LYLE’S MOST RECENT BOOK,
Neo This, Neo That: The Rise and Fall of Contemporary Painting
, had become, to his surprise, a big success. He had been invited to lecture to emerging artists at Skowhegan, an artists’ colony in Maine: two days, two lectures, two critiques. After his first lecture, wherein he basically said that to paint without acknowledging that painting was a moribund art form was to deceive oneself, and art produced in self-deception was pointless, he was led through the painting barns and sheds, where the young artists stood about like cows, staring at him, daring him to speak. He began to think he might be murdered while he was there. His lecture the second day was to have been a continuation of the first: a sort of highlights of recent self-deceptive and indulgent painting. But only one person showed up the next
morning: the young man who was scheduled to drive him to the airport at the lecture’s conclusion. He was being boycotted. This fact seemed not to bother the people in charge; they thought his presence there had been a good catalyst for discussion. So Lyle got in the car with the driver, who was named Robert, and they drove an hour through the gloomy wilds of Maine in silence. Lyle was hovering on the border of sleep when the driver spoke.
“What?” Lyle asked.
“Your lecture,” Robert said. “The one you were going to give today. What was it about?”
“Oh,” said Lyle. “More of the same vitriol. About the curse of abstraction.”
“Abstraction is a curse?” asked Robert.
“Yes,” said Lyle, “finally. And I don’t mean just in painting. I mean in all the arts. In literature and music. Perhaps not in dance, because of Balanchine. His genius allowed abstraction to reinvigorate the art. But in all the other disciplines abstraction has proved a dead end. A wall that artists have been beating their poor heads against for the better part of this century. I think if painting—indeed, if art in general—is to survive, let alone matter, it must become reconnected to life as we live it.”
“Who’s we?”
“People,” said Lyle. “The man—or woman—in the street. Painting can’t be just for painters. That’s the problem with music. When any art form becomes a dialogue of artists talking to themselves, it loses its—well, it loses the thing that makes it vital. That connects it to the world.”
“You don’t think it is?” asked Robert.
“Not even remotely,” said Lyle.
“Perhaps the failure is on your part,” said Robert.
“What do you mean by that?”
Robert shrugged. “I mean maybe you’re not connected to the life that people are painting about Maybe you don’t approach it with the right experience, and attitude.”
“I don’t subscribe to that notion,” said Lyle.
“What notion?”
“That I, as the viewer, am in any way responsible for the work’s failure or success. I think that is a terrible notion that abstraction, because of its deficiencies, has introduced to the world of art. I bring nothing to a painting. The job of the painting is to bring something to me.”
“Do you like painting?” asked Robert.
“Of course I like painting. I like good painting.”
“And what do you think is a good painting?”
“A painting I can bear to look at for more than five seconds.”
“Only five seconds? That’s all?”
“Well, you know what I mean. Five minutes, then. You’re a painter, I presume?”
“Yes,” said Robert. “You saw my paintings yesterday. At your crit.”
“I don’t remember. What did I say about them?”
“Nothing,” said Robert. “You sort of glided by and nodded. Like the queen.”
“That probably means they’re good. It’s the good ones I nod at. What do you paint?”
“Landscapes, mostly,” said Robert. “Contemporary landscapes.”
“Well, that sounds harmless enough.”
“You think of art in terms of its ability to inflict harm?”
“No,” said Lyle. “Of course not. Why are young people nowadays so literal?”
“I don’t know,” said Robert. “Ask a young person.”
Lyle looked at Robert, who was looking at the road unfurling itself in front of them. “I’m in an awful mood, aren’t I?” he said. “I’m sorry. This weekend was just a bit unnerving.”
Robert did not reply.
“Do you like it at Skowhegan?”
“I like being able to paint all day. To have the time to be an artist. Or pretend to be one. I don’t have that luxury in New York.”
“Why not?”
Robert shrugged. “I can’t afford it.”
“If you really are an artist, you can’t not afford it,” said Lyle.
“Thanks,” said Robert. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I meant that to be encouraging,” said Lyle. “Actually, I admire you very much. Trying to be an artist. To be painting now, at this point in time. It takes courage. To be a painter, to spend time making paintings, to think you can paint something that matters, that takes courage.”
Robert did not reply. Lyle looked out the window. They were on a highway now, and it no longer looked like Maine. They could have been anywhere. They continued in silence, and arrived, finally, at the airport.
“We’re early,” said Lyle. “I suppose I’ll get some lunch. Would you care to join me?”
To his surprise, Robert did. They had a not unpleasant lunch in the awful restaurant at the airport. Lyle drank three glasses of wine and got a little drunk and gave Robert his phone number and told him to call him when he returned to New York. To his surprise, Robert did.
They went to the movies one evening in July, and had dinner, afterward, in the garden of a restaurant.
“So,” said Lyle, “how is the painting going?”
“It’s not,” said Robert. “I’ve had to stop.”
“Why?”
“I lost my studio. Actually, it wasn’t really mine.”
“Whose was it?”
“This friend of mine. He went to Barcelona for the year and was letting me use it. But it turns out he wasn’t paying the rent. When I got back from Skowhegan the locks had been changed.”
“Well, can’t you pay the rent?”
“No,” said Robert.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have the money. I can barely afford my apartment. In fact, I can’t.”
“I know a studio you could use,” said Lyle.
“Really? Where?”
“Well, it’s not really a studio. But it could be. How big is your work?”
“Not big.”
“Well, I have a room in my house that’s empty. It would make a nice studio. You could use that, if you’d like.”
“You have a house?”
“A brownstone,” said Lyle. “On Bank Street. It’s stupid to have the room go to waste. Why don’t you come have a look?”
“Tonight?” asked Robert.
“Well, sometime,” said Lyle. He realized Robert assumed the studio was simply a pretext for luring him back to the apartment. He thinks I want to seduce him, thought Lyle. How pathetic I must seem. Yet this realization did not stop him from saying, “What about tomorrow night?”
“I work tomorrow night,” said Robert.
“Then what about Wednesday?”
“O.K.,” said Robert. “If you’re sure.”
“Yes,” said Lyle. “I’m sure.”
On the way home Lyle wondered if he did perhaps want to seduce Robert. It was hard to discern, for sex was a subject, like geometry, that Lyle had once learned and now assumed he’d forgotten. Occasionally Lyle masturbated, quickly and dispassionately, as if he were servicing a car. But his sense of desire was gone, an amputated limb, a vague, sometimes achy memory, suggested rather than felt. But Robert’s intimation that Lyle was interested in—and perhaps capable of—seduction made him feel less sure about what he did not presumably desire. It made him nervous, and all Wednesday, waiting for Robert to come, he felt a little anxious. He remembered Robert’s face during the movie. It was like something drawn with luminous chalk in the dark, serene and engaged. Robert had small, beautiful, intensely colored features: dark black eyes that seemed perpetually surprised and alert, surrounded by their just-washed whiteness; thin dark lips pulled taut across fine white teeth. Beautiful faces usually become closed with awareness of their beauty, but Robert’s was not. His face was like a gift he had not yet learned to withhold.
While he waited for Robert, Lyle decided to clean out Tony’s study a bit, or at least have a look at it. Of all the rooms in the house, this had been the one that had been solely Tony’s. Lyle had entered it rarely while Tony was alive and only once since his death. He stood outside the closed door for a moment. He wasn’t sure what he expected to encounter inside: cobwebs and mold wouldn’t have surprised him. But of course everything was as it had been, only dustier.
Lyle sat down at the desk. There was a pale green Post-it stuck to the blotter with the address of a hotel in Buenos Aires. Tony had had a successful career writing travel articles for magazines. There had been talk about selecting some of his “better” pieces and printing them, elegantly, as a memorial. Lyle was supposedly editing it, but so far he had done nothing. He began to sort through the piles of magazines that were stacked about the room, separating the ones to which Tony had contributed from the ones to which he had not. But he did not progress far, for he began to reread Tony’s articles, trying to find in the familiar and trivial words some new, subliminal meanings. Lyle felt there must be things he did not know about Tony. Of course there were things he did not know about Tony, but while Tony was living, it did not seem that way. Tony had always seemed easy and uncomplicated—a little shallow. Lyle had thought the mourning of him would be intense, simple, therapeutic. But it was not: it lingered, uncooperative. Lyle thought the character of mourning should suit the object rather than the subject. And his mourning did not suit Tony.
Lyle read until it got too dark to read. When he tried to turn on the lamp, nothing happened. The bulb was dead. He sat for a while longer, not reading, while the darkness completed itself. Robert was supposed to come by at seven o’clock. Lyle knew it was later than that, but he did not look at his watch, because he did not want to know how late it was, how late it was getting. He did not want to know how certainly Robert was not coming. He sat there in the dark feeling a bitter disappointment fill him, slowly. Or it was not something filling him—it was something going away. Leaking. He realized how buoyed with hope and expectation he had been these last few days: he had thought his life might finally be about to change. How naïve I was, he thought, and how stupid. My life is not going to change. He felt sunk again
in the deep center of his sadness, as if he had made no progress in his mourning of Tony. Lyle had thought mourning would progress mathematically, a gradual but perpetual diminution of sadness: a slow, sure journey. One left the beloved city and watched it shrink in the distance until it disappeared, gone but remembered, faintly and fondly. But Lyle’s journey was not like that: he found himself again and again clutching the closed gates of the empty city.
He looked at his watch. It was twenty past nine.
He went out to dinner to a not-very-good and consequently uncrowded Chinese restaurant around the corner. He had never been there with Tony but went there often, now, alone, and the people were nice to him. It was the kind of restaurant frequented almost exclusively by solo diners; hushed and dim and expectant, like a waiting room, where one could feel I am not really here, this is not my destination, I am only passing through. I am on my way somewhere else and there I will not be alone.
Lyle ordered a martini and sat drinking it. Across the street, he could see the corner of an apartment building, and he noticed that between the second and third floors a frieze of deep blue and gold mosaics decorated the stucco wall. He had never noticed them before, and could not understand what they were doing on such a nondescript, ugly building. He sat and looked at them. No one ever saw them, he was sure; they were at such an odd height. He looked at them and wished he could somehow let them know they were being looked at. The human effort to create beauty suddenly seemed to him useless and pathetic, and the pathos of it, as augmented by his almost-finished martini, was bottomless and overwhelming.
I need to change my life, he thought. It is unbearable. He was
about to cry, but was saved from such embarrassment by the arrival of his dinner, which he heard approaching. The food at this restaurant was all served loudly sizzling, as if the drama of its presentation compensated for its mediocrity.
He was back in his own study, reading an article Tony had written about the carnival in Rio—no subliminal messages there—when the doorbell rang. He looked at his watch: it was a little past midnight. He decided to ignore it, but he found his concentration disturbed, so after a few minutes he went into the front bedroom and looked out the window toward the stoop. Robert stood at the top of the steps, looking down at the street. He was dressed very simply in black pants and a white dress shirt. He stood there a while, and then turned around and approached the buzzer, which he studied instead of pressing. Then he stepped back and looked up at the windows, and saw Lyle.