The doorbell at
the front of the mansion didn’t work. I knocked, tightened my wool scarf around
my neck, and after a short wait, I knocked again louder. I looked around. Fallen
leaves lay in sodden patches on the lawn, their edges lifted up and stirred intermittently
by random gusts of wind. Cars and city buses whooshed by, spinning water off
their tires onto the street on the other side of the high wrought iron fence. At
a 7-Eleven on a corner across the street, some young men were hanging around a
pay phone.
Susan opened the
door. After we said hello, I followed her across the spacious entryway and
behind a worn but grand staircase to a heavily varnished many-panelled oak door
with an ornate brass knob and hinges.
We passed
through that door into a dimly lit hallway. Several flat white painted doors
with number decals pasted on them opened onto the hall.
The chrome
doorknob on door #1 turned, the door opened from the inside, and a naked man who
looked to be in his early thirties stood framed in the doorway. He stood there
for a few moments backlit by the afternoon October light coming in through the dirty
bare window behind him.
When we didn’t
shriek or titter at the full frontal view of his pale body, he turned around,
giving us a good look at his equally pale rear end, went back into his room and
closed the door without saying anything. “That’s Bill. He’s the weirdo that
owns this place,” Susan said. “He walks around like that sometimes. I think he
thinks he’ll turn one of us on.”
She told me that
the previous owner had chopped the aged mansion in that declining south
Minneapolis neighborhood into fifteen 12 by 12 foot rooms. We reached the door labeled
#5. She opened the padlock, and swung the door open. “Bill bought this place
for a song.” “Where did he get the money?” “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to do
anything. Now he rents the rooms out to people like me.”
Susan was 22 at
the time we met up that afternoon in Minneapolis. The June before she had
graduated with a degree in Studio Arts from Moorhead State College, which is a
seven-hour drive northwest of the Twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
I had been an
art student in Moorhead too, before I transferred to the University of
Minnesota in Minneapolis a few years before she graduated. Susan and I had gotten to know each other because
we both often worked late on our art assignments.
I’m not someone
who could afford to or would want to choose my friends by their looks, but just
for the record, nobody would call Susan beautiful. Nice looking, they’d say
perhaps. She had youth and slenderness going for her. Her face was attractive enough,
but slightly marred by light case of acne and of oily skin. I don’t remember any of her facial features.
Come to think of
it, I don’t remember any of her art either. I don’t know, but she might say similar
things about me. It might be harder for her to forget my art though, the piece
I was working on was a 4 feet x 6 feet photorealist painting of flat snow-dusted
Minnesota farmland that stretched out along the interstate highway I 94 that
ran through Fargo.
The only trees in view from the open road were some
cottonwoods that grew along the outline of the Buffalo River in the distance
and some Russian olives and more cottonwoods that had been planted in straight
lines around the farmsteads by the WPA in the 1930s. A blue semi-truck
barreled towards the viewer in the left lane.
The scene on my canvas was framed by the outline of distinctive front
window and dashboard mirror of my beat up second hand Saab. The left rear view mirror showed only a circle of black, exactly what the camera had seen when I took the e photograph that I’d used for the painting.
A sign on the
right side of the road in the painting read “Downer Exit 1 Mile.” It was my
little joke. I had taken the photo out on the highway from the back seat of the
Saab on the chilly April day before my divorce was being finalized. The sign
actually read, “Sabin/Downer Exit 1 Mile.” I thought my modification was
clever. I was exiting the downer, get it? Nudge, nudge. If I’d only known . . ..
My painting was inspired
by a two-story close-up of Close’s face, an early selfie, at the Walker Art Museum.
Mine was a lot smaller than the Close painting, but it was the largest thing in
the art studio. I stretched the canvas myself, one skill I had been taught at
the school, but I needed to teach myself how to plan a painting, how to use an
air brush, laying down and removing masking tape and putting down layers of paint, painting
and reconsidering and repainting as I worked through the problems that
presented themselves. The faculty at the school was strong into teaching
students how to express themselves, and weak on teaching anything as prescriptive
as technique.
A hip young
women artist who was at the college as a visiting professor had been pleased
that I was trying photorealism, and she exclaimed that the painting captured exactly
what it felt like to drive through the landscape around there. If I ever
finished it, she said, she would give it an A. It took me a year. The visiting professor was gone back to New York city by then, but the
head of the department gave me the A and closed out my Incomplete when I told
him what my professor had said.
I would see Susan around the art studios in Moorhead during two or three evenings a week. After I
made dinner and ate with my two children and cleaned up the dishes, I would leave
the kids with a babysitter, drive back to the art building, and work until I
couldn’t stay awake any more. Sometimes I’d also see another young student hanging
around there too, a more than six feet tall boney blond guy named Sven.
I never saw what he was working on. But I
was semi-aware that Sven was “into” pushing the limits of conceptual art. That
kind of art is usually impossible to see, anyway. In case you have been mercifully
spared exposure to this enduring fad in the art world, one prominent idea
behind conceptual art is no actual work of art even needs to be created. The
art is in the mind of its creator.
I didn’t talk
with Sven much. He did was as terse as just about all of the rest of the men I
met around there. I’m from the East Coast, and I found the local men to be
frustratingly inarticulate.
I did overhear
Sven actually talking, one night in the art department. He was reading to Susan
the words from Yoko Ono’s “Snow Piece (1963),” one of the instructions from Grapefruit.
Think that snow is falling. Think that snow is falling everywhere all the time. When you talk with a person, think that snow is falling between you and on the person. Stop conversing when you think the person is covered by snow.”The phrase “snow job” popped into my mind.
After she
graduated, Susan moved to the cities to
take a job as a secretary at a law office in downtown Minneapolis. I had moved there
with my two children to escape the small pond of the small college and to try
to find like-minded people in the big pond of the big city University of
Minnesota.
The afternoon I
visited Susan in the rooming house, I hadn’t seen her in a few years. It’s too
big a subject to go into here in any detail, but I had changed in the meantime.
I had peeled off my cynical artist intellectual atheist personna like a mask. In
my miserable time alone trying to raise my kids in poverty and finish my
college degree after my divorce, I stopped thinking my husband’s name like a
mantra, which I had been doing since I took up with him ten years earlier, as
if he could save me. Gradually, I had been drawn back to the Catholic faith of
my childhood. I said to myself that even if religion was a crutch, there was
nothing wrong with accepting help from Almighty God. That meant to my great relief
that I didn’t have to figure out by all by myself any more.
Susan looked especially
nice the day of my visit to her room. Her long wavy brown hair was held back
with a leather clasp, and she wore jeans, suede boots, a loose navy blouse, and
a necklace made of colored wooden beads.
“Seeing anyone?”
I asked. “Well, sort of. I’m sleeping with a guy who lives here.” “What kind of
work does he do?” “He collects welfare.” “How can he collect welfare? Isn’t he
able to work?” “I don’t think he wants to work. He’s on General Assistance.” “What
does he do since he doesn’t work?” “I don’t know. I guess. He has a motorcycle.
He keeps it in his room. Sometimes he takes it out, and we go for a ride.” She
showed me a picture of him, a big blonde bearded man wearing a tee shirt and
jeans and motorcycle boots sitting on the edge of the mattress and boxspring
that was on the floor of her room and grinning for the camera.
At that time,
amazingly enough, a healthy young man could get on a form of welfare called
General Assistance. That was a loophole that has long since been closed.
As I was
listening to her talk, I was fuming inside about how a no-good freeloading bum like
him could get a smart attractive creative girl like Susan when he was without
any virtues of his own to offer, no education, no ambition, no job, no love, no
hope of committment. I wondered what her parents would think of the way their beloved
little daughter was living now she’d grown. She had been raised well. How, I
wondered, could she could sell her precious self so short?
I
don’t remember how we got on the subject, but she told me that she’d had an
abortion.
It turns out
that some time after I moved away from Moorhead, Susan and Sven had drifted
into one of those noncommittal affairs that became so common in those decades .
He had made no promises, and she had not expected any.
He had made up
his mind that he didn’t want to ever make a commitment to one woman or to have
kids. He needed to be free to pursue his Art. Artists didn’t have to live by the rules that
applied to other people. Being an Artist wasn’t tied up with anything so mundane as
needing to get up out of bed every day when it was still dark in winter mornings
and scrape the snow from the windshield and start the car so it could warm up
by the time he needed to drive to work so he could support a family.
Once they
started to sleep together, they experienced together all the sweet transports
of love that had traditionally been reserved for the honeymoon, but they
scrupulously avoided the 20th century sin of being possessive, and it
was important to them that they did not use the name of love for what they were
experiencing together. Susan had read enough advice in the women’s magazines
that she surreptitiously enjoyed, which warned not to “scare a man away” by
mentioning commitment.
Sven, for his
part, had practically memorized The Playboy Philosophy, which preached that
women could now be enjoyed as independent playmates, without any need for
courtship or love or commitment. The intimacy that had traditionally been
reserved for marriage could be treated as care-free play. The Pill was supposed
to free women from so-called slavery to the demands of their biology, free them
to enjoy uncommitted intimacy as if they were men.
Sven was dedicated
to his Art more than she was to hers. He took the idea of making art out of
one’s life a lot further than most. He first decided to make his life into a
work of Art by being intentional in every single action he performed. Walking
home in snow from the college to his apartment in Fargo across the Red River of
the north, he would examine every footprint he made with his big boots. He
pondered every word he uttered, savored every feeling he felt.
Then,
he decided, simple awareness was not enough.
Somehow he got a
hold of a huge roll of printing press paper and manoevered it into his
apartment. He slept on it and he ate on it. He drew on it, and he wrote on it. He
did almost everything imaginable in it, although he still made use of the
bathroom for taking care of a few basic needs. Every morning, he would roll up
the paper with the traces of his life from the day before on one side of the
room, and unroll fresh paper onto the middle of the floor on which he would
create the art of that new day. In the back of his mind, he hoped that someone
would discover his Art and showcase his genius. I have no idea how that could
have happened. Until he was discovered,
he would continue his labor of love.
Susan got a job
offer in the Twin Cities with the help of a friend of her father’s, she told
Sven. She would prefer staying around Moorhead and making art, but she needed
to find a way to make a living, since her parents expected her to move out on
her own after college. She hoped he would ask her to stay with him, but he
didn’t.
When Susan found
out she was pregnant, soon after she moved, they both were surprised. She took the
Pill regularly, at the same time every day. People back then didn’t realize
that a fairly high percentage of pregnancies occur when a woman is using the
Pill. From charts I’ve seen directly from Planned Parenthood, 6 out of 100
women get pregnant every year, even when they take it exactly as prescribed. The
next year the same odds apply again. Planned Parenthood, of course, is always
there to “help” with aborting the babies of the 6% each year.
The Pill was, as
the saying goes, a crap shoot. If the dice landed against them, people trying
to live the bogus promises of sexual freedom who found themselves about to
become parents didn’t realize that they were simply the one of the six out of a
hundred with an unplanned pregnancy each year. They would blame themselves. Actually,
quite often the man would blame the pregnancy on the woman.
A blessed event
was no longer seen as such, but as a trap, a failure, a punishment.
Lots of men
secretly or not so secretly believed that a woman who got pregnant was trying
to trick him so she could get him to marry her. She was trying to possess him. And
for that duplicity, which was often just in his own mind, many men felt they
were justified in getting as far away from the entrapping female as possible.
Sven was, Susan
told me, not like that. He was very supportive. He “helped” her a lot, she
said. For one thing, he helped pay for the abortion.
It was her
choice he told her. Nobody should force her to carry a child that wasn’t
wanted. He didn’t want to be a parent.
But if she did, that was her choice. If she didn’t, well that would make things
easier.
He also “helped”
her by coming down from Fargo to take her to Planned Parenthood for the
abortion. She was surprised by how much like a cattle call it was when they got
into the big waiting room. Everyone was told to arrive at the same time, and
then they had to stand in line to pay. The women were called into the abortion offices
one at a time in order of when they had paid.
Sven had
forgotten his credit card, and so he had to go back to her rooming house to get
it while she sat and waited and watched, and he had to go to the back of the
line again. She was also surprised that so many of the women were in tears. Down
the hall from the waiting room, she could hear one woman wailing in a recovery
room.
And wasn’t Sven
good because he waited for her in the waiting room and patiently comforted her
afterwards?
I
was surprised to hear she needed comfort. She had been so matter of fact.
She told me that
she never expected what she felt afterwards. Her whole physical being convulsed
for days with feelings of intense grief. She told me that even though her pregancy
had been only six weeks along, her breasts leaked milk and her hormones were raging
and she felt she was craving her child. The way she explained it, I tried to
tell her, it seemed to me that even though she thought she “knew” that she did
the right thing, her body seemed to know better what she had done, and what she
had lost.
Susan had been deeply
ashamed--not because of having killed her child in her womb, but because of her unexpected sorrow. But, she
said Sven was very good to her even so. She was betraying her own resolve not
to be clingy or dependent, but he took it in stride. Sven stayed with her for
three days afterwards, until she was able to get out of bed and take a shower
and start to eat again. He kissed her goodbye, gave her a lingering hug, and
went back to Fargo, back to his big roll of paper.
Modern
romance. No, not even romance, I
thought. God help us all.
We talked about
some other things, and I excused myself after a while to go pick up my kids at their
after-school program. As we walked back down the hall towards the front door,
door #1 opened just a crack, and then closed again, and to my relief I was
spared a second sighting of her flasher landlord.
I also consider
myself lucky that I didn’t get to meet Susan’s unemployed biker boyfriend. Dark had descended on the late Fall afternoon.
When I got to my car, I used the windshield wipers to push off some of the damp
leaves that had fallen on the windshield while I was inside, and I drove off to
the grammar school to pick up my kids.
A year later,
Susan met a more decent man at the law office, who had a regular job as an
accountant. She didn’t go completely traditional by any means. After a few
months, she moved in with him, but, then, to my relief, they started planning
their wedding. I asked her if she had told him about the abortion. She said he
understood and that he respected her choice. Later on my two kids and I
attended the wedding at the First Methodist Church. When we went to the reception
in the church basement, we ate sheet cake and jordan almonds and drank the
Kool-aid punch at a table by ourselves.
I don’t know
what happened to Susan after that. It’s hard enough to know what had happened
to her before that. I pray that God has changed her mind and her heart. May God
grant to her and to the men in her life and to all of us, true repentance for
the sins of our youth, and may He give us His pardon and His peace.
