Wide White Table

At the wide white table that occupies the center of the studio, he widens his hands to spread around A4 sheets of starched paper. He leans over the width of the table and outstretched his legs, asserting his dominance in the space. He does not sit. Sitting is bad for your joints. Sitting is not how you make it to 100. The whiteness of the paper and table blend together neatly. Seamless. Like the hem of the fashionable striped linen trousers he sports. He knows they’re trendy because his 23-year-old studio assistant complimented them the week prior. She said they reminded her of the ones she sees hanging “suggestively low on the hips” of loiterers in Dimes Square. He pretended to get her reference to the unfamiliar made-up neighborhood and its disciples in the moment. He has worn them every day since, though their fit on him is unflatteringly tight, far less suggestive, and more desperate for a hike up. 

On the near-left corner of the wide, white table, his Crosley "retro radio" Bluetooth speaker, which was marketed to him as a gaudy throwback tchotchke, connects to his phone. Wagner's “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” begins to play in the background – painting the studio with sound. The hefty body of the chorus, the triumphant cymbals crashing. Hard. Trumpets ablaze. Victory ensuing from the crowd – the weight of the power in numbers. The roar of applause. 

He likes playing Wagner. He gets off on being a self proclaimed ‘edge-lord’. He’s a self-loathing Jew. Reassuring patrons and commissioners, friends and visitors, and above all else his mother, that Wagner was indeed a very, very bad guy. Abhorrent really. But he can separate the art from the artist. While he may be a straight-line supremacist in his vocation, in conversation he feels the desire to push its comfortable boundaries. Desperate for a devil to advocate for. 

Leaning over the wide white table, he imagines himself from the perspective of a third party observing him draw—perhaps critics, perhaps admirers—watching the artist in awe come alive like a lion at Barnum and Bailey’s. A voyeur to his exhibitionism. He does this often. A secret he’s less willing to divulge in the memoir, perhaps as a product of his only-child syndrome; his narcissistic tendencies. 

And he’s on air. He examines his tools as if he’s about to make a dent in the white sea. He’s precise. He uses a white ruler too, and a cream protractor. He’s careful about dimensions. And about measuring. Navigating, charting a course to find his bearings like stage directions. 

Pen is a commitment, he thinks to himself. 

He considers opting for a pencil instead. His usual tool. He hesitates. 

He refuses to be perceived as insecure, the way his mother sets out to make him feel.

She’s been on his mind recently. She’s coming into town later and he longs to prove to her how much he has really come into himself in the past few years. He’s finally making money now. He’s rich. He commands attention. He roars as they watch. Goodbye Weehawken. See you never. 

He decides on pen. 

Exaggerating each gesture and facial expression, he furrows his eyebrows a little deeper and stretches the width of his smile a little more. He wants to wink to some invisible audience. Surveying the studio on edge. He wonders where the next imaginary close-up is coming from. He’s sure his T-zone is oily and needs powdering. 

“I didn’t choose this life” he repeats and whispers to himself when phantom journalists ask him how he grapples with such notoriety, as a daydream montage of press-clips and interviews roll in his mind one after the other. They prod: 

“So, Dan, that’s short for something…Daniel right?...You don’t strike me as much of Daniel? When did you start going by Dan? Was that after art school?” They would ask with a half smirk. 

He would laugh back at the banality of their questions, at their triteness. When the moment would arrive, as it inevitably would, he would decide whether to stoop to their level and answer back in a condescending tone. He’d play it by ear.

Their questions would only aggrandise in absurdity. “It’s clear from your work that Mondrian is no doubt an inspiration. What do you say to critics who might reduce your drawings to…how do I put this…slightly more angular, unjustifiably exorbitantly priced, replicas? How do you respond to the ones that argue the drawing of straight lines is by definition exclusionary?” 

He would be ready, after ignoring a fair amount of media training, to answer their queries. In an effort to convey his ease, he would lean back against the sofa of the fake studio living room. He would answer calmly, between deep breaths, by telling the interviewers how much he hates journalists. How he loathes their guts and their vapid morning routines infused by the voices of dehydrated NPR hosts. Their politically correct nonsense. He would answer arguing there’s nothing wrong with drawing straight lines. If Mondrian wasn’t making some political statement in drawing straight lines, why is he? Why do his lines have to curve and bend and be queer and have intimacy coordinators? Why do they have to challenge stereotypes and platform the under-represented? 

The corners of his mouth would twitch. He’d take a deep breath in efforts to de-escalate the reddening of his face. 

He would walk back his rant by emphasizing how he’s not against progress. How he’s not a reactionary. He’s not even a Republican and he’s a vocal denouncer of Wagner, Goddammit! 

He quickly becomes disgusted by himself and his fantasies. How indulgent. How flamboyant. This is not how men of great success, or great age for that matter, act. This is not how men who draw straight geometric lines go about their day, swept up in fictional arguments. 

Perhaps he has taken one too many of the testosterone pills purchased off a link he found on a convoluted Reddit thread a few weeks prior. He could handle his cheekbones thinning out but not his hair. He takes them only preventively – as a cautionary measure. It is all the stress from being accomplished that’s causing his sudden hair loss, he’s certain. 

He glances across the studio at a cream-framed mirror, leaning against the brick wall, flanked by some easels and a canvas flipped backwards. He runs his fingers through whatever's left of his hair. Relieved, he can still feel some sebum on his scalp. He notes that the ashy blond is not yet graying either. He meets his own eyes in the mirror and can’t help but notice how much he’s beginning to resemble his own father. 

Derailing any of the grotesque Freudian conclusions his mind works to fasten, he gets back to work. He can’t remember the specific train time his mother is taking in from Great Neck, but he knows once she arrives it only means less time to indulge in wild fantasies where he can tell-off bloated journalists. Rather, he’d spend more time grappling with the reality that the woman who raised him is still a decrepit hag. Despite her decaying physical state–her gauntness and translucent complexion–his mother sure does have a knack for spitting out sentences at a rate that only seems to increase as he makes less time to see her. All within the same breath, like an auctioneer: 

Why is he not married yet? Doesn’t he know he only has a few of the good years left? That they creep up on you? That his newfound success is fleeting and temporary? Why does his art sell for so much? Where is all his money going? Why did he abandon her to retirement home living? Doesn’t he realize it’ll be him in there one day not too far from now? Why does he make art with no subject? What are all the lines for? Can’t he just make paintings the way she likes them? One she can put up in her assisted living quarters? One she can show off to Susan and Liz at Mahjong? Is he going to visit his great Aunt in Boca during Passover this year with the cousins like they always do? 

He remembers the kind of art they had hanging in the house growing up. Some Brugel or Rubens recreations scattered here and there. They all looked the same: some overcast Flemish town picturing a gaggle of some farmers' wives in the foreground. Red in the face and wide in the hips. They wore drab colors that accentuated their fleshiness. Plowing the tired fields and leading tired lives. These women had nothing much to look forward to, they were merely waiting for their time to come. They didn’t stand at wide white tables. Not even egg-shelled ones. That’s probably why people back then never made it past 40. Like him, they couldn’t place “Dimes Square” on a map and their linen pants, if they could afford them, would probably fit them too tight too. 

And the landscapes themselves: the rolling desolate Ardennes marked by absolutely nothing. A wash of ambiguous shapes – oblong and undefined. The line work on these replicas were noticeably sloppy. Thick in all the wrong places - so obviously mimetic of talent the artists themselves lacked. He noticed especially in the landscapes, the imitations struggled in grasping the light correctly. In the one that hung above the couch for example, it didn’t know whether to commit to a direct attempt at Dutch-master recreation, or to cater to the zeitgeist of hyperrealism, and forgo any semblance of passability. The quality of its white paint was a dead giveaway – it reeked of the cheap silicone oils and ammonia of which it had been mixed with and polluted by. That never seemed to bother his mother though. 

Hanging in the parlor of a tri-state suburban craftsman instead of an overfunded museum gallery, thousands of miles isolated from its original, the painting was complacent, lacking desire. It was silent. 

Still leaning over the wide white table, he hasn’t drawn a single line yet today. Gripped between his thumb and pinky, the pen still wavers in midair. He rolls it between the two fingers fast, balancing it to the left then to the right. He can’t bring himself to uncap it. Not yet. Moving the sealed tool down to meet the white sea, he mimics drawing a line. He does so once more. And again a third time. The routined motion. Pushing down imprinting the pages with the weight of the cap. Pushing down even harder, he lets the entire weight of his body lean over the cowering tool. Squinting at the pages hard enough, he can almost see the black ink of the pen on the page. A phantom. 

He certainly feels the top of the pen digging into his left palm. A stigmata of sorts. Though he is an atheist nowadays, rest assured, it is certain he will end up at the Chabad with his Mom this weekend. 

A new sound: steps.  

Entering through the studio making their way over to the wide white table, it’s a spectator–someone to tune in. Someone to watch his show. 

At last. The feeling of the present moment–the gift–presses up against him. It caresses him all over. An intimate sensation equally invasive as enthralling – company. 

He removes his palm from the pen cap immediately. Undressing the tool like a bodice. He thinks about getting its consent first but decides against waiting for its answer. He doesn’t want to ruin the moment. A Dionysiac act. 

The oil spilling into the white sea. The steps turning into a voice. 

“It’s your mom. She’s calling.” His assistant informs him. 

He responds saying he can’t answer right now. 

He says that he’s busy at work. He says that he’s concentrating. He says that he’s making art. 

Can’t she see that?