Part 9 (2/2)

They stood like that until they were in the dark. He felt invincible, like a martyr, like a holy warrior. Why hadn't he understood it before now? No wrong for him but whatever was wrong in her eyes.

4.

THERE WAS THIS CAFETERIA-STYLE restaurant on South Woodlawn called Mandel's; in the window underneath the awning hung a small square neon sign that read, restaurant on South Woodlawn called Mandel's; in the window underneath the awning hung a small square neon sign that read, SEE YOUR FOOD! SEE YOUR FOOD! Jonas couldn't get over it. Like only a sucker would agree to pay for food without seeing it first. He added it to a sort of honor roll he kept in his head of ill-advised, unappetizing restaurant names: Hot and Crusty, Something Fishy, A Taste of Greece, a Chinese restaurant he'd once seen from a moving car called Lung Fat, though he wasn't sure that counted because it was obviously more a translation issue than a case of simple cluelessness. It was a list kept for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, though whenever he found a new one he couldn't help mentioning it to Nikki, who understood why Lung Fat was funny but not why it was still just as funny the twentieth time you said it. He just had this strange, campy affection for people and places that tried hard to sell themselves but couldn't get it right. He even ate at Mandel's a few times during his first exam week, and thereafter as a kind of exam-week tradition, wanting to do his part to keep them going despite their entrepreneurial tin ear. The food wasn't terrible. Filling, for d.a.m.n sure. And you did, in fact, get to see it there on the steam table before you ordered it. Jonas couldn't get over it. Like only a sucker would agree to pay for food without seeing it first. He added it to a sort of honor roll he kept in his head of ill-advised, unappetizing restaurant names: Hot and Crusty, Something Fishy, A Taste of Greece, a Chinese restaurant he'd once seen from a moving car called Lung Fat, though he wasn't sure that counted because it was obviously more a translation issue than a case of simple cluelessness. It was a list kept for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, though whenever he found a new one he couldn't help mentioning it to Nikki, who understood why Lung Fat was funny but not why it was still just as funny the twentieth time you said it. He just had this strange, campy affection for people and places that tried hard to sell themselves but couldn't get it right. He even ate at Mandel's a few times during his first exam week, and thereafter as a kind of exam-week tradition, wanting to do his part to keep them going despite their entrepreneurial tin ear. The food wasn't terrible. Filling, for d.a.m.n sure. And you did, in fact, get to see it there on the steam table before you ordered it.

Mandel's was dirt cheap and near campus and so it wasn't like other UChicago students didn't eat there too, but Jonas never told any of his friends about it or invited anyone along with him because he thought it would probably come off as slumming, even though it wasn't. As if he should have been eating at Morton's every night, as an undergraduate, just because he could afford to. People had weird ideas about money. Like not spending it was condescending somehow. Like being rich meant acting rich, whatever that entailed, and if you didn't live the way you could live every moment of the day, you were displaying a kind of reverse pretension. Or trying to pa.s.s as normal when you weren't. He wasn't trying to pa.s.s as anything. It was probably true that he'd been naive about the degree to which he could reinvent himself by leaving home and going away to school. It wasn't like he'd changed his name or anything. People started to figure out who he was within about the first week; after that, it wasn't so much that they treated him differently, it was that they made a great point of not treating him differently. Occasionally someone would want to pick some sort of Marxist fight with him, but it didn't interest him because he wasn't even involved enough to feel guilty about it. He and his father had never in their lives had one single conversation about, say, derivatives. It was unthinkable. No one could help what they were born into. You just had to start from zero and not let it determine who you were.

He lived off campus, but not in any great splendor or anything. A lot of undergrads lived off campus, just because the on-campus options were so dismal. When Nikki's parents came to see the place for the first time, you could tell they were a little puzzled that it wasn't nicer. Kind of mercenary of them, he mused later-out loud, unfortunately; he and Nikki had a fight over that remark that nearly undid the whole arrangement. She was four years older than Jonas-already in grad school-and he supposed that in the absence of any obvious gold-digging motive, her folks couldn't figure out what she saw in him. It was pretty disgusting, actually. Not least because they were so pleased to refer to themselves as a couple of old hippies.

He and Nikki met at the Art Inst.i.tute, though it wasn't quite as cute as it sounded, since Jonas was there on a field trip. Actually, it was more like an anti-field trip, for a course on Art Brut taught by Lawrence Agnew, a famously charismatic lunatic at UChicago whose intensity Jonas at that point still considered mostly laughable, but with whom he'd since taken three other courses, every undergraduate course Agnew offered. Nikki was a TA in that Art Brut course; he'd seen her before, in the darkened lecture hall where Agnew worked himself into a frenzy over slide projections (the informal record between slide changes was thirty-two minutes), but he'd never spoken to her until that day. She was the subject of a lot of male speculation in that cla.s.s, with a face made up of perfectly harmonized eccentricities: freckles, an overbite, a mannish brow, long black hair that was never held back in any way, so that whenever she leaned forward to take a note, her face disappeared from view. That day at the Inst.i.tute was freezing, and her strategy in response was to wear two sweaters and three s.h.i.+rts and a gigantic scarf and no coat. Jonas knew it was fas.h.i.+on at work rather than modesty but still liked to imagine the magnificence of the body that had to be buried under so many layers in order for her to be taken seriously and not incite a museum or lecture hall full of undergraduate boys. Agnew, who was only about five feet six, was lecturing invisibly from the center of a circle of about forty students, in front of a roomful of Monets.

”Was this s.h.i.+t ever ever good?” Agnew said. Not for him the reverent whisper one usually slipped into in museum galleries; where he went, the dynamics of the lecture hall went with him. ”Well, it had to have something going on, because believe it or not, Monet offended people mightily in his day, at least for five minutes or so, but believe me, offending people even for five minutes is pretty d.a.m.n hard to do. Harder today than it was then, but still. They literally wouldn't let his work good?” Agnew said. Not for him the reverent whisper one usually slipped into in museum galleries; where he went, the dynamics of the lecture hall went with him. ”Well, it had to have something going on, because believe it or not, Monet offended people mightily in his day, at least for five minutes or so, but believe me, offending people even for five minutes is pretty d.a.m.n hard to do. Harder today than it was then, but still. They literally wouldn't let his work into into the museum. And now if you go over to the gift shop which is the raison d'etre of ridiculous graveyards like this one, his work is on every desk calendar and coffee mug and golf-club-head cover you see. So what is the lesson there? I'll give you a hint: it's not a lesson about Monet. It's a lesson about what happens to the new in this world.” the museum. And now if you go over to the gift shop which is the raison d'etre of ridiculous graveyards like this one, his work is on every desk calendar and coffee mug and golf-club-head cover you see. So what is the lesson there? I'll give you a hint: it's not a lesson about Monet. It's a lesson about what happens to the new in this world.”

Jonas saw Nikki standing by herself on the edge of the circle, holding a notebook but not writing in it; from where she was positioned, she could see through the doorway to the next gallery, and something in there had caught her eye. Without giving it enough thought to lose his nerve, he walked quietly over to where she stood and looked straight over her shoulder, his face quite close to her hair, to see what she saw. It was a little girl, maybe three or four, who had somehow slipped under the rope and was reaching out with her fingertips toward one of the Seurats. She didn't touch it, though she was close enough. Some part of her was sensing the trouble she would get into. She was torturing herself. Her hand was held out in front of her in a position almost as if she were painting the picture. Jonas could feel Nikki holding her breath. Finally the girl's mother, or teacher, or nanny, grabbed her by the collar of her coat and yanked her back outside the ropes. Far from being upset, the little girl looked almost relieved. Jonas, who'd had a fair amount of success with women in his young life even though he never really knew what to say, felt the touch of inspiration.

”I bet that was you,” he said. Startled, Nikki turned around, and then fought unsuccessfully to keep the smile off her face before finally turning back toward the invisible Agnew and pretending she had been listening to him all along.

”The Impressionists were outsiders,” Agnew said, ”but they wanted in. They wanted in more than anything. This is what drove Dubuffet crazy, that kind of aspiration. He didn't want the self-conscious new, the ambitious new. He wanted the untouched, the uninfluenced. He wanted to go back. He wanted the outsider who didn't care-who didn't even know- know-that he was an outsider. Was this a vain hope? In his own case, probably. But art history is in a lot of ways the history of failure. It takes a genius to find something truly worth failing at.”

She appeared to be paying attention, but she did not move away from Jonas, not even when the group shuffled into the next gallery and Agnew began laying into Pica.s.so. There were probably fifteen fewer students in the group than they'd started out with; n.o.body cared about that, though-this wasn't high school, you could cut whatever you felt like cutting, it was presumed to be your loss. Other than the Art Brut cla.s.s, it was mostly old people in the Inst.i.tute on a Tuesday morning. They glared menacingly at the point from which Agnew's heedlessly loud opinions seemed to emanate, but they couldn't make eye contact with him, because he was too short.

The Inst.i.tute had a few Dubuffets, and they went and stared dutifully at them. Jonas didn't find them all that convincing, but that was the really electric thing about this cla.s.s: the professor was so rough on the defenseless dead artists that you wound up feeling a little sorry for them and would look more actively for some aspect of their work to like. ”You can feel the effort in his effortlessness,” Agnew said, ”the technique in the absence of technique. And though he's trying to chasten or alienate or ignore his audience, he still has has an audience, which is to say an antic.i.p.ated reaction, and that makes all the difference. You cannot, as the expression goes, get the toothpaste back into the tube. That state of pristine ignorance Dubuffet wants to go back to? Forget it, you can never go back to it. But does that mean it doesn't exist?” an audience, which is to say an antic.i.p.ated reaction, and that makes all the difference. You cannot, as the expression goes, get the toothpaste back into the tube. That state of pristine ignorance Dubuffet wants to go back to? Forget it, you can never go back to it. But does that mean it doesn't exist?”

They spent ten minutes max in the room full of Dubuffets, and then came the moment that turned Jonas from a student into an acolyte. ”Now follow me,” Agnew said, and he walked back through the museum the way they had come, into the entrance gallery, and, incredibly, out the front door onto the sidewalk. The group of students and TAs, now down to about twenty in total, followed him wide-eyed into the freezing suns.h.i.+ne and instead of turning left toward their chartered bus, followed Agnew to the right, in the direction of a group of artists who sold their work to tourists from card tables on the sidewalk. Mostly it was cheaply framed photos or pen-and-ink sketches of Chicago landmarks, including the Inst.i.tute itself. There were some Seurat knockoffs that were pretty good too. Agnew stopped in front of one particular table where a young man sat drawing on a sketch pad held down on his crossed knees. A group of pages evidently ripped from that pad was held face down on the table by a rock; their frayed edges rustled in the breeze off the lake. Agnew leaned over and rapped with his knuckles on the table; the artist looked up at him, nodded just slightly in recognition, and went back to his drawing.

”Ladies and gentlemen,” Agnew said, ”this is Martin Strauss. Martin lives on the South Side with his parents, and he comes here every day unless it's raining.”

Strauss stopped drawing, but not at the mention of his name. He looked at the pad in front of him for no more than a second or two, tore the page off from the spiral binding, lifted the rock, put the page face down on top of the pile, and placed the rock on top again.

”Though Martin has no particular notion of privacy,” Agnew said, ”I will honor his privacy by not discussing the specific ways in which he has been diagnosed by society as outside its norms. As a human being, we have marginalized him, but as an artist, he has no sense of himself as an outsider, or an insider for that matter, because he has no sense of what these categories mean. He has no sense of an audience at all, critical or otherwise. He simply needs to express something. Compulsion without ambition. Not only can this not be faked, it cannot be willed either. He could not stop what he is doing, or change it, or tailor it to someone else's expectations, if he wanted to. If you are enticed by the Art Brut ideal, you have to be willing to follow it where it takes you. This is not as simple as it may sound.”

By now Jonas had made his way to the front of the pack and could see the sketches, which someone-Strauss's mother?-had stuck in cardboard matte frames and wrapped in cellophane to protect them from the elements, that were pinned to an easel behind Strauss's card table. They were fantastically detailed black-and-white cityscapes, but the city was not Chicago. Every inch of every sheet was filled. The details, particularly the repet.i.tive arcs of imaginary Art Deco-style masonry on the buildings, were so hypnotic that Jonas felt, before he figured out, what was missing from each picture as a whole: a sense of perspective. There was no shade or depth to it, no vanis.h.i.+ng point of the sort even a grade-school art cla.s.s would have taught him. But it wasn't just some technique that Strauss didn't know. It wasn't a picture of of something, Jonas realized with a kind of s.h.i.+ver. It was just a picture. something, Jonas realized with a kind of s.h.i.+ver. It was just a picture.

Raindrops started to fall. ”Nikki?” Jonas heard Agnew say, and he looked up. ”How much time?”

Nikki pushed up her many sleeves to look at her watch. ”None,” she said.

”Okay then,” said Agnew, ”take a good look, everyone, and then meet back at the bus, please, in five minutes.” Nearly everyone headed back to the bus immediately. Other than a haircut that looked as if maybe he had done it himself in front of a mirror, and a somewhat intimidating focus, nothing about Strauss appeared all that unusual. Jonas saw Agnew fis.h.i.+ng for his wallet in his jacket pocket. He took out a twenty and put it in a s...o...b..x full of pens that sat on the card table not far from Strauss's elbow. Then he lifted the rock, took the entire sheaf of face-down drawings without looking at them, and headed back to the bus. Strauss didn't even raise his head; he just kept working.

On the bus Jonas realized that since Nikki was a TA he must already have her campus email somewhere; when he got back to his apartment he found it on the syllabus and emailed her to ask her out. Almost twenty-four hours later-which meant either a certain reluctance to cross that boundary or just that she didn't check her email that often-she wrote back yes. It didn't take too long before someone spotted them having lunch together somewhere, and then it was all over campus like wildfire. Undergrads who dated TAs were like rock stars, at least if the TA was as beautiful as Nikki was. It made things awkward for her in Agnew's cla.s.s, all those bold eyes on her, but by then the semester was nearly over anyway.

As the spring wound down, and the coffee shops and libraries emptied, and station wagons full of sagging boxes and laundry bags started crawling around campus, Jonas, who was falling in love a little with Nikki, or at least thought he might be, found himself resisting the idea of going back to New York that summer at all. For what? Everyone he knew would be somewhere else anyway, and if he went out to Amagansett instead, where he'd find a decent sampling of them, there was nothing there but decadence and narcissism, drugs and money and ent.i.tlement and waiting petulantly for the night. Worst of all was when people like his mother referred to it as ”the country,” as in, ”We can't see you Friday night, we're driving out to the country.” It wasn't the f.u.c.king country. It was a game preserve for rich people. But no one would acknowledge that: they all wanted to talk about this great farm stand they'd found, or how the guy who fixed their gutters came from an old whaling family. As for his parents, Jonas had nothing against seeing them, but the reality was that he probably wouldn't see them that much anyway: ever since they'd set up the foundation, the seam between the business day and the rest of their time had become pretty much undetectable. Evenings and weekends were always taken up with some kind of dinner or fund-raiser or ribbon cutting or whatever. Which, you know, bully for them. He just didn't want it to turn into another summer where he watched movies all day. That was for kids; and now he had a kind of life within his reach that promised something more adult and substantial, while his peers were still mired in the habits of adolescence, mastering video games and illegally downloading movies and trying to figure out where drunk women were likely to congregate.

What he would really have liked, actually, was to keep studying. One of the things he envied about Nikki was that while he was still fulfilling various diploma requirements, she had worked hard to narrow her interests down to the point where she got to spend her whole day thinking about one thing. She'd have her master's by the end of the upcoming year, and she was already gathering herself, psychologically at least, for the big push of her doctoral thesis, which would be about Donald Judd. During evenings spent in restaurants-nicer ones, now that school was out and Nikki was less uptight about being seen and he was more eager to impress her-Jonas learned more about boxes than he ever would have thought possible. It could get pretty rarefied, to the point of absurdity sometimes, but that only made it more admirable, like she was some sort of nun with no choice but to accept her own estrangement from the world. Also he knew that her excitement-about the art, about her work on it, about the future that work might bring-would generalize into an excitement that she would want to work off s.e.xually once they got back home. When she really got going she would start telling him what to do to her, which aroused him almost past the point where he could stand it. He didn't know it was possible to feel so well suited to another person, no matter how odd a match they might have looked like to others. The future, as his dad liked to say, was now.

Nikki had a research fellows.h.i.+p with Agnew that defrayed the cost of her tuition, and the terms of that fellows.h.i.+p, which were basically those of Agnew's cheerfully expressed but iron whims, were what kept her in Chicago over the summer. Her lease, though, like a lot of student leases, ran only through June. One morning at his place Jonas inexpertly scrambled some eggs and, as he watched her eat them in the summertime light with his bedsheet wrapped around her shoulders, he suggested, a little less blithely than he meant to, that she should move in with him.

He tried to hold on to this feeling of precocious maturity when his mother took the news that he wasn't coming home that summer rather harder than he'd expected. She even sounded like she might have been crying a little bit. Jonas wound up agreeing to let her send the jet for him so he could at least spend a week at home. It was a little jarring to be reminded how much bigger the townhouse was than the apartment where he and Nikki now chose to live. He said he was tired of going out so he and his mother sat at the dining room table and the cook, whom Jonas hadn't met before, brought them skate in a kind of clam broth that was probably the best meal he'd had in a year. ”Home cooking,” he said, and Cynthia laughed. There was something different about her appearance. At first he thought maybe she'd had some work done, but it wasn't anything as radical as that. Probably just Botox or whatever was the equivalent du jour. He didn't know why she thought she needed it, but he didn't say so. She liked to say that he could talk about anything with her, but it was an expression of his love for her that he would treat a subject like growing older as off-limits. She had a lot of questions for him about Nikki, which Jonas did his best to answer without answering.

His father came in when they were eating dessert. ”Look, darling, it's our son, home from college,” she said, as she'd been saying all week every time Adam walked into a room. ”You saw the OneWorld Health people today?”

”I did. For about two minutes. I really prefer it when they don't try to be charming, actually. They're like, we're busy saving lives around here, just leave the money on the table and let us get back to it.”

”Really,” she said, standing up and putting her arms around him. ”Personally I'm a sucker for a well-planned charm offensive.”

They kissed. ”Nick and Nora up in here,” Jonas said.

April wasn't home; she was spending the week out at the beach. Not surprising. Her boredom threshold was very low these days. He noticed that his mother would get a call on the cell every evening that wasn't from April but seemed to be about her. Maybe a driver or one of the other Amagansett staff charged with making sure that his sister wasn't letting anything get out of hand. He was disappointed to miss her; but it didn't last long, because the week after he got back to Chicago she called and surprised him with the news that she was coming out there to visit.

He didn't meet her at the airport-it hadn't been that long since they'd seen each other, Christmas probably, though it felt like longer than that-but he waited by the window with a cup of coffee for her car to arrive. He'd called the service himself and given the driver his address, so he didn't have to worry that she wouldn't be able to find the place; but there was an element of uncertainty that accompanied April whenever other agendas, like airline schedules, intersected with hers. It was not unheard of for her to express her disdain for flying commercial by skipping the flight entirely in favor of another few hours in the first-cla.s.s lounge. Jonas and their parents actually preferred it when she went to the lounges, though, not because they wanted to encourage her to fly drunk but because at least there were paid employees there who might help ensure that April actually boarded the plane.

When the town car rolled to a stop in front of their building's awning a few minutes later, he was a little shocked at how she looked: almost junkie-skinny, though her eyes and her skin were pretty clear and he had warned himself not to exaggerate or overreact. She set down her bag and you could tell right away, from the gimlet eye she pa.s.sed around the apartment, what she was thinking.

”Be it ever so humble,” he said.

April shrugged. ”Whatever you're into, Gandhi,” she said. ”So where's the wife?”

Jonas scowled at her as Nikki emerged from the kitchen. Nikki was blus.h.i.+ng and her voice was pitched unnaturally high; in truth she was a little intimidated by the image of Jonas's family and though she had professed to look forward to April's visit, at the last moment she seemed to have lost her nerve. She carried April's bag into the study that had been temporarily cleaned out to serve as a guest room. When she returned, she apologized for having to leave but she had a departmental conference with Agnew that started in half an hour. Jonas didn't recall her having mentioned it before. He and April watched the door close behind her.

”I am not at all sure,” April said, ”that chick likes me.”

”I think,” said Jonas, on whom this was just dawning, ”she's a little anxious that you not get the wrong idea about her.”

”What idea is that?”

”About why she's dating me.”

”Ah. Well,” April said, leaping onto the couch, ”it's true that she's a little young to be doing the cougar thing. Also a little hot for you. Nerd-hot, I mean. No offense.”

”You've never really understood that expression,” Jonas said.

”But hey, one look around this garret is enough to quell any suspicions that she's a gold digger. Or else she's into the long con. I'll sit her down and ask her what her intentions are when she comes back.”

She needed a nap, she said, and then she wanted to go exploring, which he knew meant shopping; they made a plan whereby he would meet her at Roberto Cavalli at six and then take her to Frontera Grill for dinner. It was the trendiest place he could think of and he imagined Nikki might even be pleased about that but instead she texted him to say that she was feeling sick and would skip it.

”Maybe she's afraid I'll carry her over to the Dark Side,” April said.

”The dark side of what?”

She shrugged. ”The dark side where people have fun and act their age. I've never in my life seen a chick as ready to get married as that one is.”

”You're wrong,” Jonas said, blus.h.i.+ng. ”You really think she'd be dating a junior in college if she was looking for a husband?”

”Well, not your average junior. But a forty-year-old junior like yourself? Perfect. She's in on the ground floor.” She saw the look of grim defensiveness on his face and laughed. ”Dude, you remain an enigma to me. For instance that apartment. What is up with that?”

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