Time Invents Us
HE STRIDES INTO MY ART STUDIO WITH A VITALITY AND ENERGY YOU can’t fake—the métier of the young. No paunch, no white hair at the temples, no slump in his shoulders, no half-hearted efforts at a flirtation he already knows is marked for failure. All the artists in the neighborhood have flung open the doors to their homes, their sheds, their cramped makeshift studios, their lush gardens, and people meander into these spaces to look at art. Often, they pretend they’re going to buy something—to be polite—but most of the time, they’re simply seeking the pleasure of looking, of taking something with their eyes they don’t have to pay for or give back.
Standing before one of my installations: a young man, nodding. Not only young, but gorgeous. Jet-black hair, eyes shielded by sunglasses, each lens an iridescent swirl of oil rainbow, skin darkened like summer velvet. He’s the spitting image of my husband, down to the constellation of black moles on his neck—but 30 years younger. His arms are sleeved in a sky-blue sweater. My heart catches, a strange kind of ecstasy, and I immediately want to introduce myself, to slowly, carefully roll up the sleeves of his sweater, to run the tips of my fingers along the warm surface of his arms and find his familiar tattoos. He might be my husband, my family. Not just a simulacrum, but the real thing, the human I’ve lost, somewhere in the present.
My husband has decided not to come, as per usual, and has fled to the gallery he owns in the city. He hasn’t visited any of the artists participating in Open Studios in years. He’s lost interest in art, he says, even though it puts food on our table. What’s the point? Nobody’s genuinely moved by it. People are faking it, people are desperate to seem sophisticated, he says as he drinks himself into an absinthe-flavored stupor; there’s no reason to hold back, as there are several more bottles of absinthe in the garage, a thank-you gift from a celebrated artist who sculpts phalluses in varying postures and places waxed mustaches on them.
My husband’s in a midlife crisis, but unwilling to admit it, even as all the rituals of crisis come
