index fingers, clawlike, on either side of his head) is getting national attention, because of the chord it strikes with the masses.
I’m sorry, I said, smiling. Did you just use the word masses?
Yes, god damn it! So you can come here and simper all you want about cooperation, but we know this is all about silencing us. And we will not be silenced.
You pathetic lackey, Gradison added, in an almost apologetic tone, as if completing Liebau’s sentence for him.
There was a chair in the room, by the picture window, and Farber sat in it, his back to the windblown pines outside. Legs crossed, he sipped his tea and studied the scattering of masks across from him.
You’re wrong, I said. Mal is bothered by the fact that you take issue with him. And no one wants to silence you. Anyway, you’re missing the point. Mal Osbourne is not the enemy here. He’s fighting the same thing you guys are fighting. The established cultural order is what he hates.
Then Liebau, a man nearly old enough to be a grandfather, a man with patches of white in his neat beard, did an astonishing thing: he stuck his tongue out as far as he could, crossed his eyes, and repeated what I had just said, in a tone of mock earnestness. The estabwissed cuwtuwaw owdew is what he haes.
This was a new one. I reminded myself that my unflappability, my ability not to take things personally, was what Mal prized in me — it was the secret to my ascent. Still, it was clearly time to do away with the niceties; social graces only seemed to antagonize these people.
Fall semester starts soon, I said. You guys ready? For classes and whatnot?
Farber sat up straighter. I don’t see how that’s in the bounds of –
Liebau held up his hand. He already knows. He wouldn’t ask if he didn’t know the answer. We’ve lost our teaching jobs.
How will you find work?
We have our resources.
You put a lot of faith, I said, in the strength of your ideas. I mean, I guess that goes without saying. You’d have to, since all the force, all the money, is amassed on the other side.
Gradison, who had been noisily stirring his tea, suddenly held out one fist to me, turned sideways. Thumbwrestle? he said.
No, thank you. So let me get to the point.
Mal had said I would know what to do, and it was true; it was all coming to me now, spontaneously, as if he were working through me, without instruction, my mind racing to keep one step ahead of my speech, since I didn’t think it would be wise to stop talking.
Mal Osbourne actually has a great respect for the work that you two have done. Even when it’s been directly at his expense. He can see — he and I have talked about this several times — he can see that it has a great deal of iconoclastic energy, as well as a strong visual sense, a sense of how to get a message across in the least fussy, most memorable way possible. Not just a desire to break molds, but an instinct for it, a knack for it.
I’m moved, said Liebau to Gradison. Are you moved?
Palladio would like to hire you both, I said. Your starting salaries would be two hundred thousand for the first year.
Now I had their attention. In the crack of light under the swinging door to the kitchen I could see two points of shadow; the Asian woman was listening there. Farber was all ears as well.
You want us to come down South, Gradison said, and live in the big house?
Not if you don’t want to. You can stay right here if you prefer.
Liebau held up his hand. Hire us to do what? he asked, confused.
To do exactly what you do now.
Come off it.
I’m not kidding. We’ll write it into your contracts. No restriction on content. Keep making fun of us, if that’s what you want to do.
They stared at each other.
Ask anyone who works there, if you want to, I said. Ask if their content has ever been tampered with, or censored in any way. (I was out on a limb now — Elaine’s Kerouac ad had been squashed, of course, on formal grounds — but that was an anomaly, and anyway I had to win here, I had to go back home with something to show. I knew it’s what Mal would want, even though, strictly speaking, there was no precedent for it.) Mal is a facilitator; he provides the link between great artists and the means for disseminating great art. All he has to offer is his sensibility. He hasn’t been wrong so far. And he thinks that you two have greatness in you.
Liebau tapped Gradison on the shoulder; they stood and walked to the corner of the room, where, shoulders hunched, they whispered to each other, complete with overdrawn hand gestures. Everything they did seemed to have that overlay of irony to it, of performance. I looked over at Farber, who met my eyes and shrugged, caught up in the suspense of it himself. After a minute or two they came back to the table and lowered themselves on to the pillows again.