Know Your Beholder: A Novel (33 page)

On May 5 I attended Harriet Gumm’s thesis show in a small, whitewashed student gallery in the Willis Clay Fine Arts Building. To put it mildly, it was a major step to venture this far from the house. As I prepared to leave, I was so nervous it felt like my sweat was sweating. My internal thermostat was going bananas. One minute I was freezing, the next I was having hot flashes like some menopausal housewife fanning herself in a supermarket checkout lane.

I decided against taking a Percocet. I wanted to do this straight.

It was the first time I’d taken my car out of the garage since December. For the past three years, since Lyman went to Florida, I’ve been driving his hand-me-down ’84 Olds 98 Regency Brougham sedan. It’s charcoal gray with whitewall tires. It has power steering and power windows. A fine leather interior. It smells exactly how a fine sedan with leather upholstery is supposed to smell: like success. Like an expensive set of golf clubs. It’s the quintessential accountant’s car. I wasn’t sure if the thing would even start, but it fired up on the first turn of the key.

To help me relax I put on an old Sade cassette. Sade Adu, Queen of Smooth Jazz, the Quiet Storm, the R&B Soft Rock Chanteuse Extraordinaire. Face like an El Greco painting. As a sixth grader with maybe seven pubic hairs between my thin, rubbery legs, when I wasn’t masturbating to Sade’s debut album cover for
Diamond Life
I was imagining us (Sade and me) having a secret tryst in some faraway place like Mozambique, riding bareback on a horse, our golden palomino cantering through the streets of Maputo, me seated behind my mysterious songstress, reaching up through her blouse, cupping her soft Nigerian breasts.

As reported on the news and indicated by what went down on my street, there was a bizarre and seemingly selective randomness to the tornado damage. I drove past the Dairy Queen on Water Avenue, and there were easily a dozen people lined up at the counter. It seemed to be in perfect condition. The Hardee’s, however, on the same side of the street, perhaps only five hundred feet away, was a pile of bricks and contorted conduit, with orange hazard tape and hurricane fencing enclosing the rubble.

The tornadoes wreaked very little havoc on the three-block-long Willis Clay campus. Apparently there was some water damage to a science building, which was caused by a ceiling sprinkler system getting triggered, but that was it.

At Harriet’s showing, cups of red wine and cubes of cheese were served. The artist herself was in high spirits, greeting her classmates and faculty members primly, with an outstretched hand. She had painted her nails with black polish, which brought out the ghostly pallor of her fingers and arms. Her hair looked especially ink black and glossy and her eyes were made-up hauntingly. She wore a black gown and a black veil, as if she were attending her own funeral.

I was half-expecting to see her family there, but no such luck. There was nary a Gumm to be found. I guess she is more alone in the world than I’d assumed. I figured she was one of those privileged girls from the North Shore of Chicago with a proud extended family; a blue-blooded country-club dynasty clad in ice-cream-colored Ralph Lauren, the men in Top-Siders and Nantucket reds, the women in tennis whites.

The strangest part of the night was being there with my fellow subjects, whom I had never met. As requested by Harriet, our creator, her five subjects (Jershawn, Markeif, Keith, Cozelle, and I) were also wearing black. Markeif, the most stylish, wore a black suit with a black shirt and black tie, as well as black patent leather shoes. Jershawn wore black jeans with a black knit shirt, through which you could see the segments of his impressive six-pack. Cozelle wore a long-sleeved black T-shirt featuring Biggie Smalls and black jeans so sagging and baggy it looked as if he was carrying several servings of oatmeal on or around his haunches. Big Keith wore a black porkpie hat and a black Adidas sweat suit with white stripes down the sides of the legs, à la early Run–DMC. I wore a pair of faded black corduroys that were actually pretty gray and a black Third Policeman T-shirt that we used to sell at our gigs. Together my fellow models and I could have been mistaken for some traveling R&B wedding band. I no doubt looked like their weed-smoking white-boy bus driver.

Centered on the white ceiling of the gallery, in black typewriter face, Harriet had stenciled the following phrase:

Harriet had given each subject his own narrative sequence. She hadn’t framed the works, but had simply attached them to the white walls with some sort of adhesive.

Keith and Markeif shared a wall, as did Jershawn and Cozelle.

I had a wall all to myself and I was pretty shocked at my narrative.

First of all, unlike the others, my collection was in full color. I’m not sure if this was intended to be some sort of comment (the white man always gets a little extra!), or if it was simply an organic part of Harriet’s process. I had been depicted, in succession, as a plantation owner who becomes an oil tycoon who becomes the owner of the Dallas Cowboys who becomes the president of the United States in blackface who becomes a clown who, later in life, in his geriatric twilight, becomes a gauzy-haired, sparsely bearded anorectic who’s been outfitted with a bionic penis and is again wearing blackface.

In the first picture I am a vigorously bearded, licentious antebellum plantation owner, bare-chested, slightly more fit than I truly am, with abdominal quadrants that would rival Jershawn’s, and am in the process of sexually exploiting a slave’s wife, presumably Big Keith’s, as he has been cast as the husband looking on from the shadows, barefoot and clad in a humiliating burlap pinafore, murder in his eyes. The sexual act is performed doggy-style, with my victim, a young, nubile slave woman, bent over a Louis XV fauteuil trimmed in gold leaf, facing the viewer, terror in her eyes, her hair lopsided as if it has just been violently snatched, while I, also facing the viewer, plow into her haunches with a wild-eyed look of depraved, insatiable glee.

As I was taking in the first of these fascinating horrors, Harriet sidled up and asked me if I approved of my narrative. She’d removed her veil, and her lips were so red and glossy they looked somehow fireproof.

I told her I was still absorbing it.

“It’s okay if you hate it,” she said.

I told her I didn’t hate it at all, that it was simply a lot to take in.

“You were a great subject,” she told me. “I enjoyed drawing you.” And with that she returned to her mingling.

I looked around the gallery. At this point, in addition to those of us wearing black, there were maybe a dozen others. Most of them were young students, with strange hair and odd, makeshift clothes. None of them was wearing black. There were also a few others, older, in their forties and fifties, who I assumed were faculty members. They were not wearing black either. It was starting to feel like a conspiracy, as if my four brothers and I were about to be cooked in some ill-fated African-American bouillabaisse with a pinch of white boy thrown in for good measure.

I closed my eyes and imagined the path from the Fine Arts Building to the parking lot, calculating the amount of time it would take me to get to my car. From there the ride home was maybe twelve minutes. Three stoplights. A handful of stop signs, followed by the two-mile stretch along Calendar Road.

But the truth is, I was doing okay and I returned to examining my narrative.

In the second picture I had been cast as an oil tycoon, wearing a charcoal-gray power suit, my beard curly, seemingly bronzed, my hair slicked back like Michael Douglas’s in the eighties, my skin healthy and aglow. I stand in the center of a dirt field, among a half-dozen or so oil derricks strangely reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower, my arms spread in a welcoming fashion, while Markeif and Cozelle—dressed in dingy coveralls, their faces dusty, their bodies racked with fatigue—tend to two of the derricks in the foreground. I sport a million-dollar smile, and behind me the sun is setting, casting violet and orange streaks across the horizon. The World of Oil is mine.

In the third picture I am the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. I am seated at a large ornate office desk with a Super Bowl trophy opulently displayed on a dais behind me. My hair, no longer slicked back, is slightly receding and has grayed in that distinguished, silvery way. Jershawn is also in my office, dressed in a Cowboys uniform, full pads and helmet, white cleats, striking a Heisman pose with a football tucked under his arm.

Next I am the president of the United States, standing in a desert landscape, shaking hands with a Middle Eastern diplomat in a large turban and gold sunglasses. I am wearing blackface and still have the beard. Behind us a McDonald’s is being erected, and beyond the McDonald’s, speckling the dunes, stretches a platoon of oil derricks, more spectacular than the previous ones, almost Seussian in their structural flourishes. To my right, arrayed in an impressive four-man formation, stand Secret Servicemen Jershawn, Cozelle, Big Keith, and Markeif, wearing dark suits, holstered sidearms, and sunglasses. My teeth look presidential, to say the least, in bright contrast with my blackface.

In the fifth picture I am removing my blackface and preparing to apply clown makeup. Seated at a vanity, I wear a big puffy red wig and a classic Bubbles the Clown costume, with long yellow goofball shoes. A small red tricycle is parked beside me. There are no other characters in the picture and I have no idea where it is supposed to be set. My beard is red like my wig. And I look like a fucking ass.

In the sixth and final picture I am a frail geriatric man, an octogenarian living on fumes, my hair gauzy, my beard wispy and intermittent. I stand at the sandy shore of some calm, cerulean body of water. My white cotton hospital garment has been pulled above my waist to reveal spindly bald legs and I am aiming a remote control at my erect penis, which is almost as large as one of my legs. Presumably, this is some sort of bionic, technologically enhanced penis, perhaps much like the one my father described Harley Dukes as having installed. To my left and slightly in the background, in the froth of the surf, Big Keith, cast as my driver, is poised in front of a white Ford Bronco, his arms crossed in front of his chest. In the backseat are a trio of buxom blond Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, their garishly made-up faces and swollen breasts pressed against the glass. The Bronco is dressed with red-white-and-blue celebratory bunting. Girandoles of fireworks are exploding in the sky above and reflecting down onto the surface of the water.

While I was taking in this final picture, Cozelle approached me.

“You the landlord dude,” he said.

“That’s me,” I said. “In the flesh.”

“Cozelle,” he said, offering his hand.

“Francis,” I replied, and we shook in a brotherly manner.

Cozelle scanned the pictures. He must have sensed me contracting, wishing I could disappear. “You straight?” he asked.

I grasped, after a half-second misfire, that he was asking if I was okay, not inquiring about my sexual orientation. “I feel like if I turn around,” I said, “the entire Willis Clay women’s volleyball team will be pointing at my dick. Or tweeting about it on their smartphones.”

“It ain’t nothin’ really,” Cozelle said. “She’s makin’ fools of all of us in one way or another. Them volleyball bitches is all lesbians anyway.”

I laughed so hard I almost snotted into my beard.

Cozelle then added that Harriet had defended her thesis with honors.

I told him I was glad to be part of such a great undergraduate success.

“You can’t deny the girl can draw,” Cozelle said, and then he joined Jershawn and Markeif on the other side of the room, where the two of them were speaking to a couple of young white female students. Markeif was holding the bottom of his tie, articulating with great charm and fervor the difference between the blacks featured on the tie and his dress shirt.

“This is midnight black,” he said of the tie. “The shirt’s straight-up ebony.”

Jershawn added, “Shit is mad subtle, yo.”

Big Keith was smiling incessantly and eating many cubes of cheese.

I found Harriet.

“You’re sweating,” she said. “You need a drink”—and she grabbed a clear plastic tumbler of red wine from a nearby skirted table.

I thanked her and asked what was next for her. I figured she had plans to move to the Chicago area or maybe even New York, a city with a thriving art scene. But she told me that she was graduating next week and planned on staying in Pollard.

“I have a good thing going here,” she added. “I’d like to renew my lease.”

I told her that this wouldn’t be a problem. Her eyes wandered around the gallery. She was feeling a bit trapped, I could tell, but before I let her return to her schmoozing I had to ask her something. “So tell me what happens to the little girl in the forest,” I said.

She replied that she hadn’t finished that project yet.

I asked if the little girl was still lost.

“She’s still definitely lost,” Harriet said.

“By the way, you only gave me six pictures,” I said. “The others got seven.”

“You jealous?” she teased.

I asked her if that was intended.

“There’s a reason for everything,” she said, elliptically.

The room was filling up. Five or six people were gathered around the picture in which I was portrayed as a Yodafied octogenarian with a bionic erection. One of them—a young woman with pink hair—pointed at me, then turned back to the wall.

“You’re a regular campus celebrity,” Harriet said, before drifting away.

I remained at her showing for maybe another hour. I ate cheese and drank wine and managed to stay loose. I probed my bad molar with my tongue and wiggled my jaw. Eventually I settled into my role of Art Model in Black with a kind of forced insouciance.

Toward the end, a female student approached me—the one with pink hair who’d pointed at me. She had a nose ring so small I initially thought it was a piece of glitter stuck to her nostril. She could’ve passed for a young Ian Curtis from Joy Division.