History of Art Page 2

  When the waves of sound receded, she lay on her back, rigid and panting. Every part of her felt shattered, her atoms and molecules reassembled imperfectly. The sheets were cold and damp. She thought of her youngest son, how he’d wept through his shame of bed-wetting. She rose to change the linens, staggering sideways, her inner vibrations throwing her off-balance.

  On the third day, the little rosebud teacups rattled in their saucers as the war artist poured the coffee. Everything was bright and sharp—except the translator, who lumbered in with no stories to tell. The two sat across the room from each other, sipping. The translator’s eyes were vague and unfocused. The war artist felt her gaze harden. At the very least, he could give her something to work with. They both had jobs to do, and despite the ringing in her ears and the ache of unease in her bones, she wanted to get on with it. She placed the cup and saucer on her desk and took up her usual position at the drafting table. She rolled fresh paper across it, picked up her charcoal, and cleared her throat.

  “The heat’s getting to me,” the translator said.

  The war artist raised her eyebrows. The man did look ill. “I thought you’d be accustomed to it.”

  The translator’s head dipped on his wilted neck. His eyelids fluttered, showing the whites. The war artist jumped up, broke out a cold compress from her first-aid kit, and clamped it to the back of the translator’s neck.

  “They never get the humidity right,” the translator said, loosening his tie. “Anyway, I’m from Boston.”

  The war artist sat down again at her drafting table. Over the translator’s shoulder, the bright colors of her murals blurred. She sloshed herself a bourbon.

  “You lied?” she said.

  The translator removed the compress from the back of his neck and applied it to his forehead. “Those aren’t lies,” he said. “That’s a lot of people’s truth.”

  “Are you an actor?” the war artist asked.

  “I’m a graduate student,” the translator said. “Engineering.”

  The war artist sipped her bourbon, then threw it back. “What’s your language?”

  The translator shrugged and shook his head. He had an uncle, he said, who had lived in Dubai for a while, whom he’d gone to visit regularly, and he had his training, which helped to pay his way through school.

  “This is a fucked-up situation,” he said. “I tell stories of a life I haven’t lived, and you make pictures of a war you haven’t seen.”

  The war artist poured the translator another drink. “You can’t leave,” she said, “until you tell me something I can use.”

  She sat at her drawing table and prepared to sketch. “Now,” she said. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  The nontranslating translator nodded. “She is Hindi and was born in Calcutta—”

  “Stop.” She pointed her charcoal at him. “I want the truth.”

  The young man looked away, smiling faintly. “Her father was a physician in Iran during the Shah’s reign. They fled to South Florida—”

  The war artist stood. “Imagine I point a gun at your head.” She demonstrated with her thumb and forefinger.

  He stared at her. His black-brown eyes looked wide and innocent. The war artist retrieved the pistol from her footlocker and pointed it at the translator’s head.

  “Do. You have. A girlfriend?”

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “I’ll answer your questions.”

  She shook the pistol at him.

  “OK,” the young man said. “She grew up in Worcester. She’s terrible at math. She makes good potato salad. We fuck in her parents’ bed while they’re on vacation. We did it once on her stoop and the neighbor across the street saw, and my girlfriend still cries about it.”

  The war artist straddled her chair. The facts steadied her. “What else?”

  “We’re supposed to get married when I graduate.”

  “Supposed to?”

  “She wants to.”

  “But you don’t.”

  The young man looked at the ceiling. “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I don’t think we’ll be ready. She’s never dated anyone else, and how can I be sure—how can she be sure—”

  The war artist raised her pistol and tried to fire into the ceiling. Nothing happened.

  “Squeeze again,” he said. “Like you mean it.”

  She fired into the ceiling several times, which caused her to flinch and cry out. The translator shielded his head. He waited for the rain of plaster to stop before answering. “I don’t want to marry her,” he said. “She’s boring, except when we’re fucking.”

  The war artist stared up at the now-crazed skylights. “I should shoot you,” she said.

  The nontranslating translator shook his head. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  In the end, she sent the young man away. With him, she sent a note to the captain: “I want to do my job. Let me do my job.”

  The next day a yellow form in triplicate, having to do with the discharging of her pistol, fluttered from the slot in the door to the sand. She used needle and thread to embroider her explanation: “It’s a war.”

  After she sent her translator away, the war artist so missed even incidental contact with others that the rosebud china service pained her to tears. She couldn’t bring herself to smash the cups and pot. She made weepy studies of the trio until her sorrow bored the hell out of her. Better to make it big and lurid, this loneliness. She started on large paper, and painted quickly in watercolor couples straining to make themselves one, but the paper was too small. The edges antagonized her. She moved to the walls, covering over her murals with big powerful strokes depicting the most intricate orgy she could imagine. The figures blurred together, though the most disturbing image repeated itself plainly enough: men and women opening their jaws wide and stretching their mouths over each other’s faces. She stepped away from the wall and felt the hunger and tenderness of the gesture: to want so strongly!

  Every morning, she lined up her buckets and laid on more paint, until the figures were impossible to discern. When the wall glistened thick with color, she threw herself into it, smashed her cheek in the cool earthiness, and rubbed herself along the oozing surface. She rolled along the wall and moaned, pounding her fists until she felt a shattering ache the length of her body. At that moment, she thought she heard the static click of an intercom. She remembered the sound from grade school. She paused for the message. “Eh-hem,” a voice said. Blushing, she pulled herself away from her painting. The war artist, slick with ooze, vowed to make herself and her feelings smaller.

  She didn’t see why she should eat since the food always tasted the same and it was so hot, and anyway everything had sand in it. So she ate only what she absolutely had to, and she watched as her stomach, upper arms, and thighs melted away. For the sake of something to do in between bombs, sandstorms, art making, and masturbating, she did push-ups and sit-ups. She admired her newly chiseled arms and abs. Fuckin’-A, she said to herself in the mirror. I am one bad-ass bitch.

  She was an art-making machine: totally focused, she’d learned to manage the boredom, fear, loneliness, and lust. She had been bribing the soldier who brought her food; she made pastel portraits of his children from snapshots and school photos he provided. He sighed over them, opened the flap in the door, and shoved in a stack of newspapers. The newspapers were in Arabic. It was true she hadn’t specified the language, but she thought her guard—for that is how she thought of him—was playing games with her.

  She spent the day tearing the newspapers into strips. She set up her camera, took off her clothes, and carefully wrapped herself from head to toe in the strips of newspaper. She stuffed wadded newspaper in her mouth. Only her eyes showed. She left one arm free enough to work the camera’s remote. She made a series of photographs and attempted to send them to her family, via the bribed guard. The next day, a new guard appeared, one whose hairless knuckles and hammy-looking fingernails promised no shenanigans.


  She stayed in bed all day. She nibbled crackers, curled on her side, and slept. In the night, she woke and tore fresh white sheets of paper into strips, laid them on the floor, and took pictures. Then she went back to bed. She couldn’t say what any of it meant, but she kept doing it, for ten nights by her count, until she realized she’d gone daft. She stripped nude, tensed her muscles, and stared down the camera. She made side and back views of herself, and printed these. She admired her muscles, tracing her finger along the new gutters of her body. With great care and precision, she tore her photos into strips and ate them. Then, using a very small screwdriver, she disassembled her camera. She spread the parts on a thick piece of pearl-gray paper and instinctively reached for her camera to document it. Oh, said the war artist, my. With a hammer, she smashed the parts of her camera, taking care to herd the wayward pieces. With a mortar and pestle, she ground the pieces into a fine and sparkling pile of dust. She tried letting the particles dissolve on her tongue, but they clung, coating her mouth and caking at the edges of her lips. The thing to do was wash it down, so she opened her bottles of India ink, and once she started it was difficult to stop.

  Eventually they came. The soldier with the ham-like fingernails stepped matter-of-factly over her spatters of vomit. He helped her to her feet and led her gently down the hall to a room where the captain and other soldiers waited. The captain motioned for her to sit at a long table, around which the other soldiers sat. No one spoke. The war artist sipped water from the glass in front of her, rinsed her mouth, and spat on the floor. She was determined not to speak first. The soldiers stayed very still. The air handlers whirred. She glanced down at her briefs and became aware of her stink. In the two-way mirror at the far end of the room she saw herself: gristle, bone, and muscle dressed in a sweat-stained undershirt, wearing a goatee of inky vomit. She crossed her arms in front of her. She thought of her family and all the time wasted. Finally she spoke. “Am I to be debriefed?”

  The oldest man in the room—the general—who sat across from her at the long table, smiled mildly. “What is it you’d like to know?”

  He reminded her of her grade-school principal, willing to give only what information was necessary to answer the inquiry in the most meager way.

  “Why did you keep me here?” the war artist asked.

  The general removed his glasses. His eyebrows were gray and bushy. “We thought—we hoped,” he smiled, “that you could show us something about the war.”

  The war artist felt a roiling burn at the base of her throat. “What did you learn?”

  The general suppressed a smile. “You responded in interesting ways. We were touched by your . . . humanity. We admired your passion.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Time for one more question.”

  Grit clicked between the war artist’s teeth as she spoke. “Why did you keep me in that room?”

  “I see,” the general said. “We didn’t want to hurt you.”

  Some soldiers at the table had gone red around their ears and necks. A fine crust of sand lined the uppermost ridge of a young man’s ear. One young woman had an angry red stump for a thumb. The ham-fingernailed soldier, upon closer inspection, wore prosthetic hands. The war artist couldn’t help staring. She wondered if his new finger fit the trigger. She imagined him working it into place, not being able to feel the resistance or gauge how much pressure was necessary to squeeze off one round or two. She watched the soldier so intently that she didn’t notice the urge to sneeze coming on, and she neglected to cover her mouth and nose. She sprayed the soldier’s new hands with dark gritty mucus.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She started to wipe her nose on her forearm, but the soldiers on either side of her offered hankies.

  “It’s OK,” the soldier said. He cradled his M-16 as he wiped his prosthetic hands. “It happens to all of us. It never goes away.”

  WORD PROBLEM

  I.

  Ten students attend the conservatory at a nationally acclaimed school of music.

  Students A and B, male and female respectively, are naturally gifted singers for whom music is an uncomplicated joy. Whether or not they themselves become nationally acclaimed products of the nationally acclaimed school, they imagine that they will sing all their lives. Both feel sheepish about the nerve it takes to send oneself to a nationally acclaimed institution in order to devote oneself to a discipline that all but promises some version of failure. Even people who are very good probably aren’t good enough. Frankly, they are a little embarrassed by their self-indulgence, but they have to get a degree, and it might as well be in something they love, something that doesn’t yet feel like work.

  Three of the students—C, D, and E—are insecure perfectionists who are fiercely competitive. Student C has an eating disorder and wears only black T-shirts and jeans. The other students suspect that he waxes his entire body because he has no arm hair. Student D is insecure about her breasts and wears extra-extra-large sweatshirts, even when conducting, which sometimes gets in her way. No one would care anything about her breasts, but she has made such a show of her horror of them that by the end of her third year she is known as “Tits.” She has a beautiful voice, which she disavows, though she will sing Happy Birthday as long as a top and a bottom are available. Student E seems nice enough, and she actually is nice, though most of her peers suspect she is not as nice as she seems. Her parents have inculcated in her a faith that promotes tolerance and loving-kindness, so she mostly competes with herself. She has not played team sports, but she did march in band (tuba), so she knows what it’s like to work hard with others. She took some grief as a girl playing tuba. She is very tall.

  Red-haired Student F has a vibrant personality that she uses to mask the pain of growing up with overly critical alcoholic parents. People who don’t know her well—and most don’t—think she is intense but harmless. She goes to some trouble to remain harmless, as when she attended classes for one week posing as a man dressed as a woman. Some assumed devotion to Rocky Horror, others to whimsy or musical theater. Her friends, both of them, knew that her brother had punched the windows out of his bedroom and had just begun a long convalescence in a private hospital.

  Student G possesses modest gifts but is even-tempered and hardworking. She knows she is good enough for certain things—teaching, for instance—but she also thinks she might be able to make it as a performer. She sees plenty of people waste their talent—it doesn’t move them, they are lazy, or they refuse to take an interest to spite their parents. She also knows that some people are weird or assholes, or so crazy they can’t get out of their own way. Some are full of self-loathing, and they sabotage themselves. She figures if she can hang in there, she will probably be successful. If pressed, she would admit that her dreams with regard to music making involve steady work and steady pay.

  Student H is a well-adjusted genius. His parents love him and have been supportive of his musical activity from a young age. If asked, he would name having to quit sports as his sole lingering resentment from childhood. He was twelve when he injured his hand playing baseball and couldn’t practice piano. You cannot serve two masters, his father said. But H’s body loved sport: the thrill of physical contact with other players; moving at speeds uncalled for in the rest of his life; poised, alert and waiting for the next play to unfold. Nothing in his life has equaled that feeling. When he plays music with others he experiences similar moments of anticipation; something is about to happen, and he can’t predict exactly what it will be. He especially feels this when he sits in with jazz musicians, which he does as often as possible. It’s like a pickup game, he tells his parents, though they don’t know anything about basketball, except that it’s a way for musicians to ruin their hands and embouchure.

  Students I and J are smart—very smart—and they are assholes. After two semesters, each thinks he is the smartest person in the school. They no longer believe in music as it is typically defined. They are sure most people do not even hear what is being played
. They are not allies; in fact, they take no notice each other. They tend to skip class, and the music they want to make can’t be conjured in the practice rooms. I skulks around the trestle near the defunct paper mill, recording the sounds of trains coming and going in the blue hours. J writes evocative nonsense verse, which he turns in for every assignment, regardless of its relevance. His teachers assume he is having a breakdown or that he is stoned. Something is wrong with him, and it’s not their fault or problem. He arrived this way, bright and unready to learn.

  Students I and J know all about John Cage. They don’t know that they are furious with him. They feel—and they are right—that they can never employ his logic in order to surpass him. They will always be re-creating his experiments on his terms. They can’t articulate this, but John Cage is their father, and they would like to murder him. Each suspects, on an unconscious level, that he is not smart enough to metaphorically or intellectually slay John Cage. The alternative is to get good at something people might actually like. Thus their rage and despair.

  II. Problems

  Solve the following problems, showing your work. An answer key follows.

  1. Twenty years after they earn their degrees, how many students make a living at making music?

  2. How many graduates of the nationally acclaimed school of music become nationally acclaimed themselves?

  3. How many students maintain an uncomplicated relationship to music?

  4. How many students write jingles for television?

  5. Which students suffer breakdowns and why?