Mutual Admiration Society Getting Drunk Together In Public.
Another art opening.
Photographs of the underbelly of urban capitalism.
Rare that the ocular suck should gaze upon the down and out and come away so untouched.
Was that what made it art, she wondered?
A wino taking a leak on the side of a mailbox.
Splain me, she felt like dumbing.
Red wine in cheap plastic cups.
Her favorite.
After five glasses you still got more of a buzz by burrowing your nose in the pile of overly-perfumed overcoats left casually on the ratty sofa at the gallery’s front door.
The sixth glass was the key.
Photographs of pots and pans, of flies dappling the forked punctures of a half-eaten slice of peach pie, a close-up of an ashtray, an Alamo snowball, a nipple-ring on a sleeping boy, a sign outside a Tex-Mex place, the letters rearranged to read: PO KAN SEE WHU.
Anais is claustrophobic, unaware, or seemingly so, of the lechery she inspires.
She is silent before the exhibition, holds her criticism like a child holding its bladder in the backseat of an endless road trip.
People know her.
She knows them.
There is a parenthesis of empty space between her and her surroundings, whether canvas, wrought iron, or flesh and bone.
Tell me what you see are words which will be rewarded by the deepest silence.
If gestures constitute betrayal however, then Anais has the body of a Borgia.
The room they walk through, stand in the center of, grow restive in, begins to swirl.
In the pit of her stomach, the moths scout out the traces of love’s infiltration.
Tell me what you see.
Better yet, tell me what you look away from.
Sisterhood’s as much a joke as any other kind of hood but even so, on certain nights the sum is almost greater than the parts.
(Buffalo Gals leaf through a True Confessions, pages sticky with the latest runaway’s spilt cherry Coke.)
The centerpiece of the next exhibition was a tape recording of the artist moaning.
For the first three or four minutes the audience continued to stroll about slowly, a few with sheepish grins as though they found the sound not titillating so much as embarrassing.
Removed from any context other than the rather bland architectural photography on the walls and the fact that the venue occasionally saw service as a chapel for the students, the nature of their reaction could safely be assumed to be a commentary on the perceived sexual quotient in her performance.
Between the moaning’s fifth and tenth minute several of the audience left the room, while the others grew silent, coming to rest before on photograph or another, as though they were waiting on a train that was running late.
There was no distinction as to men or women in this reaction.
The frailer of two monks from the on-campus brewery approached the tape recorder itself, hunching slightly and working his bifocals on his nose, teeth bared in concentration.
His companion took out a pocket watch and whistled.
A light breeze blew through the room.
All of this was noted by the artist herself, who bore an expression of someone with a vague feeling of being put upon.
Not so much misunderstood as misapprehended.
Anais and Mary made a circuit of the room and then stood by the door, watching the others, watching the bar-stooled artist watching them.
A tiny half-nod passed between Anais and the artist.
-You know her? Mary asked.
-I know her, Anais replied, lowered her voice to a whisper:
-she stole this idea from a friend of ours.
-I thought everything was stolen these days.
-That’s true, but it’s the difference between tomb-robbing and corpse-snatching.
-I sort of like it, Mary said, but I’m not sure what I think of her just sitting there.
-She’s being provocative. She’s planting germs in everybody’s head. The moment of truth will be when the tape stops.
-And?
-I’d rather imagine it than experience it. Let’s check out the booze at the reception.
By the seventeenth minute of the moan only one person remained beside the artist.
So this is what my fate looks like she wrote with spider script on the back of the programme.
She made a column of nine attributive words and equal-signed them with accurate descriptors of the remaining spectator (given the light, the distance, the contracting room) in the likely event he didn’t survive until the reception.
After a half an hour she noticed just how sad she sounded, moaning invisible under fluorescence.
At the reception and afterwards, Anais and Mary talked postcards, and erotica, the various enigmas of the truly perverse, exhibitionism in others, in themselves, the experience of being nude in a roomful of egos, both those riotous as incineration and those weak and pulling every punch, the furious scribblers who couldn’t care less if you were beautiful or hideous and the day-dreamy oddballs who wanted you to like them, to think well of them, to give some sort of permission to whatever was slithering and bubbling in their head.
They made their way along Montrose Boulevard, taking turns at mimicking the more amusing attendees they’d encountered. When they reached the corner of Hawthorne Anais said she was going to drop in on a friend, and reminded Mary of the exhibition of Ingres’s drawings which would be on display in a week or so.
-We have to make sure and catch that, she said, you’ll see why, I promise.
-Sounds like a date. Goodnight, Anais.
-Goodnight, Mary.
Mary crossed the street and then stopped and stared down towards Roseland, where a black dog was running unhurriedly away from its slowpoke owner, its leash making a slapping sound on the asphalt. She recrossed the street and caught sight of Anais. She watched her for as long as it took for Anais to reach a triangle of light cast in collaboration with a streetlight and the giant neon letters of a multi-story parking garage. Anais vanished in the light. Mary waited, counting out the seconds, expecting to see a more shadowy, smaller version of her beautiful friend once she’d emerged from the blindness.
But nothing.
It was as though Anais had been swallowed up in the gold and white, or like Danae, was submerged and whirlpooled in the froth of a god’s downpour of love.