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  Shadows and Light

  THAT FIRST EVENING (AND SECOND NIGHT) OF WADE’S stay with Wanda and me, when I climbed with tired legs and eyes up to our third-floor apartment, I heard Pat Metheny’s Bright Size Life playing through our door at a volume perhaps beyond the bounds of neighborliness, though Metheny’s music, with the possible exception of Zero Tolerance for Silence, which hadn’t been released yet, is neither in itself nor socioculturally the sort to goad fretful calls to the police. The music, at any rate, was loud enough to cover the sound of my opening and closing the door.

  The apartment was cozier than it had ever been since Wanda and I began our tenancy about a year earlier. We didn’t trouble ourselves much with décor and atmospherics, so this isn’t saying much, but we did trouble a little, so it is saying something. One late-spring Saturday shortly after we moved in, for instance, we took a walk and wandered into an estate sale at a long-neglected Queen Anne–style house, where we bought a pastel rag rug and two unsigned oil paintings (a daub of an Ayrshire cow, a seascape not unlike one of Courbet’s elegant toss-offs). For the walk home, we hoisted the heavy rolled-up rug over our shoulders and each tucked a painting under a free arm. Before long we had to rest, using the rug as a log bench. I rubbed and rotated my neck; soon Wanda took over rubbing, and we smiled at each other because the neck’s soreness was cunnilingual. Cottonwood inflorescence and a pleasant breeze were making the city a snow globe (I collect them), and I believe I made Wanda laugh by catching some of the fluff on my tongue. At another point along the walk home, both of us, almost at the same time, noticed a smell coming from the rug, a subtle but nagging urinous smell, entirely resistant, the coming weeks proved, to various nonprofessional cleaning products and techniques. The urine, Wanda insisted from the moment we first smelled it to the moment she hefted the rug into a dumpster, was human. Feline, I suspected. She propped the paintings against the same dumpster, because she could no longer enjoy them aloofly or ironically, she said, having envisioned the deceased’s solitary, incontinent final years of endless television, the blue light gleaming through the window at indifferent neighbors. (Last night I walked by a house whose living room was TV-lit in flashes of all the primary colors, and maybe some nonprimary ones too. Do the new TVs offer more heterogeneous window light to passersby, or has blue’s dominance been overstated?) Also during our first months in the apartment, Wanda and I (I really) often lit candles from a package I’d bought one payday at a grocery store. After this supply ran out, though, we normally dwelt in bright overhead light, either because it was easier to flick one switch—or, sometimes, push one (the living-room overhead was operated by two resistant buttons, not a toggle switch)—than to spend several seconds fishing under our askew lampshades, or (we dwelt that way) for other reasons, such as Wanda’s preference for sex in the sharpest, least flattering light available.

  But as you may have deduced from the above use of the word cozy, the living room’s overhead light was off when I walked into the apartment that first evening of Wade’s stay. He had bought a package of red dinner candles, had jammed four or five of them into our tritely bohemian wine-bottle holders, caked with piebald wax, had jammed another four or five into unfamiliar wine bottles probably scavenged from recycling tubs. The bottles were ingeniously diffused throughout the living and dining rooms: on speakers and tables, on the TV and the floor, on Wade’s record boxes and our small bookshelf; the light balance was perfect, I thought. Our two living-room lamps (one a twin-goosenecked floor lamp with megaphonic shades, the other intending to look like Hank Williams) were on, but Wade had swapped their abrasive light bulbs for softer versions (“glow pears,” he called them). Incense was burning. The whole room was yellow with red accents, cavelike and warm, warm figuratively—literally it was hot: the apartment’s radiators overtaxed themselves in fall and winter; October through March we walked around in T-shirts and unbuttoned pajama tops, shed much nocturnal blood through our noses.

  Wanda: “Part of it’s just run-of-the-mill ironizing, but really I’m working with entitlement, appropriation, displacement, trying to interrogate who owns these jokes.” She was sitting at the Formica table explaining her work to Wade, who was preparing a mostly premade pizza in our tunnel-like kitchen. They greeted me and she carried on. She nearly had to shout over the music, but she had a strong, performer’s voice. For money, she answered phones for a catalog run by the public radio station, taking orders for jocular sweatshirts and Garrison Keillor cassettes, but mainly she was a cover comic, collage comedian, or conceptual stand-up. She performed under the name Shucks Miller and built routines out of old jokes by Sid Caesar, Cap Dolen, Herbie Dodd, Henny Youngman, Harry Kobinz, Robert Klein, Gabe Kaplan, Richard Pryor, Morris Wohl, Lenny Bruce, Blowfly, Barry Greer, Rodney Dangerfield, Futz Kruger, Alan King, Nat Davis, David Brenner, Jimmie Nichols, Woody Allen, Mort Sahl, Russell Jones, David Steinberg, Dick Gregory, Don Rickles, Bob Hope, and others, plus anonymous jokes from out-of-print anthologies, jokes from allergenic back-issues of Playboy, Passages, and Reader’s Digest, jokes from the squarest daily comic strips (Mort Walker, Harry Scott, Dik Browne, Bil Keane, Ted McKinley, Cathy Guisewite), these last especially awkward to cover since Wanda would have to describe the drawings as well as recite the bubbles of thought and speech: “So this youngish yet frumpy woman is standing glum-faced in a dressing room, all manner of bathing suits tossed higgledy-piggledy around her …” It was stock postmodern shtick, unserious, many would argue, but Wanda was serious about it, tried to use the method as a path to something larger. She spent a lot of time in the library, sometimes eleven or twelve consecutive hours, listening to old records under big beige headphones, poring over joke books, filling her notebook. When she got home, her ears were often still sweaty, her fingertips still dusty, and I’d kiss or lick them to reward her labor. She had several cardboard fruit boxes filled with notebooks, themselves filled with jokes she’d considered promising enough to write down, but almost all of these jokes she ultimately rejected. The second stage of keepers she wrote out on cards taken from a board game, fairly large cards (5½ x 3¾ inches), the kind that can only be read through a tinted viewer, though of course Wanda’s felt-tip writing could be read without the viewer. When planning a set, she would obsessively arrange and rearrange the cards in arcs and other potentially engrossing shapes on our scratched hardwood living-room floor, making it tricky to walk around without disturbing her provisional outline. “How much longer about do you think these will be on the floor?” I’d say. And she’d say, “Someday I’ll have an atelier for this shit, but for now we’ll just have to embrace the obstacle-course thing.” She used words like atelier aggressively, I thought at the time, to stress that she was smarter or at least better-read than I was, but now I think she took more pleasure from the words themselves than from the humbling effect they may have had on me.

  I went to turn down the music a notchette, and took a seat across from Wanda at the table, on which there was a fat, impressively rolled joint sprinkled with brown sugar. The table no longer wobbled; someone, surely Wade, had made a shim out of a shard of cracker box. “My till came up ten dollars short,” I said.

  “Can I borrow ten bucks?” Wade said while rubbing butter on the pizza crust’s rim with a satirical flourish. Then to Wanda: “So you do this act in comedy clubs?”

  “Sometimes. I’d like to do that exclusively, but they don’t invite me back. Mostly I work in small theaters, cabarets, some queer stuff.”

  “One of her shows turned into a real cause célèbre awhile back,” I said. Probably I didn’t come up with the worldliest pronunciation of célèbre.

  “Yeah,” Wanda said. “I did one of the Jewish sets in a Shylock costume, with a butcher’s knife and a giant papier-mâché beak. Some people got upset and I had to be part of this panel discussion. Of course all the jokes were by Jewish comics. No one bitches when I do the misogynist stuff.” (The panelist who called Wanda’s Jewish set “falsely provocative” was right, I think,
though this panelist hadn’t actually seen Wanda’s set; when Wanda looks back on her early work, she must feel some remorse or humiliation, as I do about my less public mistakes.)

  “Also her great-grandmother might have been Jewish,” I said, tonguing the edgy mouth of my night’s first can of beer. There were already six or seven empties on the kitchen counter, most squeezed into approximate hourglasses.

  “You ever work in blackface?” Wade asked.

  “Not yet,” Wanda said.

  “You guys don’t remember Grace Slick on Sullivan,” Wade said.

  “Smothers Brothers,” I corrected.

  “You do anything by—who’s the guy? With the big red hat.”

  “Licitra?” I said.

  “Yeah.” Wade put the pizza in the oven.

  “No,” Wanda said. “Too obvious and not funny.”

  “She wants people to laugh with the jokes, not at them,” I said.

  “I’m not sure I’d put it that way,” Wanda said. “If everyone laughs it doesn’t work, but if you get islands of laughter, especially male islands, or oblivious female islands, then I get the room tension I’m after.”

  “That’s all I meant,” I said.

  “Sometimes I’ll catch a dyke flash some frat dude a cold stare,” Wanda said. “That’s the sort of thing I want, not to see the dude shamed—’cause they’re both right and both wrong. But just to enact something.”

  “Enact now,” Wade said.

  “I’m trying to revivify these jokes. Like with digital sampling, how the source material a lot of times is reborn through fragmentation, deracination.”

  “Right, yeah, that sounds good,” Wade said, leaning against the stove. “I mean, I don’t know anything about computers, but I used to be what you might call a reproduction purist. I’d read Benjamin’s ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ and Berger’s Ways of Seeing”—this title he pronounced with a funny German accent: Vays ohf Zeeink—“and my response to the ultimately liberating ‘withering of the aura’ and all that shit was not just to accept but to prefer and demand everything at one remove, at least one: so the record, I thought, was better than the band; the Memorex better than the record; the Marcantonio engraving better than the Raphael original; the painting inspired by the engraving better than the painting inspired by the original; the coffee-tabled color plate better than the framed canvas; the grainy black-and-white detail better than the color plate; the photocopy of the grainy black-and-white detail, stuck to the fridge with a service-station magnet, better than the black-and-white detail; the belch better than the hot dog; the photo-booth polyptych better than the kiss; the memory better than the affair; the shadow, in other words, more compelling than the figure.”

  “Yeah,” someone said.

  “’Cause shadows add layers of mystery,” Wade went on, “nimbi of abstraction, suggestions of perfection, and in so doing climb like dark horses closer to the fab Forms of the intellectual ether.”

  I said something inarticulate, closed my eyes, softly pulled the hairs on my Adam’s apple. I liked listening to Wade’s voice, fast and mellow like Charlie Parker darting through a ballad—“Bird of Paradise,” say, which is really “All the Things You Are” or all the things you are. He could talk and talk, and it wasn’t windbagging, I thought, it was bullshit artistry, at once seductive and irritating, often most convincing when I didn’t quite know what he was saying. “An intelligent man would often be much at a loss without the company of fools,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. Certainly Wade spent time with intellectual equals, but I think he was happier away from them. No mistake: Wanda wasn’t a fool, far from it, but she was only twenty-five (or twenty-six—it’s sad that I can’t remember her birthday) and didn’t debate or refute Wade as often as she could have even then. As for me, I might have been a fool, though possibly in this book I’ll exaggerate my younger self’s foolishness, and my current self’s, either out of modesty or because readers find foolishness endearing, and because now is the era of the man-boy fool, or because I aspire to become a wise, truth-telling fool, for which plain foolishness might be good preparation.

  “Of course the ‘figures’ of my little examples,” Wade said, “if transferred to Platonic metaphysics and psychology, are themselves copies of, or copies of copies of, the universal Form.” (To me) “Did you get to Plato before you dropped out?”

  “A little.”

  “I only dredge him up because it’s hard to talk about copies without him. It’s fitting that xerography, whence the trademark and metonym Xerox comes, derives from the Greek.”

  “I thought it came from Bud Xerox,” Wanda said.

  “So maybe you remember,” Wade said, “that art, as Plato had it, is two steps from Absolute Being, the Form, the Idea, the definite and fixed grades of the will’s objectification, just like Bobby Bland was two steps from the blues.”

  I stood up but gestured that I was still listening.

  “So for One”—Wade made a capital O with his arms—“there’s Absolute Beauty; then there’s temporal, palpable beauty, such as a beautiful woman, exempli gratia Wanda—rolling her eyes as I speak—a beautiful woman who copies or partakes somehow of Absolute Beauty; and lower down the line let’s say there’s a painting the woman modeled for. Then there’s the reproduction of that painting in a much-manhandled edition of Erotic Art through the Ages, the prize of my coffee-table porno-art books before I sold all my stuff.”

  “How much did you get for all that stuff?” I asked from the other room.

  “It’s impolite to ask about money. So about this updated Platonic ladder let’s agree that one can take Plato seriously without taking him literally, and that the antithesis of his intolerable aesthetics, that art of true sublimity not only improves life but improves on life, won’t do either, at least not as an abiding faith.”

  “Where the fuck are my Bobby Bland records?” I said.

  “I moved him to R&B,” Wade said. “It’s bad taxonomy to put him in blues.”

  “What? You can’t be moving my—”

  “Aristotle, better of course on art than Plato—” Wade said.

  “But worse at it,” Wanda said.

  “That’s true, that’s true,” Wade said, “to judge from the extant record. Complicating things further.”

  Wanda smiled.

  “Aristotle says in his Poetics that Polygnotus’s paintings and Homer’s poems ‘are better than we are.’ You could read that as just a simple acknowledgment of artistic idealization, but he also suggests that such an improvement is possible even in dancing and flute playing—”

  “Except that’s not possible,” Wanda said. “Flutes are horrendous.”

  “You just haven’t heard the right flutes,” Wade said.

  “James Newton’s good,” I said, back at the table. “Dolphy.”

  “Don’t underrate Herbie Mann,” Wade said.

  “What I’m saying is I hate flutes. I don’t care whose fucking flute it is.”

  “Do you like steel guitars?” Wade said.

  Wanda hesitated for maybe twenty seconds. “Yes,” she said.

  “Okay, so by the time Aristotle says we can be better than we really are by playing steel guitars, we’re well on the way to art as religion, art as transcendence, art over or against Earth and all its stuff, though also art that uncovers that stuff’s truth and esse, as when Hegel says that a portrait by Titian or Dürer, or any portrait finely attuned to the sitter’s spiritual vitality, is more like the individual than the actual individual himself.”

  “Except Hegel wouldn’t have seen any of the actual individuals Titian or Dürer painted portraits of,” Wanda said, “unless they were painting Methuselah.”

  “Well, that’s a simpleminded complaint,” Wade said. Wanda defended herself without excitement but Wade cut her off: “Anyway, I’ve become something of an art-as-religion apostate. It just doesn’t seem to sustain me anymore.”

  “Can we smoke this spliff?” I
said. Wanda gave me an amused look at the word spliff.

  “That’s what it’s there for,” Wade said.

  “Right on.”

  “This record used to be a real make-out favorite for his mother and me,” Wade said, looking at Wanda while wave-pointing in my direction. “Something about Jaco’s Fender, those rubbery bass glissandi, like a tongue in your ear.”

  “But kind of flatulent, too,” Wanda croaked midinhale, then imitated the sound.

  “Jaco turned his Fender into a fretless by himself, you know,” Wade said, insulted it seemed, “with nothing but a toenail clipper and a half-empty tub of oleo.”

  “I was just kidding,” Wanda said, “it’s really nice.” Her smile, as a rule and in that instance, wasn’t especially warm, was cooler than she was. Her features were in general severe. The bridge of her nose was particularly knifelike. These descriptions aren’t intended to be physiognomic, however. She could be harsh sometimes, sure, but in terms of kindness and warmth she bettered me and would have measured well against a higher standard.

  “Yeah, but it’s not wallpaper,” Wade said. “You have to listen to it. It’s not pretty, it’s beautiful. Mysterious. The oldest known ancestor of the word pretty is a West Germanic word meaning ‘trick,’ but there’s no trick to this stuff, no wool-pulling.” He nodded my way: “I’m impressed that you have this CD. You need to do some weeding, though. You’ve got a lot of crap in there, impoverishing the collection.”