The Renegade

So many of Nann’s friends seem to know the history of almost everything, where it was published, and who really did the work to publish it. Books and artworks are everywhere in her loft apartment. There are canvases stacked four and five deep in the guest room with the folded blankets. Her friends are awkward in groups, having spent so much time alone. Warbly on social legs, they’re like loose drawings without frames. She’s a lot like them.

She hosts a Sunday conversation on housing then one on voter redistricting. She likes the energy of these events, artists waking up, realizing they can’t be neutral.

She gets a telemarketing phone call saying she’s won a cruise. She hangs up on the chipper recorded voice and calls her nephew. He doesn’t answer.

She looks at her canvases and the work of former students kitchen-hung in cohabitation with the dented pots she uses. Where would all of this go later, when she dies? Her sister’s family wouldn’t do anything about it.

Her friends seem to read the rest of everything she doesn’t read. Her lovers talk about their CVs, about what is missing from them, why they won’t get the awards they think they should be considered for. They tell her this from her shower, from the toilet, at the folding TV table she uses for meals.

Nann didn’t spend more than a few days in college and was always an annoyance to her teachers in high school—not showing up, reading more than they did. She moved to New York with a lover, with a duffel bag. She taught for a stint in California, in a sculpture department, driving around in her red convertible, before they didn’t ask her to come back. Even when she was there, she was still a New Yorker.

She attended a whistling concert in Central Park once and, every year or so, the opera. She knows how to make some vegan dishes that she thinks are pretty good, but she isn’t vegan. She avoids her landlord, who is rent-controlled and does not fix the elevator.

She almost always asks a question during question-and-answer and people at talks usually think she sounds frustrated. She can draw anything just as it is with seemingly few marks—a crumpled piece of notebook paper, an elbow, an ankle.

Every weekend, she pulls a couple of dead leaves off her plants, and if they are leaning too much toward the sun, she rotates them to help them straighten up.

Even when she can’t really afford to, she gives money to the still cash-strapped nonprofits that had earlier produced her performances. She spends time on the phone convincing her friends to buy the work of a young painter she likes who makes black-and-white cartoons that look sort of like they’re doing yoga.

When she doesn’t want to leave the house, her friends tell her she just has to show up and show her face, that she will be adored. After all, she is well-collected. There are her portraits; they are known. But, she is nervous anyway. She always feels unprepared.

She keeps soap slivers and seems to never finish a bottle of shampoo. In her bathroom, you can hardly see the edges of the tub. She’s known Jack Whitten, Paul McCarthy, Yoko Ono, Richard Foreman, Anne Waldman, and Sylvia Sleigh. She knows all the words to a number of Russian and Irish folk songs she sings at Thanksgiving.

She knows the streets. She can feel in her body when they are about to get busy. She knows where Lead Belly lived in New York with his wife Martha. She knows where Susan Sontag lived in Chelsea, where Alan Sonfist built his primordial park, and where Gordon Matta-Clark arranged railroad ties into a small park trellis and amphitheater.

She knows all the diners in the city and the waiters and waitresses recognize her, know what she likes (soup, turkey clubs, lite beer), how she sweats from below her sideburns in droplets that spring up there, and how she whips her hair. She is alone again now, without a lover, but probably not for long.

She is surprised by how often people wear sneakers, but she does too. Hers are bright orange. She goes to a place called the Performance Garage in Delaware to see one of her students win an award. She says: “We used to wear ties and dresses to performances. We weren’t capable of constant contact the way people are now—this weird digital intimacy. But we looked nicer.”

She responds to all of her emails graciously within a few days or apologizes for being grumpy which no one perceives because they value her critique of their play or her response to their boyfriend’s comments about the president.

Nann says, “Come on over.”

She gets up from her chair and hardly ever ponders over a passage in a painting, but she loses herself for days worried about a faraway hurricane. She watches news talk shows. She reads a book about North Korea then the second edition of a book she’s read before on race and sociology. The people who come to visit her show her their thesis drafts or their ‘zines and hand-sewn verses. Her bedroom ceilings are long-past peeling.

She likes cannoli.

When she paints, it has to be all texture, like a swamp with sticks. She has puppets, a bugle she can play, underlined articles she likes or that piss her off.

The landlord probably doesn’t mean to be a prick, she thinks. His son could get more for her apartment and the building. She eats crackers. She doesn’t mind them stale. She makes coffee and goes for leftovers in the fridge.