Martin Sloane (3 page)

I took up racquet sports in the hope of meeting people on my own, and learned that panting and sweating was not the way to do it. Then Molly decided to sign us up for sculpture in our second semester. Mrs. Borovin, our teacher, arranged for the class to see a sculpture expo in Toronto that March. I’d never been to Toronto, even though it was only five hours north of Ovid, and I’d hardly even had a sense of it or Canada. The country above us always struck me as storage space, like an attic, so the revelation that there was art there was interesting, although odd. I have no memory of crossing the border in our old school bus, nor of coming into the city. I don’t remember the March weather, nor the look of the people, or even what the buildings looked like.

The art was boring. Blotchy clay sculptures of men in motion, or women with breasts so heavy the statues had to be braced to the gallery wall with strips of metal. Mrs. Borovin stood us in front of one dull bronze or miasmic fabric draped over steel mesh after another, and talked the class through the basics of three dimensions. I drifted away, and eventually into the street. There was another gallery beside, smaller, with only a couple of what appeared to be display cases on the walls. I was surprised to find that the cases themselves were the artworks. Wood-framed boxes with glass fronts behind which some antic arrangement of things gave off a feeling of intense nostalgia. I had never felt anything from art (so I realized then): I was more interested in the brush stroke, the way the canvas was stapled to the frame, or the evidence of a pencil line erased. But here, I was distracted toward another place. The boxes contained bereft little worlds — a sand-filled teacup, a broken clay doll. One (it appeared empty) had a little drawer at the bottom with a jewelled handle, which, when you opened it, revealed a handwritten story pasted to the bottom.
For the rest of time,
it said,
it was as if the little place was getting smaller and smaller, although they could still see it, a dot on the horizon
. I closed the drawer and looked again into the space above it, and finally saw, against a backdrop of greyish blue, an almost infinitesimally small pebble with an even smaller pine tree — carved out of the broad base of a single pine needle — standing on it. Another box, embedded right into the wall, featured a front made out of wooden slats, and peering past them, I could see the backs of four birds — two large, two small — in a miniature living room. It took me a moment to realize I was looking down onto them from above, like a god in their ceiling, their smooth brown forms among the furniture a family settling down after supper. Another had a blue curtain drawn shut over the contents, with handles coming out of the top of the box to open them, but I was afraid to touch it.

The one I found hardest to turn from was a box on a pedestal, made of glass on all sides, which was filled with a viscous blue fibre draping down from the top. It was difficult to see what was suspended in the middle of the space, and I had to stand for a while on each of the four sides, collecting the visual information, until it resolved into something identifiable. It was a mermaid. Her body hung limply curved, her hair draped on each side of her face, loosely falling into the depths, and her tail curving on the other. I startled when I realized what it was. It was called “Sleep” and I was overcome with greed. I wanted it like nothing I had ever wanted before. It was like the way a lover hungers for the body of the one desired: I wanted no one else to ever see it again except for me.

I crept over to the man at the desk, palms sweating, heart racing, and I told him I wanted to buy it. He folded his newspaper and looked at me over it.

I don’t think you can afford it. How old are you, anyway?

What does that have to do with it?

You can’t just go buying artwork like it’s candy.

If I can afford it, it doesn’t matter why I’m buying it.

Tell me how old you are.

Twenty, I lied.

Well, come back when you’re forty, and we’ll talk. He returned to his newspaper. I got out my purse and unzipped the billfold. I had ninety dollars. I took the money out and went over to his desk, slapping it down under my palm.

That’s all I have. You tell me what I have to do.

I already told you. Not for sale.

I’m leaving a deposit.

Look, honey, you’re not even old enough to vote where you come from —

Excuse me, I said, but the voting age is eighteen where
I come from,
and I very much plan on voting in the next election, thank you very much.

Why don’t you just take a program and vamoose, he said. I’ll sign it for you if it makes you feel any better.

Why? Are you the artist?

No, I’m the gallery owner. It’s as close as you’ll get. He shoved the money back across the desk.

I took one of the programs, then saw the show’s manifest tacked to the wall beside the door and took it down. There were a couple of red dots beside some of the pieces, but “Sleep” was still unsold.

This says “Sleep” is $180. Ninety’s enough to hold it, isn’t it?

That’s a typo. It’s $1,800.

I stood in the doorway staring at him, then took the money out again, folded it, and wedged it into a space between the doorjamb and the wall. That’s my deposit. I’ll come back with the rest. And I’m taking this. I waved the manifest at him as proof.

Daringly, so I thought, I wrote to the artist when I returned to Bard. I told him about my experience looking at his art, plying my adjectives, and I asked him to wrest, if he could, the thing I loved from Mr. Sullivan. I suggested perhaps he needed someone not quite so allergic to money representing his work. But Martin surprised me by writing back and returning my deposit, saying it was he, not Sullivan, who’d asked the gallery not to allow any sales to individuals. He was skittish about private persons owning his work; he wanted to be able to visit it.

This admission lit a fire under me, and I wrote him to say I still wanted “Sleep,” and he could come any time and see it. He didn’t bend, but he continued to write me, and over the period of a year or so, I gradually forgot about the artwork that had so moved me and began to want to see
him
. So I began to machinate a way for him to come to Bard. I asked him to send some slides of his artworks, and I approached a pliable curator at one of the campus galleries with them, a wraithlike woman named Mrs. Vankoughnet. It was as easy as that.

Done
, I wrote back to him in October of 1985,

You’re due next April. Now we should talk about where you’ll stay. There are a couple little hotels just outside campus, but since you’ll probably only come for the opening, why don’t you stay in my dorm? Obreshkove’s an open easygoing place and you have a nice view of the field and some big metal sculptures. My roommate says she’ll probably go visit her parents that weekend, anyway. You’d like Molly, but she’s quite a boy magnet. I showed her the slides, by the way, and she likes your work too, so I’m sure she’d jump at the chance of having a great Canadian artist sleep in her bed.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m single. I just want you to know in case your wife is anxious. What I mean is, I don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable with the fact that it’s a single college junior setting all this up. Anyway, I think people should be up front. Is this too personal? So far, I should say, you’ve been very adept at appearing quite personal in your letters but upon rereading them, I can see you’ve actually told me nothing about yourself. Is there anything to tell? I remember reading Flaubert somewhere saying that you had to be orderly in your life so you could be violently original in your work. If he’s right, you must be as interesting as sawmill gravy in person. Still, why don’t you tell me the basics? The name of your wife and children, for starters? (If you have any …)

My uncle says I am being a mover and a shaker by getting you down to Bard. Is that how you see it? Are Canadians like the English? If so, I’ve been pretty pushy in terms of how you guys are.

God I really like you. I was just realizing this. Your letters get better when I reread them. I hope you will let me take you to my favourite cake and tea joint when you get to Bard (although this place is in Rhinebeck — a little hole-in-the-wall of a town near here) and we will talk about all kinds of things. Last time you wrote you said that you thought collage was a nostalgic impulse. I think you’re wrong. Can we argue about this? Kurt Schwitters would laugh up his sleeve at you for saying that. His collages are like writing letters. Letters are collages, aren’t they? Educations are collages, too. That’s why they call it college har har. The café I’m taking you to is called the Blue Chair. They have chocolate chip cookies as thick as your fist. Write me soon.

After crossing the field in a small army of hands, the boxes made it safely to the gallery. Mrs. Vankoughnet seemed impressed with Martin and shook his hand as if he were already important. She gave him some documents describing the gallery’s obligations to him, and vice versa, but he wasn’t interested in them, and two days later, when it turned out he was to have signed them, they’d vanished.

Bringing Martin to campus gave me a kind of celebrity that had previously been Molly’s, and I basked in it. For the rest of the first afternoon, fellow students from the fine arts programs followed us around like trained geese, asking Martin questions in little embarrassed voices. No one knew how famous or unknown he was (the truth was closer to the latter), but the fact of his being from another country made him authentic in the eyes of students who’d grown up in cow-towns all around the state. They formed a semicircle around him, drifting back as we walked through them.

Where do you get your ideas?

I don’t think I have ideas, Martin said, and everyone laughed, as if he were joking. I don’t, he repeated.

But, said one of the girls, there
are
ideas in your art.

I don’t do it on purpose, said Martin.

Are you a surrealist? said a tall printmaker with a shaved head.

No.

Would a surrealist
admit
he was a surrealist?

Yes.

You idiot, said someone else. It was the Dadaists who went around saying they weren’t anything.

The little crowd started buzzing. No, said someone else, they admitted they were Dadaists! They all pretended they didn’t care about the art world, but they were
soooo
big on making sure everyone spelled “Dada” right.

Go ahead, spell “Dada” wrong for me.

I pulled Martin away from them. Let’s have supper somewhere else, I said.

I want one of those cookies you’ve talked about.

We left the freshmen behind, waving their arms.

I made him wait outside the dorm while I changed, then got into a borrowed car in an agonized-over dress that rode up every time I clutched. Keep your hands off, I said, then pointed to the gearshift to clear up any confusion. I’d borrowed a car from a friend who hadn’t witnessed the fate of the other one. Martin sat quietly in the passenger seat, his hands folded over his legs. For the first time since he’d arrived, there was an uncomfortable silence, an appropriate silence for two people who hardly knew each other, and the feeling that I was out of my element briefly took hold. Then I nervously started rambling, shooting in the dark for subject matter that he might want to add his two cents to: the benefits of small schools over large ones; the problems of teenage pregnancy; some thoughts on the differences between Americans and Canadians in which some ideas of the colour of currencies were forwarded, and finally, a short tractate on cows and weather.

Finally he said, I’m not actually Canadian, as you know. I still think of myself as Irish.

You don’t sound Irish, though. I mean you don’t have an accent.

I was convinced of the importance of not having one when I was growing up in Montreal. But hiding it made me feel all the more Irish. Like a man who gets home from work and puts on a dress.

Huh? I said.

I just mean I wanted to fit in.

Did you speak French?

Seulement un peu.

I’ve always wanted to.

Funny, he said. That’s what they say up there too.

I took the turn for Rhinebeck, and we drove down the town’s little main street, with its churches and gas stations. This looks just like where I grew up, I said. A little blot with people living on either side. He looked through his window and nodded. How long ago did you leave Ireland?

Forty-five years, six months, fourteen days, and seven hours, he said, then turned to look at me. I must have been trying to keep a straight, sensitive composure and failing, because he laughed. It was around forty-five years ago. I was eleven, he said.

We went into Bella Notte and the waiter brought us a wine menu without carding me, so we ordered a bottle and toasted each other. The scent of the wine filled my head like a sound, and after a glass, my courage returned.

Let’s go back to this no-ideas idea, I said. You really think your work doesn’t
mean
anything?

Well, it must mean something, it’s just that I don’t think about it. I mean, it doesn’t matter to me.

But aren’t you interested in what people see in it?

No.

I tilted my head at him and narrowed my eyes. Okay, I challenge.

What?

It’s what you say in Scrabble when you think someone’s made up a word. That made him laugh, and he covered his mouth, muffling the sound. It was strange how he seemed at one moment completely open and the next was concealing everything. The laugh had the effect of looking like he’d been caught in a lie and I pointed an accusatory finger at him. Aha! So you just don’t want to talk about it.

Not so, he said. It’s just that if I was any good with words, I’d
put
it into words. But I’m not. So the way I feel is the way my work looks, and that’s its meaning, or as close as I can express it. And what other people think about it is, again, a step away from what it “means” because they’re describing something, and —

You’re no good with words.

Yes. He finally exhaled and looked down, smiling, and stared into his soup. He looked fantastic to me, sitting there as real as anything, with his almost-messy hair, his dark blue shirt open at the neck. Sometimes, if he turned just right, I’d see a flash of grey hair within his shirt. I felt like someone who’d suddenly come into more money than she knew what to do with, except it’s not easy to find a place to stash excess feeling. I was also acutely aware that many hours had now passed and I had yet to say the kind of stupid, uninformed thing that was probably inevitable. The wait was killing me. I said, I just want to let you know that I’m setting some kind of record here for not acting like an idiot. And you should probably, you know, make some allowance for me to put my foot in my mouth, or something.