Yes, I am the Artist

            by Lia Vardy

 

         “What do you do?” they asked.

         “Well, I’m an artist,” he said.

         Those were nights before Jack stubbed his toe on the corner that jutted out between his bathroom and the hall. In the dim lit nights when he had a bit too much to drink and work got too hard his toe would almost decide to, stub itself. The sudden pain would make his knees buckle and his eyes widen as he fell onto the linoleum feeling so sorry for himself. A grown man with his toe throbbing in his cupped hands, a constipated grimace across his face, ugly and pathetic. Jack felt embarrased. As if someone would be watching and say, “Poor Jack, he used to have talent, now he’s on the floor.”      

         There he was, acclaimed and he couldn’t think of a thing. There was all that white that stood staring blankly up at him, mocking him. Jack felt nothing. He convinced himself that his bedroom was dirty or that he was hungry, just so the whites would stop staring at him. And he’d leave them grinning because they had won.

         “I just, I just wish you could take yourself seriously, I love your work,” a woman would say with her eyes wide looking up at the ceiling in bed. “I really loved your work.”

And he would turn over, defeated by the whites and this woman, and pull the string to the lamp until the room turned black.

         Often the galleries seemed to call too soon,“How many pieces do you have so far?”        

The telephone sat cradled in his neck as he shaved in the mirror. The faucet ran cold water and a drop of blood traveled down the drain.

         “Fuck,” he cursed.

         “Fuck what?”

         “Ah, I just cut myself, listen I’ll call you back. I have tons of pieces, they’re, they’re uhhh spilling out of the studio and into the bedroom. I’m inspired,” Jack lied.

He dabbed the cut with a tip of a tissue and looked at himself in the mirror, all he saw were the whites of his eyes and the whites of his teeth and the white walls around him. It made him sick.

         “It makes me sick.”

         Jack once held a brush and knew what to do with it. Blue faces, giant parrots, fighting families, extended hairlines, rows of books, naked bodies, and everything came swiftly and with ease. The crowds loved his work, women, really beautiful women, would walk into an exhibition and their necks would fall back as they stared up at a floor to ceiling piece. They would say,   “Ahhh,” as people do when they see redwoods old and aging or babies with wide eyes. Really satisfied because something great exists and is close enough to touch. He once heard the clicking of a woman’s heels and felt it was something special, something just for him. The way they walked around his art, stepping towards it, and almost into it. Then backing away and turning on their heels and looking over their shoulders before they left.

         “Jack, I don’t know how you do it,” the girls would say. And it may as well have been sex, for all the good it did him. But now Jack sat sprawled in a bathrobe on the floor thinking of the women in their black dresses and the men with their bow ties and all their, “Ooo Oos” and wanted to vomitt. But maybe the paint tubes or this room was getting to him, he needed fresh air. It was as if all that blank canvas had become himself and he was beginning to feel surrounded. Like the author who wrote 2,000 words on suicide and died of the fumes from his own ink before he ever got to finish. Too bad.

          He thought himself a tortured man, plagued by painter’s block.       

         “You know, all blocks in creativity are simply the artist becoming, well becoming self concious of what they produce,” Karen said as she inhaled from a cigarette and let her eyes wander to look smart. Marty would then begin to speak and she would chime in blowing smoke everywhere. Jack had mistaken this behavior for intelligence, for wit. Later he realized Karen had simply seen movies.

         “It’s true, she’s right, she’s always right. You’re becoming more self aware but you’re still this brilliant artist-”

         “Brillllliant!”

         “-And you know, you’re just sitting there making these excuses.”

         “These excuses!”

         “I think you’re afraid to let people down, you’re a famous painter and you’re still alive,” Marty poked his finger through the air, “I mean, you’re getting paid for this, how many people make it that far. Eh? Yeah, so poor Jack if you have a, a, what did you call it Karen?”

         “A creative block.”

         “Yes, a creative block!”

         “Imaginary! No such thing! Artistic scapegoat. Poor Jackey and his little goat,” Karen coaxed.

         “We don’t mean to be hard on you but, you’re brilliant.”

         “Brilliant!”

         “Shut up,” Jack would say.

         “We’re right,” Karen affirmed with a new cigarette half dangling, making her mutter as she searched for her lighter.

         “We’re always right,” said Marty as he lit it for her.

And so Jack walked home feeling even more sorry for himself, knowing that he hardly suffered from lupus or cancer. All he suffered from was the self esteem of a thirteen year old girl with a paintbrush. And yet, he still wondered which was worse.

         At three am he woke up on the couch with the televsion flickering against the walls on mute. The silence forced him to foucs on the screen as it rapidly switched colors, numbers, cars, teeth, jaws, butts, and breasts.

         “Because of televison, the human mind is working much faster, and so I thought to multiply my images in order to keep the viewer’s attention.” Jack thought of his art school friends and their obsessions as the pictures flashed across the screen.

         “Fuck Andy Warhol,” Jack cursed, he was feeling less creative and more bitter by the second. He stumbled up to go pee, tripping on an empty can of Campbells by the couch. He felt groggy and his back was sore from sleeping in the strange position. He splashed water on the scruff of his face and pulled at the bags of his eyes. He feared yellow teeth, and brushed away with Colgate, only to meekly smile at himself in the mirror and see the untouched white that it left behind.

         Louise owned a gallery uptown and called just as the sun leaked into the studio space.

         “Good morning Jack, it’s Louise.”

         “Louise, how is everything?” Jack tried to sound busy and fufilled.

         “Fine, but I have a favor to ask of you. My niece Donna is here from Buffalo, she just moved for a bit to get a job. Now I’m getting older and I wouldn’t be as much fun as a young artist...”

         “I get it,” Jack grumbled into the reciever.

         “It’s just that, you’re an inspirational artist. She needs to meet someone like you, people like you.”

         “Alright, I’ll go for a coffee.”

        

         “You’re the artist?” she says, Donna, Jack is told, is in her early twenties.

Donna had prescription glasses that were red in the rim, and too big for her face. They made her look like a bird, that long nosed, thin lipped girl. Her eyes, the size of golf balls now, would stare through the lenses blankly.

         “I am the artist,” Jack said, although a little skeptical of late. Steam of espresso makers shoot off behind the bar.

         “I saw your art from the last show,” she says.

         “Oh?” Jack prepared himself for her “Ooo Ooos” as he rubbed the side of his stubble. He felt as if he hadn’t slept recently, or not for long enough at least. He had stayed up many nights in front of the empty canvas, dizzy in his underwear.

         “I didn’t like it,” she said.

At first Jack nodded, with the small smile he gave after being praised. Though he soon after realized what she had said and he must have looked pale because Donna raised an eyebrow. She didn’t apologize or explain, it seemed Donna thought of only what was in front of her, there was simply a mug on the table and an artist across from her. She looked through those red rims and said what she felt without ever feeling sorry.

         “What did you not like about it?” Jack was interested. Perhaps it was because, he had never really liked those last pieces himself, hadn’t even thought of them. He was too focused on his current late nights: white, empty, canvas. Although, he had liked the girls that liked those pieces, sometimes one would stay the night, and that’s when he really liked art.

         “I just didn’t.” she said. A mug on the table, an untied shoe, a loose button. She was blank and yet she stared and she criticized through those big red rims like she knew something.

         “I can’t make you like it, but it’s ridiculous not to have some sort of, well, aesthetic reasoning to base your statement off of.” Jack was beginning to get excited as he tore a pack of sugar open and watched as the white crystals dissolved into the black.

         “What is that?”

         “Sugar, it’s sugar and coffee.”

         “No, what you said before.”

         “What?”

         “Aes...aes something.”

         “Aesthetics?”

         “Yeah, what’s that?”

         Donna wasn’t lying. She just stared through those big glasses and she really didn’t know what it meant, and yet she criticized his art. Jack’s eyes opened a bit wider at the thought of this woman, a girl really, shrugging off his paintings because, she just didn’t like it. He thought of Karen as she smoked her cigarettes and said, “You know?” and waved her hands around. How stupid Karen would think Donna was. A young woman who dared to talk about art without ever hearing the word aesthetics. Jack pictured Karen when her lips turned up into their corners and the snort she would let out if she heard this. If she heard that Jack Laurent was being criticized by this girl. He didn’t realize how stupid he had looked staring off into space while thinking about it all. Slowly the whites of the sugar sank to the bottom of his cup.

         Jack stayed in the booth for quite sometime. For whatever reason he couldn’t leave. He watched as Donna made shapes with her thin lips. Everything dry and unexperienced, her answers often shorter than the questions. She never tossed her head or thought of what to say. She didn’t smoke because it smelled bad, she was only in the city for money--otherwise she hated it, she only drank ice water and ginger ale, and she hardly ever blinked. Sometimes she would wander off the path a bit and give detailed descriptions of the most awful topics.

         “Oh I don’t know. I never liked yellow. My house in Buffalo is yellow. It’s a transition yellow though. My mom, my mom was the one who had her mind set on the sample square of the Sears Catalogue. And when she decided, rollers covered my house in that yellow.”

She was the most brilliantly boring person Jack had ever met, and he was fascinated. He imagined that she took her haircuts like her breakfast everyday, the usual, and the hairdresser would roll her big brown eyes. Snip snip, just at her shoulders, nothing shorter. It wasn’t that she lacked looks, she had nice features and hair so blonde it was white. Maybe even once a boy had told her, “I like you Donna.” on the day just when the trees shook and the leaves fell down, and all she said was, “That’s nice.”

So Jack sat in the booth with this younger woman who knew nothing of good wine or books, who told him that his art was bad, and it could have been therapy for all the good it did him.

         When Jack got home that evening the door slammed behind him and he pulled off his jacket as he rushed across the wooden floors. There was white all around him, and for the first time in months, he couldn’t get enough. He stayed home and painted more than he ate, he couldn’t stop. Donna had a curiosity, an innoncence that was infectious. She could care less who Jack was and so Donna became a sort of unlikely muse for his work. She passed his apartment and stood as far back on the sidewalk as she could to see if he was inside. She sometimes knocked, but most often, simply turned the knob and sat on the floor as he painted and told her of books she didn’t know.

         Jack remembered being in the down the street one afternoon. The whole night before he had sat on the floor trying to paint, he had stubbed his toe between the hall and the bathroom and hadn’t bothered to get up. The following morning he heard the voice of a woman next to him

          “I know you! No, I really know you, give me a second...” Jack hadn’t shaved that morning, nor the day before. He turned to see a young woman, eyes closed and tapping her finger. “It’s at the tip of my tongue, I just can’t, wait, yes, okay you’re Jack Laurent. The artist right? I went to the small opening with Paul Stein, we spoke a bit.” her arms flew up in the air with satisfaction.

Jack’s head slowly turned more towards her and he gave a bleak smile as the sun glared in his eyes.

         “No, no, you must have me confused,” he gritted his teeth. She stared at him for a moment until her face turned sour.

         “Well, that’s just selfish isn’t it? Here you are, famous for a job that most people can’t get paid for until they’ve died and you can’t even admitt to people who you are. Poor Jack, right?” she said with a laugh.

         “Now wait just a minute, wait, wait,” he pinched his nose bridge and shook his head.

         “Yes?” she asked.

         “I’m not that bad, I mean, I’m rotten, I am, but not as much as you think.”

         “Do you think I care? I don’t know you. So you’re going for the sad painter, I get it.” her mouth slightly twisted “I mean that’s what bothers me most is that you’re probably faking it. Who wouldn’t want to be you?” and with that she picked up her bag and walked out in a stride.                The opening of Jack’s show was succesful to say the least. Most of the city had been anticipating what would come of his hibernation period. Karen and Marty stood outside smoking cigarettes and clinging to their champagne flutes. Donna walked around as people stared at her and she stared back through her red rimmed glasses. The gallery was finally opened and people made a slow progression towards the paintings on the wall. Most seemed truly shocked to see what lay on the walls. For all along the room lay canvas after canvas with collosal black block letters that read, “I AM DOING THE BEST I CAN, AND YES, I AM THE ARTIST.”