Mark de Silva - Square Wave

Up until now Lewis had been trying to find room for abstraction within a hyperrealist frame. He liked unprimed canvas, a holdover from his Baconian phase originally, but now a useful means of sending the faintest ripples through realism. It just slightly materialized the image, degrading its resolution much more finely than Warhol’s Marilyns. Keeping one foot in each realm, the technique yielded artifacts — canvases — that appeared literally stained by reality. And one way or another, in everything he did, reality was what Lewis was after.

The painting that sat on his easel now, long unworked, was of this sort. It depicted a heavily tattooed bike messenger standing on the pedals, sideswiping a hansom cab pulling onto an avenue next to a grand city park. The bike’s rear wheel is elevating and the messenger is taking flight over the handlebars, just as a postal tube is falling down between the spokes of the cab’s wheel and the bike. The cab driver, a bushy-haired Arab, has his head swiveled into a bunch of crassly arranged flowers. He looks irked rather than surprised. The horse, still unaware, remains placid.

The last painting Lewis actually finished was a truck-stop bathroom that imperceptibly merged with a slightly abstracted woman in yellow rubber gloves, kneeling and cleaning the toilet. Only inspection revealed figure to be less tangible than ground.

He had found his way into some noteworthy group shows, both in America and in Europe, and had two shows of his own, with small but generous write-ups in the art journals. But the biennials eluded him, and it pained him to acknowledge that this was not unjust.

By now he’d imagined he would have made some sort of aesthetic breakthrough, if not in the art world, then at least in his own mind. The world could catch up later. But no, the world was spot on. His canvases hinted at something they didn’t quite deliver, even he saw that.

Formally they weren’t uninteresting. But transfiguring a quality of paint into a quality of spirit, as Peterson, as all the meaningful artists had, he hadn’t managed. It was alchemy. Maybe it was voodoo. Whatever it was, he wasn’t even close.

The lack seemed not to be one of talent, or of imagination or craft, but of a certain power of synthesis. Vision in art was, at once, idea and experience, a joining of thought or affect with perception. He could conjure beautifully fresh sensations from paint. No one doubted that. And his ideas ran deep, as did his feeling for the world and its order. No one doubted that either. But he couldn’t seem to integrate them, not without seams. And eventually the stitching would give out, no matter how tight. Was it, in some sense, a lack of nerve? He didn’t know. If it was, though, he was in trouble, because day by day, summoning it got harder.

His work stalled. His financial state was weak but stable. Painting earned him little more than the occasional four-figure sale. Sometimes he was tempted to take a more aggressive market position, swap the index funds he’d converted his portfolio into for more volatile securities. But he held off, knowing that Janice would eventually earn a reasonable income; that his portfolio, even as it stood, would last some time still before inflation eroded the capital; and that his desire for more was a desire for the superfluous, one which could only be pursued by putting the necessary at risk.

So they remained, living in a false poverty, with no sign of improvement on the horizon. They had both thought this acceptable to start, and Lewis’s opinion hadn’t changed. He could have tolerated real squalor even, at least he imagined so, and they were probably heading for it. At times he took a stolid pride in this. But he sensed Janice’s growing unease with their present course, and this divergence was starting to color their relationship in ways that defeated expression.

She’d noticed, of course, that he had mostly stopped painting. It had never happened before, and this must have added something to her worries about him. As did the weeks he would spend in bed. There were also the many nights now he was out until morning, and the increasing rate at which his appearance changed. New haircuts, new clothes. When she would ask about this, he would chalk it up, plausibly enough, to type-two bipolar, the condition that had hounded him since college, even high school, though it went untreated then.

Still, she’d seen other episodes of his over the years. None was this peculiar. As for the stalling of his work, he passed it off as a deepening lack of inspiration, and the late nights as a search for some. The first part of this was true, the second not — or not in the way he meant it.

In fact, he’d taken to whoring. The practice came with an illustrious artistic pedigree, which made it easier to dip his toes. It took away some of the sense of betrayal he felt. Self-betrayal. He couldn’t see it as a betrayal of Janice. She would think it trivial.

It began, then, as a simple diversion from his unpromising present. But his spirit interfered from the start, from the time of that cab ride home from the Four Seasons. Here were women, many of them intelligent and for the most part not without options, humble though they may be, living in far greater comfort than him, purposeless comfort, on the basis of their orifices alone, not their talent or sacrifice or effort. These were self-betrayers on a Platonic scale, who refused all paths but the one of least resistance.

More than anything, there was an absolute vacuum of belief in these women. They might be the most secular people on Earth. It was this recognition, of their etiolated spirits, that prevented him from actually having sex with most of the women after the Breguet girl. His own spirit wouldn’t submit.

There were artists, like Peterson, supremely suited to giving substance to the deformed; their art in turn became the body of fellow-feeling. Perhaps nothing was more transcendent. Ruskin would have approved. But it wasn’t in Lewis. That’s what a decade of work had showed. His gift was limited, in the end, and cruelly bestowed, in that it was large enough to tempt him to try to scale the heights, but small enough for him not to be able to make the climb. And he would only understand this after falling from the mountain’s face.

What was left for him? He had Janice, but she must be disappointed, though she would never say so. How to incarnate spirit, if not in art? Hadn’t that been his fount of meaning? Life seemed only to flicker with significance, and the gaps between flickers were growing.

The Breguet girl was the start of the turnaround, though he’d felt only despair and confusion at the time. Through the next two girls, he unearthed a new fount. This one might even exceed art. Rather than give flesh to spirit, he would give spirit to flesh, re-enchant it. After the first four girls, there was no more sex even. But none would get the easy money they’d expected. Not that they didn’t get their money; he was too conscientious for that. But it was hard money — too hard, he hoped. If there was no true change without crisis, well, he would bring them crisis.

He beat them to life, that’s how he liked to think of it. He also liked “beaten to a pulp,” since pulp was the kind of thing you reshaped into something of value. You pulped airport paperbacks and printed Shakespeare. Or if not Shakespeare, then Updike at least. That, more or less, was the idea.

His powers of synthesis no longer seemed inadequate, as they had with painting. Each intervention seemed to him to embody his feeling for the world, the purity of purpose, the honoring of self, more seamlessly than the last. By the eighth girl, he’d felt he’d reached a kind of perfection. Maybe his talent for politics was not of the Wintry’s sort. It was for lived politics. Personal politics. Micropolitics. And maybe that really was greater than his talent with a brush.