FIRST DIBS/LAST WRIGHTS: Chapter Four*
MEET ROSEMARY'S FRIEND HILDA, AN EX-EDITOR OF VOGUE MAGAZINE, AND HILDA'S GAY SON, LENNY, AT DIBS AND ANNA'S "NOT SO SWEET 16 PARTY"
(Above: Posing as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin. Vogue’s November 2001 issue. Photograph by Steve Meisel.)
[*You can read Chapter One here. Chapter Two here. Chapter Three here. Chapter One is open to all subscribers. The introductory paragraphs to all subsequent Chapters are open to all subscribers with the rest of each chapter open only to paid ones. Enjoy.]
CHAPTER FOUR
“Put that over there,” said Dibs to Anna.
“This?” asked Anna.
“No: that,” Dibs corrected her, directing her from the assemblage that was atop one of the plinths in Rosemary’s art gallery to one of two birthday cakes that sat teetering on another as if it too were one of her grandmother’s works of art. Anna carefully moved the cake to the table where the wine and glasses and soft drinks and coffee pot were set up along with some canapés. Then Dibs came over and in her best let-me-just-do-it-myself mode, which she’d learned from her grandmother, moved it even more carefully (and precisely) next to another cake, each with sixteen candles atop it. The one that had been on the plinth had Dibs’s name decorated atop it and the one shunted to the side on the table had Anna’s so Dibs was certain her grandmother had purposefully placed her cake on a plinth to signify its importance compared to her friend’s since Rosemary had never really approved of her granddaughter’s friendship with this child of an “archly churched-up preacher,” as her grandmother had grumbled about the man when he came to pick up Anna once, even as her grandmother had grown accustomed to it, this friendship, so much so that they were now having a shared birthday party.
Rosemary had a month or two ago asked the girls if they wanted a “Sweet Sixteen" party since their birthdays were only about a week apart and they had agreed to conflating this party with her next art opening if Rosemary agreed retitling the evening as a “Not So Sweet Sixteen Party.” Rosemary had laughed at their insistence on the party’s billing since she knew that as long as they needed to bill themselves as such then she and the religiously deranged Wrights didn’t have to worry about the girls actually no longer being sweet. The Wrights though took some convincing and only agreed to allowing Anna to be a part of such a party and art opening if Dibs then attended their church service on the following Sunday to pay witness to how they marked a girl turning 16 in their congregation. Rosemary’s instinct was to buck at such a bargain, but then had to remind herself that Dibs had the kind of agency that the Wrights could never fathom in their Father-Son-and-Holy-Ghost fantasia - or maybe they could, Rosemary contemplated as she watched the girls trying not to be too giddy as the party hour approached, and that is why the Wrights kept circling Dibs and her with such odd interest for all these years. The more Rosemary had rejected them personally the more they allowed Anna to be a part of the life that Rosemary had craftily arranged for Dibs and herself high above the river bank where she also down there below gathered what others considered debris that she more artfully arranged in the assemblages framed on the wall and sculpted atop the plinths in what one art critic in some journal devoted to such things down in New York City had described as “Joseph Cornell in conversation with Kurt Schwitters interrupted by Hannah Höch who, not in jest, refused to hang on their every gestural word.”
When a former Bard colleague had sent her the article, Rosemary had lingered over the word “gestural” since so much in her life had - not in jest - felt just like that for the last fourteen years with Dibs as her charge, even the years themselves in some way she was still trying to figure out without quite going mad. Sometimes Rosemary thought that the Wrights just allowed Anna’s friendship with Dibs as a wedge into their lives because they had too much of a not-in-jest inkling of Dibs’s power, the manifested might of her. Rosemary had never trusted religionists of any sort - her academic career with its emphasis on Greek mythology had been a kind of antidote to their being in the world at all - but the Wrights were of an ilk that she couldn’t quite decipher. She didn’t fear them exactly. But her curiosity about them had more caution to it. Indeed, even allowing herself to be curious about a Christian sect - and that is what she had come view it as - was more than the usual dismissal which was all she had usually deigned any form of Christianity or religion worthy of eliciting in her.
Rosemary looked around at her latest work and wondered where the impulse came from within her to do it, to create all this from what others deemed detritus but she saw as somehow its finding through her its rightful place when not reconstructed exactly but carefully, precisely reconsidered just as Dibs had done when Rosemary had watched her move her cake from that plinth over there to the one next to Anna’s on the table. That’s it, thought Rosemary when she went to the anteroom to get the last piece to place atop the plinth Dibs had emptied of her cake: I am just trying to find a rightful place in this world for all that others discard down at the river’s edge which I consider my artistic cultch and others consider a damp and rather dangerous dumping ground. She had named the gallery itself Riverward and this piece she was now placing atop the plinth consisted of a gigantic old thermos she had found down there embedded in the muck and the mud. She hadn’t even cleaned it but just had done her usual shellacking atop it giving it “a legacy coat,” as she called it, and stuffed it with now unseen shotgun shells she had gathered down there as well. She had then glued along its bottom an old rusted thimble and some sort of tiny creature that had died and shriveled and dried, some dreary little thing from which she withdrew the dreariness and imbued instead with purpose, a collage’s focal point of wonder: what was it exactly there resting what appeared to be its tiny head atop the thimble, was it a creature at all or just pieces of garbage washed ashore that resembled a creature, an entity that Rosemary had devised herself that she knew resembled the Kandinsky-like ones that could scatter and flitter around her rooms when Pan and Lucifer made their one presence known? In some way, the piece was both an homage - a, yes, gesture - to them and their world in this one and a way to keep it all alive for her because it had been four years since their last appearance, years in which Dibs and Anna had become teenagers concerned with things now that concerned Rosemary herself in this next phase of her having been charged with watching over her granddaughter’s presence in her life.
That was also around the time - that last gestural intrusion of Pan and Lucifer into her living room - that she had decided to close up the store that had been in the front of this townhouse and expand the gallery in the back which presently took over the whole ground floor of the townhouse owned now by her one real friend in town, Hilda, an ex-Vogue editor, the person she most trusted in the world and the one who had convinced her to convert the whole space as a place for her art. Hilda had retired up here after taking some of her rich dead husband’s money left to her and buying up property in town thinking her days of a certain type of others following her stylish ahead-of-the-pack lead were over. Wrong. "Oh, Rosemary,” she had asked one evening as they watched the sun set and property values rise from the vantage point of Rosemary’s front porch overlooking the Hudson, “what’s an old gal to do? I tried to escape this flock by moving up here but they took the wrong hint and thought I was signaling them to follow me. I liked this place because it had a hidden style. Now it’s the worst thing possible: found-out and fashionable.”
As they’d sipped their porch wine that twilight, Rosemary smiled at her friend and her ability to make even an end-of-day conversation in this tucked-away corner of upstate sing with copy and cover lines. “Relax, Hilda,” said Rosemary. “Let’em flock, hon. Put your shepherdess staff down. You’ve always made money for others based on your instinct, make some for yourself. You own half the town by now. You’re like goddam Greta Garbo buying up Beverly Hills when it was still hick Hollywood and had no haute appeal.”
And then they had laughed. “She once made a pass at me,” said Hilda. “Garbo. Can you imagine? Gobbled by Garbo!” she’d said, the cover line practically hanging in the air between them like the Scrabble tiles had that day Rosemary sometimes wished she couldn’t recall.
"Hmmm …” said Rosemary.
“Hmmm indeed,” said Hilda. “I did imagine it for a few days, I must confess, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.” And then they had laughed again, Hilda always hurrying Rosemary along with a needed laugh when the latter was luxuriating a bit too much in one of her reveries. Rosemary loved her for that, and Hilda loved being loved for any reason someone might need from her. Hilda was a honer. A great deal of her success as an editor and fashion world legend was based on that ability - spotting the need in others and knowingly targeting it without anyone being an actual target. She wasn’t mercenary in that way - she was finally too kind - but she sure knew how to merchandize need. “Oh, Rosemary. For all those decades it was all just cargo for me to haul to deadline,” she had once confessed “all that need and knowingness and the hemlines and borrowed beauty and the dictates and the flash and the flesh and the fame and the photographs, all that high-gloss finish I put to all those beginnings in order to enable them - the careers of all those maudlin designers and marauding models, movie stars getting my imprimatur of a cover story. But finally,” she had sighed, the dramatic extravagance of that sigh Rosemary had come to understand as the wind-up for the final pitch of pith that Hilda had held back until the right moment in some latest spiel. “I was nothing but a stevedore of glamour, girl,” she had then said, sending the curveball of a sentence right over the plate. “Steve Adore - sounds like a lounge act in Vegas - where I have never been, I might add, and plan to die never having seen,” she pronounced with the laugh, guttural, gotcha, that could button it all up.
Rosemary relished the sound of Hilda’s laughter, that button of growled-forth joy, and heard it now descending the stairs since she and her twenty-one-year old son, Lenny, lived upstairs. He’d recently graduated from Bard and was trying to decide what to do with his English Lit degree. Because he was gay, Rosemary trusted his befriending Anna and Dibs. He had become, in fact, a kind of mentor to them. He must have just said something witty because his laughter was limning his mother’s, his booted footsteps following behind her giving it all a rhythmic underlay.
And what an entrance the two of them now made into the gallery. It had been Hilda’s idea - of course, it had - for the girls to make their “Not So Sweet Sixteen Party” into a come-as-your-favorite-rock-star one. Rosemary had already been admiring Dibs’s striking resemblance to Jimi in her Hendrix get-up and Anna’s to Janis in her Joplin one and even, more heartbreakingly, to Dibs’s parents since the girls had built their costumes - assemblages themselves - from the clothes that had belonged to Rosemary’s daughter and son-in-law which Rosemary had never been able to throw away. Hilda had always preached that style was all about the edit - one must never overdress, ever, ever, ever - so the bewigged shirtless Lenny was bewilderingly sexy as he strode nipples-first into the room as Jim Morrison and Hilda was, no doubt, going to hold court at the party as David Bowie just by having dyed her already spiky grey hair red and putting a different color contact lens in one of her eyes that also made its pupil appear much larger. On her forehead was painted a silverly golden astral sphere.
“Ziggy!” exclaimed Rosemary when she saw Hilda.
“Do you like her forehead?” Lenny asked Rosemary as he gave the girls each a hug before stepping back to touch - rather too alluringly - those nipples of his which made the girls giggle. “I did that, that piece of artwork on her head.”
“Not exactly like Pierre Laroche’s design,” said Hilda. “But I told him he might consider becoming a makeup artist. He’s certainly got an in.”
“Who?” asked Rosemary.
“Pierre Laroche,” said Hilda, using yet again her italicized voice while checking out the art displayed about the gallery. “He was born in Algiers, moved to France. Settled in England. Became a make-up artist for Elisabeth Arden, but quit after five years because the company insisted he became more - what’s the word - hmmm - conservative. He then became a freelancer and found himself - yes, found himself - by becoming the makeup artist for the rock stars and celebrities of his day. He went on tour with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones and became responsible for some of David Bowie’s most iconic looks.”
“Mom,” said Lenny. “Stop it.”
“Rosemary,” said Hilda, stopping it. “This is some of your best work. Which piece are you going to sell? I bet its this reimagined thermos,” she said always having loved this conceptual aspect to Rosemary’s work for she would choose one piece to offer to collectors and then take the rest of the art and burn it down by the river. She would then take the ashes to incorporate into the next grouping of assemblages by shellacking the ashes onto the pieces she would next make, continuity and ritual becoming a part of her public practice as an artist as well as her secret one - Hilda had yet to discover this - as a grandmother.
“I haven’t decided yet,” said Rosemary.
“Wait,” said Hilda, taking in Rosemary’s look - a man’s suit, skinny tie, black pompadoured wig, dark glasses. “Who are you supposed to be? I don’t remember any lesbian rock stars.”
The girls giggled. Lenny rolled his eyes. “Mom,” he said again. “Stop it.”
Rosemary: “Roy Orbison.”
“But wasn’t he a country singer?” asked Hilda.
“No. He just had the plaint of one,” said Rosemary.
“Come on, guys,” said Lenny. “Let’s go sit out back and wait for the guests. They’re about to have one of their over-our-heads conversations.”
“Lenny,” said Hilda with a purposeful mimicking plaint in her voice. “Stop it.”
(Above: “Standard with Wood” by Kurt Schwitters. 1947)
Just as Dibs and Anna and Lenny would often sit silently inside and listen to Rosemary and Hilda talking and sipping wine back on the porch, the women moved closer to the back door to listen to the three of them giggle and gossip as they sat on the back steps and waited for the teenage birthday party guests who would make an interesting mix for the art opening’s invitees. The women themselves fell silent, the better to eavesdrop, each with their own purpose to do so. Hilda was secretly afraid that her son might have contracted the new gay cancer that was being more than whispered about now and wondered if he would confess such a thing to the girls if he had. Rosemary was concerned about Dibs’s lack of menstruation even as she appeared outwardly to have reached puberty. Her human body was a manifestation that could not seem to manifest that aspect - not yet. It was more worrying at this stage to Rosemary than remembering floating Scrabble tiles and Pan’s tethering of Lucifer’s light around himself when they first appeared together in her home. She’d settle for some ichor at this point.
“I bet most everybody comes as Madonna,” said Dibs as Rosemary and Hilda cocked their ears to listen.
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