Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“Left a voice mail, I know he hates those. Anyway, would you tell him I said good luck? Good luck with the show.”

“Why don’t you try him again? He should be at the studio.”

At the studio, Jack had a long leather couch. No shower but a basin he could lean into and wash as far as his armpits. When a piece was going well, he was there all hours, through the night. He’d fall asleep on the swivel stool, hunched over the drafting table sometime near morning. When his head and his hands were running on all cylinders, it became impossible to scrape him out.

That had happened more often in the early years, when he was hungry and everything was on the rise. For a while he lived and worked the way he’d imagined doing while at RISD, five or ten pieces always going at once. So many ideas, he’d only had to go out into the world, among the ten thousand things, and there they would be. He saw strange symmetry in everything. It felt like stealing.

More recently he had begun to ask why, and, what for. At least to wonder. He sometimes caught himself standing idle and oafish among the fuel tanks and torches, unformed sheet metal, sharp dust crowding everything.

He was standing like that now.

He walked to the big window and tipped it open as far as it would go, breathing in the mild midday air. No. He would not not work.

It would go against the grounds on which he’d married. Family was meant to make things easier. He’d seen other artists, rivals and friends, how they struggled when they were alone. Forgot to eat. Lived in their studios, gave up their homes. Or the homes became the studios. They got too thin or too fat, too everything. They drank and didn’t exercise, except with girls they brought home from other people’s shows, and even then it was only an hour, two tops, before the girls pushed out from under their heavy arms and wriggled away. Drugs and they never knew what day it was. His painter friend Richard stopped taking the medication that kept his hair in his head, either couldn’t remember to, or it conflicted with the drugs he was on already, Xanax and Percocet, Valium, special K. Those he never forgot. Richard had been taking SSRIs for twenty years without a prescription. What he paid for in place of health insurance.

Jack had had it with the benders, had his fill of them by age forty. The sad and unglamorous truth that he knew and people like Richard didn’t was that it’s no good living like the art you’re trying to make. Art is work. It is getting up early and working until you are tired and after, and it is surrounding yourself with things that keep you in a healthy state. People. Life on a schedule. This was why Richard the painter was bald and Jack still had a thick head of hair.

So: He would not not work. Only he couldn’t start any real project until he knew the consensus on his last. That was another thing he’d developed these last few years, a reputation. His reviews were read now, and it made him careful.

There was one job he could do, a commission from a university out west. The director of facilities at the art school there, a woman, had given him almost totally free rein. The director’s name was Jolene, but call her Jolie, and she laughed at simple questions like they were good jokes. That and the syrupy twang of her disembodied voice had him thinking she was fat and flushed easily. He’d told her the name of the piece he was chewing over: Sculptural Improvisation. Jolie had laughed. It would be in braised bronze. “That sounds just right,” she’d said. “Just right for the space.”

He’d been getting more commissions, more attention from better galleries, steadily over the last nine or ten years, ever since the controversy, the September series he’d made, also bronze, in 2002. You’d know it. Even outside the art world you’d have seen it. Three pieces. There was the man sitting, bent over and hugging his knees. There was the woman crouched, eyes closed and arms out, hugging an empty space. And there was the other man falling, presumed falling. He was upside down, his head twisted as though just pressed against something. His bronze suit was rippled and rushing, filled with metallic air. They were put out in Bryant Park. By the fourth day, two of the three had been vandalized and had to be cleaned. By the sixth day, they were covered in tarp. Then they were carted away.

Jolie would use terms like site specific about Sculptural Improvisation ’s size and position in the surrounding quad. Jack foresaw university tour guides noting how Shanley’s piece forced the visitor to “ acknowledge the space .” They would talk about the movement of the thing, even though there wasn’t any. Sometimes with these big pieces he felt he was pissing all over everything, marking territory. Very few people know anything, and the ones who do don’t know much. Students would meet by it, sit on its low bend in springtime and wrap its ends with scarves in winter. Maybe screw on it the night before graduation.

He started the circ saw but kept stopping, thinking he heard his phone. It was impossible to hear, with the machine going and his earplugs in besides. But he swore he heard it, worming its way into his ear, that phantom tone.

The September series turned out, years later, to be how he met the girl, a graduate student at NYU who wanted to interview him. For her thesis, she said. Censorship in art. Probably won’t even be published, she told him. “I can come to you.” She didn’t have a Dictaphone or anything like that, so they recorded the interviews on his computer for him to email to her later. She kept coming, and eventually he stopped sending them. She was the kind that goes around all day with buttons undone and doesn’t know it. She kept coming.

In the studio now, he tried not to think of her, but it was hard, the number of times he’d had her there. He tried at least not to think of her by name.

His first marriage had been fucked from the start, but this time, with Deb, he’d married the right woman. He had.

Marrying Deb, having the kids, all that was right. It was he who’d gone wrong, or the world. He’d felt it these last few years. Something to do with the Internet and jihad and all the natural disasters they’d been having: There was a buzz in the air that made it harder to move forward, a feeling that they were living in a time with no future. And then there had been that girl, in her see-through blouses with the breasts under them, soft and pointed up like curious things. With her full lips and full ass, and how did she stay so full when everything else every day was being depleted, when—

Listen, look:

It’s not like I killed anybody.

That was it. Jack did not really, in the end, believe he’d done anything so wrong. With the girl he’d been careful to make no promises. He’d encouraged her to date. Deb would need time and patience to forgive him, but here, alone with his tools, he could feel he was forgiving himself already.

True, it was hard on the kids, but that was why he wanted to explain to them, explain how much it was not about them. Maybe that was the painful part, that not everything in their parents’ lives could be.

The girl was a channel that let him be a better man at home. Like a soldier, I do on the outside what I need to keep the inside safe. That was the truth of how he felt, something to be kept down and buried deep.

(But what stays buried? Even heavy things have that way about them, of always coming to the surface— especially heavy things do — and when it did happen, when it did all come out, that Jack had been sleeping with a woman who was not his wife, not once but many times, a woman who loved him or thought she loved him, everyone knew. Deb, the kids, their grandmother. Even the building knew, because of something Simon said in the elevator, when a neighbor woman from the top floor had asked how is everything, and Simon, who was meant to make his answer about school, Model UN or SAT prep work, had said that his parents were getting divorced and that probably they would be moving.