Authors: Mark Nykanen
I severed the head of each green figure with a long serrated kitchen knife, perfect for cutting crispy baguettes and alginate necks, and carefully laid them aside. I’d love to have Ring Ding see them. The detail is exquisite. I’d even contemplated having him help me build the molds. I was taken with the idea of a newsman, even an erstwhile newsman, laying his eyes and hands on the biggest story in art history, and not knowing it. But I have come to accept that it would be far too risky, and that I’ll have to pass on this particular perversity, however grand the reward to me personally. Even more tempting would be casting their faces with him, especially because he had the temerity to dredge up the only criticism that’s ever dogged me: to wit, that I can’t “do” faces.
Only a few second-rate writers have carped about this, and I know I should let it lie, but it annoys me unceasingly. The faces for the entire series are forged wholly from my hands and imagination. That these extraordinary creations, the beneficiaries of my artistic touch—the highest honor of all—should have to bear the only criticism of note, is a wound that will not heal.
The real faces, the ones I actually peel from my subjects, have given rise to my great collection of masks, the ones that will remain hidden until my death. But I’m about to make an exception for Ring Ding. I’m going to show him real faces in real horror. I fear that if I don’t, I will have to endure a replay of all that useless carping in a book (bad enough when disparagement, thoroughly undeserved, appears in an art journal).
It’s a safe exception, completely devoid of risk. I will use the real faces from
Family Planning #2
, a family from Dover, Maryland. No one will remember them. No one ever did (no one of note). And no one but Ring Ding will see them anyway; there was never a single news report about their disappearance to trigger even his dim memory. Not a one. Can you imagine? It was as if they never existed. But in many ways it was predictable, and the reason was so simple, so obvious. Why? To hear the answer is like solving a riddle: they were black! Blacks, I might add, who were eager to let me visit my cherished “childhood home.” I rather suspect that they saw a white man at their door making this request as something of a pathetic vindication of their own rise from whatever squalor their ancestors had known.
Despite my inexperience back then, I got a lot out of those black folks from Dover. Not nearly as stoical as their history of suffering would suggest. But
#2
’s all I’ll show Ring Ding. I certainly don’t intend to take him down into the catacombs for the full tour of the masks, but with the faces of two adults and three children he should see how terribly unfair that criticism is. Perhaps I’ll allude to the idea that the Dover faces might inspire another addition to the
Family Planning
series. He’s not going to know that they came from bodies that have already been cast and seen by millions.
Faces are to my sculpture as Rembrandt’s notebooks were to his paintings. I’ll tell Ring Ding that the faces inspire me to create the families, that I cannot do the bodies until I see the faces before me (and there is truth to that, much more than he’ll ever know). The faces
are
my notebooks, the ones I write in the studio. Or to put it another way, I am like a novelist who cannot devise a plot until he has his characters, who must know their fondest thoughts and desires and their back story before he can plot their future.
Now I should stop, take my rest while I can, but I stand before the monitor as Diamond Girl stiffens with a flood of orgasm, and begins to shake, the fragile appearance of a young woman at play with her body, with the thrill of a newfound friend.
She removes her hand from the cleft that she treasures so, and reaches for her underpants, which have ended up down around her knees. Her Rankness rolls off her side and on to her back without so visible an experience of pleasure; but she’s smiling, touching Diamond Girl, and I wonder, I can’t help myself even though it is a most subversive thought, subversive to my whole belief in Diamond Girl’s depravity, but nevertheless I wonder if it’s an act. I wonder, more to the point, if it’s a trap. If the two of them think they can actually seduce me into forming a threesome, a merry ménage à trois. And just that insistently my prick speaks up, for the danger is now conjoined with titillation, its sexy Siamese twin. A deadly kind of game, perhaps, to find myself between them both, the meat in their sweet sandwich. As I stand here I begin to feel breasts against my back and chest, handsome young nipples, proud and peaked, and hands, an endless stream of fingers and palms and hot horny holds that leave me to satisfy myself, which I do with inordinate haste. As I clean up, I remember that this was how it all began with Diamond Girl, with my fixation on her body, with her posing in the cage. I had hoped to see my obsession slacken, but now in her uncanny way she’s raised the stakes in the strange game she’s playing.
• • •
Ring Ding is clumsy. He almost drops the mold of
#2
’s mother, and I have to resist the urge to slap him. He has that kind of face. I have seen it countless times sitting next to a weatherman, or a woman who reads the news with him, or an aging athlete who smiles a lot and laughs even more as he reports the latest scores and mishaps on the court, the field, whatever ridiculous game they’re playing.
And he’s so serious, even pausing to take notes, that when he asks why each of their mouths is slightly open, I’m tempted to joke about the hard rubber ball. I do think the reference would go right over his head; but I restrain myself, and explain as I would to a child that I sculpt the mouths into such agonized positions to show how the American family’s attempt to speak honestly is muzzled by the
brutal
constraints of convention. Therefore, when I do faces—and I remind him that I always do faces first—I want the strain to speak to be apparent to even the most noodle-headed (like you, I want to add, but don’t). Even more than speak, they want to shriek in pain. “Can you see that,” I ask him, pointing to the curled lips, the clearly tortured contortion of the mouth.
He nods. That’s it. A nod. I have just given him the vast moral implication of my work, and I get a nod. No wonder he thinks nothing of including those half-wits with me, of enfolding my genius into pages that will include a plasterer, a poseur if there ever was one. At least the others work in stone or metal, but she avowedly eschews “permanent” materials, valuing instead the “intransigent impermanence of plaster.”
It’s enough to make me retch, and it’s all right there on her website. I shouldn’t say
her
website because, no, she’s far too modest for that, but on a website put together by her devotees. That she has them is criminal. Read all about it! She’s doing a show next winter on “slowness.” Slowness? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Honestly, the more I learn about her, the more driven to distraction I become by this pompous woman with her amateur notions of art.
She says her work is about the body. No,
my
work is about the body. Hers is about a sculptor too inept to get it right, so she renders the space the body occupies.
How can you get that wrong? Shapes it like a canoe, and says this is her shape when enveloped, or bends over and says—this gem is on the website, so you can read it if you don’t believe me—“This is the space between my legs and my torso and head.”
I allude to her by telling Ring Ding that
some
sculptors have lost faith with their art, have taken to distorting the gifts they
might
have had, that Michelangelo certainly would never have turned his back on the real challenge of the body. Rodin wouldn’t have either, nor I, and that it’s unfortunate, even shameful the way these lesser artists engineer publicity for themselves.
Who are you thinking of? he says, suddenly bolder than I would have expected.
I name names, dropping hers in the middle of a long list with no emphasis whatsoever, but he keys in on it, and the moment he does I wonder, just as I did when I questioned Diamond Girl’s desire for Her Rankness, if he fucks his subjects. If he does, then I am helpless to stop him from including her. She’s using her witchy little tail to gain success by association, and there’s nought to be done but suffer the indignity of her presence on those pages. But still I am hopeful, because if they are not having some sordid little dalliance, then with the right answer I could dissuade him from including her, and if I can do that, perhaps I can also make him see the deeply embarrassing error he’ll make if he includes the others as well.
But this must be danced around, dealt with delicately, diplomatically. I don’t want to appear to be some petty jealous artist when my concerns are so much larger than such craven considerations would suggest. I will have to pick my moments carefully, cultivate his interest in my own work, and by its rarefied standards let him view the others anew. I do have one decided advantage: I am the last of the sculptors he’s interviewing. Let them all pale by comparison.
“She is,” I tell him, “a classic example of the old axiom that those who can’t do, teach.”
This he doesn’t write down. Perhaps I have underestimated him by using such a platitude.
“It’s not as simple as that,” I concede, “but neither is it terribly complex. Her work, if we’re to be honest, could be ‘executed’ by any high school student competent with plaster. She may offer artful explanations, but text does not constitute art. Text is text, and as such is suspect in every manner possible.”
I can see I’m losing him with the allusion to deconstructionism. “It’s like this,” I add quickly, “it’s as if she’s recognized the limitations of her hands, her eyes, her vision, and imbues her work with an intellectualized air that it does not, in actual fact, possess.”
Still not the See-Jack-run school of news writing, but I think he gets it. Then he surprises me by biting back,
“Couldn’t the same claim be made of your work, with the lengthy ‘exegesis’ (I am stunned that he uses the word) that accompanies every show?”
“Yes,” I concede, “but my explanations are necessitated by the limited purview of so many patrons who might otherwise see only pain, and not the larger excrescences of culture that are represented in the work, which does not simply occupy space, but
dwells
in it.”
“That,” he notes with stunning insight (stunning for him, anyway), “sounds a lot like Heidegger, whose work also inspires Lauren Reed.”
“I assure you,” I tell him, “that I share no such ground with her, nor she with Heidegger, no matter how grandiloquent her claims.”
And that finally shuts him up so we can begin the pour.
After the bronze fills the molds, even before it cools, he reaches in his pack for a camera.
“No,” I tell him firmly. “No pictures. As I said, these faces are my notebooks. If they inspire a new family in the series, then the whole world can see them. Until then, they must remain private.”
He tries to appeal to my ego by saying that the art world deserves to see these “amazing creations” now, even in their present form, and while he’s undoubtably correct, I see right through this ploy and turn it to my advantage by saying that I have no further need to impress the cognoscenti.
“Did Kerry help you with these?” he says, the first time today that he’s brought up her name.
“No, no one has ever worked on these before. No one has ever even seen them before.”
He looks up from his notebook and asks what I thought of her work. I can’t believe this. In the midst of an interview about my art, I’m being asked to offer a pronouncement on some student’s scribbles.
“I never saw it,” I say with all the genuine indifference I feel.
He returns to his notebook for another nagging question about the faces: “Why did you show me the new ones?” His own face is noticeably blank. I imagine he’s just smart enough to play a good game of poker.
“Because you’re writing a book, and I wanted you to see
all
of my work, my very latest creations, which I think may be the best faces I’ve ever done.” I don’t believe this for a second, but I must humor the notion.
He scrawls in his notebook and snaps it shut. We are done. I sense that this is what he’s saying, that he will leave here today and I will never see him again. I search desperately for some final suasion in my unstated assault on the insult of Lauren Reed and the others, but I would appear too full of effort, and even Ring Ding would see right through it.
• • •
I feed Diamond Girl and Her Rankness a good meal, veal with potatoes and asparagus. Her Rankness brightens when she sees her plate, but this is not intended to flatter her: I’ve already seen how Diamond Girl shares her food, and I have no desire to see her lose so much as an ounce of her succulent flesh to Her Rankness.
They have the easy physical familiarity of athletes in a locker room. They brush past each other without worrying about touch. They must know that I know, but Diamond Girl still makes a display of hooking her finger around the waistband of Her Rankness’s jeans.
“I see you’re happy together,” I say with the unease that only Diamond Girl succeeds in wringing from me.
“We are,” says Her Rankness forcefully, a little too forcefully to be convincing. A little too … strained.
Diamond Girl has a smoother ploy. She draws Her Rankness to her and kisses her neck from behind while she trains her beguiling eyes on me. Diamond Girl’s tongue makes an appearance, too, before she says that they need a bath.
“I’m sure you do. I’ll get the water and soap.”
They bathe while I watch them on the monitor. Her Rankness manages an enterprising degree of modesty, but not Diamond Girl. She did this to me before with the bath, the arch posing. All of this has the tread of familiarity, but I watch as eagerly as ever because it also has the same quicksilver excitement.
It is only then, in my postorgasmic glow, that I remember what I said to Ring Ding about Her Rankness’s work. My stomach tightens, my face actually twitches because I said I’d never seen it, but I’d told him the first time he came out here that her work showed promise.