Tease (Songs of Submission #2)(19)
Author: C.D. Reiss

Our noses sat next to each other, and my lips felt the heat of his. I smelled his sagey cologne and fennel toothpaste.

“Monica?” I knew that voice. It had uttered my name in the dark of night, with moonlight coming through the window, and had screamed it in the bright light of day with heat coming off the asphalt. My name had been on those lips between laughs and tears and rage and humility.

I turned my face away from Jonathan’s. “Kevin.”

“I’m sorry, I, uh … didn’t mean to interrupt, but I didn’t know if I’d catch you again tonight.” He was in a brown suit for a black tie event, with a lavender tie and a blue striped shirt. It should have been a mess, but he looked gorgeous, like he was in the world of the reception but not of it. The scarf in his pocket was folded into a peeking triangle, and his pants fit him as though they’d been custom made. He’d apparently been shopping for the event as well, and unless he had a rich girlfriend, the business of being Kevin Wainwright had been brisk.

“Hi, Kevin. This is Jonathan.”

Kevin held out his hand. “Drazen?”

“That’s me.”

Of course Kevin knew Jonathan, at least by name and face. He made it his business to know anyone who could afford original art.

Kevin turned back to me. “Did you see my piece yet?”

“No, where is it?” Of course he was worried about himself. Of course he thought nothing of interrupting an intimate moment to ask me if I’d seen his piece yet.

“No rush,” he said. “It’s around that corner. I just wanted to see you first. I want to say…” He glanced at Jonathan, then back at me. “I hope you like it. Excuse me.” He fell back into the crowd.

“That was awkward,” I said.

“Looks like we’d better go see if it’s bullshit on a stick.” Jonathan held his arm out, and we turned around the next corner.

“Kevin Wainwright puts his bullshit in a box.”

Kevin was known for installations. Two dimensions could not contain him or his big stinking ideas. His first set up was in a ten by ten storefront he rented in the worst part of downtown. When his parents moved to a one-bedroom apartment in the center of Seattle, he got shipped a basement full of every toy, game, and fetish object from his childhood. But to him, it wasn’t crap. To him, it was media. He spent a month in that storefront hanging, pinning, pasting, and strapping things to the walls; setting up tables for mise-en-scenes with army men and action figures; deconstructed board games and decks of cards, mixing up the pieces to make new things. I hadn’t known him then. I shared his bed after he was already an agented comet streaking across the art-world’s night sky. I had heard of his downtown storefront, which had been titled Arcade Idaho and had spawned a hundred imitators but not one other success story.

Kevin was a shrewd businessman as well. Installations left nothing for the artist to sell. His art wasn’t a painting a rich person could put in their living room or a sculpture for their yard. He sold the preparatory sketches and worked closely with a little hipster bookbinding outfit on Santa Monica Boulevard to create limited edition booklets containing silver halide prints of the installation, along with his wordy, over-modified prose describing what it all meant.

I knew his exhibit would be crap. I knew it would be manufactured meaning, and exasperating, and it would remind me of all his drama. But when I turned the corner and saw the doorway to the installation, I got a little nervous. Metal signs hung outside. CAUTION. HARDHAT AREA. NO TRESPASSING. The signs were typical Kevin overstatement, but the sign at the top concerned me.

FAULKNER COAL MINE

“Isn’t that your last name?” Jonathan asked.

“Yeah.”

“You sure you want to go in?”

“No.”

But I pressed forward anyway.

From just outside, I heard a canary singing, a lone bird at top volume. The doorway was little more than five feet high. I bent a little to get in, and Jonathan bent a lot.

The room was dark, with spotlights to point where he wanted you to look. At first, I hadn’t adjusted to what I was seeing. He’d scribbled a lot of words, floor to ceiling, on two facing walls and the other two facing walls had eight and a half by eleven copy paper pinned to them. Piles of objects were on the floor with papers on music stands, which I couldn’t read because people stood in front of them.

Then, like a gunshot, the canary turned into the honking of a disconnected number. Everyone flinched, and some people got angry at the intrusive noise. Except me. I knew what the noise was about. I knew what the canary was about, and I knew, for damn sure, what that installation was about.

The phone noise drove out the people standing in front of one pile of about nine small objects. A black chalk line had been drawn around them. A music stand stood in front. The stand had a piece of paper clipped to it, and engraved on the paper:

1 (one) 13.5 oz bottle Purell shampoo. 50% empty. Current value – $2.39

1 (one) 13.5 oz bottle Purell conditioner, dry hair formula. Unopened. Current value – $4.79

5 (five) Tampax brand tampons, regular. Current value – $1.34

1 (one) Recyclable toothbrush, soft bristles. Used. Current value – $0

1 (one) 16oz bottle Kiehl’s Crème de Corps moisturizer. 75% empty. Current value – $12.50

I remembered a conversation over that tube. He’d questioned me about that and everything else, because he assumed I was too incompetent to manage my skin.

“How much do you spend on this stuff?” Kevin had asked, putting a blob of Kiehl’s into his palm.

“This bottle will last me a year if you don’t take that much.”

Then he’d rubbed it on my thighs, and we did it on the bathroom floor. The bottle was 75% empty because that wasn’t the last time.

I felt Jonathan behind me. “What is it?” he asked, just as the canary came back on.

“This is the stuff I left at his place.”

Someone moved to my right, and I saw a pile of clothes. The pockets of my jeans and the T-shirt I slept in were folded neatly under a pair of simple cotton underpants. I didn’t read the little menu. I knew what those jeans were worth. Any normal person who wasn’t terrified of getting sucked back into their ex-boyfriend’s life would have gone back for them.

To my left, a pile of hair accessories: a brush and a scrunchy. And a disk of birth control pills. Open. Half-used.

“Are you sure you’re taking these right?” he’d said one month when I was a day late.