Revenge of the Decorated aRT School: Part Nine

It was time for Reena’s first shoot. She was nervous. A sickly fluttering feeling surrounded her, penetrating every orifice of her body. Seeping out of her glands, a trail of unease followed her every movement.

Reena and Maris hadn’t spoken since their last encounter; Reena had tried to spot her at After Dark the previous night but to no avail. She was panic stricken that she had totally fucked it. What else could she do? She was just hoping that she would manage to catch her alone at some point during the shoot.

Reena had no idea what the structure of the day would be. She had never been to a model shoot before. It was a totally alien world.

Begin.

Minute by minute the studio was morphing into a increasingly pathological idea of public apace. The noise-level thickens as more people enter. There are lots of young women and men, lots of their skin. It’s a big production. Temperatures rising. Flesh on the stove. People walk in-and-out. This seems disorderly, but it’s the noise of production producing good-looking confusion. The stylist puts on a Cat Power CD and, singing along, begins to steam a rack of bras and pants. Recently, on the radio she heard a replay of an old interview with Bob Dylan. When asked if he ever would do commercials, he said… short and semi-toxic … only for underwear. Then 2004, it came true, and the song was I’m Thru With Love.

The stylist’s steam is rising.

Maris appeared and kicked things off with one of her classic pep talks, saying this business still had a few sensations lurking in its sleeve if we could all, for once, accept its machine-like nature and not insist on bogging it down with our lazy ideas about art. She was speaking into a bin of underwear, holding up item after item for all to see. Then, while refolding the underwear into neat, little business-card-sized bundles, she confidentially issued encrypted commands to the photographer, “Two words, Bjarne: carcass, automatism. Love of course, would be a third.”

They had Reena run up and down some stairs and then asked her to lie on her stomach on the floor and smoke cigarettes. They massaged a few drops of oil into her hair, combed it out, blow-dried it from various distances, repeating the process several times before smoothing in something that smelled like apricots.

Reena Spaulings as a medieval Russian pilgrim, male. “We’ll teach you, you fake saint, not to seduce girls.” Two soldiers separating her from a girl who has come to her for help. Reena wearing only underwear.

Reena as Henry David Thoreau with his brother on their boat trip up the concord and Merrimack rivers. In their tent listening to dogs howling at night. 2^nd scene: morning, Reena digging around in the boat for a melon. Brother visible in the tent.

They all seem to know each other. There are in jokes in the air. Also, many different clicking sounds: of computers, of cameras, of lights, speakers, digital impulses, of high heels and wooden slippers. Everybody is talking to somebody, incessantly. Everybody is doing a job. Reena is doing a job. The photographer is nervous. It is a big job. No, it’s not… it’s not a job, somehow everyone feels it is their own, and that it will move them wherever they might go, an aesthetic quantum empire.

Dressed, undressed, dressed again. New flesh, new mind, new people.

Her bottom looks like soft white cheese. Mascarpone, spread. A smooth fresh ball. It starts to perspire. She kneels on a wooden crate among scattered bales of hay. The set is rustic, with Italian peasants, goats and wheels of ripening cheese. Her feet are dirty as if dragged across a barn floor. She is posing like a bard, lazy, blank cat. In the sun. It makes sense. She laughs compulsively.

Reena, as pilgrim again, installed in an empty bathhouse. Legs paralyzed and weak as bits of straw. “With this liquid, I rubbed my legs five times a day. And what happened?”

Maris in the middle of the injunction zone called photo shoot. A look of outer-body detachment, yet she can feel the smells of fears, excitement, existence. She wears black cotton panties most of the time. Every day, though, the ritual requires some change. She looked at Reena. That’s not only a girl, that’s culture.

Maris keeps punching the photographer in the back and telling him Reena is not a bowl of fruit. He is like a cautious rabbit being lured out of his hole, starting to sniff around. He smokes a joint on the roof and comes back with ideas. They converse through nods, glances and improvised hand signals, sometimes breaking the silence with a word: “slumpy” “crass” “idiot” “rad.”

Reena stands in her museum guard pose, facing the camera and then the wall. They expose 50 rolls in three hours. They take Polaroids between set-ups and have excited conferences around each one, like generals around a battle plan, pushing on, like people who believe they are getting things done, pushing on. Maris is rigid with concentration and sometimes snaps at the studio hands. Maris is glowing with creative purpose and sometimes ecstatically squeezes Reena’s hand. In a movement of inspiration that nobody sees coming, she elbows the makeup artists out of the way and begins to draw on Reena’s face with a red ballpoint pen.

There is this “I want whatever happens” body and a “nothing ever happens” face and the camera keeps clicking at that face and that face clicks back. It is a brand new camera with an extremely fast motor to capture the moments between the clicks. But there are only voids between the clicks. Deepening the voids, that’s what this odd model is doing. The spiritual and the popular are having a meeting, to stretch some horizon? “You will be like the bum on the subway if you don’t obey.” Where is the soundtrack for that? A couple of girls with clipboards and pencils are arguing in front of the new boom box. It seems the CD player is giving up with nasty gasps of noise. Suddenly everybody is pulling pills or gum or cigarettes or cell phones out of their pockets and handbags. Reena by now looks like a piece of scrap paper with a drawing of red ballpoint tattoo. Suddenly everyone needs a break and a gallon of water.

Maris says we are all geniuses. She massages Reena’s rubbery shoulders with long, cool fingers, the inches the waistband of the pants down a couple of centimeters. Reena cannot breathe. The photographer exposes his final roll.

Afterwards John thanked reena for having integrity, and said he hoped she would be able to continue with it, but Reena said it wasn’t integrity because she wasn’t whole, she was in pieces. And John said well perhaps you’ll be able to remain in pieces, and not become whole. Reena said if I cared about it, I would be whole and not in pieces.

Reena looked around, Maris had already disappeared. Reena left, feeling like she had just spent the day being violated. She felt dejected. It was time to get fucked.

The next day.

Reena thinks to herself, “Get up idiot!”

She thinks about the red numbers spelled on the alarm clock.

She thinks about getting up.

She thinks about having a look at her face, did anything horrific take place in the night, like in a science fiction film, which she always secretly expected?

She thinks let me relieve myself. I think about the dust that gathers so quickly on the white tiled floor, and the shower hairs left high and dry by receding waters. A cult had arisen. Without proper arguments or any established philosophy, but with an aesthetic as tough as weeds, which is significant to kitsch.

This was the weirdest time of Reena’s life. It feels like being showered with 100 roses. Or just sniffing life. Even not giving a dam about flowers, Reena thinks this happened all too fast and came as a surprise. She thinks about the pee-toilet bowl acoustics and about the cotton rectangle on the inside of her underwear. Perhaps it will make her strong. She gives all, and will not receive anything. She thinks, taking three squares of toilet paper, folding first along the perforations and then folded the whole thing in half. Everything three seconds she is fine. Every second second she gives up. Every five seconds she rises up. Feeling perpetually x-ed.

She thinks, standing naked before the mirror. She thinks about how she looks from the front, with shoulders proper and back, and then with shoulders slouched, like normal. Shr thinks about her body – is it sexy? Or better, is it touching? Could someone be moved by it? She thinks so. She thinks about her shoulder muscles, which all on their own decide from day to day if they will appear masculine or somewhat feminine, the different shades of her body, the relative white of her thighs, her ass, her stomach, the darker shades of her shins, arms and back, the splotchier bothered skin of her face, hands and feet. This is a banality but it should be better understood.

She thinks about the crack in the 11 inch all-in-one TV/VCR and about the throw rug from Bed, Bath & Beyond. She thinks about the nook of bad spirits, the crevice between her dresser and some stackable plastic storage units, which she had unconsciously made into a bad energy ghetto, the bad part of town of her room where she put soiled rags, liquor bottles (both empty and full) her cigarettes and ashtrays (when she was trying to quit), plastic bags, and whatever else she preferred to hide from herself. She thinks about her nails. She thinks about the dust on her CD player, the week-old flowers, the faux wood paneling of her desk top, as she cracked her back to the left and then the right and do some neck rolls. She thinks, without inspecting her feet, with so much city around us our bodies are all we have to become dazzled by nature’s unmanufactured forms, growths, cracks, fractures, fissures, deformities and transformations. She thinks about her black plastic wastepaper basket to her left, which she had pissed in one night when she was too lazy to make it to the bathroom. She thinks, she likes the floor a lot, as she goes to lie on a piece of it and looked up out of the window, thinking of how the sky is shoved to the periphery of the stage by our monuments and monumental buildings.

She thinks as she taps on her computer,

Dear _________

Everything’s fine with me. Now that it’s almost spring, each day around 4 o’clock, I speed down to the water to read for an hour or two. It’s almost time to take out those sunglasses I brought last autumn. Yesterday, as I approached the water, I discovered a movie was being shot. The scene was about a man drowning in the river. It was great fun for us onlookers to watch a man dramatically drowning and in grave danger.

                                                Lots of Love,

                                               

                                                R

She thinks some more, with her chin in the hole of my coffee mug.

She thinks, dear artists (even those whom she liked) that they can’t escape it, they are making art that approximates life and she’d prefer, at the very least, life that approximates life. She thinks about how her body is her brains and how her brain doesn’t have a brain.  

Revenge of the Decorated aRT School: Part Seven

Maris Parings tied a small, quivering dog to a parking meter, gave it a kiss on the nose, and breezed in through the museum’s doors. Reena saw her gliding past the Artwork as if on little wheels. What was she doing here, and in the same soiled dress from the night before? Maris Parings was not here for the art. She slipped Reena a business card and was pointing at her organizer with a flexings vine of a finger. Her eyes were swimming all over Reena’s uniform and behind each smile she had another one waiting in reserve. As Maris’s eyes examined Reena she suddenly had a flash of the night before, hands rushing all over her body, grabbing flesh. Reena blinked herself out of it.

Maris plan was to use Reena for a fashion shoot, a last-minute brainstorm on Maris’s part, and she was more than willing to break her contract with Woman because she was so sure that Reena’s gawky, asymmetrical physique, day-old-bread skin (blemishes included), and somewhat lost-looking face would really make the underwear come alive this season.

This campaign would be their best ever, and would speak to a generation long numbed by swollen breasts and lips, jutting hips, machine-flattened tummies and picture-perfect hair. The fall-winter line would hit the market with a poetic-realist slant, and the bras and panties would come off even sexier if the body wearing them wasn’t so over-determined in advance by the product it modeled. It would have the energy of an encounter, and would therefore involve people and produce a more exciting, even catastrophic relationship between the skin and eye. The images would reinvent Reena as a knockout, in her own way, the kind that nobody saw coming. But most exciting of all, we would be making that once-in-a-generation leap into a seemingly unknown form of seduction. We will use very little make-up and flat, natural lighting. It will be photographed by that upstart son of a gun dealer, Bjarne Mayhem. If his naked party polaroids no longer wowed the art world, his almost-naked billboards might still cause a car crash or a crush or whatever.

Reena shrugged her shoulders and looked not entirely moved by the proposal; it seemed that deep down she had really only wanted to reenact the previous night. Nether-the-less she deliberated for a long minute, shooting glances at Maris figure as she thought it over. She couldn’t help wondering if Maris was insane. As soon as she got her yes, Maris was gliding out again, part curious museum goes and into the throbbing spring air.

Love is a red heart. And lust a bright red, sheer g-string. A single trumpet blare. In front of this panty, the brain goes right back to sleep.  Little, low self-inflamed flame. Stamping out that space of itself in high wattage spectacle, shame and dollar amounts. While taking in the landscape, the eyes put their hands at the sight, blocking as if to stop the sunlight.

Was it true: did Reena Spaulings love Maris?   

Reena decided to throw caution to the wind; she left her post, 15 minutes earlier than her break allowed. She was taking a big risk, a risk not only to her job, but also to her pride. Reena caught up with Maris just before she reached the main door and grabbed her arm,

            “This way” she gasped at Maris, and pulled her toward the staff door down the corridor. Hurrying faster, Reena noticed that Maris did not even hesitate to question her actions; soon it was difficult to tell who was leading whom. Slamming through doors, sliding past other gallery workers Reena knew exactly where to lead Maris. There was a small back room near the staff locker-room that nobody used anymore, since the locker-rooms had been rejuvenated the year before; and most importantly, the room could lock from the inside.

They reached the room and hurriedly shut the door behind them the dull click of the lock weighted with so much expectation, anticipation; suddenly all of Reena’s courage began to fade from her and she stopped and stood still, as Maris backed away from her. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, Reena’s breathing too, had lost all sense of rhythm. She takes a step forward, but Maris hand rises in a gesture for her to stop. Did she really expect Reena to take control of herself and this situation before it goes any further? Doesn’t she see that she can’t? Doesn’t she see that she has tried?  

Maris can see in Reena’s eyes that she has no intention of stopping on her own. Her body shudders as her arms fall to her side. In two steps, Reena is standing in front of her, pulling her onto Reena, and kissing her with the hunger brought on by the hours she had spent thinking of her since last night. Hands inside her shirt, sliding up and around to her back, ripping her shirt from flesh, Reena’s mouth feasting on her nipples.

Reena realizes that Maris is pushing her. Not pushing her away, but downward. Reena knows immediately what she is asking for. Reena tries to take it slowly, she wanted to revel in this moment, knowing that tomorrow she would remember exactly every second of this encounter, but Maris wouldn’t have it, forcing her head down further. Without pause Reena slides Maris’s pants off, and slinging them away from her; somehow her trousers had got lost in the minute or so they had been in the room.

Maris hands are in Reenas hair, gripping it, forcing her between her legs. Reena’s arms slide beneath her soft arse and around her legs to hold her still. Maris can feel her breath on her skin; as seconds feel like eternity. Then Reena starts, lips, tongue and mouth all working together, other and over again. Licking, suckling, nibbling until she was shaking. Finally Reena gives Maris what she wants, Maris gasps as her hips try to move, but Reena stays strong and holds her still, she must wait a few seconds longer. Just as Reena has waited for this moment. Slowly she begins the rhythmic movement that will bring her to climax, allowing Maris’s hips to rock with her. Slowly, at first, but picking up speed as she gets closer and closer to coming. Maris’s hands are no longer gripping… 

Revenge of the Decorated aRT school: Part Five

Reena’s on her feet again, presiding over the meeting between people and pictures of people. She’s still a little lost in the after-effects of last night’s muscle workout and drugs. A pleasant, run over by tires feeling. If called on to speak she would have trouble doing so. The paintings seem to be getting what they need, and the people are heavy, drowsy in the galleries today. A young Japanese couple is drifting through, laughing, brushing, crushing each other’s clothing. An American bald man seems to follow, or drift along in their wake.

Reena kills some time by contemplating the painting in front of her. Violets in hand, she looks like an appropriated renaissance Madonna. A fallen, half-peeled orange lies at the bottom of a stand upon which the parrot is sitting. In front of the parrot is a glass with water for him to drink. The woman is standing against a dark blackish-green background. Her dress is huge, covering her entire body with salmonish-pink satin. It is quite a contrast. One notices right away the other black parts in the portrait, as they seem to be connecting agents to that abstract plane: one tip of a boot stepping out of the pink, the black velvet choker round her neck, and her eyes. There is also the parrot’s one eye.

Reena has stationed herself in the carnival route, where people come out from the 3rd room all turned on and flyby the 1st to get to the 4th. That seems to have been the idea, she meditates, to have the 4ths naked woman and parrot, right at the end of the arcade, a destination. This woman sprawls on her back laughing, flirting with her own bird, who is on her finger flapping his wings, seemingly maddened by the acre of hair that flows from her head. What’s her body to him? Her nipples. Reena is still tasting the cocaine, and her own hair smells cigarettes from last night and the oil from her actions.

She’s starting to fall asleep on her feet while guarding. It’s something every guard has done, and knows how to do. She starts running back snippets from last night. Sometimes she unintentionally makes a face while standing there, or speaks a little by surprise in response to her memories. Not even memories but actual odors. Some of what happened at After Dark eludes Reena’s memory of the night before. Like the dark parks in the painting, these gaps are the connecting agents to the abstract plane she calls “good times.” They are the not so good times, or the times in-between, the parts that contrast with the fun, pink, fleshy areas that unite the composition of her conscious experience of the party. She remembers the sexy, almost scary shine of Maris’s glossy lips, but not what they said. She remembers that at one point they were alone together. But not what caused the commotion afterwards, or how she ended up alone in the street. She remembers the cab ride home, but not how she paid for it.

Reena has a blackish-green bruise on her thigh; somebody’s phone number is inscribed upon her palm, half erased there in the chemical sweat. Reena is drifting in and out of consciousness while standing and looking.

“Now,” it occurs to Reena, “I’m ready to extend the domain of pleasures.”

Meanwhile in the background of the gallery Kevin had been sat at his desk for an hour already, but still hadn’t begun the pile of letters, leaflets and magazines that were teetering on the edge of his desk. On the top of the pile was the quarterly magazine, Currents issued by the Lightbox gallery in Woking where Kevin had begun his curatorial career. Leafing through the pages filled with glossy pictures of second-rate artworks, articles on the museum’s multi-cultural outreach programs, and dozens of photos of donors and trustees forcing smiles and clutching glasses of chardonnay, Kevin mused on how far he had come. Even though, just out of college, he had secured a coveted internship at the Royal Academy of Modern Art and believed with hard work he could rise through the ranks there, Kevin was suddenly enlightened when he overheard the director of the museum confide to one of his deputies: “There’s no was we can use Phillips for that job. To promote from within was to promote mediocrity.” Gaining entre into the exclusive world of the art museum, he’d discovered, required a stint of some duration out of town. So, setting his sights on the smaller counties, he found a posting online for an entry-level job at the Lightbox. The interview process was pro forma, as his RA credentials, meager as they were, trumped his competitors’ Ph.D.s.

He settled back in his chair and looked at the cover of Currents. It featured a photo of his smiling former boss, a career museum bureaucrat, proudly displaying the museum’s newest acquisition, a set of Matisse’s Jazz prints. He tossed the magazine into the trash. Next on the pile were several dozen reception and dinner invitations on which Kevin hastily scrawled “REGRETS” then set aside to give to his assistant. Kevin despised openings – at which it was impossible to see any art – and loathed the obligatory dinners that followed. Yet he knew there were some he must dutifully attend. The dynamics of the art world played itself out at these gatherings where careers were made, and sometimes lost. He paused, as he was about to add another invitation to the reject pile. It was from Peter Merton himself, an invitation to a party in honor of the publication of John Russell’s monographs. One that he really couldn’t squirm his way out of.

Sigh. Kevin hated fucking aRT parties. 

Revenge of the Decorated aRT School: Part Four

The evening had gone well for Kevin. He had survived the wrath of the critics, collectors, and his bosses. The work that he was planning to show in the Biennial was new, edgy, and raw. The Emily’s video had gone down especially well; it was much better than any of the “real” video art that was out there anyway. Kevin ambled home slowly, enjoying the crisp air; as he was walking home Reena’s night at After Dark was just beginning.

Kevin’s apartment was small but clean, by Norris Road standards anyway, and miraculously there were no cockroaches. It had been a godsend – thanks to a tip from a friend of a friend – a sunny one bedroom in a pre-war elevator building which, seventy-five years before, had been the address of choice for immigrants who’d made it big in the furniture, restaurant, or rabbinical supply business. To the right of every one of the wide apartment doors was the telltale outline of a mezuzah, each covered in a thick coat of black paint. The building still exuded a faded elegance, its spacious lobby adorned with chic art deco detailing and a mural representing the original Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, apropos of the edifice’s name, The Peter Minuit. The current residents were mostly artists, writers, and musicians. His next-door neighbour was typical, a successful screenwriter who could have lived anywhere she pleased but chose Norris Road because it provided her with “material.” At her wedding, to which she’d invited everyone on their floor, Kevin was amused to see not only Reading celebrities but also some familiar characters from the neighbourhood: the taciturn Korean dry cleaner and his wife, the Gorth cashier at Kim’s video, and the homeless man who slept in front of Rahim’s shop in a cardboard box.

Kevin’s apartment was cluttered with furniture and books, most of which had belonged to his parents. It was an odd assortment: an antique German cabinet and an old clock his mother’s family had brought over from Latvia, a Danish Modern living room set, a faded Persian carpet, a dozen or so contemporary photographs, drawings, and prints, and a large oil painting of a rabbi in a fur hat (a distant relative, he’d been told). The windowsills were crammed with his mother’s houseplants, which Kevin had dutifully cared for since she passed away, carrying them with him on two cross-country moves. Every available surface was covered with books. They filled several walls of shelves as well as teetering in uneven piles on top of the coffee table and in stacks that lined the corridors, making it treacherous to move from one room to the next. Kevin loved his private little nest though at times it did make him feel just a bit suffocated and prematurely old.

Kevin sometimes wondered if his own passion for art derived from the fact that it was the Lower Earley gallery boom that saved his neighbourhood and made it safe again for him to play outside. One of the fire galleries to open was right across the street from Kevin’s home, a tiny place called 5.5:6.1. At first it seemed like just another eccentric Lower Earley storefront, no different from the place a few doors down that had in its window a dusty collection of plastic dinosaurs hanging by nooses or another nearby that had filled its entire front window with a thriving colony of ants. What made 5.5:6.1 truly eccentric was how clean it was and how brightly lit. Kevin was intensely attracted to the crud-free interior that he recalled having his very first hard-on the day his mother relented and let him step cautiously inside on his way back from school.

The next morning Kevin stepped out of his building onto the tenement-lined street. Even through a thick blanket of haze, the sun felt as if it were burning through his clothes. “And its not even 8,” he thought. As Kevin walked down Norris Road to Pitcroft Avenue, a garbage truck followed bleeping loudly as it lurched and groaned from one towering pile of garbage bags to the next. Leaping off the metal perch at the back of the truck, a young man in a sweat soaked wife-beater set upon the bursting plastic bags stacked high within the wheelie bins on the path. Kevin admired the man’s glistening coffee-coloured skin and a gentle, almost childlike face. He seemed subdued, already exhausted at the start of a long, hot day. In another line of work he might be considered attractive, mused Kevin.

A block ahead, Kevin spotted the decrepit white building that was the Studio 4 gallery, once an old war hospital the building had not changed much on the outside since it was built in the 1950’s, apart from the large conversion that jutted out of the back of the building that was constructed some time during the 90’s. Unattractive to start with the building had no aged well. Its concrete façade was streaked with grime and, in the damper months, covered with a mould-like crud that had to be blasted off – when the museum could afford it – with high-powered steam guns. The interior was even worse. The parquet floor was buckling and had acquired a tacky, mottled look. The galleries were poorly proportioned and flowed awkwardly. Most of the interior walls were white hardboard screwed into the solid brick walls. In some galleries the ceilings were too high, in others too low, the lighting system was antiquated and flakes of asbestos occasionally descended on visitors like the first hint of oncoming snow. The main lobby, a small and uninviting space, had recently become home to an outsized and garish enterprise called “The Studio 4” experience,” were you could buy ties and coffee mugs with images of works from the collection. Pin boards adorned the walls here, with notices and posters from various past Studio exhibitions, and other shows happening in near by London.

Kevin came in the staff entrance, “You certainly are an early riser,” mused Gary, the regular guard. Kevin found the security guard to be rather insular and hard to read, but Gary was an exception. He always brought Kevin a coffee whenever he wandered over to the near by coffee place, and treated Kevin to other perks, like not having to sign in or call down to admit in his guests.

            “I don’t have much of a life,” admitted Kevin.

            “Lie in bed a while, man. Enjoy your sweetheart,” said Gary with a schoolmasterish frown.

            “No sweetheart now, I’m afraid.”

            “That won’t do at all,” said Gary, shaking his head gravely.

            “What happened to that nice young man you brought to the staff party last year?”

            “I haven’t seen him for months. He had issues.”

            “Issues? What issues, man? He looked like Brad Pitt.”

            “Trust me Gary. Serious ISSUES.” Kevin gave Gary a pat on the arm. In fact, though Kevin hated to admit it, the guy’s only “issue” had been that he liked Kevin enough to ask him to move in with him. After which Kevin stopped returning his calls and resumed his weekly forays to the adult video store where he got and gave as many blow jobs as he liked without ever having to deal with anything more personal than an occasional unpleasant smell.  Kevin had only had one serious live in boyfriend and that had been such a disaster that he had vowed never to repeat the exercise. It was during Kevin’s second year at University. He’d been chosen to play Romeo, despite having little acting experience, and found himself suddenly involved in a relationship, onstage and off, with the first year who had been cast in the role of Mercutio. Their affair was built around the play, and even after they moved in together their daily conversations, including sex-talk, were peppered with Shakespearean quotations. Kevin cringed to recall how his thespian boyfriend used to cry out, “Romeo! Humours! Madam! Passion! Lover!” whenever he had an orgasm. When it got to be too much – a year after the last curtain fell on Romeo and Juliet they were still speaking with English accents – Kevin tried to break off the relationship. At which point, Mercutio took things to a new level, swallowing some improvised poison and stabbing himself with an old letter opener. He was taken away by people from the Student Health Services and Kevin never saw or heard from him again.  

He flipped on the curatorial floor lights. The offices were laid out so that the lower-level staff – the Girls from Good Schools – occupied cubicles in one larger room, while the curators enjoyed private rooms, with large windows. Kevin unlocked his office, tossed his backpack in the corner, and opened the blinds. Across the street the construction crew had just finished work on the new Enterprise Building, so the rattle of their jackhammers did not disturb him today. He gathered the pile of mail his assistant had left for him and began sorting through the envelopes as his computer booted up.