Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

When May came, late in the semester, I had a twelve-painting series, and Professor Wei finally let me show it to him. We lined them up, five around the walls inside his office and the other seven in the hallway outside. He walked from piece to piece, examining each with his trademark silent-concentration face. It was not a good sign. In class he was effusive about the work he liked. He had sung Durant’s praises for two hours, though no one in the class was interested. Watching him apply his critical eye made me reexamine the set from the perspective of an independent viewer, and the stress of his silence suffused me with doubts not about my technique but about my choices. I knew what he was going to say: the choices were wrong. The only portrait they showed was a self-centered pretender.

I realized I had never been taken apart before. I’d had no reviews in papers, little or big. My work had not been on any sites and had not been subject to angry comment threads. I’d exposed myself so far only within the womb of the academic workshop, where most of the students were middling and the professors paid to be gentle. As blunt as Professor Wei was in class, I sensed his workshop was a soft territory compared to where we were heading now.

He was steepling his fingers again, tapping the two index fingers together. When his response finally came, it was less thorough than I’d come in hoping for, but a much easier escape than I had been anticipating. “Well done,” he said, and dialed a number on his cell phone.

“David, I have something to show you.”

At that time I thought expectation was the hardest state, that I couldn’t bear the waiting. When I think back to that summer, I remember doing a lot of walking around town. I’d walk north through the cobbled brick streets of Beacon Hill, cross the Longfellow Bridge into Cambridge, then cross the Harvard Bridge back to Back Bay. Other days I’d walk through the Fens and down to Jamaica Plain. My spurt of inspiration had played out, and I was eager for the next one to catch me, but so filled with ambition I was in no state to be caught. Halloween was around the corner, and I could once again bankroll the rest of the year, but I was reluctant to begin what Professor Wei had dismissed as craftwork when I had actual artwork hanging on the walls of that gallery out in Brighton. Only in retrospect can I see what a joy it should have been, feeling like I only had to choose what I wanted to become and it would happen.

On a Saturday in late September I took the T out to Brighton to begin collecting my paintings, none of which had sold. I was going to have to bring them back one by one and find a place to store them; I had graduated and no longer had access to the school facilities. I was an artist on my own now, and no one owed me anything. I’m sure the professor would have met with me to give me advice, but it was no longer his job, and I was embarrassed to visit him because it would have felt too much like begging. I went in and took the first canvas off its hooks, my self-portrait divided into every self I thought I could have been, my favorite to look at when I was composing them, the most painful to look at now.

Outside I leaned it against the wall to give Deckinger a call. I had a spreadsheet of all my clients from the previous year, and the plan was to start contacting them the first of October. I called Deckinger so early because he was my biggest ticket, but more so because I hoped he might buy one of my paintings, even if only out of nostalgia, even if only to have a story for his friends: “I bought this from the kid who carves my jack-o’-lanterns.” If he only gave me eighty dollars for it, if he hung it in his walk-in closet, the sale would mean more to me than another five thousand dollar commission.

He answered, and I told him who was calling.

“Never heard of you,” he said.

I repeated my name and reminded him of the pumpkins from last year. “That’s right,” he said. “They were a big hit. Everybody loved it. Thought you should know. It’s the way the world works, right? You pay an artist for work in your home and manage to steal all the credit.”

“I don’t need the credit,” I said. “I’m glad they went off well.”

I told him about my ideas for his pumpkins this year, that I could do a Sistine Chapel that would blow his mind, or a crowd of horrormovie villains. Sales weren’t in my blood, but I thought I was coming on smooth. I was aiming for bigger spreads, more pumpkins, more cash in my pocket.

“I haven’t thought much about what I’m doing this year, but when I do I’ll have my secretary get in touch. Look, I’m getting on the bridge. I’ve got to go.” He hung up before I could renew my pitch. From that point on, I knew the score. I knew there would be no call from any secretary. I even knew Durant no longer graced his foyer, now that Guy Bonner was the soup du jour. I took my painting and got on the train.

In Allston, though, I had to get off because the train became too crowded. At each stop, at the usually empty stops after the line turned left off Commonwealth, new people poured on. What had been a ghost train in Brighton was now full of elbows that did not bode well for my canvas. At Packard’s Corner I made the decision to walk the rest of the way. It would take a lot longer to bring home all the paintings this way, but it was a walk I enjoyed, down Commonwealth right in front of Boston University, with the river peeking from behind in the gaps between buildings.

At first I’d been unable to figure out what drew the crowd that day. It was too early in the morning for a Red Sox game, too early in the week for the Patriots. Even in the “Athens of America,” as a few old-fashioned folks still called Boston, plays and museum openings didn’t draw like this. The traffic was backed up as well, at a complete standstill in the eastbound lanes and not much better westbound, and even the sidewalks were overwhelmed with a mix of the young and old.

When I got closer to the center of campus I saw pavilion tents and young women in scarlet polos ushering about young people in backpacks. It was Boston University’s move-in day, and four thousand new students were swarming east Allston with their parents in tow. There was music playing; there were games, festivities, booths, all signaling the commencement of a new age and new possibilities for the arriving students. Along the street, buskers and artists had come to take their tithe, selling Citgo signs and Fenway Parks and paintings of the Common. I even saw the street artist—the one who’d sold me the panorama for Deckinger’s pumpkins that day in Back Bay—hauling in hundreds with his infinitely replaceable work.

I leaned my painting against a garbage can and walked on without it. It could decorate a dorm room or migrate to the dump, but that was no longer my concern. As I trekked farther up Commonwealth, I saw what was stopping traffic. A clumsy U-Haul driver had driven his truck through an underpass without enough clearance, shearing off half of the overhead storage compartment and wedging the vehicle in so tightly that two parallel tow trucks were trying to pull it out together. A piece of wooden furniture too mangled to identify lay along the line between lanes, surrounded by a smashed TV and scattered boots and dresses. A girl in a tube top berated her father on the sidewalk. The foot traffic swarmed around it all and walked on unaffected, and the subway cars rattled by, and the river flowed on as always.

At home I poured myself a small glass of Paul Giraud and drank it slowly. I had a few inches left in the bottom of the bottle, and when I was done I hid it away in the back of a cabinet and never touched it again, because I know that when it’s gone, it’s gone.