Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

“Already taken care of,” Cynthia said.

“Mommy?” April said.

Cynthia put her palm gently underneath her daughter’s chin. “Oh, my sweetheart,” she said. “Ten days. It’s not that long.”

April stood up, stomped back into her bedroom, and slammed the door. Adam and Cynthia exchanged a look that made it permissible for them both to laugh, just for a second. “Déjà vu, or what?” Adam said.

“All of a sudden I feel ten years younger,” Cynthia smiled. But then she lost herself in staring at the closed door, and when she looked back at him she was crying again. “Seriously,” she said. “I don’t understand it. What did I do wrong?”

His cell phone vibrated again; he stood to leave the room. “You didn’t do anything wrong, my love,” he said. “She’ll figure it out. The way you grow up is you find your thing to struggle against, and, I mean, look around.” He kissed her forehead on his way past the couch. “Whatever it is, we’ve hidden it pretty well.”

The image of the presumably autistic young artist rocking on the floor with his fingers in his ears imprinted itself on Jonas, and when, a few days later, he and Nikki met Agnew in his office on campus to deliver their informal report on the fair, that, rather than the art, was the thing he found himself describing. Agnew had a way of leaning backward when he felt something interesting was being said — usually by himself — and so Jonas could tell he had not miscalculated in telling the story.

“So what do you imagine this guy was shutting out?” Agnew said.

“The whole condescending circus. The whole glorified Tupper-ware party they’re basically making out of his attempts to communicate. The profiteers. The charlatans.”

“Wrong,” Agnew said. “He would have had his hands over his ears if it was Mother Teresa talking too loud for him, or Rembrandt, or Clement Greenberg. Or his family. You’re the one making the value judgments for him. To him, noise is noise.”

Jonas nodded submissively. He felt a little naïve for romanticizing it like that.

“And as far as charlatanism goes, you’re right: outsider art is overrun by thieves and hacks and opportunists and corrupters. Which makes the difference between it and any other type of art exactly nil. Forget about them. They’re not worth getting mad at. The difference here is that the artists themselves can’t be corrupted by it. Nor can they be uncorrupted, for that matter. It’s not in them. If they’re really outsider, that is. There’s a tremendous amount of bullshit involved.”

“How do you tell what’s real and what’s not?”

“Well, anything can be forged in this world, but the total absence of self-consciousness turns out to be pretty damn hard to fake.” This for some reason made Agnew bark with laughter. “But often you just need to meet the artist. Simple as that. It’s like being one of those psychiatrists for the prosecution. I spend a lot of my time doing that now.”

On the walls of Agnew’s dark office there was no art, nor any reproductions. Instead there hung framed photographs of artists: Duchamp, Pollock, Warhol, and many others whose faces Jonas didn’t recognize. Nikki had told him about this. Apparently Agnew found actual works of art too distracting; he became so lost in staring at them, even in reproduction, that he couldn’t get done whatever work he had shut himself in his office to do. So he displayed the artists themselves, because, he liked to say, they were much easier for him to ignore.

“You could make the case,” Agnew said, “that the history of modern art is the history of artists trying to unlearn what they know. To them, the world that is made is really the only world that matters. You can work all your life to break all those connections to the known world and re-form them, but it’s never the same as not having had those connections in the first place. So in that sense it’s not hard to tell when someone’s a true artist, whether or not he considers himself one at all.”

“You have a budget,” Jonas asked, “from the department for the research you’re doing for your book? To pay for graduate assistants?” Nikki, still holding in her lap all the one-sheet artist bios from the fair she had assembled for Agnew, turned and looked at Jonas in budding surprise.

“Yes and no. The department basically lowers the tuition of the students I have working for me. It’s not like I have actual cash to distribute. But, in any case, I’ve used up my allotment and then some.”

“Would you be willing to take on another one? Off the books? I don’t mean ‘off the books,’ sorry, I just mean that no one would have to pay me anything. It’s not necessary.”

Agnew leaned back. “Well aren’t you the young man on the go,” he said.

“I could do some of this research for you. Check out some of these artists. Maybe even find new ones. I wouldn’t presume to offer you my opinion or anything, like your grad students do, but just legwork. However I could be useful to the project.”

“Why?”

Jonas cursed his own blush, just at the moment he was trying to seem a little older than he was. He was trying not to look at Nikki, whose mouth was hanging open. “Why? I just… All my requirements are done, or just about, and I haven’t found anything that interests me as much as this. It’s like something I’ve been looking for, if that makes any sense. To be honest, I’m already thinking ahead to what I want to do after next year. I think I could get a jump on a thesis this way, not that it would intersect with your work at all, I’d keep that totally separate. But it is a huge field.”

Agnew rocked in his desk chair and drummed his fingertips together in the air for what seemed to Jonas like a minute. “Can I ask you a personal question?” Agnew said.

Jonas nodded.

“I read in the paper, a few months ago, about a guy named Morey, one of those hedge-fund guys, who threw a birthday party for his wife. Rented out the New York Public Library for it. Wyclef Jean played. Those are your parents, aren’t they?”

Jonas nodded again, fidgeting a little.

“Did you go?”

“Sure. It was their anniversary, actually, not her birthday.”

“Some big one, right? Like their twenty-fifth or something?”

“Twenty-third,” Jonas said, and laughed grudgingly. “He does kind of jump the gun sometimes.”

“I have to admit,” Agnew said, “I read about how guys like that make their money, what they do all day, and I don’t grasp it at all. Alternative assets or whatever they’re called, it just bounces right off my brain. And I’m presumably not a dumb guy. But hey — people think what I do for a living is arcane.”

Jonas didn’t smile. “I know what people think about throwing a party like that,” he said, “but the thing is, all the display wasn’t for anybody else’s benefit. It was for her. That’s the way my dad thinks. They are just really in love with each other, in this kind of epic way. So I just try to focus on that. That’s the real context of everything they do — each other. The other stuff is just kind of outside the walls. Every family is bizarre from the outside in some way, right?”

But Agnew shook his head. He looked at Nikki and pointed back at Jonas with his thumb. “That’s some end-times shit, your boyfriend’s family,” he said. “That’s okay, though. It’s not possible to hold it against him, and anyway I wouldn’t, because it just makes it more interesting that he’s in here. Because this is some end-times shit too, what we’re doing. I mean, what we’re studying here, what comes after it? That desire to feed on every new expression of what it is to suffer and be human, that need to seek out what’s unfamiliar and make it familiar, it’s like a goddamn fox hunt, and over the centuries it has narrowed down to this. Should we call off the hunt? Probably, but the question is moot anyway, because the world is incapable of leaving art alone. And après nous, what? I don’t know what comes after, what kind of art, what kind of artist. I really don’t. But after all these years, you and I will be there at the end. It’s kind of thrilling, isn’t it?”