Other People's Clothes Page 2
“How?” I asked, softer than I’d meant to.
“It’s like, domestic…it’s cute…”
“How is this domestic?” I asked again, firmer.
“You can’t escape it.”
“The hair ties,” said Jeff gruffly, whose ratty flannel matched David’s.
“And the way you fastened the wire, it’s so dainty. Like clinging on to past stuff. It’s like a dream catcher—or a jewel box, or—”
“I think there should be more stuff too,” David said. He took another sip, ending his presence in the discussion, then turned to a girl who had a brand-new tattoo, still puffy, of a sparrow on her neck and refilled her cup. A few others chimed in their agreement.
“It seems underdeveloped.”
“More of a proposal or proposition.”
“Watered-down Rauschenberg.”
In the pit, the easiest way to dismiss a female’s work was by calling it domestic. Or decorative.
The double D’s. Or as David Chris pronounced domesticity, dumbass–titties.
When I’d found the battered piece of plywood on an overcast Wednesday, it was swollen with the liquids of the city and lodged behind a bike rack, anything but the double D’s. I hauled it back to the studio, my fingers still ringing with its weight while I began to scrutinize the board. For all its gritty ugliness it was smooth like driftwood, its jagged edges rounded by its movement through the concrete tides. Every paint fleck and indentation seemed important, telling some traumatic story only I could hear. It felt obvious to me that this board would be home to all the other bits, the treasures I had been finding in the daily currents of the sidewalks and stairwells over the past month. But I didn’t know how to say any of this to the class. I just let their comments wash over me, afraid that if I said any of those things, and they still dismissed it, I would have nothing.
I was jealous of all the students who had grown up in big cities. They seemed to have the tools for living in New York. Everyone’s parents were interesting: cartographers, novelists, costume makers, environmental lawyers and projectionists at MoMA. My mom worked at a cheesy real estate agency in Florida. I still tried to perform the New York City stereotypes—I wore a black leather jacket, I rarely washed my brown hair, I drank coffee even if I didn’t like the taste, I had a fake ID, and I was perfectly comfortable saying fuck you. But the alien-hot-air rushing from the subway grates could petrify me. The psychic weight of all the people waiting at the stoplight at 14th Street could render me unable to move my legs. Grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s was horrifying, and going to the post office overwhelming. I reminded myself that in some ways I was more equipped for all of this than a lot of my classmates, most of them had never done a load of laundry in their life. I’d explained to at least three pajama-clad students how to add soap to the big white machines in the basement. I had a nearly full scholarship, I could make an omelet, and I knew I wanted to be an artist. I believed that should be enough.
When I was younger, my ability to draw was the only thing that made me, even vaguely, popular. I rendered crayon princesses and dolphins jumping through flames, whatever my peers required of me. It was like printing money. In fifth grade my crosshatched drawing of the playground won a schoolwide competition for the cover of the 2001 calendar. I turned my skills to collage in middle school, covering binders, lockers and prepubescent walls with cutouts of Destiny’s Child, Leo, Christina and Britney. And in eighth grade, my best friend, Ivy Noble, a ballerina, decided she wanted to go to New York City and dance at Juilliard. Ever competitive, and ever willing to follow her, I decided that I too would go to the big-scary-pickpocket-city, for art. So I threw myself into studying—she had rehearsals and training, but I had the library. I discovered Man Ray, Basquiat, and the otherworldly collages of Hannah Höch, who pushed me to pervert Leo and Britney into dramatic teenage abstraction.
At least I didn’t cry in class. I had gulped for air in the bathroom after a critique but I’d never cried. And I’d often meet up with Ivy, who had, despite the nearly impossible acceptance rate, made it to Juilliard unstressed. I even had a few friends, and my then boyfriend, Nate Kai. He was one year older than me, a cynical computer dork with an intense MacBook stare—whenever he’d launch into talking, his turtle-green eyes would get a dark zoom while he rummaged for words, like a hand silently dipping into a Scrabble bag, feeling for the next vowel. Nate, the debate champion of his boarding school in Massachusetts, maintained his tradition of choosing an argument-a-day to spar over: Was it morally corrupt to sell your work in a gallery? Was computer-generated painting still painting? Was everything a ready-made in our current age of art-supply manufacturing?
Our relationship scared me. But I thought that was how artists’ relationships should be; unpredictable, tortured, intense. And Nate’s East Coast-ness was the complete opposite of the sunburned beach brains I had grown up with. I’d even briefly met his parents at the Four Seasons before a UNICEF charity function. They were icy at best, but totally regal. Nate’s father, Ken Kai, born in Japan, was a Wharton-educated banker and his mother, the lemon-meringue-haired Barbra Kai, was an heiress to a small chemical fortune.
Nate had a habit of leaning over my sketchbook, his mouth squishing Orbit gum, critiquing me, “Zoe—I just think there is—chew—too much going on, don’t be—chew—afraid to waste paper.”
I was afraid to waste anything, I was on scholarship. Nate loved waste. He had his parents’ credit card, and when he got into a fight with his dad, as he often did, we’d take a taxi up to the Carlyle Hotel and order two of the Dover soles deboned table-side on a silver platter. Nate desperately wanted me to have a fetish. I didn’t. He did. And he wouldn’t tell me what his was unless he truly believed I had one. I googled fetish.
Arousal by insects.
Arousal by stone and gravel.
Arousal by amputees.
I had no idea what to pick. I was with Nate because he made me feel a part of another world, not because I wanted to step on his face in high heels. But I was afraid to lose him, his tickets to the opera and his boarding-school anecdotes. One night after color theory class, we were walking past a grocery store. I told him he could pick out a zucchini and fuck me with it. Vegetables would be my fetish, sure. His eyes lit up, his hands excitedly moving through his iridescent black hair as he inspected each zucchini, measuring it with his index and thumb, squeezing it, finally settling on one with a slight curve. Back at his apartment, mid-act, he suddenly looked down at the squash in horror, certain I was trying to shame the size of his truly normal-sized cock with the girthy vegetable, he began crying and told me to leave. I walked back to the dorms mortified. I googled fetish, again determined; role-play, tentacles, feet, toilet paper, rubber, medical supplies, teddy bears.
A few days later things had calmed down, the squash remained unmentioned, and we were peacefully watching a Kenneth Anger movie he’d already seen, but insisted I see. He ran out to get more beer, leaving his phone on the stone counter, it began to shriek, a buzzy hyena. I tried to ignore it, focusing on the Nazi bikers sinking into the blue highway, but it began its electric howl again. And again. I finally picked the phone off the desk, about to silence it when the text messages popped up. They were from a girl, Sam Cassady, scheduling a time to meet and what he should be wearing. Leather pants and white button-up. When Nate came back up the stairs and saw me holding the phone, his face dropped. His eyes enlarged, the green zoom, he was momentarily speechless, then he dumped me.
* * *
—
Per Carol’s email instructions, I prepared the documentation of my work for the abroad application, pressing each slide into its little plastic sleeve saying an inaudible prayer, which quickly mutated into inaudible fuck-yous.
FUCKYOUDAVIDCHRISANDNATEANDALLOFTHESCULPTUREMOTHERFUCKERS.
Repeat. I would leave Manhattan, the isle of rotten man.
A few months
later, with joyous exuberance, Carol Gaynor called me to her office, which was slender like her, and informed me that I had been accepted to Helsinki for a study abroad year. I would walk to the sauna on the sea and continue my studies with students of dignity. Carol did an embarrassing little dance with her index fingers shooting up above her head. High on my impending exit I treated myself to a box of sushi and a bubble tea and called my mom while sucking down tapioca balls.
I ran into Nate sitting on the steps of the school. And because I was happy I said hello. And he took my smile, my little opening after three months of cold-shouldering, to begin talking about himself and his life, a roaring faucet of banality. Enjoying the tapioca balls expanding in my stomach while staring at his dull face, I was pleased at my ability to ignore him. And then, as if dropping a brick on my sandaled foot, he mentioned how he had just heard he had been accepted to Helsinki. I said nothing, spun around, and walked back to Carol’s office, my brain thudding. Nate had known I was applying to Helsinki. I had even shown him the campus on Google Maps, zooming in on the sauna that splooshed out at the sea. The manipulative prick. Carol informed me there was one spot left at the art school in Berlin.
* * *
—
I had really only known her from a distance, I never imagined spending a year in a foreign country with Hailey Mader. I knew she wore Chanel Mademoiselle—a ubiquitous Windexy vanilla scent that was popular with dental hygienists, gallery assistants and other women proximate to benign power. I knew she possessed the frightening fortitude to break her own nose, chewed Dentyne Ice gum, and decorated her dorm with 1930s posters of Italian liquors—but I had no idea what Hailey’s artwork was like. I’d never seen her in the pit. She’d told me once with an air of deep seriousness that her work was conceptual, as if that explained everything. At school, to me, she was a character in a poorly acted TV show with only the edges of an identity.
Apparently Hailey could speak German, a fact that Carol had been excited to relay while she handed me a wad of brochures. I was relieved I wouldn’t be alone. Relieved someone else might have a plan. I still had Hailey’s number from a study group, so I called, and she’d sounded genuinely excited, rattling things off—her tickets were booked, she’d found a hostel, she’d get a new SIM card when she got there. But there had been a slight falter in her voice toward the end of the conversation, a barely noticeable shift in tone, as if it were just dawning on her that she would no longer be alone. I imagined Hailey might have wanted to reinvent herself in Berlin. Maybe she’d watched Cabaret with Liza Minnelli too many times. Or planned on cutting short bangs and producing techno, or maybe she too hated the sculpture-dicks. Whatever it was, by the end of the call she knew we were stuck together.
* * *
—
Our first meal in a proper Berlin restaurant was at a fondue place near the hostel, a dark hobbit hole with knobby wooden chairs, thick menus and flickering candles. The waiter was cute in a teenage-heartthrob way, and kept theatrically checking in to make sure we were okay, then retreating with a wink. I asked Hailey why he was being so nice.
“We are hot and barely twenty. And foreign.” She stared the waiter down with a fuck me grin while sopping a square of bread through the thick bubbling cheese, he reciprocated with a head nod as if he were going to jerk off in the back room.
“So, what happened with Ivy?”
I stuttered. I hadn’t realized she knew about Ivy. I’d missed my final crits for the funeral, so I guess everyone in my studio classes knew, but I had somehow hoped to keep her for myself here. Just before I’d left for Berlin I was still regularly forgetting, thinking of things to tell Ivy, pulling out my phone—and only after I’d begun typing would it hit me that she was gone.
“She was murdered,” I said matter-of-factly, startling myself.
“I know,” Hailey said, subtly gesturing her knife toward her neck. “Do you know who did it? Like, do you have any ideas?”
“They think it was random.” I was mushing the remnants of food on my plate. I wasn’t ready to trust Hailey with Ivy.
She was holding my stare, she wanted more, she jabbed a chunk of bread, “Nothing’s random.”
I shifted my focus to the drone of the refrigerator holding chocolate cakes iced in what appeared to be whipped concrete.
“Did you dye your hair to look like her?”
“How do you know she was blond?” I asked, startled.
“I looked her up on Facebook.” She paused. “Everyone loves a dead girl.”
I nearly choked, Hailey continued. “And anyway, we can be best friends now. I’ve never really had one—my family moved around a lot.”
I was relieved when the waiter interrupted my silence and Hailey began speaking in overly enthusiastic German. The language frightened me, every sentence felt like a car being compressed into a cube. It seemed impossible to flirt but the waiter was laughing and Hailey was coquettishly tracing her collarbone. The situation embarrassed me. I stared out the argyle stained-glass window until he left. We counted our shiny new currency, like terrified goblins. Hailey whispered that we didn’t have to tip too much, that it was different in Germany, but it felt too weird, so we tipped like Americans, regretting it as we trudged back to Hostel Star.
Two days later we heard back from a potential apartment on craigslist, advertised as a fall-to-spring sublet. The Australians had been getting more aggressive, one of them lunging into my bed reeking of cigarettes and urine. Hailey had written explaining that we were students and clean and respectable and so forth. The subletter, who had posted no photos of the apartment, was apparently “a fellow expat” and asked if we could meet later that evening. We took the mustard-colored subway across town to Schöneberg. The building sat on the end of Bülowstrasse with a ribbon of raised train tracks running directly in front of it, and nestled across the street was a plump brick church surrounded by a pleasant little park with a wooded area. It looked like the Europe I had imagined.
“See those women?” Hailey asked, snapping me from my fantasy, pointing to a cluster of bodies clad in neon stockings with corsets pulled tight over puffed jackets. “They’re prostitutes. It’s legal here. They even pay taxes.”
I nodded, not sure if that meant it was a good or bad neighborhood. Hailey was full of facts, which I was grateful for. I knew nothing. Earlier that morning she calmly informed me that the reason most German toilets have a shelf instead of a water-filled bowl at the bottom is because they liked to inspect their shit.
“I think it’s a perfect backdrop for our time abroad,” she said, gesturing toward the street and the stone facade in front of us. I nodded again. We stomped our boots at the door, then trudged up to the second floor. When the door creaked open we were hit by the smell of flowers, like at a funeral, sharp and final. A jet-black-haired woman stuck out a hand equipped with five crimson fingernails, and introduced herself as Beatrice Becks, her B’s popping when she said her name, “Beee-atrice Beee-cks.”
I smiled cautiously, tossing the name in my mind like a coin.
Tall and elegant, in a billowing white Oxford, Beatrice ushered us into the entrance hall, her flowery scent intensifying as she extended her arm, pointing toward the coatrack. Her fragrance was something I couldn’t place from my countless hours behind the perfume counter at the mall—maybe Diorissimo by Dior, but that was too creamy, this was pointed; peppery even. She watched closely as we peeled off our coats.
When we knelt to take off our boots, Hailey leaned her head toward mine. “She looks like Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction, right?”
I held in a laugh. I’d never seen it, but knew the poster from Kim’s Video—it was the exact same haircut and red lipstick. I stole another look, Beatrice was waiting for us with her arms crossed, she checked herself in the hallway mirror, lifting her hand to adjust her bangs, then relaxed her jaw and cocked her head. Clearly aware of her best angles.
&nb
sp; Hailey stood and I followed her socked feet, then glanced to my right and caught a view of a green-floored kitchen. Beatrice turned left, we trailed, entering the living room, warm with light flickering from a chandelier of candle-like bulbs. Hailey gasped at the beautiful room. The ceilings were at least three times my height with trim that looked like cold butter carved with a spoon. I had seen enough photos from the other options on craigslist to know this was not normal.
We both jumped. There was another woman sitting in the room, dressed in the same style of Oxford with the same bobbed hair and bangs, but hers a dull gray. Hailey bowed nervously. The gray-haired woman dipped her head in return. I let my eyes fall to the couch she was seated on, which was bright red and lip shaped, in a plump surrealist pout. Beatrice, who had seemed so tall at the door, diminished as she took her place on the couch. The other woman was introduced as Beatrice’s mother, Janet. I stood transfixed by the odd expression of the couch, one corner seemed to be turned up toward the ceiling as if caught in a fake laugh.
The mother and daughter stared at us with the focused eyes of a Renaissance painting. I shivered, noticing the windows were open, but the cold was seemingly unregistered by the two perfect wax figures.
Beatrice broke her silence. “I am a writer.” She said it as if it were a fact we already knew well. “And I am leaving my flat to take refuge from the Berlin winter in the warmer climate of Vienna.”
I stared blankly. Hailey chuckled, it was a joke. I followed in a forced burst. Beatrice regained the floor. “And we are from California.”
There was an old-world elegance to the way she tongued the word Calii-four-nia, it vibrated with the sound of expensive cars turning on rock driveways and grapes blowing on vines. I assumed she was in her early forties.
“I will be in the throes of works at the Austrian Federal Chancellery Writers’ Schloss, a mouthful, I know, but a fabulous place to focus.” Beatrice looked to her mother, searching for something. Janet dipped her pointy chin approvingly, Beatrice seemed to relax, moving her index finger over the red line of her lips. I noticed that Janet, despite her gray hair, didn’t seem that much older than Beatrice and they shared the same features—a strong nose, and nearly black eyes, but everything on Janet was sharper, almost ridged.