have had time or patience for my prudery, silly cow that I was. The point was to be good at it—at art—and not to care. It wasn’t clear which of these was the more important, or whether simply in caring one fell at a crucial hurdle. Would it have been better not to be good and not to care? Obviously, above all—I had Rose in her splendid nudity in my mind’s eye—it was important to be good. Sirena, fuck her, was good.
But that, I told myself, was no reason to abandon my artists and their habitats. They were good, even if I wasn’t especially—doubt! Doubt! The enemy of all life!—and I owed it to them: so when Sirena was away, I went into the studio on Thursday and again on Friday, and stayed late into the night, to select and carefully to frame under glass the perfect reduced prints of Edie that, once installed, would look down upon her in her sealed room. Even as I filed and measured and glued, I thought: What are these images, even? They aren’t new. They don’t, as Pound so wanted, make it new. A magpie cobbling, they don’t owe anything to my own efforts. Or rather: given how labor-intensive my efforts were, my failure of effort was something bigger, somehow more grandiose, a failure that I could sense, like a blind person, but couldn’t properly identify.
But why, I asked at the same time, why judge what wasn’t yet made, not yet fully itself? The dioramas aren’t in competition with anyone, with anything; they’re your expression. Yours.
Yours? How can they be yours, when they’re simply primitive homages to actual great artists of one kind or another?
But as a sequence, they have a logic—
And that logic is entirely subsidiary. It’s a follower’s logic.
But aren’t we—most of us—followers?
But do we want to be? Surely a work of art isn’t simply about what is? Do you leave a door open for what could be, what we want to be?
Even as I filed and measured and glued, I was thinking more about Sana twirling, or the girl-child reaching, or Rose embracing, than I was about my own work. I was thinking about the intimations of monstrosity in Sirena’s world, about the Jabberwock eyes, and of the film she proposed to make of the children, and of what, exactly, it might be like.
It was around ten o’clock on Friday night that I became aware, as months before, of footsteps in the corridor, of a shuffling pause on the threshold, before the inevitable knock. It was warm, and I had all the windows open, so that the rustling of the leaves outside was like a voice, whispering, and it was so calm, and astoundingly I found that I was also calm, or almost. I didn’t grab for my X-Acto knife, or bead with sweat. Besides, I recognized the knock. “Who is it?” I called, as I walked to the door; and in response, again, the particular knock.
Skandar stood outside, a smattering of greenery on one shoulder of his messy suit jacket, as though he’d walked through a bush.
“Hey.” I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I felt a surge of something so strong it was almost like being sick. “Wow.”
“I was at a supper, not far away. Some Lebanese graduate students, talking a lot. Near Davis Square.” He wore the goofy smile, and surely had had a few drinks. He was carrying a paper bag. “I thought you might need a break,” he said. “I thought either a drink or a walk. So I brought a bottle of wine—it’s red, I think you like red?—and I brought—” He looked down.
“Your shoes.”
“Yes. I brought my shoes. Which I will need if we go for a walk.”
“Certainly around here,” I said, taking the bottle out of the bag. “Come on in.”
He was diffident, almost shy, his manner very different from that of his first visit, when he’d behaved as though he were my host, rather than the other way around.
“Sit down,” I said, pointing to his wife’s cushions. “I’ll get a couple of glasses.” There were only coffee cups in sight, those pretty, chipped ones, so emphatically hers. I poured red wine into two of them, and felt alluringly bohemian doing so, and wondered how much I owed to her any bohemianism, and any allure, I might have. But just then it didn’t matter. Even the thought was an anticipation of guilt. I hoped he wouldn’t comment on the cups. He didn’t.