Boarded Windows (4 page)

I went to turn down the music a notchette, and took a seat across from Wanda at the table, on which there was a fat, impressively rolled joint sprinkled with brown sugar. The table no longer wobbled; someone, surely Wade, had made a shim out of a shard of cracker box. “My till came up ten dollars short,” I said.

“Can I borrow ten bucks?” Wade said while rubbing butter on the pizza crust’s rim with a satirical flourish. Then to Wanda: “So you do this act in comedy clubs?”

“Sometimes. I’d like to do that exclusively, but they don’t invite me back. Mostly I work in small theaters, cabarets, some queer stuff.”

“One of her shows turned into a real cause célèbre awhile back,” I said. Probably I didn’t come up with the worldliest pronunciation of
célèbre.

“Yeah,” Wanda said. “I did one of the Jewish sets in a Shylock costume, with a butcher’s knife and a giant papier-mâché beak. Some people got upset and I had to be part of this panel discussion. Of course all the jokes were by Jewish comics. No one bitches when I do the misogynist stuff.” (The panelist who called Wanda’s Jewish set “falsely provocative” was right, I think, though this panelist hadn’t actually seen Wanda’s set; when Wanda looks back on her early work, she must feel some remorse or humiliation, as I do about my less public mistakes.)

“Also her great-grandmother might have been Jewish,” I said, tonguing the edgy mouth of my night’s first can of beer. There were already six or seven empties on the kitchen counter, most squeezed into approximate hourglasses.

“You ever work in blackface?” Wade asked.

“Not yet,” Wanda said.

“You guys don’t remember Grace Slick on
Sullivan
,” Wade said.

“Smothers Brothers,
” I corrected.

“You do anything by—who’s the guy? With the big red hat.”

“Licitra?” I said.

“Yeah.” Wade put the pizza in the oven.

“No,” Wanda said. “Too obvious and not funny.”

“She wants people to laugh
with
the jokes, not at them,” I said.

“I’m not sure I’d put it that way,” Wanda said. “If everyone laughs it doesn’t work, but if you get islands of laughter, especially male islands, or oblivious female islands, then I get the room tension I’m after.”

“That’s all I meant,” I said.

“Sometimes I’ll catch a dyke flash some frat dude a cold stare,” Wanda said. “That’s the sort of thing I want, not to see the dude shamed—’cause they’re both right and both wrong. But just to enact something.”

“Enact now,” Wade said.

“I’m trying to revivify these jokes. Like with digital sampling, how the source material a lot of times is reborn through fragmentation, deracination.”

“Right, yeah, that sounds good,” Wade said, leaning against the stove. “I mean, I don’t know anything about computers, but I used to be what you might call a reproduction purist. I’d read Benjamin’s ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ and Berger’s
Ways of Seeing
”—this title he pronounced with a funny German accent:
Vays ohf Zeeink—
“and my response to the ultimately liberating ‘withering of the aura’ and all that shit was not just to accept but to prefer and demand everything at one remove, at least one: so the record, I thought, was better than the band; the Memorex better than the record; the Marcantonio engraving better than the Raphael original; the painting inspired by the engraving better than the painting inspired by the original; the coffee-tabled color plate better than the framed canvas; the grainy black-and-white detail better than the color plate; the photocopy of the grainy black-and-white detail, stuck to the fridge with a service-station magnet, better than the black-and-white detail; the belch better than the hot dog; the photo-booth polyptych better than the kiss; the memory better than the affair; the shadow, in other words, more compelling than the figure.”

“Yeah,” someone said.

“’Cause shadows add layers of mystery,” Wade went on, “nimbi of abstraction, suggestions of perfection, and in so doing climb like dark horses closer to the fab Forms of the intellectual ether.”

I said something inarticulate, closed my eyes, softly pulled the hairs on my Adam’s apple. I liked listening to Wade’s voice, fast and mellow like Charlie Parker darting through a ballad—“Bird of Paradise,” say, which is really “All the Things You Are” or all the things you are. He could talk and talk, and it wasn’t windbagging, I thought, it was bullshit artistry, at once seductive and irritating, often most convincing when I didn’t quite know what he was saying. “An intelligent man would often be much at a loss without the company of fools,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. Certainly Wade spent time with intellectual equals, but I think he was happier away from them. No mistake: Wanda wasn’t a fool, far from it, but she was only twenty-five (or twenty-six—it’s sad that I can’t remember her birthday) and didn’t debate or refute Wade as often as she could have even then. As for me, I might have been a fool, though possibly in this book I’ll exaggerate my younger self’s foolishness, and my current self’s, either out of modesty or because readers find foolishness endearing, and because now is the era of the man-boy fool, or because I aspire to become a wise, truth-telling fool, for which plain foolishness might be good preparation.

“Of course the ‘figures’ of my little examples,” Wade said, “if transferred to Platonic metaphysics and psychology, are themselves copies of, or copies of copies of, the universal Form.” (To me) “Did you get to Plato before you dropped out?”

“A little.”

“I only dredge him up because it’s hard to talk about copies without him. It’s fitting that
xerography,
whence the trademark and metonym
Xerox
comes, derives from the Greek.”

“I thought it came from Bud Xerox,” Wanda said.

“So maybe you remember,” Wade said, “that art, as Plato had it, is two steps from Absolute Being, the Form, the Idea, the definite and fixed grades of the will’s objectification, just like Bobby Bland was two steps from the blues.”

I stood up but gestured that I was still listening.

“So for One”—Wade made a capital
O
with his arms—“there’s Absolute Beauty; then there’s temporal, palpable beauty, such as a beautiful woman, exempli gratia Wanda—rolling her eyes as I speak—a beautiful woman who copies or partakes somehow of Absolute Beauty; and lower down the line let’s say there’s a painting the woman modeled for. Then there’s the reproduction of that painting in a much-manhandled edition of
Erotic Art through the Ages,
the prize of my coffee-table porno-art books before I sold all my stuff.”

“How much did you get for all that stuff?” I asked from the other room.

“It’s impolite to ask about money. So about this updated Platonic ladder let’s agree that one can take Plato seriously without taking him literally, and that the antithesis of his intolerable aesthetics, that art of true sublimity not only improves life but improves
on
life, won’t do either, at least not as an abiding faith.”

“Where the fuck are my Bobby Bland records?” I said.

“I moved him to R&B,” Wade said. “It’s bad taxonomy to put him in blues.”

“What? You can’t be moving my—”

“Aristotle, better of course on art than Plato—” Wade said.

“But worse
at
it,” Wanda said.

“That’s true, that’s true,” Wade said, “to judge from the extant record. Complicating things further.”

Wanda smiled.

“Aristotle says in his
Poetics
that Polygnotus’s paintings and Homer’s poems ‘are better than we are.’ You could read that as just a simple acknowledgment of artistic idealization, but he also suggests that such an improvement is possible even in dancing and flute playing—”

“Except that’s not possible,” Wanda said. “Flutes are horrendous.”

“You just haven’t heard the right flutes,” Wade said.

“James Newton’s good,” I said, back at the table. “Dolphy.”

“Don’t underrate Herbie Mann,” Wade said.

“What I’m saying is I hate flutes. I don’t care whose fucking flute it is.”

“Do you like steel guitars?” Wade said.

Wanda hesitated for maybe twenty seconds. “Yes,” she said.

“Okay, so by the time Aristotle says we can be better than we really are by playing steel guitars, we’re well on the way to art as religion, art as transcendence, art over or against Earth and all its stuff, though also art that uncovers that stuff’s truth and esse, as when Hegel says that a portrait by Titian or Dürer, or any portrait finely attuned to the sitter’s spiritual vitality, is more like the individual than the actual individual himself.”

“Except Hegel wouldn’t have seen any of the actual individuals Titian or Dürer painted portraits of,” Wanda said, “unless they were painting Methuselah.”

“Well, that’s a simpleminded complaint,” Wade said. Wanda defended herself without excitement but Wade cut her off: “Anyway, I’ve become something of an art-as-religion apostate. It just doesn’t seem to sustain me anymore.”

“Can we smoke this spliff?” I said. Wanda gave me an amused look at the word
spliff.

“That’s what it’s there for,” Wade said.

“Right on.”

“This record used to be a real make-out favorite for his mother and me,” Wade said, looking at Wanda while wave-pointing in my direction. “Something about Jaco’s Fender, those rubbery bass glissandi, like a tongue in your ear.”

“But kind of flatulent, too,” Wanda croaked midinhale, then imitated the sound.

“Jaco turned his Fender into a fretless by himself, you know,” Wade said, insulted it seemed, “with nothing but a toenail clipper and a half-empty tub of oleo.”

“I was just kidding,” Wanda said, “it’s really nice.” Her smile, as a rule and in that instance, wasn’t especially warm, was cooler than she was. Her features were in general severe. The bridge of her nose was particularly knifelike. These descriptions aren’t intended to be physiognomic, however. She could be harsh sometimes, sure, but in terms of kindness and warmth she bettered me and would have measured well against a higher standard.

“Yeah, but it’s not wallpaper,” Wade said. “You have to listen to it. It’s not pretty, it’s beautiful. Mysterious. The oldest known ancestor of the word
pretty
is a West Germanic word meaning ‘trick,’ but there’s no trick to this stuff, no wool-pulling.” He nodded my way: “I’m impressed that you have this CD. You need to do some weeding, though. You’ve got a lot of crap in there, impoverishing the collection.”

“Some of them I get for free at the store,” I said.

“Well, you can get matches for free, but that doesn’t mean you should use them to burn your house down.”

“Kind of an over-the-top analogy,” Wanda said.

“I used to have a tape of this album,” Wade said. He was cutting the pizza with a pair of scissors. “Listen to that bass.” He hummed along with a few bars, conducting a bit with the scissors—or, not so much conducting as describing a finchlike flight pattern.

“A genius,” I said.

“I sold to Jaco one time,” he said.

“Really?”

“Just once, down in Atlanta. We walked together for a block or two. The whole time he held a catalpa leaf in front of his face to avoid recognition.”

“Wow,” I said.

“That was Jaco,” Wade said. He brought the pizza to the table and sat between Wanda and me with his back to the kitchen. “Yeah, this album sounds exactly like the drive from Enswell to Grand Forks, but not at all like the drive from Grand Forks to Enswell. In fact clashes with the ride home. Dissonant where it doesn’t want to be. I’ve tested this several times. I used to have a Rand McNally extensively marked up with that kind of research.” He looked into Wanda’s eyes. “His mother and I, we listened to a lot of this one, a lot of Joni, the jazz Joni, Jaco Joni, Jarrett, J. J. Johnson, Jimmy Giuffre, Jimmy Webb, Jimmy Reed, Jim Reeves, Johnny.”

“Which Johnny?” I asked.

“All of ’em: Hartman, Hodges, Coltrane, Carson, Mathis, especially Mathis. We’d recite Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Bataille. We were D-Luxe Frenchies. Have you met his mother?”

“No,” Wanda said. “I’ve talked to her on the phone.”

“Seen any pictures?”

“Yes,” she said with put-on affection.

“Lord,” Wade said, now drawing a figure in the air. “Legs like inverted traffic cones. She was a Lachaise sculpture. And a real voluptuary. I trust she still is.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to move things in another direction.

“A beautiful woman!” Wade said. “Not pretty at all. I’ve thought about calling her before I leave for Berlin, but … to what end? She probably wouldn’t want to hear from me anyway.” He looked at me.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” I said. The pizza sauce was oversweet and the cheese kept sliding from its base like a slapstick toupee.

“The early Joni—not the early Joni, but the second phase, star-made Joni,
Ladies of the Canyon
through
Court and Spark—
that period doesn’t work for me as bedroom music. The lyrics are too distracting, like having your lover’s roommate in the corner talking on the phone, about you. That’s a male perspective, I know,” he said, glancing at Wanda, who may have found the glance patronizing, may have found the word
lover
oily or square, though the more up-to-date substitute words tend to be cute, imprecise, or overslangy.

“I don’t like vocal music at all during sex,” Wanda said, “unless it’s in a foreign language—”

“A foreign tongue?” Wade said.

“Yes, a foreign tongue,” Wanda said. “Or in English but indecipherable. I think I’d like to live where hardly anyone spoke English. People say that’s the best way to learn a foreign language, but I’d want to stay ignorant, maybe choose somewhere with a language I had no interest in learning, with a different alphabet so I couldn’t figure anything out. Maybe then everything would be dreamlike and romantic. You could imagine people were reciting poetry and plotting revolutions when really they were just gossiping or asking for change.”

“They’d probably ask for change in English, if they were asking you,” I said.