An Affair
By Edmond Caldwell

1.

Mike and Ashley’s first date – but we can’t really call it that because they were married to other people and still operating under the “just friends” label, and anyway it was engineered to be a total coincidence – was to an art gallery downtown. The pair were united by their interest in serious culture (their spouses preferring, alas, lighter fare), and from glancing at reviews and taking in bits of word-of-mouth they had learned of an event – some called it performance art, others an installation – that serious people simply could not miss. And so naturally it had been the topic of the private moment they shared during their monthly couple’s match, while Ashley’s husband was still in the pro shop and Mike’s wife in the restroom.

“I might go on my lunch hour next week,” said Mike, who enjoyed a flexible schedule due to the nature of his employment, such that his lunch could last, say, the rest of the day. “Not Monday, of course, way too busy, but—” He checked the wireless internet on his Blackberry to confirm the location of the gallery, observing in a passing murmur that it didn’t open until noon. “Sounds interesting, I might want to check that out,” said Ashley, who could always get notes from a fellow student. She followed this up with a remark – completely out of the blue, of course – about how packed her own schedule was that week, starting Wednesday in fact. And so it was set, without a word having been breathed of any actual appointment, that their meeting would be shortly after noon on Tuesday.

And a lovely afternoon it was, with crisp light cutting through the broad windows of the converted factory warehouse where a small lunchtime crowd was already gathered to watch the performance. The artist sat in a vacuum-sealed Plexiglas box – about the size and dimensions of a port-a-john – with an air-pump on its roof. Every ten minutes the pump shut off and the artist had to swipe a card, like a credit card or a hotel key-card, through an electronic sensor on his right in order to purchase the next ten minutes of oxygen, at a rate of a dollar a minute. If the artist failed to swipe the card he wouldn’t suffocate immediately, of course, because he would still have to use up whatever oxygen was left in the chamber, but it wouldn’t be long – some of the visitors were trying to estimate – before he began to wheeze and gesture frantically, or grow woozy and turn blue, and finally explode like an astronaut or implode like a deep-sea diver or simply crumple into an unconscious heap. The result would be the same if the artist swiped the card only to discover that he had used up all his credit, but such an oversight wasn’t likely because the card was programmed to carry only ten dollars at a time – a single payment for a single ten-minute continuation of the pump. Thus the card had to be replenished at regular intervals from an additional electronic unit – this one like a small, two-way ATM – set into the Plexiglas on his left, and this unit, it turned out, was supplied only by whatever funds the audience was willing to put in it, in ten dollar installments, from their own personal credit or debit card accounts. The audience, in other words, was charged with keeping the artist breathing – or not.

The performance went on for ten hours a day, and was to continue for an open-ended number of days – as many as possible, it was assumed. If various limits and conditions had been pre-programmed into the system, these were to safeguard not the artist but rather the element of brinksmanship in his performance. For example, the suspense would be spoiled if someone – a wealthy but clueless patron of the arts, say, or a critic hostile to conceptualism, or a personal enemy (envious fellow-artist or embittered ex-lover – word had it there were plenty of both) – were to fill the ATM-like unit with six hundred dollars worth of credit at the start of a shift, let alone enough credit for a week’s or a month’s worth of oxygen. Therefore the unit was set to accept only a single ten-dollar payment from any particular card on any given day, and only two such payments at a time. The little green light signaling that the unit needed to be replenished began blinking only after the first installment ran out. Thus at any moment the audience had only twenty minutes, at most, to wait to see if somebody would step up to keep the artist breathing for another brief stint.

These details about the performance were outlined in the flyer that Ashley had taken from a table just inside the entrance of the exhibition space when she got there shortly after noon, and another of which Mike picked up on his arrival a few minutes later (“You, here! Ah, so we chose the same day…”). The flyer also included a brief biography of the artist, a paragraph kindly acknowledging the help of the artist’s assistants and funding sponsors, and a statement in bold print that the ATM-like unit was managed by a security company of good repute so that all account numbers and PINs remained private. What the flyer did not discuss was the meaning of the piece, what the artist was trying to “say”; even its title was inscrutably generic: Performance #17. Here, then, was the serious matter to be discussed by Mike and Ashley as they witnessed the performance along with the rest of the onlookers, after a suitable period of aesthetic contemplation, of course, and even – because the piece itself raised the question of an engagement beyond mere spectatorship – of active participation in the form of shelling out the dough.

When the green light blinked, several people made motions as if simultaneously to step forward and to reach for their wallets or pocketbooks, motions which may have been expressive of real intent but which may equally have been mere feints of the sort one makes when reaching for a coworker’s dropped pen, confident in the coworker’s alacrity or servility to save one the effort of a full stoop. But it was Mike himself who made the boldest, most vigorous step forward and the surest, most decisive unholstering of his wallet, and so it was Mike who got to make the next installment, thrusting his debit card into the ATM-like unit and punching in his PIN number. He tried to catch the artist’s eye while he was waiting for his receipt to print out, imagining some expression of acknowledgment if not of gratitude (a curt man-to-man nod or tip of the chin, say), but the artist – he had a shaved head and narrow eyes, and in his blue track-suit looked more like a penny-ante bagman for the Russian mob – seemed completely absorbed by the open laptop on his knees, over whose keyboard two curiously stubby white hands played like hungry anemones in an aquarium. But if the artist was ignoring his latest donor, he was ignoring everyone else as well, and this perhaps took the sting out of it. Artists! A boorish, self-absorbed bunch, as persons; it’s the art itself we’re interested in, and Mike had some thoughts on that already – was this piece some kind of commentary on the bystander effect, which he remembered from Psych 101? – as he returned to Ashley’s side.

By this time, however, Ashley was speaking with one of the artist’s assistants. What would they do, she asked, if the oxygen ran out in earnest (those were her very words, “in earnest”) – surely he wouldn’t be allowed to die in there? “Yeah, you might get sued by his estate!” another visitor chimed in. Mike found himself vexed by Ashley’s question, for it was really more like one his wife would have asked; in fact it was the very question his wife would have asked. That was the thing about his wife: she was only interested in people. You couldn’t get her to discuss an abstract idea or concept, or to apply general principles to specific situations, or to synthesize the anecdotal into a more comprehensive picture, to save her own life. And even with her exclusive interest in people, she was lousy at discussing psychology; everything with her was an individual case, to be taken on its particular merits, as if every comparison were necessarily invidious and thus to be avoided in the name of taking the other person’s point of view. Of course, years ago (well, eight already) he had adored this quality in her, had extolled it in conversations with his friends, had written about it in the long-since abandoned journal he’d kept, or more often had thought about keeping, at that time. Such compassion! Such empathy! Such warmth! After watching a movie, she would speak of the characters as if they were real people, and, more, as if she could have solved all their problems if only she had played a part in the drama. Here, Mike knew early on, was emotional authenticity of a type you did not often find in life, at least not life in the big city, where people were so guarded, so armored, so looking after Number One. But the big city was also where people were sophisticated and discussed ideas and concepts, and applied general principles to specific situations, and synthesized the anecdotal into more comprehensive pictures, and thank God for that, because after a few years he found himself hungering for something beyond the small-town sensibility of his wife’s incessant gossip. Because that’s what it was: in the absence of general principles and the clarification and articulation of some kind of conceptual framework, even talking about something like her sister’s “fight with cancer” (she actually had used that cliché) was reduced to the level of gossip.

No, the assistant told Ashley (it was only the third day of the performance, maybe that was why he sounded so patient with this question he must get asked a hundred times in a shift), they would have to get the artist out of the booth if he went completely unconscious. The problem was that they couldn’t just open the door and pull him out whenever they felt like it. The assistant pointed to the keypad on the door – only the artist knew the code. He let himself in at noon with his liters of water, thermos of coffee, and box of food, and he let himself out again at 10:00 pm with the empty thermos and trash. He’d set the code himself and he refused to give it to anyone. Maybe he’d let himself out at the last possible minute, but if he couldn’t or wouldn’t, they would have to break in somehow. And that booth was very sturdily constructed. They’d call 911 and then have a go at it themselves until the EMTs and the firemen got there, but it might take axes or the Jaws of Life or whatever – you certainly couldn’t get it open right away. Couldn’t even shoot a hole in it – it was bulletproof, like the Popemobile. So even if the artist’s death was unlikely, some kind of medical emergency, including even brain damage, was a distinct possibility. People just had to keep attending the show, ten hours a day, every day, and a good number of those had to be willing to pay. Maybe eventually the novelty would wane, the crowds dwindle, and then the next move would be the artist’s to make – or maybe one day a crowd would show up simply to watch him suffocate.

Somebody else then asked what happened when the artist had to pee, reminding Mike how trivial and gossipy this whole discussion was (because by then he had become absorbed in it), and as the artist’s assistant went on to explain about the little hole in the seat and the Velcro strip in the artist’s tracksuit, Mike took the opportunity to steer Ashley aside and ask her what she thought. Ashley didn’t know what to think yet, so Mike brought up the phenomenon of the bystander effect. Oh yes, poor Kitty Genovese, said Ashley. She remembered it from her undergraduate psych survey. Kitty who? said Mike. He remembered the effect but not the name of the victim. The woman who—, started Ashley, but right then a collective laugh went up from the onlookers and Mike and Ashley looked too.

A large TV monitor was suspended from the ceiling about ten paces behind and to the left of the artist’s booth, its flat screen aglow with the artist’s Twitter profile. The topmost tweet read: Heard that one a million times already. Yawn! This was in response to a remark one of the onlookers had just made to his neighbor – “Ever see the end of that Tony Curtis Houdini movie?” – spoken in a low voice with head averted from the booth. Apparently the installation was miked and the artist could hear all the remarks; the crowd was laughing at its own sudden exposure. The artist typed on his laptop and another tweet appeared at the top of his list: This one 2, “I liked it better the 1st time, when it ws called The Hunger Artist.” Again everyone laughed, wanting to show they got the high culture as much as the pop culture references. “Everyone’s a critic!” one visitor chimed in. EVERYONES A CLICHÉ, tweeted the artist. This brought on a low ooooh from the crowd along with a smattering of more nervous laughter.

By this time the green light was blinking again and a slender young man detached himself from the crowd and skated up to the ATM-like unit. Even before he stepped away from the booth a new tweet appeared: What this guy really wants is 2 suk my cock. “At a dollar for every quarter inch,” the young man shot back. “Do the math, baby!” Everyone laughed, including the artist. 4 that u get 2 blow me 4 free, he tweeted. With a thumb-and-pinkie phone and a broad wink the young man mimed “call me.”

“I want to go next!” cried Ashley, waving the card she had removed from her handbag. When the green light started blinking again, a gallant visitor standing closer to the booth gestured for Ashley to step up. She smiled warmly at the artist while the artist smiled wryly back. Albino art-teacher just gave me her nip to nurse, he tweeted. While not an albino, Ashley was one of those persons with so fair a complexion that they looked molded of pink-tinged chalk, and even her eyelashes were pale. Moreover, she had very large breasts, so large in fact that in her early twenties she had considered breast-reduction surgery. When she read the tweet the pink tinge of her chalky molding turned to full blush, but her own good humor forestalled Mike’s impulse to come to her defense: “It’s like having your caricature sketched by one of those street artists!” she laughed. Beyond the superficialities of complexion and breast size the artist had, after all, really “gotten her number” – she wasn’t an art teacher yet but she would be after she finished her degree and got her certification.

Mike and Ashley ended up staying for another fifty or so minutes after that. It was longer than Ashley had anticipated, but Mike for some reason now seemed as reluctant to leave as he did to continue discussing the piece. Instead he stood poised and alert, as if waiting for an opening somewhere. They watched as the artist had an exchange with a grizzled poet who had dropped by. Still pecking out pomes on yr Olivetti, homie? the artist tweeted. “Except when I use parchment and quill!” said the poet, flourishing a small spiral notebook out of his pocket. He opened the notebook, cleared his throat, and read one of the entries to his sudden audience (a poem later included, with one or two minor revisions, in his chapbook Regression Analysis). Everyone applauded except the artist, who rolled his eyes. “Litrachur is 50 yrs behind painting,” he needled, adding in the next tweet, Gysin said it, I believe it, that settles it. “You may be right, brother,” was the poet’s quick riposte, “but at least poetry is still twenty-five years ahead of fiction!” Then he rolled a cigarette and stuck it behind his ear for later.

At other moments the artist ignored everyone, barely looking up from his laptop even to stick his card into the unit on his left and swipe it through the unit on his right, in the meantime issuing a stream of random tweets.

Beuys sed: "To make people free is aim of art." Discuss.

I say: to make #me expensive is aim of art. Discuss.

And when he did deign to notice his visitors and donors, more often than not it was to challenge their generosity with provocations: These 2 just meet on J-Date or what? Free Palestine! But nobody that day appeared to be anything but forgiving (even the J-Date couple, it turned out, were anti-Zionists). Clearly all were in harmony with the act, laughing off the barbs like they would those of an insult comic, and every time the green light blinked someone was sure to tithe.

By 1:30 Ashley was hungry and her back hurt from having to hold up her large chalky breasts. “Well, what do you think?” she asked in the kind of voice that suggested a statement about the time rather than a real question. “Yeah, yes, just—,” said Mike, still looking at the booth. At that moment the green light started blinking again and Mike lunged to the ATM-like unit. Once there, however, he assumed a patient and even formal manner, addressing himself to the apparatus with the exaggerated precision of someone making introductions at a state dinner. The artist ignored him, chewing his lower lip while staring into his laptop screen. Finally Mike completed the payment but remained standing at the booth, looking back and forth from the artist to the TV monitor while sliding his wallet back into his pocket. The artist was indeed typing again, but the tweets didn’t have anything to do with specific donors at the moment: Tweet re: #me, niggas! Make #me TRENDING TOPIC! Ashley had already retreated toward the exit and at last Mike came after her, glancing back at the screen a few more times until they were out in the parking lot, squinting as they got out their sunglasses.

Once on the sidewalk they proceeded up the long block toward an area of boutique restaurants and sidewalk cafés. Ashley had a vision of an herb-and-chèvre omelet and a glass of white wine, followed by a frothy cappuccino, and the vision fortified her enough to start the discussion which would continue over the meal that she assumed – by the unspoken accord she was careful not to handle too consciously – they would be having together. It would be an interesting and even necessary discussion, too, because she really couldn’t decide if the performance they had just attended was a very nuanced and sophisticated staging of the contradictions of culture and commerce, audience and expectation, spectacle and alienation, celebrity and self-image in the information age, with onion-like layers of irony that suggested issues as far-flung as arts funding in the metropolis and resource privatization in the Third World, or just the stupidest thing ever.

“Well—” she began.

Mike had his Blackberry out and was lifting his sunglasses with the other hand to squint at the screen.

“Sorry—” he said. He put the device back in his pocket and smiled at her. “You—?”

“I—”

“Um—”

“You—”

“OK, well—”

They were at an intersection. Straight ahead on the far side of the intersection was the strip of tempting boutique restaurants and sidewalk cafés. On the right was the way to Mike’s workplace. On the left was the way to Ashley’s campus.

“I go this way,” said Mike, pointing to his right and retreating a step.

“Oh,” said Ashley.

2.

Mike and Ashley’s second date – but we can’t really call it that because it never took place, or at least it hasn’t yet, but rather hangs there in futurity as a kind of pure potential, a road not taken, or if that is too passé, then a placeholder at the end of a dotted line on a decision tree sketched with odorless marker on an conference-room whiteboard. Mike walked back to his office, although the return trip took twice as long as his initial walk to the gallery because of the frequency with which he stopped to consult his Blackberry, shading the tiny screen with his hand because the sun was at his back. He was checking the Twitter page to see if the artist had tweeted some sarcastic comment or other about him after he and Ashley had made their exit. Mike knew, for example, that he was dressed more like an uptown yuppie than a downtown bohemian or a grad student, so he thought perhaps the artist might choose to make a derisive comment about the difference in their values insofar as these were reflected in Mike’s sartorial choices (which anyway were really his wife’s, since Mike found shopping boring). But among the most recent tweets he saw nothing to suggest such an acknowledgment, so as soon as he was back in his office – he was a partner and could pretty much do what he wanted – he fired up his desktop to search the earliest tweets of the afternoon, from around the time that he had used his debit card to make his first donation. Still he found no tweet that could be construed as a reference to him.

In the early evening Mike returned to the gallery instead of going home right away. He stood among the spectators and looked alternately at the artist in his airtight booth and at the Twitter profile on the monitor suspended from the ceiling. Mike wished he had another credit card so that he could make a third donation, but he had only the two he had used earlier that day. The thought crossed his mind to ask one of his fellow spectators if he might use a card of theirs in exchange for ten dollars in cash, but he dismissed this in the next instant because of course nobody would give a stranger their PIN. Instead, Mike moved to the front of the clump of visitors and stood with his arms crossed, staring at the artist as if willing him to look back. He stayed that way until he noticed how hungry he was, having skipped lunch.

He returned the next day, again shortly after noon, and made two payments into the ATM-like unit, about an hour apart. The artist’s sly and vaguely Slavic-looking eyes never once met Mike’s or even seemed to dodge away after a flicker in his direction. Mike went again the afternoon after that and made two further payments, but no tweet appeared on the monitor that had anything to do with the artist’s persistent benefactor. Therefore Mike stayed late at work that evening and returned to the gallery at 9:00 pm, only an hour before closing time, to deliver his master-stroke: His wife’s debit card, which he had sneaked out her purse that morning. He entered her PIN – she had confessed to him about a year ago that it was the name of a favorite childhood pet, which explained why she always seemed close to tears when withdrawing cash – and let his finger fall on the Enter button like a judge’s gavel while he smiled in triumph. Still no look, and no tweet.

Throughout the week and over the weekend the number of visitors to the gallery increased as buzz about the controversial performance spread. Mike showed up one or twice each day, always making his two donations (he had returned his wife’s debit card to her purse). The visitors who made their contributions at the ATM-like unit before and after him almost invariably, it seemed, got some kind of acknowledgment, a smile or sneer or pucker or frown if not a provocative tweet, but the artist always pointedly ignored Mike (at least it struck Mike as pointed) even though he was glad enough to breathe the oxygen Mike had purchased on his behalf. When Mike was not at the gallery he used his Blackberry or his office PC or his laptop at home to check the artist’s Twitter page. Perhaps he had missed a relevant tweet, or else the artist had waited until Mike was gone to make some comment, no doubt of a slighting or insulting nature, about “that yuppie guy who comes every day.” Or perhaps the tweet – or even tweets – about Mike were right there in plain sight, but in some kind of artist code so that their author and his in-the-know fans could have a laugh at Mike’s expense with the additional spice of their victim’s utter oblivion. Therefore Mike studied the tweet-archive from the times of his visits like a diligent code-breaker, turning phrases around to consider them from all angles, weighing connotations as well as denotations, looking up unfamiliar jargon and hip slang, searching for clues.

One time instead of looking right into the artist’s eyes, Mike tried focusing at a point on the artist’s forehead, midway between the eyebrows and the receding arc of stubble. This might be off-kilter enough, he figured, to unnerve the artist and distract him into a direct look. When this strategy failed Mike switched to a full-blown “two can play at this game” approach, appearing at the gallery for long stretches only to completely disregard, or at least pretend to disregard, the artist in his booth. Instead Mike stood off to one side and ate a fat sandwich from the deli around the corner, or else he moved into the body of onlookers only to spend his time reading a folded section of newspaper or an art-magazine interview with one of the performer’s rivals. At other times Mike simply people-watched among his fellow attendees, occasionally engaging one or another in friendly chat.

Eventually, however, Mike found himself standing closer and closer to the booth itself, for longer and longer periods of time. He had dropped the pretence of doing other things and again stared directly at the seated figure in the blue tracksuit. At one point he noticed that he was standing near enough for his breath to condense on the Plexiglas surface. This defeated his purpose, because it might obscure the very moment when the artist shot him a glance, so he backed up an inch or two until he could breathe normally without clouding, even for seconds, his view. Other visitors, of course, noticed Mike; he would occasionally hear them talking behind his back – “He’s not dressed like a street-person, but he sure acts like one.” This assured him of his solidity, because to the artist himself Mike might as well have been vapor. The artist’s assistants, too: they never once asked him to move or threatened to call the cops. It was obvious that the artist had instructed them to ignore the strange yuppie’s presence just as utterly as he, the artist, ignored the strange yuppie.

By the end of the second week of his daily visits Mike could be found standing this close to the booth for as much as an hour, just staring at the artist’s head. He got to know the head very well, its contours and subtle hollows, the pronounced occipital shelf in back – the whole phrenological terrain. With its stubble, thicker here and thinning there, it resembled an old tennis ball, and Mike – a very good player although he hadn’t played in weeks – imagined striking this ball with his racket against the side of the school building near his house, whacking it again and again as it ricocheted back, bouncing it off that hard wall with the racket he gripped in his fist, feeling the satisfying recoil and hearing the thwock! thwock! as it was batted between taut strings and reinforced concrete. In the seismic tremors of the artist’s scalp and jaw muscles Mike tried to divine some awareness of the intense vibe he knew he was radiating – the artist might, after all, acknowledge him with a twitch of his ears or the lobes of his nostrils, if not his eyes. Instead what happened in these spells of concentration was the visual equivalent of a word repeated until it turned to nonsense. The artist’s head lost all sentience and significance, became a mere thing, detached from its place on the human frame: a bulb of matter, a primal bud – a tumor even. And yet, however nonsensical, it burned itself into Mike’s mind like the afterimage of a klieg light on the retina. Even when Mike was not at the gallery, even when he closed his eyes to prepare for sleep, there before him was this pale bubble of skull, this question mark, spectral yet as sickeningly substantial as an elephantine fungal mass. Its presence rendered Mike, on his side, an absence.

At length the number of visitors to the gallery started to dwindle, a few fewer every day. During the prolonged hours of sparse attendance, the echo of a stray observation or scrape of a footfall in the renovated warehouse brought in its wake a suspense-filled hush. The artist himself seemed as blasé as always, ebulliently mocking his contributors even though the green light on the ATM-like unit had to blink its “feed me” message for ever-longer stretches. In the meantime his tweets appeared to be coalescing into an excursus on the sociological phenomenon of hipsterism:

If hipster = wannabe form w/ no content

(not wannabe anything in particular, just wannabe)…

…What do u make of wannabe hipsters?

Yet every few minutes, it seemed, Mike could hear one of the artist’s assistants sigh or one of the gallery staff tap a pen. If he waited long enough, a time would come when his presence was finally unavoidable. He would be the last visitor at the booth when the green light blinked into overdrive and the air pump cut off. The artist would begin to pant and wheeze and gesture frantically, or else grow woozy and turn blue, his feeble hand swiping his card even though he knew it was out of credit. And then, before he imploded like a deep-sea diver or exploded like an astronaut or simply crumpled into an unconscious heap, he would raise his head to Mike with a look, an acknowledgement – an appeal. Then the ball would be in Mike’s court.

3.

Back at the brownstone, Mike’s wife had just gotten off the phone with one of his business partners. Yes, she’d had to admit, Mike had been acting a little strange lately, more than usually preoccupied. Was he ill, perhaps – some dire diagnosis he didn’t want to burden everyone else with? No, no, nothing like that. Everything would be OK, she told Mike’s partner, if they just gave it time.

But she was really not so sure, herself. Lately Mike spoke to her less and less – barely looked at her, in fact – instead sequestering himself in the den and snapping his laptop shut whenever she walked by. And those were the evenings he spent at home: Often he returned from the office late, mumbling about extra work or dinner with clients – although now she knew from his partner that he was frequently away from his desk and neglecting his accounts. Yet clearly it wasn’t some kind of breakdown, because otherwise Mike seemed full of a compact vitality. He had a new concern with his appearance: more than once she had caught him in intense consultation with the bathroom mirror, and he seemed to be losing weight. It must be jogging, because he left the house in track-suit and sneakers even though his tennis gear remained in the closet. And then, on the weekend – she was a deeply trusting person, but this really was the last straw – he’d had his head shaved in some attempt, she assumed, to look younger, edgier. Finally she had decided to put things to the test: she insisted that Mike come home on time so that they could have a nice night out at their favorite restaurant. In the end he’d had to meet her there, and between each course, each glass of wine, he checked his Blackberry for messages. When they returned home, they did not make love.

She applied general principles to specific situations, and synthesized the anecdotal into a more comprehensive picture. All the signs were there, they were unmistakable, and they added up. Tonight, whenever Mike decided finally to come home, she would ask the question she thought she’d never have to ask. She’d make him sit on the bed, and when he didn’t look at her, her gentle fingers would lift his chin.

© 2010 prickofthespindle.com