I kept a few fingers of cognac in my glass while I worked, and sipped at it when I stepped back to assess my progress. My carvings didn’t typically require such a stock-taking, but I did so, outwardly, because this was a panorama, and one needed a little more distance to see the full scope. Inwardly, I did so because the rain-wet street outside the little window, the savory steam rising from below, and a glass of such a fine spirit were almost enough to make a pumpkin look like a work of art.
Deckinger called me at three thirty on Saturday, wanting to know if I was going to make his deadline. I told him I was putting the final touches on the last one and that I’d start hauling them up within the hour. I’d be bringing them one by one, I said, walking through the Common rather than taking the T, and each trip would take about twenty minutes.
I put aside what I’d actually been working on that morning: a new painting that had been occupying more and more of my brainspace since I’d stood in front of Deckinger’s Durant. I always did my best work when I was neglecting something else important; I could channel the pressure of a deadline into an artificial deadline for myself.
Durant saw all the faces in the crowd, but my project was to see the crowd in a single face. I had a huge self-portrait going, divided into little rectangles like the index guides in an atlas. Eventually the guides would fade into the paint laid over them, but each little box would have distinctions both in a slightly different undertone and a slightly different cast of feature—that is, one corner of the mouth would be playfully smirking, the other turned down; one eye would appear to be the eye of a hero, the other the eye of an old woman on the subway. The trick was getting them to conspire to create one cohesive face, one only slightly fractured, able to draw the viewer closer to observe each panel and examine the infinite parallel versions of a single human countenance.
But that would all have to wait. I quickly fine-tuned the last of the pumpkins and stuck it under my arm. Outside, I was surprised to find a black car waiting for me, and a chauffeur holding a sign with my name on it as if I were being picked up at the airport. So I loaded all the pumpkins into the trunk, cushioning them with some Styrofoam blocks I had in my apartment, and we drove the short trip up the hill to Deckinger’s condo.
The foyer looked the same, but the rooms beyond were decorated with framed posters for dozens of old horror movies: Poltergeist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and so on. A rented bartender was setting up his table, and Deckinger sat on the corner of his sofa trying to connect his laptop to what seemed like a very complex stereo system. He was not impressed with the first pumpkin I brought in, decorated only with the tail of the river and a few trees. Nor was he happy when I told him I’d deviated from the specs he gave me, forgoing two rows of five pumpkins for a triangular design with just one pumpkin on the bottom left, rising to three high on the far right.
He studied the first one, his face looking something like a TV judge when he threatens to hold someone in contempt. That expression eased toward neutral as successive trips to the car filled in the tableau. The driver offered to help, but I would not have anyone else handling the delicate pieces. It took about fifteen minutes to come together. When they were all arranged Deckinger looked at me, shrugged, and said bemusedly, “What did I expect from pumpkins?” He counted out the balance of the commission from his wallet.
I wasn’t worried. I took his money, crouched to a knee, and used long matches to light the eighty-two candles I had glued into position inside the cavities. I did the river first, in the foreground, and with only it and the silhouettes of trees illuminated it recalled the untouched landscape here before Boston. Then I lit the buildings, carefully carved with a pattern that showed certain offices still lit but others darkened for the night. For last I saved the lights of Fenway and the landmark Citgo sign on the right of the panorama. I had used cardboard cutouts and four different colors of candle for the Citgo sign so the triangle was separated into orange, red, and maroon just like on the sign itself, and the CITGO letters glowed blue and bold. Making it all come together had at first felt like I was fashioning the land with my hands, then like I myself had built the city on top of it, like I could conjure whole civilizations.
I stood back and observed it with Deckinger. Lights blinked on and off inside the buildings. The currents and eddies of the Charles moved and swirled in the magic of the candlelight. It was hard to believe this real bend in the Charles was just outside, less than a mile away, when it seemed to be living for the moment in this parlor. I looked over to Deckinger, but he didn’t take his eyes off what I’d created.
He went to his kitchen and started polishing a lowball glass, which I think he did for show. He poured himself a dram of something darker than the cognac. There was no glass for me this time. “Well,” he said. Then again, “Well. Isn’t that fucking something?” He got out his wallet again and counted out more cash, still watching the river dance. He’d tipped me five hundred dollars. Yet I found my own eyes now settled on his glass of that mystery spirit, thinking I might trade the whole tip for my own glass of it and for the name on the label.
In November I conferred with Professor Wei, and I found myself rushing through an explanation of my work—the painting I’d brought and the sketches I’d done for a few more—in order to tell him about Deckinger, his Durant, and my pumpkin-carving adventures. I lowballed the amount I made by several thousand—studio art professors brought in less than the cost of living in the Boston metro—and still I raised his eyebrows. I told him I had stumbled into a Beacon Hill client base, and he said, very pointedly, “A-ha.”
My ideas for the Christmas season were still in development: intricate wire wreaths speckled with mirrors and candles; nativity or festivity mosaics; huge panels of holiday scenes constructed out of Christmas lights, like a Lite-Brite on crack, I said.
Professor Wei had an impressive slouch. His shoulder blades and sacrum were the only points of contact with his chair, his feet extended far in front of him, giving the impression that his body was the hypotenuse of a right triangle. It was more work, I was certain, than sitting straight up would have been. He did it when he was concentrating. He was also steepling his fingers, which signaled concentration squared.
“Hand me your sketchbook,” he said. He flipped through it several times, taking so long on each page that I was sure he was preparing a scorching critique. The ambitious students flocked to his classes and the sensitive ones flocked away, for he was not one to mince words. In turn I began composing a mental apologia, though I never planned on using it, because while the professor never raised his voice, he never lost an argument either. When he finished he closed the book gently and slid it across the desk to me. He tapped the front and asked, “Why would you work on anything but this?”
Those were just ideas, I told him, ideas too derivative of Durant to be worth anything on their own. The carving had netted me my living expenses for most of a year, and hadn’t even monopolized my time—half of this painting had been done during my busiest days of carving. If I could come up with another moneymaker for the holiday season, I could set myself up for the next two years and have half my student loans paid off by the time I graduated. Remembering the Jewish neighborhood down the street, I started extemporizing: artisan menorahs, micropainted dreidels. Only later did I realize how stupid this all sounded.