摘录

Chapter One The Lecturer on Art Late as usual, Vivian Hart rammed her car into the fast-moving traffic heading west to New Jersey over the George Washington Bridge. The aggressive driving was just a reflex, a habit acquired during her thirty-eight years on Planet New York. She was on her way to be fired, a situation that no degree of promptness would improve.     She had received the call at nine that morning, a terse order to attend her first faculty meeting in the ten years she had taught at Malcolm College of Knowledge. The explanation came when she turned on the car radio. Every day, just before the weather, her favorite station featured a one-minute exposé of the most glaring case of capitalist malfeasance in the last twenty-four hours. Today's subject had been Vivian's boss.     Amos Malcolm, millionaire pioneer in drop-in education, the genius who had transformed an evening class in auto-body repair into the largest privately owned school in the tri-state metropolitan area, had just been indicted for misappropriation of federal funds. To keep their client out of jail, old Amos's lawyers had agreed to an immediate suspension of operations. When she finally arrived at the main campus, a converted freight depot just off the New Jersey Turnpike, it was to hear a somewhat reworded version of the same news. Malcolm College of Knowledge, Where Northern New Jersey Learns What Earns, was beginning a systemwide restructuring of its curriculum that necessitated a brief interruption of classes. Starting today. Ending no time in the foreseeable future.     None of this was Vivian's fault. She had not pressured students to apply for guaranteed student loans to pay for programs that would never, ever bring them a job. She had nothing to do with the Keyboarding Department, equipped with Underwood type, writers of a sort not seen in any office in North America for over thirty years, or with the Computer Servicing Department, where students were graded on their ability to crawl under tables and make sure that all plugs were firmly anchored in their sockets. She had never approved the program of the Interior Decorating Department, which offered a master's degree to anyone who could make a color wheel out of an ordinary paper plate, or of the extremely popular but apparently illegal Domestic Surveillance Certificate Course, where students were taught the best ways to spy through the windows of total strangers. For ten years she had lectured on art and architecture without ever once suggesting that anything she said would make her students more employable. The worst she had done was allow them to plaster her photo through the catalog to show that one could indeed be a student at Malcolm College of Knowledge and still learn something about the arts. Not much, as a brief consideration of the course offerings would show, but at least something.     And now she was out of a job. After the gray-faced accountant had explained there would be no final checks, there was not much more to say. Vivian had no office to clean out, no favorite piece of equipment to steal before the federal agents got there in the morning. Nodding briefly to her former colleagues, none of whom she had ever met, she returned to her car and headed back to Manhattan. A Career Retrospective Vivian's first feeling was embarrassment at finding herself in so trite a situation. Malcolm College of Knowledge was certainly on the fringe of intellectual respectability, but it was a ragged edge she valued more than she had realized. She felt like a character in an academic farce.     In a sense, Vivian was a victim of her own success. Small, fair, and unremarkable in appearance, she had made the most of her agile mind, her facile tongue, and her passionate conviction that the salvation of modern woman (by whom she meant the middle-class, moderately educated woman of postindustrial urban centers) lay in the rediscovery of her connection with the primitive rhythms of the ancient earth. Her popularity came from her talent for titillating night school students with soft-core pornography presented as "eco-feminist art appreciation."     It was an accident at first. Hired at the last minute, recruited by a notice posted outside the office of the Graduate Program in Art History at CUNY, she had agreed to deliver an eight-week series of lectures which somebody in the marketing department had already tided "Making Sense of Impressionist Painting" Her husband was between photography assignments, her son was six weeks old, and she needed the money.     The day before she was to begin, a tired-sounding woman from the business office called to say that sense had somehow been changed to sex in the announcement that went out to two thousand people on their mailing list. It was too late to mail corrections, and, actually, preregistration had been pretty good, so did she think she could make her lectures fit the new title? Too confused to object, Vivian agreed.     The renamed course was a huge success. The class, twenty-three strong, found something deliciously hip in Vivian's way of pairing gorgeous color slides of everybody's favorite French paintings with biting attacks on the exploitation of female models. They lapped up her analysis of Renoir's boating party paintings as modern fertility rituals. They took notes when she showed how Cézanne's haystacks were really male-coded assertions of power. They were bemused when she described van Gogh's tortured fields as erotic fetishes, the landscape writhing in a frenzy of sterile titillation. For her final lecture she rehashed a seminar paper where she linked Monet's famous garden with Luther Burbank's experiments in hybridization, exposing both as capitalist-oppressor attempts to exploit nature for commercial use.     After "Making Sex of Impressionist Painting" came the even more popular "Making Sex of Urban Architecture." The growing audience, still almost entirely female, had giggled when Vivian announced she was going to trace the history of what she called "civic erections." They loved it when she talked about roads and bridges as a municipal chastity belt imposed upon the sexual organs of the earth. They howled with approval when she defined the male ideal of a public park as a grassy mound pierced at the center by a fat, upright column commemorating a particularly orgasmic moment of military penetration, and they nodded in solemn agreement when she described the long tradition of multi-stepped courthouses and public buildings as a conspiracy to deny access to stroller-pushing mothers.     By the third series, "Making Sex in the Garden" over a hundred women, and even a few men, were paying to hear Vivian's weekly diatribes. Soon a Thursday night session was added to the original Tuesday schedule. In a small but fervent circle, Vivian had many followers.     Over the years she had expanded her topics to include "Reclaiming Your Inner Gaia" (on landscape painting), "The Feminine Touch" (on autoeroticism), and "Women Who Run with Painters" (brief biographies of wives and mistresses illustrated with paintings for which they served as models). Every fall she repeated "Making Sex of Impressionist Painting." Putting it at the top of the mailing list was like having a license to print money, the business manager confessed.     For this Vivian received a decent salary and access to a group medical package that paid the bills when Lily was born four years after her brother, Justin. Vivian never finished her dissertation, but one of the charms of Malcolm was that nobody there cared about credentials.     Obviously, such bliss could not endure. As she flung her fat copper token into the hopper at the toll booth, Vivian decided to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her favorite source for last-minute inspiration. Justin and Lily would not be home from school until 4:30. Surely four hours would be enough time for her to decide what to do with the rest of her life. The Artist While Vivian is completing this patently symbolic journey from old life to new, we can take a moment to look in on her husband.     Richard Hart was a photographer. It was in his blood. His grandfather, a grim, quiet man who always traveled with a canvas sack of flashbulbs, had taken crime-scene pictures for the police. His father had worked at a well-known portrait studio in lower Manhattan, cajoling smiles from a lifetime succession of fussy babies, nervous newlyweds, and jowly executives who needed to look purposeful for the pages of the annual report.     Richard liked to say he sought a broader range of subjects, which sounded high-minded but meant he worked freelance, one of those reliable hacks who filled the Rolodex of every advertising art director in the greater metropolitan area, available at short notice to transform ordinary products into images of consumer desire. His days passed in an overlighted room on the West Side of Manhattan, unrolling and rerolling cascades of background paper while client and account executive squabbled over which color looked best with dish detergent, or cat litter, or whatever it was they were shooting. Much of Richard's work appeared in the color advertising inserts of local newspapers.     Richard's art was something else. Shot in black and white, obsessively devoted to theme, these photographs were meant to cut to the core of the modern urban experience. In his soul, hidden beneath his somewhat paunchy exterior, was a biting social critic. His earliest work, begun while he was still in art school, had been a series of tightly focused images of ordinary shoes (and accompanying feet) descending the same two steps at the bottom of the Columbus Circle subway station. No gallery had been willing to exhibit the Shoe Series, a rejection Richard attributed to fear of foot fetishists. Undaunted, he had moved on to the Pretzel Series, which showed people eating the large soft pretzels sold by sidewalk vendors in central Manhattan. Here, too, his preferred shot was the close-up, which often showed people with their mouths open, bits of pretzel clearly visible inside. This purified his art, Richard claimed, stripping it of the social baggage of clothing or setting.     As before, no one was interested. One gallery owner, more candid than most, complained that Richard had achieved a style that was both revolting and pointless. Taking this as a call for clearer narrative content, he had then embarked on the Icon Series, which featured cheap plastic religious objects in disrespectful situations--Buddha squatting on a child's potty, Moses carrying the Ten Commandments down a mountain of sausage links, the Virgin Mary wearing a yellow vinyl sign that said "Baby on Board." But even loaded with ironic reference, his art failed to find an audience.     When he met Vivian, Richard had known at once she was his passion and his muse, there to raise his photography to a higher plane of meaning. Just out of Hunter College, she was working for a fancy Madison Avenue florist and had come to arrange the wildflowers needed to enhance the box of margarine he was shooting. While she poked and prodded her arrangement of daisies and buttercups, she had entranced him with an impromptu commentary on the transformation of sunflowers from nutritionally useful weeds to enormously expensive allusions to the lost world of pastoral, with examples ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Van Cleef & Arpels. Although frequently misinformed, Vivian was a good talker.     Plus she was small and thin and wore her blond hair pulled back like a ballerina, which was attractive to a large, hairy guy like Richard. Vivian liked large, hairy guys. He took her out to dinner, then back to his apartment, and then out to breakfast, and five weeks later they were off to city hall to get married. It was wildly romantic, they both agreed, very proud of themselves.     Two years later, when Richard inherited a few worthless stocks and a real gem of a rent-controlled apartment from his grandmother, Vivian quit her job with the florist and enrolled in the graduate program in art history that had brought her to Malcolm College of Knowledge.     Richard, meanwhile, waited to be discovered. He blamed his lack of success on bad timing. He had been seeking originality when the next big thing was copying older works and calling it Appropriation. He had missed the brief moment when reckless opportunists got famous fast by photographing their acts of self-mutilation in the name of performance art. He had taken no nudes, homoerotic or other. He had photographed his children, but not in provocative poses. He neither owned nor photographed large dogs.     Now he was forty. It was time to develop a name, a style, an identity beyond the generic black shirt and baseball hat that could describe any photographer in Manhattan. For ten years he had watched as Vivian, the facile popularizer, sailed home from her evening lectures so high from applause that she rarely got to sleep before midnight, while he endured the fate of the true artist, unappreciated in his time.     Richard had enough sense not to share this view with his wife, but he thought it often, especially when gazing at the samples of his art photography he had mounted on his studio wall. The only client who had ever mentioned them was a shoe manufacturer who had made it clear that his own product should have a classier presentation if Richard expected to get paid. On this particular morning, he was fingering a brochure advertising the International Exposition of Photography at Arles. If he registered by May 1, he would get a fifty-dollar discount. If he was one of the first hundred to send in his check, he would get his portfolio reviewed by a member of the curatorial panel. If pigs fly, he thought bitterly, I'll get to France this summer. Then the buzzer rang. It was the messenger service with another piece of shoddy merchandise for him to backlight so skillfully it would somehow look good enough to buy. Copyright (c) 2000 Jane S. Smith. All rights reserved.