Small Town

Whatever the foundation for the Carpenter’s acts, it was unarguable that the man was obsessed. He hadn’t just suddenly lost his temper. He was, if not an artist, unquestionably a craftsman, from the planning of his projects through the selection of his tools to the execution of the finished work. And he managed all this because he was a man obsessed.

She knew a little about that.

She found herself these days in the grip of not one but three obsessions; rather than conflict with one another, they seemed to her to be complementary. Honoring all three of them, serving all three of them, she maintained her sanity.

The first, and surely it was the one that would be most easily justified to the world at large, was her increasing obsession with the works of Emory Allgood. She’d set firm dates now for the one-man show she was giving him. It would open on Saturday, November 2, and would be up for two weeks.

In preparation for the show, she found herself making frequent visits to her storage space, sometimes with no apparent purpose beyond that of familiarizing herself with the work, of absorbing its essence. She had responded unequivocally to Allgood’s constructions from the beginning, and her certainty of its merit only grew greater over time.

One piece drew her more than the others. This didn’t mean it was better, only that it had something special about it that worked particularly well for her. The central element of it had begun life as a spool, shaped like a spool of thread in a sewing cabinet but much larger — precisely thirty-two inches high, with the flanges twenty-one inches in diameter. The core, itself some ten inches thick, was of pine, the flanges of half-inch fir plywood.

Once it had held wire or cable of some sort, wrapped around its core like sewing thread around an inch-long spool. Now it held — what? The sins of the world, that would be her guess.

He’d mounted it on what must have been the steel base of some sort of low stool, and had driven all manner of objects into the wooden spool. The effect was not unlike that of West African nail fetishes, where an upended log, sometimes but not always carved into a human form, was pierced hundreds upon hundreds of times with nails — or, in one example she’d seen at the Brooklyn Museum, with the blades of knives, all of them rusted.

Like most African tribal pieces, the nail fetishes were art only in the Western viewer’s perception; like the masks and shields and drums that filled museums and important collections, they were purely functional in the eyes of those who made them. She’d long since forgotten the purpose of the nail fetishes, if she’d ever been clear on it in the first place, and she couldn’t hope to guess what had prompted a wild-eyed little black man in Brooklyn to stab knives and forks into the wooden spool, to pound nails and screws and miscellaneous bits of hardware into it, to screw in a brass doorstop here, the wooden knobs from a chest of drawers there. Why had he done it — and, most mysterious of all, how had he managed in the process to create not a mad jumble, not a discordant conglomeration of junk, but an artifact of surpassing beauty?

The Sins of the World — that’s what she would call it, and it would be on the cover of the exhibition catalog and on the postcards as well. She was positive someone would snatch it up, couldn’t imagine Gregory Schuyler letting it get away from him, but she didn’t know if she could bear to part with it. She might find she needed to hang on to it.

In the meantime, it had migrated from her storage bin to her living room, where it occupied a place of honor. There she was able to confirm that it wasn’t just her, that others responded to it in much the same way she did. You couldn’t just walk past it. It grabbed your lapels, demanding attention.

And it received rather more attention these days than it might have at an earlier time, not because it had changed, not even because the world had changed. It was simply seen by more people now, because her apartment was receiving more visitors than it had in the past.

And that, of course, was the result of her second obsession.

Her sex life, she was quite certain, was sane and manageable. She had to keep reassuring herself of this, however, because it was without doubt a far cry from what society regarded as either sane or manageable. She was having sex when she wanted, with whomever she wanted, in whatever fashion she desired.

If she were a man, she sometimes thought, what she was doing would be seen as demonstrating no end of good, even wholesome male qualities. The only way a man could engage in sexual behavior that the world would deem excessive was if he forced himself on others, took his pleasure with children, or caught a fatal disease in the course of his adventures. (And even the latter was only punishment for his transgressions if he caught it from another man; if he got it from a woman, it was just the worst kind of bad luck.)