“I should go to the studio,” I said.
Pierce’s lips pressed themselves together. “I should go in the house.”
I opened my arms and he stepped into them, and we held each other there in the driveway. He pulled away, crying. “It would have been better if it was Mal,” he said. “With us.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Pierce shook his head. “Definitely.” And he went inside.
thirty
I couldn’t decide what to wear to my meeting with Ray Burn. It was Wednesday morning, and I had canceled my cartooning class with Wurster, in exchange for a promise to draw all day when I got back from New York. I didn’t tell him that Susan had gotten the afternoon off, faking a chronic illness and its attendant doctor’s visit, and that we planned to spend the day together.
Considering my previous wrangles with discipline, I went out to the studio every afternoon with surprising ease. I’d had to drag myself to work in the old days. It wasn’t that I was having more fun (though I’ll admit there is greater satisfaction in drawing competently than in drawing badly); it was simply that the more work I did, the more I wanted to do. I was turning into a junkie.
Part of my high, of course, was a boost in self-regard: I was beginning, at last, to feel like a cartoonist. Cartooning was making me into a visual thinker, my drawing into a sort of emotive shorthand. I was developing a taste for the self-contained. Oddly, this change didn’t seem to come entirely from my lessons with Wurster or the cartoons I studied: it was more like these things helped to uncover what was already true, but hidden, about my artistic sensibilities. I was establishing an aesthetic, something I’d never had before, even when I was trying to be an artist.
All the same, I bristled at the boundaries of my one square Family Funnies panel, and even more at the raw materials available to me inside it: not my family, not even anything remotely close to me, but a coterie of cutout shills employed to deliver flimsy one-liners. I’d been trying to think of the strip as a kind of self-limitation, like a fugue or a sonnet, but even Beethoven or Keats could not have made art out of the Family Funnies.
The irony was all too obvious: not until I had given up art for a career in schlock did I begin to feel like an artist.
My one white oxford shirt had an ink stain on the right arm, but I decided I could wear my blue blazer on top, and avoid taking it off during the interview. I put on a pair of khaki pants and polished some old wing tips I’d salvaged from my father’s closet before the big clean-out.
“Looking good,” Pierce told me when I came out to the kitchen. He was leaning over the coffee maker, watching fresh coffee drip into the pot. Over the past week he’d been much less gloomy than usual, and often was up and out of his room before I left the house. He had a jittery, anticipatory air about him, as if there was something up his sleeve. I let his statement take a few turns around my head, ran it through the sarcasm detector.
“Really?” I said.
He stood up. “Well, for you.”
“Hmm. What are you up to today?”
He shrugged. “Not much,” he said, but went on to explain that Mal was picking him up over his lunch hour, and the two of them were going to go see Mom. I was having some trouble getting used to the new genetic circumstances. Knowing now what had been hidden in plain sight for so long, I could see how Rose might stretch her already-strong biases against Pierce into a tacit exclusion of him from the family. But still I looked at Pierce and saw, at first impression, not a piece of Mal or a piece of my mother but a piece of myself. “We’re going to try and get her used to the idea of coming here. You know, talk about the neighborhood and the house and all.”
“Do you think it’s going to get through?”
He shrugged. “I dunno,” he said, and I could see that the question offended him more than a little.
I gassed up the Caddy and stopped at the Jersey Devil, a coffee shop and bakery in Titusville. It was a little out of the way, but I had a theory: I figured if I drank coffee in the car and had a pastry to soak some of it up, I wouldn’t have to pee until I was well into the Burn Syndicate’s building on West 57th. And I needed some kind of distraction on the way to the city, a drive of geometrically increasing intensity that began with shaded country roads and derelict barns and ended with traffic jams and squeegee men.
The shop was mostly empty. A grizzled maniac type hunkered over a steaming cup at the only occupied table, and a pretty girl in denim overalls was talking to the clerk. The clerk looked familiar. He had small round glasses, a fluffy head of curly hair and a large, assertive goatee. He was also dusted with flour. It took a moment, but it came to me: without the flour, he looked just like Leon Trotsky. The girl was saying, in a seductive, sugary voice, “I’m really looking forward to reading your manifesto.”
“Helpya?” he asked me brightly. The girl turned and offered a vacant, half-lidded smile, and I felt like I’d just interrupted a sexual act.
I ordered and he gave me my food in a paper sack before turning back to the girl. I had to pull myself out the door, so desperately did I want to stay and hang out with these kids. I was halfway to New York before I sorted out this feeling: it was jealousy, the kind I sometimes got when I caught a glimpse of people doing exactly what they wanted.
* * *
The Burn Syndicate occupied the nineteenth floor of a building that, beyond all probability, I had been in before. There was an art gallery on the fourth floor I had once had a piece in. This was probably the high point of my career as an installation artist. The show was called “Garbage, Garbage, Garbage,” and the piece I’d shown was, by necessity, only a small chunk of a larger work. It consisted of a metal trash can lid with rotten things hanging off the bottom of it, and was called “Detritus, Risen.” The show went on for three days before the gallery was shut down due to fire code violations.
I was early for the meeting, so I stopped in for old times’ sake. On display was a series of “drawings” by a woman I’d not heard of. I had some trouble finding them. All I could see were the walls, each painted a metallic dark gray. Nothing hung on them. Then I realized that the walls were the drawings: she had apparently taken a pencil — lots of pencils, I supposed — and covered every inch of wall space with graphite and fixative. I took a postcard on the way out and put it in my jacket pocket. It was a white index card “drawn” on in the same way.
On the nineteenth floor, I peed, then waited on a long leather couch in a lushly carpeted room that could have comfortably housed a chamber orchestra and several parked cars. Some distance away, a receptionist sat behind a wide mahogany desk. She kept glancing at her watch, then looking up at me. At about ten minutes past ten, she picked up her phone and spoke to somebody, but I was too far away to hear. She hung up, came to the couch and said, “Mr. Burn will be with you shortly. Would you like a Perrier?” I told her I would and she vanished through a smoked glass door, and returned with a bottle of Perrier, a bottle opener, a cocktail napkin and a small wooden table. She opened the bottle for me, set it on the table and returned to her desk.
I didn’t particularly like Perrier, but I stuck to protocol and drank some anyway. It was a testament to both the decadence and puissance of the beverage industry that water could be altered so that it made you belch. After a time, someone came out for me. “Mr. Mix?” he said.
“Yes.” It was a young man, some kind of intern or temp, with a round face and thin brown hair. He was wearing a golf shirt, untucked from a pair of jeans, and white tennis shoes.