Jerry then did something strange. He introduced himself, and as I mumbled “Lena” in reply, he removed my beret, brushed the bangs from my face, and then replaced the hat, securing back my hair. I noticed then that his eyelashes were inordinately long, like a girl’s false ones. — I like to see who I’m talking to, Lena. And these are not the kind of eyes that should be covered, he said with a big smile that disarmed my rage at his presumption. Pathetically, I smiled—that little-girl smile. I was too intoxicated by his presence to even detest myself for it. (Self-loathing would come later.)
We chatted for ages, sipping wine; more and more wine. Then, by intoxication’s strange social alchemy, we were trudging through the white-and-black threadbare streets, past the snow-covered cars that lined the road like giant teeth, back to his place, which was thankfully close by. He lived in the top part of an old house that had been split into two apartments. It was spacious, even luxurious. I thought we’d have sex then, I really wanted to, but instead we just talked and made out and drank coffee. The morning light came up, showing Jerry’s pores and the tight angles of his jawline and cheekbones, and he suggested that we took the El downtown back to my student dorm. He wanted to see my work. I remember the warmth of his body next to mine on that crowded train, and just wanting that journey to last forever.
The train spilled us back onto the frozen, empty, downtown streets. When we got to my student residency, Kim was fortuitously up and dressed. Jerry greeted her politely, and then looked over my series of sketches and drawings, and the couple of pieces I’d got mounted and hung in the meager wall space in the dormitory. — You’re good, he acknowledged, — and, even better, you’re prolific. We have to get people to see this stuff.
He confessed that he’d heard about my talent, and had been checking me out for a while. I was suitably flattered. No, I was totally enraptured. A few nights later, we were back in his apartment, the kitchen, and started making out again. I sensed this was our time, so I slipped down the wall, and we sat with our backs against the cold refrigerator, kissing with an intensity alternating between teasing control and wild abandonment. I broke the spell of rapture to advance the deal, and unzipped his fly, reached in and felt his hardness. He started making a soft whistling sound, like blowing compressed air through his front teeth. It was strange, but then he got me to stand up and step out of my pants. I didn’t need any encouragement. But when I did, he just looked at me, as if locked in some weird stasis. I took charge again, gently pushing him onto the kitchen floor, conscious only fleetingly of the dirt that he seemed to register in faint distaste. — Can we—he started, but I silenced him with another kiss, and unbuckled him, yanking his boxers aside, watching his veiny dick spring free. It thumped flat onto my stomach, so I straddled him with one hand pressed against the old, chunky, cream-colored Kenmore refrigerator.
His wide hand cupped the back of my head and neck, and then we were moving sluggishly, uncomfortably, my knees pressed into the floor, until he shimmied up, leaning against the Kenmore, caressing my ass (still through my panties) with his other hand, and also kissing, then biting, my neck. I kissed his mouth, deeply. His hands were fastened onto my hips, pulling me down onto him, me yanking my panties to the side, and then I felt myself enclose him all at once, and a fire burning somewhere near the base of my spine. Almost immediately, I was contracting hard, fucking him faster, and with force, till his grasp on my hips tightened as he tried to push me up and off him, gasping, but I shouted, — Wait, and felt myself shunting into another space and dimension as Jerry groaned, me pushing with final, determined strength right to where I wanted to be, then, afterward, slowly peeling my spent body from his. As we slumped to the floor I saw that he’d spilled onto the hardwood, over my panties (which were still half on), my thighs, and his own crumpled pants. I watched him slowly bang the back of his head twice against the refrigerator. Then he drew in a deep breath and exhaled in a gurgling, euphoric laugh that warmed me as I curled into his side and fell into a slumber.
I was woken by the biting cold, with no idea whether I’d been out for seconds or an hour, feeling myself bobbing into consciousness from being deeply submerged, a sensation I’d always associate with satisfying sex. Jerry had disentangled from me, and tucked a cushion under my head. He was gone and a window was wide open. Although it was his place, a bolt of panic and shame still gripped me; I recalled my mom’s one attempt at sex education: — Don’t. They’re only after one thing and once they get it they’re off. God made fingers for rings!
These words must have burned deep, as, in mounting dismay, I squinted in the moonlight to find my pants, pulling myself into them. As I straightened out, I realized with great relief that Jerry was still there; I saw him through the kitchen window above the sink, standing out on the fire escape, smoking a cigarette. It was dark but he was dimly lit from the spotlights. His arm was resting on the window ledge, and he was looking out at something in profile. His hair was wrecked, his lips were parted, and his breath billowed out almost as densely in the cold as the blue tobacco smoke. I joined him and noted he was wearing a T-shirt; he hadn’t even put on his sweater or coat. It was as if he were oblivious to the bone-tapping cold. His eyes were shut, those long cow-lashes resting on his cheeks. They opened when I stepped outside. — Hi, he said, drawing me close, then making a motor sound in my ear, — Brrrrrr!
I laughed and looked at him. Snowflakes disintegrated in his hair. I wanted to reach up and touch them but instead we stood face-to-face, me pulling myself closer to him, my hands gripping his T-shirt. I stepped further into his warmth. My chin spiked his chest. I could feel the dumb brutality of the redbrick building, the sticklike winter trees, gray sky, and white streets below us, pressing in on our drama.
Anything seemed possible with Jerry. He bristled and crackled with an intoxicating power. He had the confidence and sense of entitlement I lacked but desperately wanted to access. Over the weeks, I felt some of it starting to rub off on me. I soon stopped thinking of myself as tubby little Lena from Potters Prairie. I was an artist. I was Jerry Whittendean’s girlfriend.
But what was I bringing to the table? I didn’t see it then, because, like almost everyone else, I was so in awe of him. But what I brought was the talent. Jerry’s tragedy was that, to paraphrase him, he was neither good nor prolific. He had passion and ambition, but little skill to back it up. Nor did he possess what all successful artists require more than anything: an engine. That had never been developed, perhaps due to his background of relative privilege: a father in the oil industry, a large house in Connecticut, and a private education. For me there was no such thing as a blank canvas. I couldn’t wait to defile it with my strokes. And I couldn’t wait for Jerry to defile me with his. I couldn’t take my hands off him. And I discovered, to my surprise, that, in love as in art, I was by far the hungrier of the two of us. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it seemed that with Jerry everything was poured into the initial seduction. After that, he grew bored and complacent quicker than I could imagine any other man ever doing.
But my warning bells ought to have started ringing when he announced he was moving his focus from multimedia and concentrating solely on photography. Even his most sycophantic
acolytes
, like Alex, balked at this. Art school operates on a hierarchy. Painters are number one in terms of prestige and credibility, closely followed by those who choose to pursue sculpture. The multimedia people are harder to classify, as the discipline was then too new and too amorphous to get a proper handle on. But those specializing in photography tended to be a very confused breed. Apart from the central question as to whether photography could be considered art at all, it was the poor relation at the Art Institute of Chicago. Frankly, my high-school facilities back in Potters Prairie, MN, were superior. For half the price of the Art Institute’s fees, you could go to Columbia College, or even rent a photography studio. However, the snappers weren’t quite at the bottom of the pile—that honor went to the viscom students (why would anybody pay so much money to get a degree in graphic design?) — but they were pretty damn close. And Jerry wasn’t a bottom-of-the-pile sort of guy.
While my social life was on the up, his visits to my dorm, where we made love in my single bed, poor Kim often pretending to be asleep, or leaving to shuffle out to Dunkin’ Donuts in the cold, were its undoubted highlight.
There wasn’t an enviable leisure scene in the student accommodation back then. We were isolated from the city, trapped in a downtown, which, at the time, was near dead and occasionally hostile. Considering the number of students there were at various colleges, there was precious little in the way of social facilities catering for us. Basically, you had to make your own entertainment. A lot of my first-year downtime was comprised of standing or sitting around, usually smoking cigarettes outside the residencies, on the steps of the Art Institute, or hanging out in Dunkin’s, where we competed with local bums for free donuts. There was practically nowhere else to go for food, and it meant that the weekly red line L trip out of downtown to a Jewel-Osco was a welcome adventure.
Yet the spartan tedium of student life in some way facilitated its creativity. Artists (professors) and students socialized together a lot, and Jerry introduced me to the big hanging-out culture. It made sense as the tutors had the status and the apartments outside of Chicago’s then ghostly downtown, with six-packs of PBR and bottles of vodka in their refrigerators. And it proved useful. You were supposed to take twelve credits per year, and I took twenty-one, probably around eight of them accrued just through hanging out with teachers. And I didn’t have to fuck a single one: I was fucking Jerry, and it was tacitly understood by even the biggest predators that I was his girl.
I glance at the soundless TV. Stephen, the suitor of the twins, is on. I reach for the remote, with an urgency that shames me, and turn it up. He has become a celebrity, this poor boy from Arkansas; he has the status that the East Coast, educated, bohemian Jerry Whittendean sought so desperately. I would once have disdained the crassness of our sick, sensationalizing reality-TV-dominated society. Now I find myself giving thanks for the crass, leveling, bizzaro democracy it confers.
Stephen looks harsher across the eyes, his gestures and tone have a cocky defiance about them. He’s embraced the narrative of his fame with a sense of entitlement, wearing the mantle of arrogance well. — I told Annabel, don’t y’all be separatin’ on account of me.
— But you say you love her, says the disembodied voice.
The camera closes in, as Stephen goes faux shy at this question, but there’s a tight slyness to his features, followed by an acknowledging shrug. It’s actually a great, but chilling, TV moment: he knows he’s been outed, but he’s now too full of his own sense of power to actually care.
— Will you carry on your relationship with Annabel once she’s separated from Amy?
— I guess.
We cut to the studio, and after a banal summary by the anchor, the story switches to a corrupt local real-estate deal and I drown the volume. I wonder how much Stephen is getting paid. I muse bitterly that it’s too much for this imbecile, then turn the full circle, fearing for the boy, concerned that he’s being exploited. Angry that his story will be torn from him and broadcast to the world, and that he’ll have no reward bar his fifteen minutes of fame. I can see him in five years, a semilush on a bar stool, pulling up his YouTube clips on his smartphone, sticking them in the face of anybody who will listen.
Was Jerry’s need for recognition really any different?
At the end of my first year we moved into an apartment together. Or not quite together: a bunch of us, Kim, Alex, Olivia, and Amanda, rented a huge industrial space. There was a burgeoning gallery scene emerging in the West Loop district to rival the more established one at Near North, and we decided it was the place for us. We painted the beige walls a brilliant white and used display boards to partition the space into “rooms.”
The West Loop was a postindustrial area of old factories and meat markets, retail suppliers and warehouses. It felt so desolate across from the foreboding triple barriers of the Chicago River, the railtracks, and the concrete freeway overpass, all of which seemed to cry “keep away.”
But the homesteaders weren’t hearing anybody. High-end restaurants opened on Randolph, and reputable galleries like the McCormick set up on Washington. Our second-floor loft was close to Washington and Halstead, and a rash of new exhibition spaces.
Jerry and Alex had a blue neon sign made for the window, which simply said,
Blue
. And so we curated and exhibited our work. I was the most prolific, but Alex, Amanda, and Kim also produced stuff. Jerry would mostly drink, and talk. We leafleted the crowds who came into the area for the gallery walk on the first Thursday of the month. Word of mouth operated and our first three shows were packed, though largely with friends and those drawn to the free beer that bobbed in big plastic buckets of icy water. We knew how to throw a party. We were the student in-crowd, privileged and exalted. Although we were secretly hated by the many, they were also desperate to be in our circle. I was possibly the only one of our group who fully understood this dynamic. A willowy blond girl, Andrea Colegrave, was particularly pushy. She tried to befriend me, then Kim, Amanda, and Olivia, eventually sleeping with Alex. Her neediness was pathetic, and it repulsed me. But what was even more threatening was that smug private look she gave me, a look that said “I know who you are.” And that “who” was the fat nerd I thought I’d left behind in Potters Prairie.
Then, for our fourth show, one of our professors, Gavin Entwhistle, brought a visitor along. Up until then I had little idea what an art collector looked like. Jason Mitford was nothing like the old moneyed, wavy-haired, blazered, and cravat-wearing crust of my imagination. He was dressed all in black, with a contrasting shock of electric white hair. He looked like a rock star, or, rather, what he was, a failed rich-kid artist.