Break in Case of Emergency (3 page)

“So, any news?” Jen's mom asked.

Jen's mom never telephoned her, but if Jen did not call at regular intervals, Jen's mom would complain to Jen's dad, who would then send an email to Jen asking why she was ignoring her mother. The subject heading of these emails was “Your Mother.”

(Jen's mom became agitated, however, if Jen telephoned her too frequently. “Enough! I'm
fine,
” she'd say in lieu of greeting if one of Jen's calls followed another too closely. The acceptable interval between calls widened and narrowed at will.)

“Any news on work, you mean?” Jen asked. “Not just yet.”

“Could that Meg find you a job?”

Meg was a program director at the Bluff Foundation for Justice and Human Rights, a private behemoth so agelessly fortified by old money that its temporary hiring freeze was itself a metric of dire economic crisis.

“Meg has been really helpful,” Jen said. “But obviously I don't want to put it all on her to find me a job—”

“Fine, fine,” Jen's mom broke in. “Anyway.”

Jen never knew if her mother's conversational style was symptomatic of mere incuriosity or rather of an extreme wariness of any social transaction remotely resembling confrontation, which presumably included most exchanges of words. At cousins' weddings and sisters-in-law's baby showers, Jen watched with dismay as her mother attempted to mingle with people she'd known all their lives: arms folded in front of her as a shield, chin pulled defensively to her neck, poorly conditioned limbic system misinterpreting a niece's attempts to inquire about her protracted kitchen renovation for a passive-aggressive face-off between two opposing parties.

“Could that Pam help you?” Jen's mom asked.

Jen had been dating Jim for nearly two years before he ceased being
that Jim.

“That Pam always helps me, in her way,” Jen replied.

A few weeks into her post-Federloss unemployment, Jen had started spending several afternoons a week at Pam's place. This pleased Jim, because Pam and her boyfriend, Paulo, were artists, and Jim thought of Jen as an artist, too.

“I was never
an artist,
” Jen would say. “I never
made art.
I drew things. I painted things. People.”

Pam and Paulo rented a cheap cavernous space in Greenpoint close to Newtown Creek, the site of one of the largest underground oil-and-chemical spills in history. On the walk from the G train stop to Pam's, Jen could never discount the possibility that her air sacs were swelling with some kind of fine fecal mist of gamma rays and chlorinated benzene byproducts, a carcinogenic ambience that Pam enthusiastically leveraged in last-minute rental negotiations with their absentee landlord. The front half of Pam and Paulo's space, which was about the size of Jen and Jim's entire apartment and shared a wall with a tavern, served as a studio by day and a gallery by night. Paulo had divided the back half into four narrow, windowless “rooms” created by particleboard partitions that stopped two feet short of the ceilings. Pam and Paulo slept in the largest partition, while a transient cast of roommates—tourists and students and the hollow-eyed recent survivors of imploded live-in relationships—took up monthly or quarterly residence in the other three spaces.

In the front studio, the drafting table, the kitchen table, and a futon relocated from the master bedroom were currently paired with miniature towers made of stools, pillows, and stacks of oversized books. Each stack was jerry-rigged to support Pam's leg, which had been crushed in a hit-and-run the previous year when a delivery van made a squealing right turn and threw her from her bicycle. Three operations and hundreds of hours of physical therapy later, the leg—which looked perfectly normal at first glance, and both shiny-swollen and shrunken at second glance—was still grinding and wheezing in its sockets. Jen imagined that Pam's powers of concentration were such that she'd occasionally see a drop of perspiration splat onto her laptop, and finally notice that the usual dull ache in her leg had escalated into jangling agony, thudding away at the double-glazed windows of Pam's flow state as her conscious mind deliquesced into oneness with Final Cut Pro or the Artnet biography of Sigmar Polke.

Jen and Pam had met their freshman year of college in a drawing class, where Pam had been impressed by Jen's hyperrealistic technical abilities and Jen had been enchanted by Pam's impassive terribleness—her wobbly, allegedly one-point-perspective
Still Life with Cranberry Vodka and Froot Loops
had so appalled their drawing teacher that he accused Pam of exploiting his class for another taught by his ex-girlfriend, “Kitsch-Kraft and Outsider Art: Toward a Deliberately Bad Avant-Garde.”

Later, though, Jen experienced the growing recognition that Pam was “a real artist.”

“You're like a
real artist,
” Jen blurted out drunkenly to Pam the first time they went to a party together.

Jen's talent-spotting acumen was confirmed their junior year, when Pam started convincing people to allow her to take their picture first thing in the morning, before they got out of bed, before they even fully awakened. Pam would then mock up the unairbrushed, usually unflattering photograph as a faux magazine cover, billboard, or author's jacket photo. The photos, taken in weak dawn light, were dusky, pearly, sometimes slightly out of focus; the best ones looked like secrets or accidents, or secret accidents. Pam called the pictures Wakes.

She started with the people who spent the most time under the roof of the drafty, creaking, badly wired hundred-year-old Colonial house that Meg, Pam, and Jen rented four blocks from campus. The first Wake, of Pam's then-boyfriend, looked like a seventies rock star's mug shot: alarmed and defiant, dazed and hairy. In the second Wake, a puffy-faced Jen ducks bashfully away from the camera; her face is captured in three-quarter profile, her hand blurring upward to check for traces of dried sleep.

The third Wake, of Meg—who was Jen's friend first, whom Jen had introduced to Pam at the “You're a real artist” party, which it often occurred to Jen to point out, though she never did—was the revelation. A double gash of mattress marks swooped across Meg's right cheekbone like a panther's caress. Her hair, which usually fell in computer-generated gentle waves, swirled and crashed around her heart-shaped face. Meg's lips fell slightly open; the strap of her tank top wiped sideward, tracing the curve of her shoulder. Instead of ducking away from Pam's camera, the half-asleep Meg leaned into it sensuously, chin forward, eyes heavy and intrigued.

Pam knew what she had. She blew up the picture big enough to swallow an entire gallery wall at her end-of-semester show. It was a stunning photograph, raw and gorgeous and discomfiting in its intimacy. That it was a stunning photograph of
Meg
—old-money Meg, moderately-famous-last-name-demi-campus-celebrity Meg, Phi Beta Kappa–as-a-first-semester-junior Meg, paragon-of-the-public-service-community Meg—made the photograph an event.

Now everyone wanted a Wake. The campus weekly kept an issue-to-issue tally of everyone who had a Wake and should have a Wake and desperately wanted a Wake, and also a regularly updated online ranking of existing Wakes, with Meg permanently and ceremoniously lodged at No. 1. Pam won a grant to create a single-edition magazine composed of nothing but Wakes. Clem Bernadine, editor of the campus humor magazine, submitted his shirtless and chaotic Wake as his yearbook picture. Joseph Potter, a beloved tenured professor of theater studies, used his one-eye-closed Wake as the jacket photo to his book
Dre Gardens: Hip-Hop, New Money, and the Performance of the Self.

Pam was now intuitively aware of her genius for talking people into doing things that were not ostensibly in their interest. For her senior thesis project, she convinced the university to allow her to change the signage on several sites around campus to verbatim transcriptions of graffiti from the men's bathrooms at the art school. Instead of directions to the buttery or the law library or the Women's Center, visitors during Parents' Weekend puzzled over commands and epigraphs such as
STOP DRAWING D'S AND DRAW BIG TITTIES INSTEAD
and
SILENCE IS GOLDEN BUT DUCT TAPE IS SILVER
and
SINCE WRITING ON TOILET WALLS IS DONE NEITHER FOR CRITICAL ACCLAIM NOR FINANCIAL SUCCESS, IT IS THE PUREST FORM OF ART—DISCUSS
, all presented in the university's elegant house typography, Demimonde Condensed Blackletter. (The sign outside the university art gallery's parking lot, which temporarily read
FIRST-YEAR BOYS ARE TOY BOYS
, may have caused the most consternation.) Pam also kitted out a trailer outside the art school as a fake “visitor's center” and filled it with mock posters and brochures advertising the art school. The promotional materials glowed with wholesome and bright-eyed ambassadors of the future of contemporary art, lounging on the campus green or peering rapturously at the art gallery's resident Pollock, their thoughts and hopes amplified in Demimonde Condensed Blackletter captions along the lines of
DON'T JUDGE ME I ONLY NEEDED MONEY FOR COLLEGE
or
I HAD SEX WITH YR TRASH CAN IT WAS OKAY
.

“I heard some guy call it ‘interventionist art,' but that made you sound like a substance-abuse counselor,” Meg said to Pam at her senior thesis show. Meg was looking over Jen's shoulder at a thick, glossy “informational packet” that Jen held in her hands, titled
STOP WRITING YOUR NAMES HERE HALF THESE PEOPLE ARE BROKEN UP ALREADY
.

“Arbitration,” Pam said. “If anyone asks, say this is arbitration.”

Pam had continued in this arbitrative vein for the entirety of her postcollegiate art career, year after year producing little that was sellable and less that was sold, and occasionally running into a spot of potentially career-enhancing trouble, as when she used grant money to purchase a month's lease on a storefront next to a real estate agent's office, painted the storefront to appear indistinguishable from the real estate agent's, and posted property advertisements in the window that looked identical to the real estate agent's—that is, until you looked closer at the descriptions, which were written in Pam's recognizably run-on polemical style:

Panache! This dazzling new build destroyed three neoclassical buildings and a park and a dog run Now it's a fifteen-story tower block Steps from Boutiques Bathed in Light No one making less than 500% of the median local income can afford a studio here Turnkey terrific!!!

“It's a commentary on gentrification,” Pam explained to Meg, whom Pam called for legal advice after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the adjoining real estate agent.

To support herself, Pam presumably chugged along on enough one-off adjunct teaching jobs, freelance writing assignments, guest-curator gigs, and other odds and ends to get by. Pam and Jen never spoke of money, and to judge by the frigid winter temperatures in Pam's quasi-legal abode, the smelly-damp bathroom she shared with a revolving door of lost-seeming strangers, and her static college-era wardrobe of holey leggings and faded Champion sweatshirts, Pam didn't have any.

“Do you want to know how I know I'm not an artist?” Jen asked Jim one night, after coming home from one of her unemployed afternoons at Pam's. “Because I couldn't live like Pam lives.”

“I doubt Pam needs you feeling sorry for her,” Jim said.

“I don't feel sorry for her!” Jen said. “I feel sorry for me!”

“Pam and Paulo are doing fine,” Jim said. “I liked that show they did about gentrification.”

“That was Pam's show,” Jen said. Paulo made large, gooey clumps of things that gelatinized in her memory. He'd tie together dolls, tree branches, and tire irons into a stakelike arrangement and then pour gallons of red paint over it, or lace stacks of 1980s-era issues of
The Economist
with strings of Christmas lights that were also looped around the necks of vintage lawn jockeys sourced on eBay, and then pour gallons of resin over it.

“And I know Pam and Paulo are doing fine!” Jen continued. “That's my whole point! I would
not
be fine, if I were them. But they are fine. More than fine.”

Pam had enlisted Jen's collaboration on her current work-in-progress, although Pam was reticent about its exact nature. All Jen could glean about the project was her own role in it: to paint a series of five-by-four-foot portraits based on the grinning, healthy specimens in the promotional materials for WellnessSolutions, a health insurance company.

“So you just have to make sure you have a senior citizen, a new mom, and an apple-cheeked teen,” Pam told Jen, handing over the WellnessSolutions brochures, “and they should look
maniacally happy.
”

In college, Jen painted larger-than-life photorealistic portraits of classmates, teachers, and celebrities: She projected a photograph onto a canvas, traced the main features in pencil, then painted in oil over the tracings. The aspirations toward extreme verisimilitude owed largely to an indelible nightmare Jen had as a freshman in which her first-year painting class was violently purged and repopulated by the blurry wraiths of Gerhard Richter's Baader-Meinhof series. Though she would have admitted this to no one, Jen suspected that she had allowed her portraits to become so big because the ideas they contained were so small. Perhaps they didn't even contain ideas so much as self-projections, as wobbly and coarse-grained as the mechanical projections that propped up her technique. There was an element of self-portraiture in the grinning nervousness, the anxiety of obedience, that could start creeping around her subjects' mouths in the transition from photograph to canvas, in the obsequious gleam of the eye that might twinkle in the canvas but not in the photograph.

In Jen's mind, she appropriated the outside of her work from photographs and the inside of her work from herself, and others mistook this for creativity.

“You are a fabulous copyist, Jen,” said one of her professors. For that class, Jen had painted identical twins in the Diane Arbus mode, and titled the work
Biological Inheritance.

“You are an
astonishing
technician,” said another of her professors. “But what else are you?”

“I reproduce things,” Jen would say. “Things that already exist. I don't even reproduce things—I reproduce reproductions of things.”

“Jen saying her art is not art is the most Jen thing that ever happened,” Meg would say.

“Jen, why do you make art if it's not art?” Pam asked.

“Pam just made you into a koan, Jen,” Meg said.

“Why is your whole life a lie, Jen?” Pam asked.

“Hey, Pam,” Meg said, “do you think we could get Jen to put herself down about how much she puts herself down?”

“Hey, Meg,” Pam said, “if a snake ate its own tail, do you think Jen would apologize to the snake?”