The Long Corner by Alexander Maksik

Author:Alexander Maksik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2022-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

As I lay naked in my bed, I imagined Plume watching over me while I kicked and moaned and clicked my worn teeth.

A storm woke me in the morning and for hours I lay listening to rain thrashing the tin roof.

My breakfast was there as ever and, ignoring today’s card, I took it back to bed and ate it for lunch and drowsed beneath the white muslin like some grieving viceroy.

When I woke again there were three papaya seeds stuck to my cheek and it was late afternoon.

19

At some point in the night, I woke to the hope that when the sun rose Theo would be at his easel trying to paint, counting his slights, searching for a name. But later, I went up to his studio and found no sign of him. All the brushes, the cups, the bottles, the cans, all gone. His chair was pushed square to the table. I don’t know how they could have done it so quickly, but the boy had been erased. In his place was an empty canvas propped on a clean easel, like some interior designer’s idea of a room where art is made.

I sat on the floor looking out the glass for a while. I liked being there in the quiet, with the door closed. Even the simulacrum of art held the power to move me.

Frankel said that when he first began working, everything he did was a response to death. Every idea, every sketch, every sculpture was, in some way or another, a form of memorial, which was to say that everything he did was a reference to what no longer existed.

“In those days, I demanded a silent, isolated studio. I was obsessive about it. Unless I was working alone behind a locked door, I was paralyzed.”

“What changed?”

“I became a revolutionary,” he said, patting my knee.

We were on a bench in Washington Square Park drinking coffee from paper cups.

“What were you revolting against?”

“Death,” he said, in a quiet voice, as if revealing a secret. “It had never occurred to me before. But then, all at once, I saw that I had more interest in the living, that as long as I always knew I could die, would die, the new sculptures could never be empty of death, but they could become driven by, and evidence of, my futile, joyful war against it.”

While I was working on the profile, Frankel gave me free access to the studio. I could come and go as I pleased. Speak with whomever I liked. I drank with them. I got high with them. I tried to separate the artists from the stragglers. I stayed into the early morning and sometimes slept on a couch. I was happy either way. I loved waking to see the nests they’d made and I loved walking home with a cup of coffee just before dawn, still a little drunk, always writing. There was less litter in the space between my mind and my work then, the lines more direct.

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