Caren Beilin's fiction has appeared, or will appear, in McSweeney's, LIT, The Lifted Brow, Torpedo, DIAGRAM, 5_trope, the book of illustrations We Are The Friction, Big Lucks, and Pear Noir. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Art in Relationship

posted Oct 26, 2010

He could not love her art. He sat before it, honing his eyes over the object. He did not love it. He was disgusted by it, not because it was disgusting but that a person he so cared for, so very much did love, would make something so imperfect against his estimation of her person. It was nothing in comparison to who she was or how he felt. It was a disturbance.

She wanted to know what he thought and he did not comment for an entire week, suffering grim dinners and poor, blank staring, and then finally did say something, something to the extent of, No, I do not like it, it, this thing, is not part of my love, does not exalt and heighten my love, and my love does not pour through you into it. He loved it no worse, no, no better, than a child she might have had with someone else, or, to put it better, someone more.

It was not the most disgusting thing in this universe and only the next month it was shown in a gallery and people came up to her to tell her what they thought: they loved it. But she was already broken about it, and a broken open artist, and by the end of the opening night, she ended the relationship.

She had to. Her art was her life, and his view of it as an aside, excisable, a disturbance, something he would never stoop to help raise, imbecilic, not as deep, true, and beautiful as was necessary for love, or as what he might make, if he ever stooped, to use his hands, was destructive, like an IV bag full of acid had been hooked irrevocably to her ego, to worth.

She loved him and had entertained seizures of sureness that she would have his children, whom she’d already assigned fragile, tributary names, Djuna, Ruth, but a week’s worth of silence about her art was enough to destroy everything, and she told him so, and walked back into the gallery where more people came up to her and interpreted her message to her in such a way that she thought: Does he think the world is full of imbeciles?

In the months that followed he began to tell this as a funny story, about his not being able to force himself to love crap. What could I do, it was crap? he stylishly lamented.

She told it as a sad story, and an unresolved story, unable to be confident in other people’s approval, because an artist will suspect her admirers to be imbecilic, her doubt and shame souring into scorn for her own collectors, scouring their affection with a grim sponge, and she believed inside of herself that he was the only smart person she knew, that it was smart to hate her, or her art, or, irrevocably both, so she missed him but also missed the feeling she first felt, which was of being looked at as an artist, by him, that he loved her art before he knew it, unconditionally, before the conditions of reality, or an artist’s derangement, or a man’s derangement, ended the relationship.

He did not understand her admirers and did think them either unlearned about art, or life, or imbecilic or swayed by the charm of her delicate, eager figure. Which she did have. He thought that anybody can do what she did, and what’s more, more, and so began to make art—statement tapestries.

They met again when they were both installing new work for a group show in town, at a mellow museum everyone used as a café, also. She was drinking coffee in the atrium and holding her art in her hand. It would go on a small pedestal. It looked trite even through the slim magnificence of her fingers he still loved, because he never didn’t love her but could excise her art at any moment, without thought, it was not a part of her. He did not know why the excellence of her being did not translate or did not pour in orderly brilliance into her handborn objects, why her art was not a representation of a soul which surely was responsible for the birds. But her art wasn’t good. It was as though her art were an illness she excavated from her hands, art that she bore from her heart through the conduit of their work, tumor after tumor.

He shook his head, thought to approach, but saw they could not speak ever again, so tender was her pain and passion, so he resumed hanging his large wall piece, tapestry of a polluted marsh, which had already been sold.

At the opening, they did not speak once, but for a long while she stood in front of his tapestry, admirers and attendees and collectors pausing and passing, going on, pausing, passing, using phones, going down, for coffee, for drinks, for their coats which were piled on a large exaggerated bed in the lobby, to give off the feel of a house party, in this careful, happy museum in this small, incestuous city.

Sometimes she left the area where she would stand in front of his piece, to talk with friends, admirers, collectors, but for most of the night, she watched it, watching through its threads, her eyes marching as if with gun into the minutiae of the forest of his weaving, peering deeply into worth, working worth into pestilent froth. She was filling her brain with what she thought of his art. Although it was clear they were not going to speak, he did not want to leave until she did, or go anywhere without her anymore, those months, so stood next to her in front of it as the museum closed and everybody else left more and more.

When they, too, left, their empty coats lay in a pose of embrace on the museum’s bed, a student’s flourish of involvement in art, surely. They pulled them apart, as if they were the parents of witless lovers, and put them on, awkwardly, as if two lovers were silently dressing, and then she walked away, the unknowability of her thoughts on his art, his worth, her love, diminishing of his life.