Cultural Capital
The house looked to be made of stone, but I knew it wasn’t. The whole place had a medieval vibe: faux-lime veneers, wrought-iron crest suspended above an arched door with strap hinges, marble planters loaded with annuals in imperial tones. A line of austere shrubs lined the carefully mulched front walk.
Ugh, Republicans.
They even had an American flag.
I hated rich people.
Be bighearted. Every time, I had to say it to myself. Be good.
I rang the doorbell.
But I had no heart. I wasn’t good.
Stop it,I scolded. You need this. Think of the children.
I heard footsteps approaching from within. That didn’t mean anything. Whoever was inside, a phantom, a shut-in, a hater, they might make it to the peephole, and—struck dumb by my paint-flecked workwear and asymmetrical haircut—judge me unworthy of entry, of acknowledgment, of the most basic and perfunctory courtesy, might ignore, turn away, recede back into the depths without a word.
Just to be rude, I pressed again on the buzzer, hard and long this time.
I hated rich people. The way you had to show up at their doors, in person, and beseech them in your most supplicating voice to fund the public good. I mean, I hated everybody. I hated everything. But rich people, I hated most. Tara, my work wife and the only other employee at Oneonta Arts, said that was the perimenopause, but she was wrong. This was just the way I was. I’d always been like this.
The door swung back.
“Geneva?”
I gasped. I don’t know why. I didn’t know this woman. Or, I mean, I did know her; I had known her once, but I couldn’t place her. Hair voluminous, blonde of cream, of candy. Figure like Jessica Rabbit at the office. But she wasn’t dressed like Mrs. Rabbit, no. She was dressed like a business executive who was also a trad wife, the fluffy little sleeves on her poplin dress crumpling under her crisp, tailored blazer.
Jesus, these Republicans.
This woman. I knew her. What was her name?
“Oh my god,” I said, stalling. “It’s been so long!” Safest thing to say. Time was relative, after all—a week or a decade, it all depended.
She placed a hand on my arm. The gesture was so intimate it shocked me. Her palm was supple and chill. Expensive. I wanted to see her collection of lotions, arranged as they would doubtless be on a mirror tray set in the center of the double vanity at the very heart of this conservative stronghold.
“Come in,” she said. “Come in.”
“Amber,” I said, my sense of wonder borderline childlike. Yes. That was it. This was Amber. From high school. It was all coming back to me.
“It’s been forever, hasn’t it?” she laughed.
Not that we had some big past. We were in Biology together freshman year. And maybe, later, Painting II? A lot of garish hues, brushy clouds? Or maybe that had been what’s her name—Andrea? Abby?—who was dead now, car accident?
“Please,” Amber said, leading me inside and down a corridor to a room painted from trim to crown molding in the richest navy. Was the ceiling black?
Amber gestured magnanimously toward an antique settee upholstered in golden horsehair. I sat tentatively on its edge. The surface was weirdly rough, like a blanket covered in peach fuzz. I wasn’t sure where to put my hands. Crossed at the knee? Too demure. Braced at my sides? Damn, too itchy.
Amber was pouring dark liquid from a crystal decanter into a pair of rocks glasses. Wow. It was the middle of the day. And we weren’t even old friends. Not technically. I remembered her largely as someone from whom I’d now and again bummed a cigarette, one of those girls who smoked down by the creek. She was always yelling at her boyfriend or reapplying foundation without a mirror.
“Do you like bourbon?” she asked.
I shrugged. Of course I did. Everyone liked bourbon. But I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. Not until I understood her agenda. She seemed so happy to see me. Too happy.
“You’ll like this,” she said, over-confident.
It was weird to discover that Amber had ended up rich. I don’t think anybody would have predicted it. Senior year, Beth and Todd won Most Likely to Succeed. I don’t think Amber even made the superlatives list. Now, here she was, resting a hand slicked at the tips with fresh polish on a vintage organ she kept in her recently renovated home whiskey lounge and offering me a generous pour of some complex and precious distillation.
I took a sip and fought to keep the deep and genuine pleasure from brightening my face. I remembered from the one English course I had to take in college that every person was also the idea of a person. Amber’s idea startled and awed me. Imagine living as if everything you consumed had to be the very best version of itself.
Amber stared at me, expectant. When I said nothing, did nothing, willing myself a stone, a shell, a tree falling alone in the forest, she looked hurt.
The best bourbon. The best glassware. The best enormous ice spheres. What Amber thought a person was had the resources, the time to do the research, to taste and evaluate, to source everything. Amber probably had the world’s best maxi pads stashed away somewhere in her bathroom. I needed to see them, to understand what that category’s superlative looked like.
“Geneva—” she said, as if she were about to ask me something disturbing, insolent.
My entire body tensed.
Amber wouldn’t sit down, she was hovering above me. The pressure was building to her brow, gathering with great effort what Botox had smoothed. Her eyes were big and wild.
I took another sip of the whiskey.
“What have you been up to?” Amber asked at last. This couldn’t have been it, what she’d wanted to say. But she went on, “I heard you were at Yale?”
“Oh my god,” I said again. Millennial women always had this little phrase to fall back on. Across class, politics, region, faith, it united us, it calmed us. “That was like a million years ago.”
There had been a time when I would have loved nothing more than to discourse upon my years (too many? too few?) in the MFA program at the Yale School for Painting and Printmaking in New Haven, Connecticut. I would have expounded with great passion upon my theory of the line, explaining how associating the density and weight of an edge with the masculine or the feminine, as the art world for so long had, contributed to profound and insoluble inequality, reproduced patriarchy, hierarchy, abuse, all across our society, and I would have gone on to say more about how I was heroically, perhaps even singlehandedly (okay, I wouldn’t have said that, but had I been thinking it? maybe), trying to disrupt all this through my original and difficult painting practice, in every work choosing, but then subverting and softening, the hard stroke, the virile mark.
“I did go to Yale,” I said explicitly, as if admitting it to myself. “Yes, I did.”
I’d graduated more than fifteen years ago. After that, I’d moved to New York. It seemed like a lifetime ago, what had I even been up to back then, a little gallery sitting, a museum internship, every other afternoon spent gaping at strangers on the street (the man with a beard the color of copper, a gaggle of teenage girls, loud and certain and ecstatic, dancing outside the Guggenheim, an orange cat riding on ornate cushions in a special wagon), thinking, I’m alive, I’m alive, the sun’s out, how lucky I am, let me die here and now, a testament to this world’s essential virtue, its goodness, until, unable to make it as a painter—of course I hadn’t put it that way to myself at the time, I was just taking a bit of a break, just going to put away some money—I’d come back upstate to Oneonta, my hometown, where eventually, after years of odd jobs and adjunct gigs at the local college, I’d fallen into the executive director position at the small, rural arts organization for which I was presently here at Amber’s house to fundraise, rapidly heading, as Oneonta Arts was, into bankruptcy, despite our popular summer programming for children.
Wait, was I a socialist or just a failure?
I realized suddenly, watching Amber refresh her own glass, the bourbon catching bright as brass in the light, that everything I’d ever wanted, everything I’d ever done, none of it meant anything, none of it mattered.
I didn’t say this. I didn’t say any of this. Instead, I drained my glass and rushed on before Amber could ask another question.
“What about you?”
Amber raised her eyebrows.
“I mean, did you go to university?”
Amber’s laugh came like a hiccup. “Me? Um, well, no. I didn’t.” She didn’t sound embarrassed, just impossibly distant, like someone answering from deep inside a hollow tree.
Okay. Nice. That was interesting, actually.
“Nice,” I said.
Amber’s brow almost shifted.
I plundered on. “Amber, this place is gorgeous.” Honestly, it was and it wasn’t. It was sumptuous, yes, and filled with luxury items, even some antiques, but at the same time, it was generic, like a Pinterest board gone sentient, dimensional. “When did you move back? I feel like I should have seen you around by now.”
Amber must not be on Facebook, it occurred to me with a shock of envy, of awe. Perhaps she’d been here all along, living some mysterious and unphotographed life under our very noses.
Amber blushed. “It’s been almost a year now.”
“Wow!” So she’d set up this entire bourgeois palace in only a few months. Was I jealous? I was kind of jealous. I didn’t want ice spheres or anything. Did I? Yeah, maybe. But really, I wanted to rebuild the front steps on the house on Spruce, paint the stairwell, fence the garden, replace the bathroom faucet, change out the light fixture in the living room, rewire the laundry room, insulate the crawlspace in the attic, and so on and so on, the expense of material subsistence stretching on into eternity. This temporality wouldn’t be familiar to Amber. Money short-circuited time. It was metaphysical, a superpower.
Amber poured a little more whiskey into my tumbler. Although I’d heretofore been intending to make a handful of calls at Oneonta’s scant additional upscale estates today, I did nothing to stop her.
“What brought you back?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, innocent, defenseless. “Life works in mysterious ways.”
I stared at her. It had been a while since I’d heard somebody say something so cliché out loud. I admired it. And yet, I wished she would be more specific. I didn’t want to have to keep asking questions, urging the conversation along like a nervous little dog at the park. What did Amber do around here all day? I saw her as a living ghost, moving from room to room, dusting her luminous blown-glass orbs, rearranging her cacti, decanting her decanters.
She sat down at last, smoothing a cotton ruffle beneath her. “It was Bobby,” she said in a breathy rush, as if ashamed. “He wanted to come back.”
“Bobby?”
“Bobby Jackson. You remember him. He was a year ahead of us?”
“Of course! How could I forget. Bobby.” Yup, that was the one. Pin-straight blond hair. Loved to argue in public.
“He said his parents needed us,” she went on, “but it was more than that. Oh, Geneva,” she looked aggrieved. “This is his happy place.”
I pretended to laugh, but the words chilled me to the core. Happy place. What did that even mean? Was anyone even still trying to be happy? I’d long ago relinquished my own claim to the project. The right to pursue it was enshrined in the founding documents of this accursed nation, sure, but we Americans were on the whole an unhappy bunch, exceedingly jealous and prone to self-loathing. This was at least in part because our central value—happiness—was in practice quite boring. So was fun, if you managed to have enough of it. No, I had long ago accepted that life was for the most part horrible, so horrible that for centuries people had gotten through it primarily by pretending everything would be much, much better once it was over. I didn’t believe, intellectually speaking, that I deserved anything more, anything special. In fact, it went against my values.
“What about you?” Amber asked. When I looked confused, she helped me. “How’s Jason?”
For a moment, I had no idea what she was talking about. It was as if the force of my curiosity about her life had wiped clean the memory of my own.
“My husband?” I said, stupidly. It was true. I had also married my high school boyfriend. And yet I had allowed myself to feel for a moment superior. “He’s good! Really good. He’s still doing stonework.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” I said, unsure what else to add. I mean, come on. Twenty points off for talking about our husbands’ work before our own. “He keeps a heap of stone in our backyard. A lot of snakes live back there. You can see them choking down frogs underneath the porch from time to time.”
Amber sipped viciously from her glass. Her lips, swollen with filler, left a near-invisible imprint on the rim. World’s best tinted lip balm?
“Does he like it?” she asked.
It was hard to fathom the concept of a husband, if you stopped to think about it. In my case, I shared a house with someone whose genitals were basically the opposite of mine and who lived a kind of shadow version of my life. We each saw the other person more often than we saw ourselves. Surely I looked into his face more often than I did into my own, in the mirror? We slept next to each other at night in the same sweaty, semi-conscious miasma, always together, and yet, somehow, unable to ever fully enter into the other’s consciousness.
“Does he like it….” I repeated. Kind of a weird question. “Yes, I guess he does.”
That wasn’t saying much. Jason liked everything. He looked like Jeff Bridges and drove around in an old Buick, but he blared obscure synthwave out of it, not classic rock. He, too, enjoyed rejecting consumer pleasures. We lived a simple life.
“What about you?” I asked. “What do you do?” I was genuinely curious. All I remembered about Bobby was that he’d enjoyed sports in a completely normal, wholesome way. In middle school, he’d had a Mighty Ducks-themed birthday party at Interskate 88. No way he’d accumulated this much capital on his own.
“Me?” Amber, I did not say, you are the only person here. “Oh, you know,” she blushed again. “Bobby’s in real estate.”
Real estate. Yikes. I was wrong so often, you’d think I’d start taking that into account. I guess that made sense, about Bobby. He’d had a disarming way about him, a specious authenticity. His eyes, if I remembered correctly, were huge and blue, disturbingly so.
“Commercial?” I asked.
Amber got up again. She seemed nervous.
“Enough about us,” she said. Perhaps she communicated only in the most outlandish clichés. What did that mean as a style? As a form? (Clearly, I was still more insufferable than I liked to admit.) But actually, Amber hadn’t said anything about herself, not really. She hadn’t said anything at all.
“What about you?” Amber asked, turning my own words against me once more. “Are you still working?”
Working.
Painting, she meant. Why was she so interested in my practice? I didn’t even describe myself as an artist on social media anymore. And how did she know I’d gone to Yale? I didn’t post about that, either.
Was. I. Working. No, I wasn’t. Or, if I was, it didn’t count. Every other month, I’d stay up all night in the shed out back trying to render something obscure, the shape of anger, Jason’s eyelash, an unusual texture I’d encountered in the wake at the Jersey shore twenty years ago. But no, it wasn’t like it used to be. In art school, I’d paint fanatically, manic, going without food or drink for days, taking breaks only to go to the museum and look at the great works, which I’d sometimes do several times in any given daylight period, as if I needed to pause for an infusion every few hours, lest I bleed out. Now, my infusions came instead, and more frequently, from Instagram, which showed me images of some boots I wanted, but couldn’t afford, of someone else’s kid’s first day of school, of a Yale classmate’s solo gallery show in Soho, of babies starving overseas in war, their skin so pale and fine and translucent, their diapers outsized, an uncanny white.
“I’m Executive Director at Oneonta Arts,” I told her, deliberately obtuse. “In fact, that’s why I’m here.” I was worldly enough to look sheepish. “We’re trying to close out our summer fundraising campaign to support our children’s programming, and we’re a bit behind.”
Amber brightened visibly. “Oh, your organization is fundraising? Why didn’t you say so!”
She moved across the room to an antique vanity and removed what looked like a leatherbound checkbook from the top drawer. She really did know how nonprofits operated.
“Do you want to hear about our strategic goals?”
“Of course!” Amber was already writing out the check. “Who should I make this out to?”
“Um, Oneonta Arts is fine.” I was taken aback. “We work to bring arts programming to all ages in our community. Most importantly, I think, we run a summer camp for elementary-aged children and teens, which we’re hoping to be able to subsidize next year for families with need. We also manage a modest gallery space downtown.”
“Oh, the Mansion?” Amber gushed. “That’s you?”
“Yes, that’s us. Used to be the Teen Center? Back in the day? Not that anyone ever went, I don’t think.”
“Yes, right…” Amber inserted a gold-plated pen between her lips. “It’s a gallery space now.” Her face had been made to look like all the other faces, puffy in the cheeks, demure chin. Was she thinking? Why was she thinking?
“Yes,” I said, trying not to sound confused. “We try to host a handful of regional and solo exhibitions each year.”
“Juried?”
I looked at Amber, surprised she knew what that meant. “Well, yes.”
Amber handed over the check with a little flourish. “Geneva.” She was looking directly into my eyes. I wanted very badly to glance down at the check, to clock the amount, but I willed myself to hold her gaze. “Thank you so much for coming by.”
I was confused. Was this the end of our time together? A true protestant, I worried for a moment that I hadn’t worked hard enough for this donation, however much she’d actually donated. And on top of that, I’d felt until now that we were in the middle of something, if not a reunion, perhaps a renewal.
Amber rose expectantly, and I did the same. She put both her hands on my arms and squeezed. The gesture was tender, but perplexing. She was treating me like a teacher would a former student who had returned to give thanks.
This was why rich people hated paying taxes. They wouldn’t be able to lord it over you, not in the same way.
She led me back down the corridor to the front of the house. The walls were adorned with what looked to me like an eighteenth-century Walpole damask. Instinctively, I ran a hand along it as we made our way out. This wasn’t wallpaper, I realized, nor textile. Someone had hand-painted up and down the entire hallway this intricate, fertile pattern, which looked, I’d always thought, like flowers at the dawn of life giving birth to themselves. I stopped to stare at it. The work was perfectly done, meticulous. I felt a swell of panic close the back of my throat.
“Is this hand-painted?” I asked, although I knew that it was. I sounded a little hysterical.
Amber stopped, but she didn’t turn around. I could hear her breathing, deep and hard. Her shoulders quivered.
“Amber?”
When her voice came, it was low and mean, a little feral. “Here,” she said, her fingers closing around my wrist. “I need to show you something.”
Before I could answer, question, protest, she was pulling me, hard, toward a short door under the staircase. A slew of horrors flashed across my mind’s eye, first, medieval—the dungeon, the rack, the thumbscrew—and then, modern—Mormon mommy vloggers, narcissists, Dexter. If I disappeared, how long would it take Jason to start looking for me? Had I even mentioned to him what I was doing today? If I died, my Google history would reveal nothing about my final hours, wouldn’t help anyone find me. I’d most recently searched “panda bear” for no reason. I just wanted to see a picture of one.
Goodbye, cruel world.
No. Stop it. Surely this was something more banal. There had been something off about Amber the entire time. She’d written me a check, true, but I’d gotten the feeling almost right away that she wanted something from me. What could I, a washed-up pseudo-artist begging for tax-deductible donations, offer her, this woman who had already secured everything a person of her age, gender, and income bracket could possibly want?
Amber pulled open the unnatural little door and tugged me forward. I closed my eyes and ducked. She was leading me down, down, down, deep into the basement. The staircase was dark as pitch. A potent smell built—coriander, soil, rose.
My life had been good. My parents loved me, always had. I’d won a drawing contest in the second grade, and they’d taken me down to Parsons, in New York, to display my work. Jason loved me. He made me toast on the weekend. In the night, he pulled me to him and inhaled passionately against my neck. And I loved the children who came each July to dip their hands in paint, to press them to any available surface—newspaper, parchment, cotton.
We passed through corridors, tones. A darkness. Texture of wood, salt scented. It was ripe down here, then dry. The air seemed to change in quality as we moved through it. I was too frightened to reach out a hand. Once, I tripped, and the wall I brushed felt at once slick and furry.
Amber’s breathing guided our footfalls, in, out, in, out. My hand went numb. I didn’t know if she was still gripping it. By then, I was just moving, moving. I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t.
Then, at last, everything changed, brightened.
A soft edge. Hard.
Were we underground? Outside?
The canvases were huge, oppressive. Were they canvases? They were layered with paint so thick, it had become its own surface, roiling and hot, unctuous, demented. Across this surface, within it, were lodged shapes and outlines, objects, coins, brochures, parts of dolls, cereal pieces, unpaired earrings, entire newspaper articles, cheap gems, Lego people, shells, bits of woven palm, sage leaves, chains, leather fringe, pens, dried pressed petals (daisy, iris, orchid?), wood shavings, a receipt, several phone cases and charging cords, burnt matches, playing cards, glass shards arranged into an obelisk, a pattern, sticks, bark, an army’s worth of press-on nails (and you had to imagine it, an army with press-on nails), tiny forks and spoons, pebbles, a single Apple Airpod, shoelaces, scarf shreds, the center tendrils of leaves, miniature fruits made of clay, crystal baubles, barrettes, and more, more, more, so much more that you could stand forever, looking and naming and naming and looking and seeing and forgetting and wanting and hating.
When at first you looked, you saw nothing, you saw everything, and then, as your eye roved, shifted, tried to escape and then, failing that, to fix on something, you began to search for a position, a vantage, an angle from which you could order it all, make something out. Because that was the thing about this work—it simultaneously promised to be something, to show you something, if you could just look at it right—full on? askance?—and refused to show you anything, insisting on its own indecipherability, its own meaninglessness. The work was an achievement, you’d be lucky to accomplish this in a lifetime, it reminded me of Duchamps, of Kurt Schwitters, but there was something new about it, too, something transcendent, maybe it was the color scheme, which, honestly, I remembered from sophomore year, the pinks oranges yellows, blue of sky, blue of cloud, and yet the palate had matured, intensified, was it just the edge of gray she’d worked in, and then, there was the sheer scale of the project, the textures, this work was big enough to build an alternate dimension, to invite, no, to drive you inside.
I looked at Amber. My mouth, I couldn’t close it. My eyes were wild now, big, my chest caving in on itself, the pressure crushing my organs to meal.
“Holy shit,” I said, not to her, exactly. But for her. Yes. For Amber. That’s what I was here for. That’s what she’d wanted from me.
She came to me then. She brought me to her. She hugged me.
I was crying. Yes. I was actually crying. I pulled away and forced myself to look at her. There, in the center of her eye, I saw it—the softest, hardest edge, the hot, black center of the universe.