Ahh, Frances! I remember our honeymoon. Here, on the floor of another hotel room, I recall the beginning of our marriage – the disgrace that was our union. Rolling around on the plush carpet of the – I must say profoundly clean – hotel room floor, I remember it all! (Clean enough for you? No. But clean enough for your pre-cleans? When you would prepare for the Ukrainian maid? Also no. But, sweet Frances, your standards were holy things, too pure for this world! Altogether too brittle…)

This floor is clean enough for me. I picture the fat Guatemalan maid vacuuming it – which is easy to do, as I tracked her enormous and beautiful ass from the elevator to my own room, earlier today, Frances… earlier today, before I bought the Cold Duck – to celebrate! To commemorate my freedom from you and your Slavic housekeeper! You can have her! I tried but she wasn’t willing…

Yes, the Cold Duck… I can no longer afford fine Champagne, or even a trendy bottle of Prosecco. So I chug the Cold Duck and wince, recalling richer but not necessarily finer times. Indeed, as I’ve won from you untold months of maintenance, and as my attorney assures me that a large settlement is inevitable – having put in the years, I feel it is only what I’m owed – I prophecy absolutely finer times, times in which I will feel compelled even to dance, as I am away from you! I will break my old rule. You remember my rule, don’t you, Frances? One dance per wedding – choose wisely.

I made it all the way to middle age with you, dearest darling. I endured your affectations and senseless scrupulosity. I put up with your nagging and bellyaching. When you would survey your carefully decked out living room from your backless stool at the counter – there at the horizon of our open kitchen. Everything square, with your famous “clean lines” jutting out everywhere, like a host of skinny women bending under the weight of coitus. Like painfully amateurish enjambments in second rate romantic poetry.

And you would scrutinize me as I sat with my books of hatred and disgust. As I sat there reading of Lemuel’s adventures with the Yahoos, my own personal Yahoo would screech and gurgle at me over some foully emanating herbal tea. The steam blanching your already blanched face, dearest Frances, you’d turn like a marionette with a broken string, like the little girl in the Exorcist, swiveling until you could see me, breaking my concentration, disturbing my joy.

Are you finished with that coffee cup? I can’t stand looking at it! Are you just going to sit there reading all day? Don’t you have any ambition?

 

I endured your resentment. I endured your bad taste. Above all, your bad taste… Your mid-century modern “aesthetic.” Which, like every other halfwit of our age you took from the television, when Mad Men became all the rage. And so you bought that condo in the West Loop, saying as you tripped every nearer to the nadir of inanity that the neighborhood had “something edgy about it!” So edgy, a block from the police station and with every stroller-pushing yuppie in the city parading down Madison and over along Sangamon Street, toward the hideous park at the edge of what used to be Greek Town. I’m nauseated recalling it. Even in memory the neighborhood makes me gag.

I endured your preposterous attempts at art making. Your absurd “art practice.” Your conceptual art grift.

You’d dream up scenarios and then inadequately illustrate them with your machine. Whole seasons would elapse as you sat in your office planning these projects. I’m convinced you mostly shopped for clothes online – but let that pass! Maybe you did labor diligently with your concepts, making sure they’d all hang together. You were a concept whisperer, with your boxes of Jimmy Choo shoes strewn about the “office.” You made sure all the ideas fit together just right, just as you harmonized your outfits. You were like an architect with ideas – and it was only after much careful planning that you actually emerged and took your snapshots.

And you’d collaborate with unscrupulous gallerists, drafting “artist statements” by the bushel. You’d go through four figures worth of wine and sushi of an evening, drafting artist statements, explaining why people should find your photographs interesting and relevant and so on. And you’d perform as best you could for the lesbian gallerists who found your work so “revealing,” so “profound,” and so “insightful.” Never beautiful! They knew the century. They had an audience prepared. As did you. You’d wiggle your skinny ass for these gallerist lesbians, while I hid in the guest room to avoid reminding them how badly your one collegiate sapphic experience had gone. I hid so that they wouldn’t have to picture my hairy torso ramming you into the down pillows and thousand thread count sheets. If they only knew the filthy things you asked me to do!

 

Now I lay here on the floor, swilling my Cold Duck, thinking my way through the story of our romance. Mapping the fallout from that initial moment of self-deception, from which I fashioned our love story. For years – for whole stretches of years – I deserved the punishment that was our marriage. I did it to myself. As if I wanted punishment, craved punishment. It was sadistic what I did to myself with this love story. But then, in the end, I was redeemed by the realization that if I endured a little but longer I would be financially secure. My punishment wasn’t endless. I was in Purgatory, not Hell.

And – better still – my freedom would be founded on a crime, on the great crime of having continued a moribund marriage for the sake of a settlement. All fortunes, as they say. And all states. I’ve come to relish the thought, to be proud of myself for accomplishing this fraud. Because it’s a fraud committed against a horrid cow, spitting convention from the maw of her conceptual art flatulence. All that radical posture, those ponderous artist statements… “I’m interested in the exploration of… the intersection of…” The fallow fields of intellectual art!

Truly, I feel that she must be victimized. Imagine, a spoiled daddy’s girl pontificating about “the intersection of feminism and mechanical reproduction.” Or “modes of exploitation mediated through the male gaze.” Imagine saying these words in a drunken rant – that would be bad enough. To let them spill from your spinning head, as the acid starts to boil up through your esophagus… That would be embarrassing enough, truly. But to write them down… To write these words down, look at them again in the morning, and then choose to keep them! Is there anything more incredible in this already incomprehensible world? Verily, this is more perplexing than the wave-particle problem – though unlike quantum mechanics, the only predictive power these words have is this: that we can infer back from what’s written on the artist statement the reality of a self-important fool or charlatan. It’s the watchmaker argument, the argument from design. Except here the argument works!

Artist statements like cow queefs, settling like a heavy fog over the minds of the gallerists and the Pabst drinkers, as they mill around sniffing each other. A circle jerk of radical politics which is really a Quaker meeting, a church service, septum piercings tinkling like school band triangles, one giant nostril on another. And in the end… convention! The pitiful moral convention of our pitiful time. Which is why Frances, already a thousand times rich by daddy, couldn’t stop toing and froing, frenetic with ambition, while I tried to insulate myself… to insulate myself from exactly that din from which she claimed distance! Because I saw nothing wrong with leisure. All her flitting around wasn’t necessary. But, ahh… youth is wasted on the young, and money is wasted on those best positioned to obtain it! These bearers of the work ethic. We could have sat around in our cups, trading barbs and eating strawberries with Champagne. But no… we had to justify ourselves!

To justify ourselves… Never trust a person who feels they must justify themselves. Or worse still: one who thinks you must justify yourself. Even though I fell for it temporarily. For a time I dutifully went to graduate school to justify my leisure and our shared fortune. I attended classes, polished my German, pontificated into the ears of the emptiest minds in Chicago. Truly they were as bad as the artists! Here too they queefed loudly and endlessly: “decolonization” queefs, and “problematizing the canon” queefs. Mouths like foghorns let out queefs like hurricanes. They let out the “male gaze” flatulence there too! And accompanying that one they pushed out the “inclusivity” flatulence. They “broadened the literature.” They plucked untalented writers from 19^th century women’s magazines and promoted them into the canon – for the sake of “equity.”

“The problem here is that the criterion of judgment was wholly male and therefore patriarchal. Exclusion from canonicity presupposed exclusion from equal partnership in society.”

These were real words spoken to me once, when I stupidly pointed out that even these writers didn’t see themselves the way their 21^st century saviors were trying to see them. And then I asked if promoting mediocre female writers cheapened the achievement of the Brontes or Jane Austen… There was much screeching and… well, I had to drop the class!

Never has Dr. Johnson’s dictum been more meaningful to me: clear the mind of cant. This is what the fat lexicographer used to say. And he meant it, too. And no generation of “scholar” has ever needed more to hear it.

That was my mode of justification. My wife preferred the visual arts. Or… what had once been primarily visual arts. Now they made art with ideas… They made “conceptual art,” which is essentially just bad art and lazy philosophy. Conceptual art, which is an appalling satyr, dull wit wedged into untalented art products. And I emphasize: products! For sale to the corporation lampooned. Rothko by comparison an acetic in his cave. That is the greatest part of the crime. But from it I have every right to steal! It is my duty to steal! My theft from her coffers has been a moral act!

It got in the way of my leisure, this justification… But I knew I was already saved by faith alone! I had a whole storehouse of faith. I had faith in leisure. I had faith in the joyous posture of the infant, tit-sucking and lazing in the sun. I wanted to lay on the couch until it was time to lay across the chair, my legs spilling onto the ottoman. And then into the bedroom to lay around and see if a nap might become possible… I had faith in living an entire life in this way. Cat-like, I could scratch myself and make adorable sounds as I wheezed and dreamed. I could eat and nap. Then drink and nap. I could micturate and nap. Then leave a profound deposit in my box just before going to bed! But no! For years I had to do something, so that my idiot of a wife could feel that the spending of her father’s money was justified…

But no more. Here I lay on the hotel rug, playing with two empty bottles of the city’s finest Cold Duck like a kitten with its ball of yarn. It reminds me of the nights we spent in Rome, on our honeymoon. We kept putting the “do not disturb” sign up so that we ended up surrounded by empty bottles. And then we lined them up and went bowling with a tennis ball! That was when you were still capable of fun. When you still had a few pounds on you. When that ass was still fleshy and fulfilling. Before you embarked upon your career.

“Careful! You’ll drip it all over me!” you squealed, laughing girlishly in post-coital somnolence. I shook the bottle and let the dregs of its spray coat your thighs. You smacked me and rolled over, pushing your legs into the air. And thus ended the bowling tournament.

Do you remember our honeymoon, sweet rib-thief? When we went to the Eternal City and spent entire days in the shadow of Bernini? This was when we still played the love game. When I still routinely soaked and pickled my genitals in the brine of yours. When I salted my hog with the juices of your barren cunt (its barrenness however being one of the best things about you – no issue, other than the occasional yeast infection). In the hotel room we’d copulate like the native Romans – that decayed race of hirsute prostitutes, beggars and thieves – and worse still: artists! It was almost inevitable that we would move there, my love! For we both belonged in the humid ruins. Both of us, farting past the Pantheon, pissing drunkenly in the alley behind the Spanish Stairs… Maybe we missed our destiny… We could have been great there. Or, in any case, I might have been. I might have achieved greatness on the foundation of your father’s fortune…

Instead we returned to grimy Chicago – hog raper and gang artificer to the world. Crossroads of our continental strip-mall civilization. We flew back, got off the plane, stepped into monstrous O’Hare and it felt like we were wilting already, as we scrambled for our luggage, you anxious already to begin, me wearied and nauseous and vaguely aware of dawning responsibilities… You were thinking of some project as we passed through the Northwest side in the cab, I was trying to think of nothing but the delicious sleep I had planned for the evening.

 

I’ve been listing my criticisms, enumerating what I take to be your faults. And it’s a long enough list, no doubt. I’d have no trouble filling whole notebooks, boring psychiatrists for months. For years I could hammer home the many nuances of your many faults, could parade your various idiocies and ineptitudes past therapists and friends. Even now they promise to make great dinner conversation. Over drinks, I plan to regale dates with stories of my near-anorexic spouse – soon to be ex – her little dog, her frantic comings and goings, and all the many ways in which reality failed to live up to expectation. I’ll set up an implicit contrast with the fleshy and laid back ladies I hope to bed in the coming months and years – these voluptuous palette cleansers will hear all about you!

Yes, I’ve been rehearsing my criticisms. But deeper than all of this… Buried beneath all of these pedestrian issues… what really necessitated that we part… was that I saw you as you truly were… was that I knew! Not about your many petty insecurities – these are par for the course. No, I knew about your central fraud, your core dishonesty and self-deception. This fraud beyond all the others, that prevented our transition from the sickness of romance into the comfortable decline of codependence – in front of me and me alone you had admitted that your “art practice” was an absurdity.

You knew that your art was a deceit, a way to justify leisure in your mediocre and sanctimonious mind. You admitted it to me on that fateful night. It was just a plausible excuse for living on your trust fund. Just a purpose for your inner Puritan to dig into by way of appeasement, atonement, propitiation.

That one very drunken night, you opened up about the art fraud – but then recanted. And then you couldn’t be with me anymore because I knew. To look at me became no different than looking your own lie in the face. It was a reminder of your deception, and your ill-conceived repentance. You couldn’t bear to remember that you’d admitted the truth, and so you had to banish me…

That you even told me seems now a kind of fluke. Your guard was always up. You never spoke off the cuff. Except occasionally when very drunk…

And you were never drunker than after gallery openings. I have a theory about this. I think anything relating to your career got your adrenaline pumping, which made you able to drink a shocking amount without seeming altogether drunk. You could down glass after glass of wine, as long as the opening was going. As long as your “colleagues” were still circling the room, looking thoughtfully at yet another generation of ready-mades tacked haphazardly onto the wall like moose heads in some backwoods lodge; as long as they snorted and denounced whatever more traditional approach to art it was then appropriate to denounce; as long as they came together to kill the reasons they got into art in the first place, to take an axe to the inner logic of their own vocation; as long as the babble flowed and the general atmosphere of sneering carnival continued, you could keep yourself erect and coherent enough to fool an AA veteran.

Meanwhile I needed to get tanked just to put up with your friends – who were basically indistinguishable from your enemies. You were willing to pay the price of careerism, were even turned on by it. But the whole thing exhausted me. I wanted to get home to Henry the dog. I wanted to watch reruns of Bob Newhart in my bathrobe, a glass of hot cocoa in my hand. Instead I had to make small talk with your “colleagues.” And I had to watch what I said, too, since even your best friends were cutthroat. I couldn’t talk about your work at all, lest I give something away that they might use to their advantage. The stakes of this petty undertaking gave me heartburn. I used to worry I was getting an ulcer.

But however sober the adrenaline kept you at these shows, you’d be drunk enough to pass out in your clothes by the time we got home. Once the adrenaline receded… And I still remember coming home after one particularly galling opening, an entire show constructed around “the performance of identity,” illustrated with photographs of press-on nails and hair weaves. Illustrated with sharp renderings of extravagant makeup, with fluorescent eyeliner and eyebrows dyed to match lipstick. Even you had to admit that the show had been absurd. Even by contemporary art standards. Even in Chicago…

But then you’d gotten a call from the gallerist, who, you suddenly thought, had maybe decent taste after all. Because she wanted to give you a solo show. The watershed event that divides the wannabes from the successes. A show of your own! Just your photos on the wall! And your artist statements – those heady pamphlets that eventually took up so much of your time – published in big bold type just at the entrance…

It was “long overdue.” It was “only fitting.” It was, above all, “a great opportunity.” I simulated excitement. I put all the torque I could muster into stretching the corners of my lips into an enormous smile. I congratulated you.

Except by then you’d lost faith in your work. Long before the show… You no longer knew what you were trying to do, were probably asking yourself if in fact you were trying to do anything at all. And so you reeled when the conversation with the lesbian gallerist came to an end. You were red in the face, eyes wide, you swayed…

I asked what was wrong, and with palpable shock you summarized the offer, what was expected of you, what you planned to show… But something wasn’t right – and it wasn’t just nerves. Stupidly, I asked the question that seemed most obvious at that moment:

“Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“Of course!”

“It’s what you’ve been building toward!”

“It’s great. What are you getting at?”

“No, nothing. I agree. It’s great.”

But you didn’t seem to believe me. And so you sulked for hours, drinking still more wine, until you tripped over the edge of the couch and wound up in a tangle on the floor. You wound up in a tangle on the floor, Frances, much like the tangle I’m in now. But mine is a joyous tangle – my Cold Duck tangle – yours then was morbid and disturbing. You wriggled and pouted and waited for me to come and help you.

So I pulled you back onto the couch, opened a fresh bottle, and drank with you until you finally came out with it.

“What if… if..”

I waited patiently, petting Henry, who’d finally recovered from the crash you made, falling at the edge of the womb chair where he’d been snoozing. He ran away from Eero Saarinen’s famous mid-century chair, which remained there like a hollowed out and overboiled black egg with a piece of shell protruding from its underside. I groaned at the reminder that I was forced to share an apartment with such furniture as I watched you tear the words painfully from unconscious to conscious and then finally from your conscious mind to and through your mouth, protruding into the warm air of the condo and mixing with it there, a warm jet in a hot mass, like vomit into hot tomato soup. On one side, the chair, and on the other your voice acknowledging the growing recognition that your career was maybe an absurdity, a badly acted farce in a traveling production of a hackneyed play.

“What if one artist is as good as another?” you said suddenly and shakily. “One idea as good as another…”

“Meaning?”

“What if it’s all… marketing?”

We pondered this in silence together. I knew that you had stumbled onto the truth somehow, but it would have been too cruel to come out and say so right away. I looked thoughtful. I rubbed my chin.

“Well…” I said finally, trying to be kind, “they still need something to market!”

And we went on like this for hours, until you laid bare your deepest insecurity, which was also your deepest understanding. You knew you lacked any real facility with the aesthetic, and that, simultaneously, your “thinking” was of a piece with the “thinking” of your friends, enemies, fellow graduates of the Art Institute – in short, with your “colleagues.” You saw that your work was interchangeable with theirs.

There followed terrible minutes, more drinking. Self-knowledge can be a horrible thing, and it’s certainly not for everyone. That night you saw your “practice,” finally, if hazily, for what it really was: you’d construct outlandish edifices of ideas – inane, mostly – and then attempt to illustrate them with a few feeble snapshots.

I wondered how you’d be able to live with this knowledge as I tucked you into bed that night. I went back to the living room and stroked Henry, worrying about it. I worried about you then, Frances! Imagine it! I lost sleep over it!

But by the time your hangover was gone, so too was the insight. Well… it wasn’t gone. From then on some fragment of it rested behind your eyebrows. It became a tension that distorted your cheeks, that colored them when you pushed your bloated sounds at me. When you laid out your plans and ideals…

It all changed overnight. Yes, sleep is truly restorative. Just like that, you were “excited for the opportunity.” You were “nervous, but focused.” Soon, the show was “coming along fine!” Eventually you even had “opening night jitters.” You banished the unwanted thought so you could enjoy still more good fortune, the price of which was oblivion.

And from there… well, you know as well as I do what heights you reached. Chicago, then Los Angeles, then New York and Paris. You were “the talk of the art world.” You were “in demand.” All your friends said so. All your enemies too.

“What’s it like to live with such a talented woman?” a few of them asked me. I wanted to tell them.

“Will you make sure you still have time for us?” others said cloyingly, as they chased poor Henry from the living room. Whenever possible, the dog and I sought shelter in the guestroom together. After a few drinks no one noticed our disappearance…

You spent years developing your career, with that crumb of bad faith always obscured behind your eyes. That fragment of the truth hiding there under your well-plucked eyebrows. Only I understood its meaning. And this drove us apart more than any of the petty insecurities and deceptions or predictably declining libidos that tank the typical marriage in this low time of ours.

 

Yes, you couldn’t bear to remember that you’d admitted the truth, and so you had to banish me… But the joke was on you, because by then I wanted nothing more than to be banished. Banished from your imbecile friend group and their dull wine parties. Banished from the gallery nights, and hearing about your stints as a docent and tour guide at the museum. Banished from your too skinny ass, which no longer even half-engorged me. Did you know that for years I had to think of the Ukrainian maid every time I took you from behind? Frances – your ass could have been so much fleshier. It could have been lovely. It nearly was when we first met. But you were terrified of your own flesh. You smothered everything good about yourself. You removed actual flesh and therewith went any kind of figurative fleshiness – womanliness, Frances. You were like Lady Macbeth without an occasion. Or rather your whole life was the occasion! Unsex me, you might as well have cried – and so I had to put myself into that bony ass of yours with help from my memories. And in my memories I like to go slumming…

Within a few years of our nuptials, you had become entirely too thin, too blonde, too tall, and too well dressed. Our little dog, taking his cue, was almost as fussy as you were. But Henry was ok, especially when you were out. He used to come to my reading chair and snobbishly tolerate a few pats on the head. But then his animal nature would win out and he’d curl up on my lap while I read. We had wonderful silent afternoons together while you were out developing your career.

Still, the resemblance between you was sometimes uncanny. At mealtimes he fussed and had to have his kibble arranged so that it formed only one thin layer in the bowl – much like your sushi plates, which were brought in from Restaurant Row. And if a second layer, or even a fragment of a second layer were formed, he would not eat, but would sit back and whine, looking around the room for human compassion and intervention. Frances, you weren’t quite as loud when your sashimi was laid out wrong, and you did manage to correct the error yourself – but you wouldn’t eat a bite until you got the presentation right. This was probably the most artistic accomplishment of your life. I think about this above all as I piss out the Cold Duck into the beautiful porcelain of the hotel toilet, here in the bowels of the city, in my new and strange solitude.

Eventually, if the gods are merciful, your image will fade. In a decade, when I roll around on the floor with bottles of wine clinking about me, I’ll hardly be able to recall the way your breasts sagged or the noise you made when you were close to falling asleep. I’ll forget the imperious tones with which you denounced your friends and fellow artists in the living room, after a few bottles of Prosecco. I’ll forget all about the way your muumuus wrapped around your stick-like arms, around your too-thin frame like enormous band aids around children’s fingers. The way you laughed when you found an image vicious enough to justify your resentment. I never loved you more than when you drew blood, Frances. A little more cruelty, and with a bit more recklessness and apathy we might have made some pair. Just you, me, and your father’s money. But as things stand, I guess I’ll have to learn to live with just my share – earned honestly!

But now I must try to sleep, dearest darling – the lawyers want to see me in their office bright and early! So I’ll have to get up by 11 if I want to be ready in time for my luncheon… I wonder what you’re doing now and if you’re reviewing the minutiae of our failed life together as well.

Ahh, but I’m becoming sentimental… the drunk has progressed… It began in perfect humor, detoured through a touch of anger, and now it’s become maudlin… Nothing else to do but belch and close my eyes.