Sari Wilson

Stories

Patriotic Dead (cont'd)

The students who draw her are mostly men with long hair, who wear bandannas around, like the Mexican farm workers. She likes these students' furrowed brows, their pursed lips, the jerky motion of their arms as they draw her. She can feel her body responding to their brushes. She can feel herself.

Sometimes she goes out with them afterwards. They sit on ripped barstools and drink from heavy mugs of beer. They talk about artists' shows in East Village storefronts. They do gestural drawings of her on napkins so that her wide shoulders, her narrow waist, her oval face, her bow-shaped top lip are left behind—codified, memorialized—all over the city.

An Italian sculptor named Carlo is her first individual artist. For six months, she sits for him for four-hour sessions at $20 an hour. Carlo has a commission from a Connecticut corporation. He will later tell her that "selected features of her anatomy" have found a home in a corporate park off the Merritt. (It is still the wacky 1980s.) Though she tells him her name is Cora, he calls her Cara—sometimes Carina—with an impersonal tenderness. Carina: "One who is dear." Tears spring to her eyes.

Today Eric Biehl works on O'Keeffe's Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue. Biehl is known for his manipulated pieces that begin as replicas of iconic paintings. Later, after he finishes his version of the original, he will work it over by adding a collage layer. The effect will no doubt be haunting—images contending for foreground, each further removed from the source. His work is known for its "subversion of the hierarchy of images."

Biehl has hung an American flag behind Cara. Cara wears a red silk kimono and holds a set of cattle bones on her lap. In Biehl's version so far, the red bands flanking the skull have joined together and taken a female form. The shapes of the skull itself have fractured on her lap. The smoothness of the bones in her hands is astonishing. They seem to hold some secret energy, something tender and ancient. Biehl says that the bones threaten to "devour" her.

"A break?" he says now. He stretches, and opens his cell phone.

Cara's legs have fallen asleep and her biceps are shaking. She puts the bones on the floor and goes to the window. She gazes out onto Hudson Street. Like the rest, Biehl had started out in Soho. Prince and Greene. He'd migrated south and west with the others and stopped at Hudson and Franklin. She watches people carry coffee from the gourmet corner market. Behind her, Biehl's voice rises in a protracted coo. He must be talking to Sophie, his one-year old daughter.

When he hangs up, Biehl comes over and stands beside her. "Starbucks now," he says laughing.

They always do a run-down of all of the previous corner-tenants. Hudson Food Emporium. Kyung Song Market. Peter's Gourmet Deli. Starbucks. Their way of exorcising the past? They don't mention those who died of AIDS, the parties before they both stopped drinking, or those who had left the city in the 90s out of bitterness, spouting the old dogma and hand signs. They also do not talk of September 11. She had watched the second building come down from this very studio window. She did not understand what she saw. For moments afterward, she and Biehl had clung to each other. Later that afternoon, they had fucked a number of times.

After 9/11, another round of people fell away. Emboldened by a new patriotism, she hangs a flag from her East Village fire escape. She stomps the streets in black leather jacket, her fists clenched. The conversations she has with her mother at this time are the best of their lives. They agree that the terrorists should be routed and that this is a time for sacrifice. They agree that war is the only answer. But patriotism has dissolved amidst a lack of focus. And the call of things to buy. And, of course, it turns out there is no one to fight really—or there is everyone to fight. In this way, she is like everyone else.

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© 2009 Sari Wilson