Day: A Novel by Michael Cunningham

Author:Michael Cunningham [Cunningham, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Garth checks his messages again. Still nothing from Chess.

Focus on the work, then. He’s been waiting to tackle Hamlet.

It’s a headdress, this time. A helmet of sorts modeled on the headdresses worn by Maasai warriors, on display at the Met. Garth’s variation, almost finished, is covered in pigskin coated with tar, riddled with crevices into which he’s embedded pebbles of broken glass, rhinestones, and teeth. He’s found someone online, some ghoul who sells human teeth. He’s interspersed them among the glass and the fake diamonds.

He’s written on the wall of his studio, with a charcoal stick: all occasions do inform against me, and spur my dull revenge.

Fuck yes, vengeful Prince of Denmark.

Garth scrubs at the tar with a wire brush. It has to look worn. It has to look like an ancient object Hamlet would elect to wear when he finally decides that he needs it.

Garth stands back, gives it a good look. He decides against attaching the steel spike to the top, the one he’s sawed off an old German helmet bought at a flea market. The Hamlet headgear wants to be compact, skull-like, nothing for an enemy to take hold of, not even a spike. This headdress is all business. Its secrets are barely concealed in its crevices, as if they were bursting through some substratum of royal ceremony and sacrifice. Diamonds and teeth.

It’s good. It has force, and menace. Its intentions are well enough concealed. Still, Garth has to tamp down the conviction that it’s missing something. He’s learned to ignore that—the impulse to keep working, to add, to make it a more shockingly alive incarnation of itself. A sculpture should always look like it’s not quite finished. Hack work is finished. It’s on offer as an object of veneration. It can only stand in rooms or galleries contemplating what it considers to be its own perfection.

Jesse will be horrified. This is the nastiest one yet. Garth started with the romances—Cymbeline, The Tempest—and is just now moving on to the tragedies.

Wait until Jesse sees what Garth is thinking about for Macbeth. Wait until he sees King Lear.

One of the only advantages of working with a small-time dealer: Jesse takes solace in the conviction that his artists are too outré for what he calls the international art cartel. It helps that Jesse’s family made a fortune manufacturing sliding glass door frames. He doesn’t really need to sell anything. Never mind his refrain about championing what he likes to call “artists who live on the edge of total catastrophe.”

Jesse, if you want catastrophe, I’ll give you catastrophe.

The tar needs more work, more corrosion, before Garth gessoes it. It wasn’t easy finding old-stock gesso, far enough past its prime to give everything the merest hint of yellowish unclarity, of aging lacquer that was once meant to preserve but has, over time, conferred upon the object—the painting, the wax fruit—a frozen ongoing life in the land of the dead.

One more go with the scouring brush, then it’s time for the gesso.

Before Garth gets back to work, though, he leaves another voice mail for Chess.

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