Late this January, encouraged by the sheer familiarity of a vertical motion — snow’s impersonal descent over the neighborhood, creaking freshly underfoot; its vicious rise, so steep, to the mnemonic occasion — questions around the ugliness of everything began to take on renewed urgency across the mind’s more circular regions. To help make much-needed headway on This Truly Fascinating, Very Subtle and Entirely Sincere Question, facilitator Leon Teener — known in every corner of the body as the stone, his roundtables only ever interrupted by the effortless soarings of S. J. Bellamy, known everywhere else as the bird — wasted no time calling up the four characters most wont to meet his evenhanded gaze: renowned (uggo) scholar Hank Beale, conceptual (loser) architect Hugh Downing, actor-cum-(idiot) politician Emmett Curtis, and precocious (oh and bum, above all bum) novelist Nigel Stubbs.
What follows is a faithful transcript of the five gentlemen’s conversation, which has been edited and lightly filled in for comprehensiveness. Indeed, in view of troubling reports, now confirmed, that no traces of telegenic, charismatic, analytic, and certainly hard-working Leon Teener have surfaced since this particular roundtable, a decision was made for archival purposes to render this atypical document in full, including elements of interstitial commentary not ordinarily retained.
That said — and this cannot be stressed enough — readers are discouraged from trying to “read anything” into any non-attributed text, should it arise. The subject of the roundtables’ apparent end, after years of loyal service, remains a sensitive one for their once-convivial lady-host. Some surmise, desperate for even a trace of gossip under the sidewalk’s mute patches of sun, that the discussions are only on a temporary hiatus, shoring up strength before their inevitable return. Others murmur, stealing eloquent glances before the heat ministers silence to their very faces, that perhaps the sessions never ended at all, but rather managed to encrypt themselves somehow, unfolding as we speak in a black box where there is no telling what kinds of horrors are said and done each day. Others still, catching the general drift and leaping cravenly into the narrowing opening, the warm wet gap of pleasure itself, shoo both camps of alarmists away, insisting that no, the roundtables are finished.
“For good!” they add, embracing the new language.
Now this they shouldn’t. Basic good taste aside (warm wet gap, seriously?), the violence of the roundtables’ silent end cannot but tell — as simple logic would tell you — of some parallel violence in their origin; and while one might assume this to be A Well-Trodden Path it is actually the same Mutant, Unknowable Place it first promised to be, seeded to this day with rumors of amphibian eyes, errant toads turning slowly in the half-light, stirrings inside the curtains, and all manner of primordial terrors; a place about which one particularly fragile early reader — who, one can only hope, was exaggerating — even used the word —
Why Is Everything So Ugly?
Who knew. Who knew. But the first order of business, it was obvious to Leon Teener — who had expected a discreet promotion by now but, owing no doubt to some garden-variety wing-beating by Bellamy, instead sat usual-stanced at his usual table — would be to catch cleverly and efficiently that slimy little word, “so.”
Teener had come up with the discussion’s title in one fell swoop, as had been his habit for some time now; and far from him to consider that a stray adverb might have gotten picked up on the way down. On the contrary, the more seconds he’d spent with it, the more deeply his sentence’s perfection had impressed itself upon him: Why was everything so ugly?
The lithe body of these five words, their partwise integrity and easy fellowship, so delighting him that he’d spent the better part of his prep minute edging them coyly, sometimes wrapping them in placatory quotes, sometimes serving them an underline or two for sport, but in any case devoting not one corner of his 60-page sheaf to the memory of the four experts who would soon be assembling around the question he had been oh-so-wrong to think of — he realized now, as they slowly filled the once-vestal space of the room — as a shape.
That the particular bulge which his premature celebration had blinded him to was this “so” had become clear to him exactly as soon as the men’s physical realities had. Four voices, eight wrists, and who could say how many bones in all their breakneck concretion, and with them the awareness that there was something, well, yes . . . a little girly about it. Some glutinous, wobbling jelly quality, a loose-limbed so weird, soo sad, sooo funny bounce that, although it succeeded only in making itself look silly, betrayed also a patent desire — and this was what most worried Teener as the men settled into their seats — of passing that silliness onto “ugly,” of making ugly somehow the problem now, insufficient and yet also overeager, as if it was the poor word’s fault for not finding a way to curl back into itself once it had done its work, instead hanging around like a smiling bozo crepe after turning that perfectly nice preamble, “so,” barely a real word at all, or certainly not as much one as “ugly” was, into a useless chamber pot for its own wanton gushing.
But now Hank Beale shifted politely in his chair, peeked at the back of his brief, and, seeing that nothing further was written there, made like he had only been trying to smooth out the already flat page. Nigel Stubbs made amused introductions with Emmett Curtis, whose cubic face he dimly recognized from his HDTV. Hugh Downing, meanwhile, stared straight ahead at the defunct plastic wall clock that constituted the room’s only decoration, having presumably had time by now to apprehend his own copy, lettered in a Hellenistic, feta-bucket-inspired font that Teener was, out of the four, proudest of.
Which there was no point reminiscing about, at this juncture. A heavy silence was making its way along the table and, with Stubbs and Curtis having just barreled through the topic of Curtis’s two children’s ages, Teener had to think fast about something other than lunch.
LEON TEENER
Welcome. Please, make yourselves at home. We can skip the foreplay, yes? Grown-ups’ table and all? Alright. Let’s skip the foreplay. We are gathered here today to answer, together, a question I know is just as close to your hearts as it is to mine.
On the one hand, omitting the “so” altogether would only draw further attention to it; on the other, emphasizing “ugly” would, in a typically wily double-bind, vindicate the spirit that had suggested its appropriateness to begin with. Teener’s only option, then, was to make like “so” had been a natural part of the sentence all along. To “say so,” as the truism went, and like he meant it, too. From the throat, with teeth. That’s right. Teener would put the emphasis on “so,” and let these bastards test him if they thought they could keep it up longer than he could hold it down.
TEENER (cont’d)
Why is everything so ugly?
The creak of a chair. A measured smirk from Stubbs. He was quite sure he had seen Downing audibly wince. But now the session had begun. Teener had no choice but to trundle on, teasing from the golden curlicues of his pages the distant thread of an “everything” which, ironically, really had been the nexus of his idea in the first place.
TEENER (cont’d)
That’s right: Everything. It might sound grandiose, and the sort of notion one can rarely use anymore without undercutting it with avowals of theatricality, expeditiousness, or downright bait, or at least with the recognition that such avowals might be due. But when the chance first arose to talk about ugliness it simply was evident to me that, in a rather literal sense, “everything” was what was at play. I would look at close-held strollers in the park and indeed, “see” it; at dogs sticking their heads happily out of cars, tongues lolling in the wind, and sure enough, there it was; even at the innermost corners of my own mind, where I was sure I would find absolutely nothing, and lo: further ugliness. Landing on such a terrifying nugget, then, was not so much a choice — and Dr. Beale’s work deals so intimately with this idea that I won’t risk any second-hand butchery there — as it was, well, I suppose you might call it a concession. The only available option that didn’t involve deceit, and in particular deceit of precisely that most available kind: self-deceit.
Teener was starting to breathe a little easier. He could tell that “self-deceit” had already done quite some work for him there.
TEENER (cont’d)
Now, was there something, I suppose you could call it, “assaultive” about this everything’s immediacy, its instant, penetrating truth-value? Possibly. But that this quality was precisely what enraptured me to it is something which I imagine, from your speed in responding to my invitation, you will all sympathize with already. Let us, then, unburdened of any superfluous unease or semantic hesitation, put the question to ourselves in just the same terms as it is clearly begging, timidity notwithstanding, to be put to itself: Why Is Everything So Ugly?
Satisfied with this introduction, Teener gathered his pages and clamped them upright on the table. Partly to bring them into a neater pile, but partly also to shake off the residual image that had been curling up between his legs since that siren “so” had momentarily threatened to throw him off the gunwale. What image that was, he would not say. There was no reason why he should say. It was a private image, his own, personal, pigtail.
No!
But it was gone now. He’d only needed to say it once. Pigtail: sucked back into his mind’s eye whole by a force somehow neither himself nor it. If Teener had been more familiar with God, he would have started by thanking Him.
TEENER (cont’d)
Before we dive in today, I’d like to start by thanking Hank Beale. His contributions to the long understudied field of ugliness, indeed his simultaneous delimitation and destabilization of the very concept, cannot be overstated. As the discipline’s foremost voices have noted, there truly is ugliness pre-Beale and ugliness post-Beale. In any case I would be remiss not to acknowledge that, without him, we might not even have had an ugliness to talk about here today.
Another creak, this time from a different chair. Downing, it was clear now, was making a willful effort to unsettle the room, telegraphing displeasure on areas of his face it could not possibly have had time to reach. Still, Teener had to admit that in this case the blunder was his. He’d already trod a narrow line with the choice-concession business, and now he could not but raise his gaze stoically toward it, the solitary error, the unutterable sore.
Hank Beale’s face, or whatever it could be called. A singularity, scavenged from fractal hell(s). The face that had eaten Hank Beale’s face. The worst thing to happen to faces since time.
All now-famous soundbites, coined by Beale himself, who, all things considered, had managed to see himself through with admirable composure. But really it was something sadder, and this Hank Beale would have never found the words to say: a face that shouldn’t have been left like that.
Teener had known from the start that this zany Schrödinger’s cat of insult — to look at Beale; to not look at Beale — would be one of the peculiar challenges of the session, and had in fact devoted much thought to how it might be best mitigated after recognizing that he would not be able to find, or make, an object horrible enough with which to practice. At points this quandary had so anguished him that he had considered uninviting Beale altogether.
But this could not be: Beale was the world’s preeminent ugliness scholar, the first in fact to make such a previously nebulous notion material — including, even if they didn’t know it, to satellites like Curtis, Stubbs, or even Downing. Every notion traceable to some distinction he’d introduced, and every year a new magisterial monograph, always with a self-tickling title like “A Bad Case of the Uglies: Phenomenological Rift in the Age of Medicalized Normativity” or “That Only a Mother Could Love: Aesthetic Partiality and the Intimacy-Bias Effect.”
It was only the apparent sufficiency of these tickles to Beale’s otherwise unaccountable good mood that made Teener forgive himself, now, the scrappiness of his save.
TEENER (cont’d)
Dr. Beale’s experience is matched only by that of our, well, no less remarkable speakers. Hugh Downing, whose iconic conceptual works have, in the words of the Royal Academy of Architecture, “visited a reverberant reckoning upon the entire British architectural establishment.” Nigel Stubbs, a rare talent and longtime friend, whose much-awaited novel Ugly Babe, forthcoming this spring, promises an “unflinching dive into the underbelly of the unspeakable.” And last but certainly not least, Emmett Curtis, whom just last year I would have been delighted to introduce as the beloved title character of NTC’s hit show Norm, but whose recent turn into state politics has made even that fine pedigree obsolete. Without your tireless incursions into ethos and praxis alike, I doubt I would have been able to venture into a “why” as touchy as this one without old clichés — falling on deaf ears, coming out tongue-tied, etc. — leaving my fun dead on arrival. From the bottom of my heart, then, thank you.
A pause. Whether Teener hesitated or not, considered alternative routes, made detours however cursory into questions of form and matter and sense, was a question of little interest; he was, in the end, going to do it. It was going to be done: there.
TEENER (cont’d)
Thank you for coming.
Done.
Four men. Five, if you counted him, which he supposed some sticklers inevitably would. Five men, too, for Why Is Everyone So Careless? Five for Why Is Everywhere So Bleak? Four for Why Is Everything So Different Now?, because that time Teener had only invited three guests as a sly metatextual gag that had been lost on his either humorless or apparently short-sighted party.
But could he really be blamed for his gatherings’ fraternal grain? (The phrase “boys’ club” sometimes tugged at the edge of his consciousness, but it only served to evoke ashtrays, G-strings, and other sins too far on the outskirts of Teener’s reality for him to be able to enjoy its long reverb.) The truth, in any case, was simpler than all that. No woman had accepted Teener’s invitation. And he would happily say as much himself to anyone peeved enough to ask.
That no woman had received one, either, was a detail he reserved the right to keep his own — and that, turning it around now in his mind, he was hard-pressed to imagine himself easily cornered into disclosing.
“Mr. Tanner! Mr. Tanner!”
(He always simplified his name, for speed, to Tanner in the press conference scenario, and employed similar shortcuts to flesh out the gaggle of reporters. To the women, then, the disrobed, windswept look of Liberty as seen in the French Revolution; to the men, the face of Bellamy had things not gone so badly for him after the utility pole accident, which he sometimes gave himself leave to fold into the story for how earnestly the detail would ask.)
“Mr Tanner,” one distraught Marianne might say. “Did you invite any women to join your roundtable today?”
A beat. Suspense had to go first. He would hold the door, the line, the microphone in his sweatless palms.
“Sorry. I think your tits are stuck in your — I couldn’t quite — your ass —”
“Oh my. Jesus. Mr Tanner. I’m so sorry. Is that better?”
“Sure.”
“I was just wondering, if you wouldn’t mind sharing — how many women did you ask to your roundtable today?”
No beat this time: “As many as you want, baby. Throw out a number, a hole’s a hole.”
The nonplussed murmurs, the disoriented groans, the time for square pegs to enter the picture and confusingly round out the whole. Round out the hole? Hopeful looks, and the fledgling dawn of understanding; but no. The general chaos would buy Teener enough time to invite at least one woman.
…who would fumble her way to a seat, having presumably brought her own chair; mouth flustered apologies for being late; and, as everyone shuffled to coax the table back into symmetry — quietly irritated by how long this whole thing was taking, and all to express a point which surely, by now, was obvious — wind up squarely behind Beale’s microphone by the time she readied herself to speak.
But first perhaps she could let the man get a word in.
HANK BEALE
I’m sure I speak for all of us, Mr. Teener, when I say that the urgency of confronting ugliness in all its thorny particulars has always been front of mind. Before I venture further, we have the table for one go-around, correct?
TEENER
That’s right. One go-around.
Teener said this with an arch smile he knew to be unnecessary. His sessions, despite having been recently capped at a single go-around, had famously never dipped below the four- to five-go mark. More often they would sidle up to double digits, and even then reconvene soon enough for another round. In fact Why Is Everywhere So Bleak? had just that week posted a record for seven consecutive recalls of upwards of four go-arounds each. Why the one-go limit had been decreed at all, Teener did not know, but he was certain that it had survived its author.
BEALE
Then let’s not waste any time. In all my years of studying the dizzyingly vast world of ugliness, the only truly definitive conclusion I’ve reached is that inquiry can sense when it’s being too delicately handled, and it doesn’t like getting bored. Let me open, then, with a proposition as naked as the subject invites: everything is so ugly because ugliness is funny.
Teener quivered. This was even more titillating a start than he had hoped for.
BEALE (cont’d)
Take the sentence, “I’ll always remember how sad I was when I found out that Santa wasn’t real, and it was only my uncle Gerald whose dick I was sucking.”
A ripple of laughter passed through the room, hastily reined in.
BEALE (cont’d)
And now, just as an example, take my face.
If Beale noticed the flinches that even his express warning had failed to prevent, he did not let on.
BEALE (cont’d)
What do these things have in common? Nothing about the “items” they begin with so much as the subversive captures which they subject these items to. A childhood reference, captured by an adult one. A human face, captured by an inhuman lot. Two worlds that should have remained separate, no longer so. And in their dissonance, a strange kind of shock-harmony recalling, if not precisely the pleasure of laughter, then certainly the seizing of some latent possibility just as a) all-consumptive, b) involuntary, and c) unmediated as it.
Beale knew as he spoke, of course, that he could’ve said anything and still held the group’s horrified attention. But this didn’t bother him anymore. And not through anything so depressing as habit. No, what kept him not just afloat, but buoyantly so, was a private faith — made even stronger, even surer to him by its brazen irony — in balance. The secret conviction that it would all not only be made up to him, but tenfold. Why not as disproportionately, after all, as the first time around? It was on the force of this tacit understanding that he glided happily through his days, and sometimes almost guiltily so, for being the only one aware of the indecent reparations awaiting him at the bottom.
BEALE (cont’d)
Of course, this begs the question of why these two planes should meet in the first place. In saying that everything is so ugly because ugliness is funny, but not giving an account of funniness’s own operative properties, I’ve achieved little more than if I’d proposed that the stars are so bright because the night sky contains nothing to look at but them. But perhaps even this poetic flourish is not the worst place to start.
Not the worst place to start sounded to Emmett Curtis like probably the safest place to join.
EMMETT CURTIS
Way to kick us off, Hank! I love that space analogy you just made. Especially now that, in a society saturated with electrical lights, we never do see the night sky. If there was a power outage we’d have to bumble around using our phones’ flashlights, or asking strangers for directions. Similarly, in a world full of external beauty it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint, when considering such an abstract idea as the “cause” of ugliness, what it is exactly that we’re even talking about.
Curtis got the sense while he was talking that the others were making faces, Downing a slightly amused smile, Stubbs some twitchy stroking of his stubble. He figured it might be helpful to pepper his points with occasional nods to his professional credentials, lest the group write him off as just another pretty face with more words than he knew what to make of.
CURTIS (cont’d)
Speaking for myself, the type of ugliness I find most disturbing is the moral kind. Of course this was a belief I’d already started exploring as an actor with my character Norm, who crisscrosses all across America in his work as a vigilante. But then one day I woke up and I thought: Wait. Why should protecting the moral order fall to regular folks like Norm? Why are we such fans of stories where the little guy is all that stands between us and evil? That’s when I realized I no longer wanted to be the face of the Norms of the world. I wanted to help build a world where there was no need for Norms to exist at all.
Curtis was rather proud of this slogan, which he and his wife Doreen had recently perfected together. The truth was that, although nobody here could have guessed it, the transition to political life had not been as easy as his prior immersion in fame had led him to expect. The chance to “show the world what [he] was made of,” as Doreen had put it, was actually why Curtis had been so eager to join the roundtable in the first place. Especially after Ann Arbor.
It was a statewide policy forum, the kind he’d quickly developed a knack for, and he’d been remarking on how frequently the happiest women around him seemed to light taper candles before dinner, or even do something as simple as put little ice cubes in everyone’s water, when a short, pudgy-looking lady, some down-ballot incumbent from the next town over, started grinning into her double chin: “Maybe some slight selection bias to adjust for there, before we can establish nationwide frequency?” Curtis patiently assured her that frequency couldn’t be “adjusted.” It was just whatever number you got. Some inexplicable laughter wavering through the auditorium, which curdled into applause when the lady responded, sitting up suddenly, chins unified, “In the right hands, maybe it stands a chance.”
That was all. But the worst part was that, even now, Curtis could not see what on earth the little woman might’ve meant by the right “hands” — probably because, as Doreen later concluded, neither could she.
At least, Curtis tried to remember, his home life remained as wonderful as ever. True, since the birth of their youngest, he and Doreen hadn’t yet been intimate again. But they still laughed. They still flirted. They would refer to sex as “seesawing,” to avoid tipping off the oldest, though they couldn’t have foreseen all the cheeky high-jinks the image would create opportunity for.
— Can we seesaw another time?
— Whenever you’re up for it. I’m always down.
— Wow! That one’s going to take me a while to get over.
— I thought it was under you preferred?
— Emmett!
— Sorry. But I felt like we were getting back into the swing of things.
— Can we just sit?
Curtis wasn’t embarrassed by the safe word Doreen had chosen. Why should he be? Some men didn’t have sex at all. His sympathy for them was only deepened by how close he’d occasionally come, these last two years, to counting himself among them.
TEENER
Of course, Mr. Curtis, those of us less civically active than you may need to admit the possibility that there is no such world. Only a strange shadow, always lurking beneath our day-to-day life, asking to be reckoned with.
Teener was trying to bait Downing into the conversation. Stubbs knew that. Not only because he, too, had watched the interview where Downing spoke of “a mysterious frequency, always humming beneath our everyday life, asking to be contended with,” but also because he knew everything there was to know about Teener. They were old friends, practically inseparable during college — Teener with his tractable intelligence, easily canalized, Stubbs with his restless, over-associative mind, always tripping over itself. Not that Stubbs envied Teener for it. His world had shrunk to just these hermetic roundtables, while Stubbs’ remained infinitely extensible across the boundless province of his novel-in-progress. It was only that Stubbs, from his more capacious perspective, could tell that Teener, from his stunted one — and yet no less vainglorious than before, as the casual largesse with which he’d phrased his invitation to Stubbs had confirmed — believed himself to have somehow “won.”
NIGEL STUBBS
I think what you’re trying to say, Leon, is that to talk about ugliness as if it were an avoidable “outcome” of our world rather than one of its process-inherent features might be a mistake in kind. But look, personally, I would push back on that idea.
This was actually one of the central themes of Stubbs’ own novel Ugly Babe, or at least it certainly could be. He’d initially told people he was working on the novel simply to keep them off his back, but over time repetition had begun to prejudice him against other plans. The title was inspired by a friend of his, Lucia — a rather lovely girl, actually, whom he might have asked out if he’d been able to supply himself with an extra reason to do so, which, judging by the fact that he never did, he supposed he hadn’t — who once told him that her mother had been a sex-trafficking victim as a teenager in Colombia, rescued only by the backhanded chance of some passing American who, apparently forgetting that Lucia’s mother had just spoken English right in front of him, told her madam with the slightest flick of his fingers: “No ugly babes.”
Wasn’t that the coldest thing you’d ever heard? But Lucia now worked at an emergency women’s shelter, which suggested to Stubbs that she’d managed to glean only the most literal interpretation of her mother’s story. What he wanted Ugly Babe to recover instead was its true, innermost kernel, both for Lucia’s sake and for her mother’s. And yet, six years later, every entry point Stubbs had considered still seemed too partial — approximate in some maddening, ineffable sense — to warrant his actually committing it to the page in full.
To awaken the writer inside him, Stubbs would sometimes try little tricks, like smoking a cigarette, or resolving to have sex in a more “sexual” way moving forward. But Stubbs didn’t like cigarettes. He liked dried apricots and cashews.
STUBBS (cont’d)
Take dried apricots, for example. How they make fresh apricots seem tasteless by comparison even though, presumably, the first person to dry an apricot must have been moved to do so by some appreciation of apricots’ taste. It’s precisely by proceeding comparatively that we denature objects that, on their own, would’ve been just fine. Make ugly that which, without our intervention, would have only ever been itself.
Pleased with this last line, Stubbs shot a furtive glance at Teener. But Teener was looking, ominously, at Beale.
BEALE
In the sense that fresh apricot should not have been dried at all, or that dried apricot should not have been made referent, in an ideal model of human cognition, to the fresh apricot it referred to?
STUBBS
The latter. Definitely.
BEALE
Ah. The problem of self-reference. An idea very close to ugliness. Or perhaps, rather, a very ugly idea indeed . . .
Whenever Beale spoke, Downing would snap back to attention. Partly due to a general interest in extremes, but mostly due to his finding the man smart. Or at least, thinking he did. Downing had read his latest paper, “That Only a Mother Could Love,” on aesthetic partiality and the something something effect. But all he could access of its contents now was the image it had produced in his mind, of hundreds of mothers picketing outside some Yankee academic building, holding signs reading Hath Not a Mother Eyes? and Leave Women and Children Out of This.
Though he felt some remorse in this particular case, Downing credited much of his professional success to this capacity, really this uncontainable gift, for producing unasked-for images. All through his university years, when his talentless peers had snubbed him in tacit ways — an error painfully obvious to them now — he’d essentially survived each day on a single picture: that of the inconceivable behemoths, composed of waves, thrusts, slips, pulses, and prongs, and only ever as phallic as the viewer insisted, that he would someday visit upon the world.
Of course, his powers of imagination also had their downsides. Take sex, for example. Not that there weren’t others — but this one came up frustratingly often for Downing. Just this month he’d been forced to forswear edge-of-the-bed doggy-style altogether for how it had burned him through three consecutive girlfriends by inducing the same thought each time, that he was relieving himself, relieving himself like at the urinal, and how could he be turned on by someone who reminded him only of his capacity, shared with bonobos, with gerbils, and even, he thought as he brought himself to a begrudging finish, with other people, to expel whatever inside him was asking for expulsion?
Had these particular three been given a chance to speak, Downing knew, they would have likely described him as an abomination, a dead set of wires inside a real man’s body, asking what had he done with the human it belonged to, where had he buried its organs? But they wouldn’t be, at least not today, today it was he who was speaking and not too shabbily either, judging by the rapt looks on his colleagues’ faces when he said, relishing the precise acidity of his voice, how instantly it turned the other men’s to squeals:
HUGH DOWNING
I notice that we’ve not yet spoken about perspective.
Perspective was really the sole point Downing had come here to make, his participation the hope that he’d see it fruitfully instantiated by the others, Beale especially, for a recent project of his premised on subtraction. Though it was not impossible that Stubbs — he hadn’t found any of his writing in print — might bring some novelistic feel for omission as a generative principle, too.
DOWNING (cont’d)
From Tokyo to Doha to Berlin, my experiments in concept-led architecture have borne out a familiar maxim: perspective is all. Such that, if everything is so ugly, it may be quite simply because some angle of it already is. No matter how perfect or cautiously handled a form, its foul, freshly perceived counterpart does exist, and from there finding it is just a matter of “being able” or “not being able” to see. Your heart might be soaring, for example, like an eagle, and by all means, enjoy it while it lasts! Because blink once and you’ll find that your precious heart is no longer soaring like an eagle, or even flying like a bird, or even beating its gauzy little wings like an insect, but rather circulating toward unsuspecting others, believed to be primarily airborne, like a virus.
This was just the problem Downing was currently trying to wriggle out of explaining to Carlotta, a youngish, lapsed-Catholic lapsed interest whom he’d continued seeing casually over the last few years out of inertia. In chatty moods his talking, turning her enamored silence to music. But in quiet moods his silence, turning her fussy talking to noise. There was no way out, but crucially no way in, either. At least not without destroying some elemental integrity he rather pitied Carlotta for having encountered so scarcely that she believed she had recognized it in him at all.
DOWNING (cont’d)
What my buildings do, then, is not so much “reveal” this problem as transform it from original sin into sinful originality. Take as a given that all things are eloquent of their context. And that every context, if you go far back enough, is likely to have kept an ugly little apple within its fingertips’ reach.
Though he’d heard Downing’s sin-originality switcheroo before, Teener, for his part, was all ears. Certainly there was something off-putting about the man, not only his dead-eyed look but also his forensic Roman nose and thin, bloodless lips, laid out offhandedly as if evidentiary of a prior crime. Watching his archived interviews, Teener had been thrown by how abruptly each recording seemed to end, realizing only after one particularly hasty fade-to-black that what he’d expected was for some sort of title card to appear, beginning with “Hugh Downing went on to win” and ending, many lines later, with “He was never formally charged with any wrongdoing.”
But he was too curious about the man not to invite him, and particularly about whether this — his apparently visceral deflection into buildings — was part of his appeal for the beautiful women he famously cycled through in droves, primarily through the Eastern European circuit. Less curious, rather — Teener knew it was part of the appeal — than invested: and hopeful, perhaps reasonably so, that Downing’s winning streak might rub off on him, on all of them, racking up Svetlanas galore, though of course Teener would have been happy with just one Svetlana each, and sure, he would take Beale’s too if the poor girl promised to stop crying.
CURTIS
Context is something I think about a lot too, in my line of work as a candidate. It raises the question: Could time be a missing part of our equation here? Things certainly didn’t feel this ugly to me when I was a younger man. Maybe one thing became ugly by accident and corrupted all the others around it.
BEALE
In that case, though, you would still need to account for what occasioned the corruptive accident in the first place.
CURTIS
Exactly. That account is sorely missing from our context right now. During my teens, I remember everything was so beautiful. I felt I was discovering it all for the first time, and that it was not only there for the taking, but actually inviting me in — me, specifically, telling me: Come on in, Emmett! GO, Curtis, GO! Nowadays everything is so loud and unpleasant and grating, as if it didn’t even recognize the existence of any kind of ideal “version” of itself, beyond itself.
The more Curtis spoke, the more Stubbs felt that, in answering the question “Why is everything so ugly?” he might as well have been answering the question, “Why is every girl so ugly?” But he couldn’t yet tell if this feeling was a reflection of Curtis’ mind or of his own, and he waited for Curtis to speak long enough that the distinction might make itself known.
CURTIS (cont’d)
It doesn’t help that everything’s so fake, too, all plastic and packaged and synthetic. It’s like, hello! None of us want that! But I feel like we already know what would make everything less ugly. Now it’s a matter of going out there and actually getting our hands dirty to make it happen. All it would take is for one person to assemble some sort of grid, divide every “thing” up by its parts — aspect, upkeep, spirit, wear, etcetera — then give each part a score, and from there we would easily be able to separate the good apples from the bad. And, even if we weren’t able to fix the bad apples, at least we could keep them from rubbing off as much on the good ones as they do these days.
The problem was that by the time Curtis had finished speaking, Stubbs had already forgotten about his question, or else written it off as evidence of a deeper confusion in terms than he’d initially suspected. It stood to reason that he — he, Curtis; or he, Stubbs; or, for all he knew, any of the others — should replace “everything” with “girls.” Girls were everything to them. They always had been.
The same could not be said about Downing. Downing wanted to talk about buildings. On the strength of the evidence, Downing wanted to be a building, his back tensing at odd intervals as if to push against its give. Certainly he would have thrashed around, during Curtis’ rant about apples, if it hadn’t threatened his structural integrity.
Now he saw a way to slice through and went in for the kill.
DOWNING
Obviously the grid, as both method and metaphor, is a temptation. I was trained at the Royal Academy, where there were essentially grids up everyone’s assholes. Much of my early work was calibrated on those assholes themselves, and it’ll come as no surprise that none of you have seen any of it.
This origin story wasn’t a lie exactly. In the sense that the story was true, and Downing must have had an origin, and it was never him fusing these two facts into any particular claim. But still as he spoke, another story loitered around his mind, announcing itself with a familiar “ding.”
DOWNING (cont’d)
But what grids get wrong is their tacit assumption of commensurability.
That Downing had not been selected for membership in the Wren Honor Society was not the problem. That had never been the problem. No, what tolled on in his mind was what he’d done the night of the selected architects’ initiation. To this day, he didn’t know what had gotten into him. How he could have convinced himself, even if the cohort had been chosen anonymously, on the strength only of their designs — just what made the brush-off so maddening — that it would be a good idea to rent out a three-piece suit, hang around the Wren House until there were no other initiates left, and when the time came, simply ring the doorbell as if he was the latest among them.
A minute passing under that tyrannical arch.
Two. Nothing but the sloping voussoirs.
Three. Still the pointed ribs, and now a little less than nothing.
But just as Downing had begun to turn back towards his residential college — promising himself that he would prove them spectacularly wrong, prove them extinct, in fact, invent buildings so protuberant they could swallow up their anorexic 19th-century cottage like a suppository — he was sure that he heard, just behind the door, so close there could not have been more than a hairline of mortar separating it from him, a chuckle.
And even then, even then the green truth would not ripen until time supplied its missing half: that the higher Downing’s excrescences would fly, the more Wren Houses they would be capable not only of taking in but of spewing out in pebbles, the more this chuckle would in turn distance itself from the street-level view of his younger self, walking home tight-throated in his rental skin, and instead settle somewhat anachronistically on the secret simultaneously born and disposed of by the time he’d folded himself wordlessly into bed: that the true author of such monstrous dongs would forever remain a pitifully, laughably, chucklably tiny ding.
DOWNING (cont’d)
In truth, nothing is commensurable because nothing is continuous. There is no common scale — not even a temporal one. Reality, it turns out, is far less like a musical score’s inlaid melodies than like its white-space catastrophes: the crescendoes, silences, and aftermaths as jarringly self-referential as notes, famously, are not.
Even today, Downing knew — though he no longer lingered on each new instance — seeing the word “ugly” on his brief had evoked the phrase “turned ugly,” and with it the image of himself as that cravatted carcass. Everywhere reminders, every award a mnemonic device, every cut ribbon a tolling bell, and yet nobody else to see it; the wound had always just been inflicted, it would always just be inflicting itself, past and future hot forever on a single scent, his.
DOWNING (cont’d)
Which is why, in my work, the sense that something is wrong arrives well before any feeling for where. And why ugliness, as both category and condition, remains incomprehensible to me unless one begins from the assumption that the known, the visible world is not only nothing: It is less than nothing.
Even before it happened, Downing had always been fond of those stories where obtuse masters turn away genius but guileless apprentices, “who would turn out to be none other than”. . . Giotto di Bondone, Vincent van Gogh, Auguste Rodin. Why should it be too much for him, Hugh Downing, to turn out to be none other than himself, either?
DOWNING (cont’d)
What matters, in other words, is not the perceptible. Not one jot of it. It is the second frequency, the irrepressible remainder, churning under the perceptible’s useless static.
A chill up Curtis’ spine. Downing couldn’t have missed it. “Frequency” was probably one word out of thousands. What were the odds that it would come up here, now, in a sentence that could not have contained more than 12? Curtis knew, rationally, that the taunt could only be in his head. But this seemed exactly as unlikely as his own rationality had just devastatingly exposed.
BEALE
Before we go any further, let us attempt a definition of this second frequency. I try not to burden novelists with more theoretical machinery than they are typically eager to operate, but the apposite quotation by Stendhal — “Beauty is the promise of happiness” — has always seduced me, less for its own implied promise than for its withheld guarantee: namely, that ugliness is the certainty of unhappiness.
STUBBS
I believe the original French translates to beauty being “merely” the promise of happiness, though. No?
BEALE
Sure. Ugliness is nothing less than the certainty of unhappiness, if you prefer.
Stubbs had sensed it before, but now he was sure: Beale suspected some sort of shallowness in him, in the kinds of points he was capable of making. Whether Teener had primed him for this or Stubbs had invited it himself by thinking, admittedly, of the roundtable as little more than a distraction from his writing, not to be yielded to at full capacity, he couldn’t tell.
STUBBS
But suppose we were talking about someone with, well, an ordinary life.
Of course he knew it was brash to use that phrase, “ordinary life,” on Beale, brash like it would be to mention a trip to Thailand to a man who had lost his entire family in a tsunami. Making him traverse not only the fixed point of his predicament, but also the space linking, for him only, neutral signifiers to the nontransferable coordinates of his suffering. But Stubbs couldn’t think of any other way to connect Beale’s line with his next idea, one which he hoped would prove he’d done more, these last six years, than memorize quotes by writers merely less fastidious than he.
STUBBS (cont’d)
In such a person’s life, while everything is just as likely to be ugly, the certainty of unhappiness is far less likely to develop the linguistic apparatus of self-knowledge that certainty stricto sensu requires.
Stubbs had recently encountered the phrase “stricto sensu” in a dictionary of Latin locutions, and if the chance to deploy it hadn’t been the reason he’d accepted Teener’s invitation, exactly, it certainly hadn’t hurt. But the problem was that, in a dilemma exactly inverse to that of “regular life,” he had been so eager to say it that it had now somewhat predetermined his next idea.
STUBBS (cont’d)
What Stendhal’s line suggests to me, then, is something constitutive, not experiential. That everything is so ugly because, if it weren’t, everything else would be inchoate. I won’t do anyone the insult of saying that the ugly is to the non-ugly as death is to life, but you get the idea.
It was then, measuring how easily the sentences were coming to him here against the labored progress he’d been making on Ugly Babe, that Stubbs realized something. He rarely felt he had sufficient cause to speak. Not unless prodded onward by the prospect of connecting existing blocks, or of selecting favorites, as from a word bank, to display side by side (“ugly babe” and “stricto sensu” being two recent examples, but his earliest love was pure, atomic, indivisible “lilliputian”). In fact he’d recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica, where he had repaired for some much needed writing time, but where his most freighted sentence hadn’t appeared until baggage claim back home. The sentence was: “I much prefer hard-shell suitcases to soft-shell ones.” Its concretion had almost made Stubbs jump. Why should he, Nigel Stubbs, have such a thing to say about suitcases — and for no apparent reason at all, since his own suitcases were all, and had all always been, soft-shell?
The irony of this stimulus-dependent speech, given his peerless need for aloneness, so unsettled him now that he considered leaving the roundtable altogether to go write about it. But then there’d still be the selfsame nightmare of having to choose specific words over all the others to do so, not to mention the vestigial hope that he’d be able to smuggle “lilliputian” anywhere, now that he’d alerted it so plainly to his intentions.
STUBBS (cont’d)
Put differently, while there are certainly smells so bad that no amount of deodorant can undo them, most people won’t meaningfully register these over the course of their lives. Which changes nothing about the fact that, were such smells not a certainty, the notion of deodorization would have long forfeited much of its legibility.
DOWNING
A person appraising a smell, though, already presupposes rather far a distance. To me true ugliness would lie, rather, in the smell being able to smell itself.
At this Beale flashed an almost-smile that seemed to untie itself before it could hold.
BEALE
Right . . . a smell shouldn’t be able to smell. I see we’ve made a partial loop here. To that particular blip in the field — and I suppose I should have noted it earlier, but I didn’t want to dam our natural flow — where “a conclusion about the ugly” and “an ugly conclusion” appear to converge. I spent much of the second decade of my career basking in that particular intoxication, and though it did produce some of my most elegant sentences, I should warn us outright that the observation is little more than, as they say, a “sexy” axiom. Every conclusion worth its salt requires taking it as given.
“Let’s, then,” Teener had to stop himself from moaning. Indeed it would have been obvious at this point to anyone paying attention — or even following along distractedly, as he had — that the question of why everything was so ugly was not in any way being answered.
Teener chided himself for having slaved over every contour of “so,” “ugly,” and their privatest relations, when clearly the others were perfectly happy just slapping words around. Not only had the most compelling theories — energy; lovelessness; fuck it, evil — not so much as teased an appearance; none of the terms that might have conceivably brought them forward had even been grazed. As for the connections that were being made, they were of the most haphazard kind, often revealing themselves to be little more than occasions for each man to wander off into some tangent whose importance seemed known only to him. Beale, Downing, Stubbs, and Curtis may as well have been sitting at four separate tables.
It was this, in fact, more than the discussion’s inner waywardness, that had begun to wear on Teener. Why was everyone doing so little to bring into focus the delicious subtext binding them all together? It wasn’t like he’d expected anybody to wink, exactly. But some acknowledgment of the thing “really happening,” some minimal display of simultaneous understanding and adherence, felt like the baseline of even the loosest forms of social cohesion. Forget soccer teams and mobs; even fathers-in-law knew to pretext a trip to the garden before a heart-to-heart.
They were, in other words, taking the space he’d graciously secured for them for granted. And the resulting loss of a certain magic, its all-too-easy displacement, made Teener feel, if not altogether like a pencil pusher, then not enough not like a pencil pusher that the phrase hadn’t, a few times now, entered his awareness. Didn’t these people realize that, regardless of his success in shirking it, there was, in fact, a one-go-around limit on these things? And that, at least as far as they were concerned, he had created this roundtable out of — well, if not out of nothing, then at the very least from scratch?
It was only the hope that the others might be goaded into substance by sheer immiscibility that kept Teener from screaming when he glimpsed Curtis knitting his eyebrows together to speak.
CURTIS
One idea that Hugh’s word “distance” highlights for me is the theme of empathy. How far do things have to be for their ugliness to kick in? In my hometown’s graveyard, for instance, there was a well-known grave atop of which, to express her eternal love for her dead husband, a widow had had a sculpture of a sleeping woman built. The woman in the sculpture had this really delicate, ash-colored body, draped in the thinnest of silks, and her weight settled so naturally into the grave that you felt almost intrusive looking at it, as if the grave really was the man she’d fallen asleep with all her life.
The story’s strange specificity had exerted an immediate effect on the room. Even Downing had drawn still, listening.
CURTIS (cont’d)
Now, this was in the early days of the web, right? So one time, my brother and I, we’re curious, and we decide to head over to the headstone and write down the dead husband’s name. We sit through dinner as if nothing were burning a hole in my back-right pocket. But at night, after everyone’s gone to sleep, we sneak downstairs to our dad’s computer — a Gateway 2000 that he kept in the den — where we pretty quickly find not only the wife’s Match.com account but also a face that, well, let’s just say that it could not correspond to that body. My brother and I — we felt so guilty, but, boy, we nearly peed ourselves laughing.
Though he reasoned that she couldn’t be, Beale, at the thought of a woman as ugly as him, felt a terror too sharp to dissolve into gratitude for his own sex. Ugliness, he knew, could not be looked at — at least not under any kind of sustained light — in a female subject. In fact every few years he’d be treated to a bout of collegial ribbing from the Gender Studies Department for using only he pronouns in all his test cases. But, re-reading the cases, Beale could not bring himself to reassign even the mildest ones to shes. In a woman, he’d quickly concluded, the only appropriate response to a fate like his would have been suicide. He did not mean this in any rhetorical sense. The woman in him had killed herself the second he’d conceived her.
CURTIS (cont’d)
Now, in a case like ours, what was uglier: our snickering, compared to the mourning widow’s gesture, or the real woman, compared to her sculptural fantasy?
DOWNING
And why not both?
Stubbs smiled at the line’s conclusiveness, before realizing that it had somewhat concluded the story. Perhaps now was the moment, then, to launch into a point only adjacent to it — the one, incidentally, that he had been hoping to make just before, coiling desperately towards a second chance the second he’d finished speaking, just like he always used to in lectures while Teener colored his neon flashcards.
STUBBS
Which begs the question: Could everything be so ugly simply because, if it weren’t, what would we be sitting here talking about?
Beale casting a long, commiserative look around the room, then putting on a forbearing smile.
BEALE
I suppose that’s a neat trick.
And there it was. The predictable humiliation — and all because Stubbs was here, giving half nobodies half-baked scraps to kill time, instead of focusing on his actual writing. It occurred to him that he hated all-male groups. Groups in general, but especially all-male ones. He would have preferred to be with Lucia, back in Costa Rica, on that black-sand beach he’d loved.
The specificity of this insight startled him. Lucia in a bikini on a tropical beach was better than four men fully clothed at a round table? But these didn’t feel like two instances of the same thing, at least not nearly as well as hard-shell and soft-shell suitcases were.
So he was back to square one, and he resented the group even more for taking so long to bring him there when Ugly Babe was waiting for him just a roll away.
BEALE (cont’d)
But of course, one remaining possibility is that we would be sitting here talking about beauty.
And now Beale found himself edging towards a thought so precious, so fragile, and so recently alighted on that he realized he had secretly reserved it for himself, for fear that it might flicker out instantly upon contact. But something about the group had moved him — or more precisely agitated him, that sense of simultaneous encroachment and stasis — to advance towards a clearing. The kind, he knew, that nobody but him would have had the temperament to think of.
BEALE (cont’d)
Beauty, however faraway a notion it might seem most of the time, could very well be the simplest answer to our question, a diagonal sort of Occam’s razor: Everything is so ugly because beauty is too inviolate to let itself be manhandled like that. And wouldn’t that be appropriate, for such a sublime promise? To be there everywhere, but impalpable? Or do you think that beauty is a wooden puppet with no name, waiting to be given one by whichever one of us animals bothers to pick it up first?
A surprised silence followed the intensity of his formulation. First of all, a name was the last thing Stubbs wanted to give some imaginary puppet, wooden or otherwise. As for Curtis, he couldn’t help but feel like Beale was suggesting that acting was a kind of puppetry, too, scorned by “regular” people who viewed actors only as fame-hungry animals. Meanwhile in place of the puppet Downing had accidentally pictured the roofied body of a girl he used to go around with, Olga, which disturbed him given that he’d never actually needed to roofie Olga to get her to do any of the things that had inscribed her body in his memory in the first place.
DOWNING
Right. But of course puppets already were created by someone, even if not you, and given something, even if not a name. When I create a building, surely I am responsible for ensuring it doesn’t collapse on its visitors. Isn’t it backwards to impute the error to whoever has confused beauty, that sublime promise, for something so inarticulate, rather than to whoever has made it possible for beauty, so sublime, so promising, to be articulated by self-appointed third parties at all?
Now Teener was starting to think he’d gone mad. What the hell was Downing talking about? It didn’t even seem like he was responding to Beale’s point — or at least to anything Beale had said as it pertained to the broader goal, of them putting their heads together, huddling into the circle of a common problem — so much as following the current of his own voice wherever the discussion’s rudder might push it. And it wasn’t just Downing, either. Teener wasn’t inside the men’s heads, but he could tell that they had all, start to finish, been uniformly distracted.
And so it was Teener who introduced an idea he hadn’t anticipated, hadn’t even thought before he said it, really, but that he felt sure in his own blind boredom might restore a bit of heft to his table. This time he felt proximate enough to God to thank Him for giving him, if not quite seriousness itself, then at least its serviceable trappings.
TEENER
Well, but Dr. Beale’s point on perceptibility brings out an interesting tension. We’ve been treating our question today as though it were self-contained, or “subject-less,” so to speak. A floating array of words. But of course no question ever is. If we fold this variable back into our model, could it be that everything is so ugly because “you,” the person asking, are so ugly, and as it turns out there is not quite as much separating you from everything as you might have supposed?
As soon as he was done speaking Teener knew — though he did not yet know why — that he had made a mistake. Distance seeping into the room like a miasmic vapor, and on everyone’s faces thickening looks of offense, Beale’s most of all for how Teener had introduced the heretical point as an appendage to his. Teener himself felt as though he hadn’t so much produced his own idea as fallen into it like a trap.
Something to do with the tricky syntax of this “you,” its implication that the roundtable had been somehow a lure, some kind of perverse sandbox in which he, Teener, could play out an idle bet with himself. See how long he could call four grown men ugly to their own faces; laugh at their unwitting unibrows; make them think they were going to prom.
An insult, simply.
BEALE
Now, Mr. Teener, I’m not sure…
But Downing silenced Beale with one hand and, before speaking, opened then closed his mouth carefully in a false start that only sharpened Teener’s panic.
DOWNING
Personally, I might have chosen a different way to spend my Saturday had I known that when we were asked to answer the question, “Why is everything so ugly?”, the very person asking might not have found everything so ugly at all, but instead simply wished to give his ostensibly opposable thumbs some quality twiddle time while people who actually did find everything ugly, and with good reason, too . . . while those people, well . . .
Beale tried to step in as if sensing danger, but Downing tensed his hand forbiddingly.
DOWNING (cont’d)
While we humored you.
Teener had no chance to respond before Stubbs pounced.
STUBBS
The goal being to find out, à l’occasion, what our reasons might reveal about our own “ugliness” that we ourselves couldn’t see? If I catch your drift, Leon? I’m not accusing you of anything, of course. Just trying to understand.
Color had noticeably risen into Teener’s face now. First, no, Nigel had not “caught his drift.” Second, yes, Nigel was accusing him, or at least picking up a thread first spun by Beale and then tightened by Downing. But third, and most distressingly, all three men had missed his drift entirely. Much too entirely, in fact, for thinkers of their caliber.
All that balking, for an entirely conceptual you. Oh, slippery! It’s slippery! As if no actual “you” had sat right there, all slicked up, not only in Beale’s beauty impalpable nonsense, but also in Downing’s angles everywhere shtick, Stubbs’ general lacework, or for that matter Curtis’ trash filler, which could not possibly have chosen to create itself. If the men were angry at him, Teener knew, it was only for how easily his touching had laid bare the brittleness of their own contributions. And in fact he would have relieved the four of them of their duties right then if he hadn’t worried — as Downing, especially, seemed like he might be on the verge of doing — that they were about to walk out on him first, leaving him all alone, afraid and all alone in a room whose air seemed suddenly to quicken with remembered life.
TEENER
Well, I must admit that I’m rather caught off-guard. And so very sorry. I must have chosen my words clumsily. I only meant that we, all of us that is, had perhaps not considered a possible avenue for why everything might be so ugly. It was a purely theoretical question.
And, after a silence,
TEENER (cont’d)
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that there was something ugly about everybody here.
STUBBS
Right. No, of course. It’s just that we came to answer, to the best of our ability, a question you said you needed help with. So you can see how it’s off-putting when suddenly it doesn’t seem like you’ve spent any more time on it than it took to doodle our little briefs. I mean, do you even find anything ugly?
Teener resented the stray shot, which, even for Stubbs, couldn’t have been accidental, at his font work. But his position was too compromised to open a second front now.
TEENER
Of course I find it ugly — as you know perfectly well, Nigel, and perhaps better than anyone here. And not just anything: I find everything ugly. Indeed I find everything so ugly.
Downing laughed.
DOWNING
Sooo ugly? Really? Do you find everything aaas ugly as you find yourself, then, Mr. Teener?
Now here Teener couldn’t imagine that Downing wasn’t delivering the punchline — one Teener would by this point have accepted, even if it came at his expense — precisely to the absurd circularity of his own setup. Three seconds of Downing’s vaulted silence, and Beale doing nothing to break it, and Stubbs and Curtis staring at their own hands, disabused him of this hope.
And so Teener laughed now, too, in spite of himself.
TEENER
Well, maybe. I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. To help me find out. Why else would I have put such an odd question to the group?
It was then that Curtis, mercifully silent during the whole of the exchange as if tipped off that headway would be important, glimpsed a bone.
CURTIS
Excuse me, everyone, and I want to make sure that I give you — give us — the space to pursue these fascinating ideas, but I’m afraid I’m looking at the time, and we’re coming to the end of our session. Right? The one go-around limit?
Emmett “Norm” Curtis. Dimwit Courteous. The face of all Norms. The mitt of all Rules. Teener could have killed him. Of course he couldn’t exactly tell everyone now, when his integrity was just what was being called into question, that “the one go-around limit? Right?” was in here a loose dingle of words, as pliant to his purposes as “doctor, doctor” is to the joke it announces, or that this analogy had occurred to him just that week, after he’d spent so many consecutive hours around this very table that he’d penned more “doctor, doctor” jokes than he now would ever have a chance to witness Curtis missing.
TEENER
One go-around, already! Ha. Time really does fly out here. But perhaps it might indulge us with a brief landing. If only for the opportunity to clear up this you-me-everything business, or bracket it entirely and continue with what I felt, until now, had been a truly exceptional discussion . . .
Seeing that no one was biting, or even really looking him in the eye, Teener folded.
TEENER (cont’d)
I do hope, at least, that I managed to clarify my intentions in introducing this notion. Simply to pursue a thought that had been tugging — since we started talking, and not one minute before — at my own consciousness . . . and tugging indeed only thanks to your own brilliant interventions. Which are not only the lifeline of these sessions, but the reason I set out to do this work in the first place. So, once again, thank you for coming. I wish that we could end on a somewhat less confusing note. But this is, of course, part and parcel of any serious inquiry. Sometimes the compass just spins.
By that point Downing had stopped listening, absorbed in the thought of the building designed as a subtraction from which this ridiculous interlude had poached him, and tapping his foot restlessly as if the correct rhythm might teleport him blessedly back to the void.
But in Beale an altogether more ambiguous feeling had taken root. He both wanted to leave and not to leave. To be not here — doing his work, spending himself on it — and yet also here, where nothing besides this room could materialize, including, therefore, not this darkest of propositions: that perhaps it would never be made up to him. That he would get to the bottom and find no redress waiting. Not for the ugliness, which he really did believe had been two things yoked fascinatingly into one, but for the suffering, which had only ever been one thing, and about which he’d never had anything to say.
Such a primeval fear, he knew, was not something he could assign to Teener, or anyone, really. Not even himself. Only to whoever had decided, for reasons he would never comprehend, that it would be okay to just leave his face like that.
STUBBS
“Sometimes the compass just spins.” Well said, Leon. Besides, I’m sure we’ll have much occasion to meet again, keep the convo going. I certainly would love to.
Stubbs would certainly be far too busy finishing Ugly Babe in the coming months to keep any kind of “convo” going. But nobody here needed to know that. The element of surprise, in fact, was what most excited him about his novel’s release.
TEENER
Thank you for that, Nigel. Your words certainly mean a lot to me.
Teener looked at Downing then, who seemed to realize that some final gesture of fellowship was expected of him, too, before he could be absolved of the group — as he wanted, more than anything, to be.
DOWNING
In architecture, we always say that time does half the work. Perhaps that’s true of most things.
And one by one the men drew back their chairs and stood, some making more effort than others to restore the cheer that, surely, had no reason to have disappeared from the room altogether.
CURTIS
Maybe next time we should ask, “Why is everything so hard to pin down?”!
Stubbs thinking he was doing it on purpose now.
BEALE
At the end of the day it’s like any game. The cards don’t know how often they’ve come up. All we can do is meet each one as it’s dealt, and try to ignore the clumps.
At that phrase, “ignore the clumps,” Curtis perked, a flicker of almost-clarity passing through him on the way to Ann Arbor, but vanishing by the time Teener clapped Beale’s back heartily.
TEENER
And with a table like this one, there’ll be plenty more hands.
His optimism was not counterfeit. For all the private embarrassment of this failure — and already he scrutinized it, not ruling out “So” as a possible culprit, at least in intimating an early sense that words could be thrown willy-nilly — the important thing, he knew (and in fact this was just what had always distinguished his own sure-footedness from Bellamy’s flapping) was traction, not purchase. A single hitch was only a bump in the long road of keeping good men coming to his table to talk.
All that mattered, then, was that this one pass quickly from memory; and so Teener’s mind had already turned to that dicey press conference, which he stood little chance of avoiding now, where he would still need to answer that woman as if her right boob weren’t spilling out of her tunic and where he had, to make matters worse, entirely lost the thread of how a round hole could fit into anything, without a square peg.
He bunched his stack of papers under one arm and tried to give his irritation a fleshier name as he followed the men out towards the door. For a moment there the implicit cluster formed by the group, like itinerant penguins, might have evoked a sense of comedic warmth, a cozy, none-the-wiser-eh, title-sequence optimism, and for a moment it really did. But then Stubbs glanced back at the line and said knowingly,
STUBBS
None the wiser, eh?
and in his entropic stubble the effect got caught like a finger in a conveyor belt. The last man to leave, Beale — though Teener tried to tail him in an interminable tap-dancing thank you pong to his thank you ping, which was only right, after all hadn’t Teener organized the whole th — closed the door gently behind him, as if not to wake a wild beast captured fitfully and beaten only with great difficulty to sleep.
And it was funny, because with all of them gone the round table really did seem momentarily like just such a beast. An animal subdued, or a coral scissored. A grunt. Long-dead yet still reactive, existing only to be done to. Strange in fact that the men had felt no embarrassment calling it a table at all when, looking at it now, you could see clearly that it was much less a table than a felled tree, debarked, admitted into a sorry heap of itself. Even the room, really, was not so much a room as a clearing of space around the heap, a somatic recoil as if from blown-out eardrums or a cut-off tongue. Something, in any case, whose very label of “round table” seemed only to bespeak a cruel owner, drunk on her brief ability to make the physical and oral violences meet so perfectly.
If it almost grated against some compositional instinct, that perfect wrongness of it, then you couldn’t help but grope around for another way to look at the whole thing. It was true, for instance, that from a different standpoint dried apricots were very tasty indeed; that two boys laughing about a gravestone were fending death off regardless; that buildings shaped like waves could be new at each swell; that babe was a free word, the word of a man choosing words freely; that tickles were effective most days; and moreover that any number of such designs could at any moment come into view, sprightly as any argument, alive with all the colors of possibility.
But the generous spirit which this exercise required had come, also, from within a possibility and already it had disappeared into the bottom of the glass pane like a raindrop. The truth — and there it was, right there on the table — was that the surface was all rather empty, and no great presence in the dumb air around it, either. A pounded pole and gashed-on cap. A clubbed slab on a stick. A round table, because what else could it be called? Either way, it would be so ugly. God. It really was: so, so ugly.
But why?
Why so ugly?
The question, surely, had as much a right to express itself as a person has to lean against her car window and look at, say, the headlights-specked raindrops after a too-long trip, too far from home. And yet in the absence of further discussion it seemed to hunch up around the ribs of its own slightness, laugh rather meanly at itself for having expected its five little water lilies to lead not just to the nirvana of comprehension it had so clearly envisioned, but indeed to any legible place at all, any landscape less primitive than a small toad staring blankly at you from inside a circle’s center, staring blankly some more, and then letting out a croak.
Which, admittedly, it could not be excluded — and listening more closely, it was in fact hard to deny — was a somewhat wet, incredulous croak, deliberately mocking and yet also obviously kindhearted, the sort of croak that could only mean, You people are still here?
And nobody was, least of all me, but if I had been then perhaps it would have occurred to me by this point to suggest that everything was so ugly because of a room cracked open up a snowy mountain road however many discussions ago, and then there would have been no reason to fill it with toads and raindrops and round tables at all, eureka.
Youmna Melhem Chamieh is a French‑Lebanese writer and editor. Her stories and essays have appeared in outlets including Harper’s Magazine, Zoetrope, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the Financial Times Magazine.