The Long Battle
Short Stories
Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a short story from a collection called Lives of the Artists. At the partner site
, writes on a visit to Moravia.Best,
Sam
THE LONG BATTLE
They had been together at RISD, the famous RISD class, which produced so many interesting people, really had its sway over fashion and art for decades after that. Peter was from a New England mill town, wrong side of the tracks, had grown up lobstering during the summers, always wore his checkered shirt as a kind of badge of class solidarity. It had been a big deal for him to attend a place like RISD, a lot of tears shed by the women who circled around his mother, a lot of cold silence from the men who’d mentored him, but he was in the grip of certain theories about the absolute primacy of art, showed up at campus with his poofed hair, his thick moustache, toting his suitcase full of French philosophers. Dorothy had also grown up poor, although somehow, at the same time, between Colorado and Italy. Her father was some kind of WASP, one of these pedigreed WASP families, who’d chucked it and decided to paint and then to teach art — back to the land was the thought Peter had about her, her family consciously cultivating her, a multi-generation project, just exactly all the influences, all the conditions you would need to really make it as an artist. And when she showed up at RISD she was completely formed. There was no doubt about that, not the first time he saw her photos in a little showcase put out by the school, peered at them, formulated the critiques in his head, argued with them the way he’d argue with a teacher or in an artist in a museum, somebody trying to commandeer his entire perception of the world, he agreed with this, he didn’t agree with that, he wasn’t sure that was exactly the right direction for him — he’d been a bit confused by the layout of the exhibition, didn’t realize that the photos weren’t from a teacher or the permanent collection, were from another student. And, curiously, the other students, who were normally so fractious, so averse to awarding any sort of praise to anyone, accepted it as well — the way that, in class, her photos were passed over very quickly, the professor nodding along like he was running down a checklist or listening to a tune in his head, yes to the composition, yes to the color scheme, yes to the content, yes to the ineffable, artistic, whatever you call it, sometimes allowing his eyebrows to shoot up in unfeigned surprise and appreciation, and then moving on to the next one, the usual long argument about whether the corner of a wall constituted a clever riff on negative space, an interesting take on deconstruction, or was just a prank. And Peter became most aware of it when somebody’s friend visited from home, said over drinks, “Who’s the best here? I want to meet the best.” It was unclear what the friend wanted, he was a jocky type, whether he wanted to challenge the best to a fist fight or a photography competition, wanted to line them up for a Mellon grant, all completely unclear, but the table he was sitting around took him seriously, nodded towards Dorothy, who was drinking some kind of a lemonade down towards the other end of the bar, said, “That one, she’s the best,” and that seemed to subdue the jocky friend somehow, he pursed his lips, was no longer so eager for the fist fight or the photography competition, and Peter, who was competitive about everything, was strangely not in the mood to challenge either, sipped his beer, didn’t even ask what the criteria were, didn’t try to parse the question, just took it as confirmation of something he already, deeply, understood.
He wasn’t romantically interested in her either, which also surprised him. That might have been what subdued the jocky friend, the tiny blonde with her high carrying voice, the large features, Jewish and Italian unhappily mixed. He had meant to be as promiscuous as possible in college, that seemed to be the one meeting point of the disparate corners of his identity, the wrong side of the tracks and the Left Bank intellectuals, but within about a month of starting school he’d met LeAnne, who had very long straight dark hair down to the middle of her back and a waist that somehow sloped in, she was busy with a photo project of working-class people all over Providence, and Peter accompanied her, holding her extra lenses while she set up stevedores and mill hands in their poses.
The friendship with Dorothy developed gradually and seemed to be her initiative. He would pass her looking preoccupied on the streets around campus and she would accompany him for a while without its being at all clear where she was going. A little while after this, when he was at LeAnne’s, when they were still, for some reason, hiding their being together, or at least the extent of it, there was a note pushed under the door, addressed to both of them and inviting them for a tea party.
That was irresistible, and even though it specified formal dress (whites only), they did their best. He cobbled together a kind of disco outfit from a couple of friends, LeAnne had a chest of dresses from her mysterious Southern upbringing. Dorothy opened the door to her place very shyly. It was a large industrial loft, Peter was familiar with it from some of the photos she’d shared in class, it was completely empty of all furniture. It had been part of some warehouse and the proprietors, shutting down, like a retreating army, had thrown up a stove, toilet, and a kind of slop sink and seen if they could grab anything in the residential market. Dorothy was in a ruffled white dress with a sash, she was probably 5’0” and the dress made it seem like she was about six inches high and four years old. They stood around, since there was nothing to sit on, Peter admired the light and the view, LeAnne went around snapping photos since it reminded her so much of the factories and workman’s lofts that she was profiling in her series — Peter was too newly in love to point out that it was very bad form to encroach like that on another artist’s space, and, besides, Dorothy didn’t seem to care at all.
The tea party was pretty much exactly as described. She had a kettle and a few bags of jasmine and then when it was time to serve the tea, at the place settings with napkins and spoons that Dorothy had decorously laid out on the floor, it was discovered that one of the three cups she had, when it was taken off its shelf, was actually missing a whole side, and Peter went out and jogged to the pawn shop on the corner and bought a mug and raced back before the tea cooled. Dorothy, getting ambitious, was trying to make soft-boiled eggs to go along with it, Dorothy and LeAnne standing together by the stove, attempting to work out at what time they’d started cooking and whether the clock could be trusted to tell the time.
It was a bit silly, Dorothy seemed not quite to know all the rules of conversation. She laughed too loudly at things that weren’t exactly jokes, she told stories that kind of doubled back on themselves and then drifted away. At some point, she took her Graflex off its shelf and snapped a few photos of them sitting side-by-side, sipping their tea, the tips of their fingers just grazing one another’s.
The tea party made LeAnne very proprietary towards her – it was one of these events where everybody laughs a lot, enjoys themselves, everybody has a good time, makes various plans towards one another, but underneath the conversation the plates of status are shifting and hardening. LeAnne now referred to her in her high Southern spirits as ‘the poor girl’ — as in, we should do something for the poor girl. And all that they could think to do was to invite her over to use their shower. And this might have seemed a bit condescending, a bit cruel even — now that he’d gotten to know LeAnne better, seen the way she went after girls she perceived as rivals — but Dorothy appeared timidly, knocked so lightly at the door that for a while they assumed it must be just some apartment sound, she was carrying a towel and a change of clothes like a shy kid on the first day of camp. LeAnne ushered her into the shower, showed her with exaggerated care how all the knobs worked. They sat in the main room. They had been playing cards and now they let the cards lie, Peter glanced through negatives, trying to choose what he wanted to develop, LeAnne picked up a book on theory that had been lying face down. Dorothy stayed in the bathroom forever, eventually Peter couldn’t take it, ran into one of the dining halls to urinate. She came out looking like a different kind of person, towel tucked demurely over herself and a second one wrapped around her hair. She was asking LeAnne about some kind of face cream and they went in together, Peter sitting on his bean bag, glancing at the negatives, glancing at LeAnne’s book, trying not to pay too much attention to the sounds of girls laughing behind a closed door.
That was the pattern for a while, these exchanges of visits like some kind of diplomatic nicety, the paper slid under the door, inviting them to a tea party, Dorothy playing the part of sly elf and never materializing at this moment, the invitation usually in rhyme, sometimes with a drawing attached to it, there was always some new theme to the party, some new person, a dress code, an injunction, for instance, to speak only in iambic pentameter, and the party was always the exact same thing, the new person wouldn’t show up, there would be the soft-scrambled egg, the crockery on the floor, and then at some point, still giggling over her uncompleted stories, Dorothy would take the Graflex and start moving around them firing off photographs. Sometimes she would then forget about them and set up a shot of a beam of light coming through the window or look for the cat in its hiding place to see if there was a photo there. Her visits were less ceremonious — the knock at the door, although of course Peter and LeAnne didn’t lock, she was free to wander in, and then the long shower, the shy little nod to them as she was leaving, a couple of times she actually curtsied, and when Peter went in the bathroom the mirror and surfaces completely steamed over.
Around that time she started submitting more nudes in class. Some of them were people they knew, both guys and girls in the program lying around naked in her loft – maybe they had also been lured there by a tea party. There were a handful of guys they didn’t know, who seemed like townies or else the breed of inter-campus hitchhiking vagrant that was their connection to the outside world, all of them perfectly un-self-conscious in the photos. But mostly it was Dorothy herself, Dorothy with her heavy breasts lying on the couch, head bent backwards towards the camera staring straight into the lens, Dorothy wrapped in her towel, her head maybe still wet from Peter and LeAnne’s shower, the towel just slipping off her shoulder down at the bottom of the photograph, Dorothy curled naked on the floor, making roughly the same shape as a garter snake that she’d borrowed from a pet shop and was lying in a bowl next to her.
Everybody was so used to Dorothy’s work being edgy-yet-tasteful, elegantly made, that there wasn’t much discussion of it in seminar, just the hint of a professor pushing back, raising his eyebrows in that skeptical museumgoer’s way, asking if she was ‘trying for something.’ And there was a bit of quiet interest as well. The girls she’d asked to model for her were never the prettiest ones at the program — she never asked LeAnne for instance — they were feminists, the braless, unshaved armpits crowd, they would be lying in a way, heads in the middle of the frame, and breasts cutting a line on the edge of it, or sitting next to Dorothy on her derelict couch, legs spread, pussies wide open, wearied expressions as if they were waiting for a long-distance bus, so that it was somehow, even though everything was exposed and flagrant, very difficult to think about sex, or at least not in the way you were used to.
Towards the middle of the second year, she suddenly announced that she was moving. It was getting to be a bit much to do her weekly or biweekly shower at Peter and LeAnne’s — or at the apartments of the other people who’d decided to treat her as a charity case. “I’m going to have a real place,” she announced. And she sent a bunch of people identical tea party invitations, asking for ‘gym wear,’ and when they showed up she revealed that there was no tea party at all, that they were to help her move her things to the new apartment. It turned out that she had very little stuff, mostly just broken crockery that was dumped on the way, Peter took several trips empty-handed just following along, trying to be supportive. They laid everything out in the apartment, which was very cute, a hand-me-down from an older student who had just moved to New York — laid out according to a feng shui sort of scheme that LeAnne helped prescribe. The cat found a new hiding place. When Peter was on the street smoking a cigarette, somebody ran downstairs and told him to stand back, made sure to clear the area. “The mattress is coming down,” he announced. And they looked up together, watched a group trying to wedge the mattress through the window and then shoulder it so that it came clear, and Dorothy standing with a flushed, victorious look, like a monarch who’d just ordered a controversial execution, and watching it plummet to the street below. “I can’t live in a place like that,” she announced when she was back on the street. And her band gathered up the teapots and suitcases, took the different corners of the mattress, started parading everything back to the old loft, while Dorothy stayed behind to recover the cat.
***
Peter had been in New York when the news came of Dorothy’s suicide – he was not, thank god, one of the three people she had called during her black day, who had told her, basically, that she was being dramatic, complaining about her bicycle being stolen, about a grant she hadn’t gotten. He was out on a shoot, an ad thing he had picked up. If the phone rang back at his apartment, he never heard it.
It wasn’t a complete surprise the way that everybody else claimed it was for them. For one thing, it really was rough living in New York City. Everybody else seemed to discount that as a valid reason, there was a tendency to concentrate on lovers, the inter-city hitchhiking vagrants, it was becoming very fashionable at that time to diagnose wide varieties of mental health disorders, but the city was grim and expensive and it ground you under, Peter could attest, and he was a newbie, had spent a few months after graduation recuperating at home, and visiting LeAnne’s, saving up money for the push to New York. By the time he got there, Dorothy was already a battle-scarred veteran of it, she’d left campus in the middle of graduation preparations, told everybody that they could grab what they wanted, and a few people did, although not Peter, collected a few of the photographs and drawings that were scattered all over the apartment, all the shots of Dorothy casually topless, quietly sold them later on for absurd amounts of money. When he visited Dorothy in New York, fresh off the Greyhound, she had her loft there, as much a replica as possible of the place in Providence, with a faucet that sprayed water off to the side and a non-functioning shower, which seemed to be her signature. But it wasn’t joyful the way it had been in college. She had tried to tidy a bit, which somehow unnerved Peter — had made it as far as folding up the clothes that she then stacked on the floor. She showed him her ‘book,’ which was really ridiculous, shots of her around the apartment in clothes she must have picked up from vintage shops; he seemed to know something about advertising, maybe the agencies would be interested in this?
He’d seen her really upset only once. That had been back at RISD. He went to her apartment his last year. There was no pretext of a tea party, they were close enough by this time that he could just stop by. She was half-naked, in underwear and some kind of a sashed approximation of a t-shirt that she’d probably thrown on when he knocked. She’d been trying to do a shoot and something had stuck in the Graflex’s shutter, she was dissecting it, trying to stitch it back together. She was cursing at it, really cursing, she swatted him away when he offered to help out. There should have been something enjoyable about this, the helpless woman, the broken machinery, the day’s plans ruined — Peter had been with LeAnne long enough that he’d started to stray, just little affairs here and there, with friends from the periphery of his social group, pretty much exactly like Dorothy, and, with anyone else, it would have been the most natural thing in the world, but she really was devastated, she was speaking in loops sort of the way she did when she couldn’t manage to tell a story, she was narrating to the camera what they had been meaning to shoot, how well it had been doing all morning, what the strange sound was when the shutter came down wrong, how it had stopped behaving altogether. She was pulling at the roots of her hair, Peter thought he should stay there for a bit in case she hurled it out of the window or something, then he wandered off — it was obvious that she was in a completely different state pretty much from anyone else, this really was the only thing she cared about.
He was at the funeral, he met the father, lumbering around like he was drunk or lost on a battlefield, shaking everybody’s hand as he passed them — he’d been in New York, as it happened, about to have a retrospective of his work at MoMA. And he was part of the group that once again went through her loft apartment, tried to clear out her things, he stood back from the muttering, dazed conversation of who would take the cat. And he went to the show that the father organized, a completely subdued event at a gallery in Chelsea, everybody floating from one picture to the next as if they were votaries in a cathedral. He assumed that that would be the end of it — the parents pressing hands with whoever came, all the hugging, the dabbing at eyes — but of course it wasn’t. There were the write-ups, the extracts of her diaries, the reprints of her photos, the concerted effort of her father who had essentially given up his own career, the shows in larger galleries and in cooler galleries and in museums, the people attending who weren’t RISD and weren’t downtown art crowd, who were something else, Yale students, Columbia students, the kinds of people who were trying to figure out what was coming next, what was their identity going to be, the way they’d stand in front of her work, spinning their necklaces in their hands or biting on their lips, the odd feeling that what was hip, what was supposed to happen next, had somehow already vanished, and they were reading the little poems and notes that captioned her pictures as if they were some kind of epochal epitaph.
***
Peter had a very good career. He worked primarily in fashion, but there were shows as well of his art. He drifted into celebrity portraiture, a bit like Avedon. He took photos of incredibly famous people, his personality was strong and reassuring and unorthodox to just the right degree, he had a gift for getting these people to reveal themselves. He also had his share of photos of beautiful nude women, which he shot in a very Edward Weston way, all about the geometry, the limbs, the curves, as an aesthetic of their own, the way a model would be wrapped around herself, her breasts, ass, even face, she’d be just kind of peeking out from the flourish of hair, from the spirals of back, the arch of side. And he did sleep with many of them as well, that had been a real sticking point early on with LeAnne, first he had tried to resist and then he had failed and then they had broken up for a while and then LeAnne got a sense of humor about it, and everything worked out in a very satisfactory way.
In the 2010s, a researcher tracked him down to his place in Colorado. He was pretty much retired by then, having — against all odds — made a real viable career in photography, doing a shoot for a fashion magazine if it genuinely interested him or if he wanted to do some kind of upgrade to the house. LeAnne had died of cancer and he’d thought her place might be taken by one of the younger models whom he still did shoots with, was still familiar with, but it hadn’t worked out like that, none of them were as edgy or as smart as LeAnne, none of them saw through him in the way that she did — after forty years together, even allowing for breaks, he was more attached to her than he possibly could have suspected.
The researcher went through his Dorothy material. As she did, he started trying to explain out loud, to himself, why it was that he hadn’t shared any of this before — it just hadn’t felt like the right time, it was his glimpse into her, letting it out would be some kind of a confirmation that she was really gone, there was an image of her that everybody had, this dark, tortured soul, he felt strange somehow puncturing that, even adding to that, felt strange about turning her into the giggly girl throwing tea parties, about normalizing her. Any one of those might have been the right explanation, he couldn’t really tell, in any case he let the researcher haul everything off, and he participated gamely in the preparations for the show, confirming dates, identifying some of the townies and random friends who were in the pictures, providing context, which, as often as not, was completely trivial — a class had been canceled, they had the afternoon to themselves, Dorothy got in a groove taking photos, they’d smoked a blunt as part of the tea party, Dorothy was mesmerized by the light falling onto the floor of the apartment.
He attended the opening, they’d wanted to make him a kind of guest of honor, but that wasn’t his style, somebody had caught him at the entrance and dissuaded him from paying admission. Everything was blown up, enormous, all these photos that had been lying around as negatives and small prints in the back corners of his house. Some of them were hers, some were LeAnne’s, some his, they were all of the same kind of thing, but somehow you could always tell which were Dorothy’s. There was a photograph that caught his breath — it was the one that everybody in the exhibit circled around — Dorothy standing triumphant at the window with her mattress hurled to the street below. He’d forgotten that he had the presence of mind to snap a photo. Even at the distance he was standing from her, there was a gleam in her eye that frightened him — like some great idea was coming to her.
But that wasn’t what really got him, what made him dizzy, kind of grasping towards walls as he made his way to the exit, smoked his first cigarette in a long time. It was how vivid all of her work was, that time just perfectly captured, the way she was completely natural, completely present in all the photos she took of herself, and without benefit of any of the psychological tricks, the gradual warm-up he used to get his models, his subjects, into the right frame of mind. He had a good eye, Peter, he was smart, he had talent, he’d devoted himself entirely to photography, he’d done it well, had a long career, tried many different things, made many mistakes, learned from his mistakes, kept growing, kept improving, could be proud of what he’d made and accomplished — and none of it was anywhere close to what Dorothy had shot when she was 20 years old, just fooling around by herself, in her room.