Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [23]
It's the first time I've seen all the prints laid out together and, despite my anxieties about coexhibiting with Khanyi Nkosi, I'm deliriously happy about how they've come out. I've already made my final selection, although I'm glad to see Sanjay and Jonathan have picked out the portrait of the drag queen, caught bumming a light from a garage attendant at 3 am. I've blown it up, so that her face is all texture, the make-up caked in the lines around her pursed mouth, lit up by the flame cupped in her hands. It came out surprisingly perfect considering no one knows how to use film anymore.
The others have not, and Sanjay is still wary about the whole thing. The over- and under-exposed, bleached, washed out, over-saturated with colour, blotches and speckles and stains like coffee-cup rings, or arcs of white on white where the canister has cracked and let the light slip inside.
My shrink tells me I'm co-dependencing; my father's death means I'm paralysed, afraid to make my own decisions, so I defer to Jonathan because it's easy, and this is my core problem. Well, actually, he didn't; he let me figure that out for myself, which cost a little more, a few months more of therapay, more wasted time, when apparently he had the answer all along.
What he does tell me of his own accord, after this revelation, is that I should move out and cut Jonathan off, get some distance to regain my equilibrium, to recover a sense of self. He uses a lot of shrink-speak that doesn't translate, like it's only applicable to someone else's ordered
life, where the rules work.
So I'm still speaking to Jonathan, still hanging out with him, still sleeping with him – when he comes round. Still deferring to him on the important stuff. Because he's the guy orchestrating all the moves. Because I don't have his pull or his contacts, like Sanjay, for example. Sanjay is a major name on the international art scene, responsible for launching the trajectories of people like Susu Ngubane or Cameron Sterling, whose sculptures now sell for in the region of seven hundred grand. Jonathan deals with Sanjay on all of the details of the exhibition. Or should that be exhibitionism? Because isn't it my soul being laid bare here?
I know he's been seeing at least two other women in the times between, when we are off, on, off. Because we are just 'casual', as he calls it, because quantifying something puts it in its place. But sometimes I feel like he's reminding himself rather than me. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.
I met the one, Stacy, at a party. One of those awful media blitzes, hanging off him like she was his handbag. Old bag. Cos she was – thirtyeight at least. An editor at one of the pushmags he works for occasionally. One of the perks of the job, fraternising with the help. Of course, Jonathan is thirty-eight, so he's right up there
with her. Closer to her than me.
I asked to take her picture, to Jonathan's delight. 'You cunning little fox,' he whispered, kissing my shoulder, as if we were all supposed to pretend I didn't know they were fucking. 'You just guaranteed yourself a publicity splash, sweetheart. We'll have to make the event worthy of the write-up.'
But, really I was more interested in reducing her to planes of colour, the hard sculptural bones offsetting the flicker of pity in her eyes.
The print I went with was an accident, a misfire while I was adjusting the light settings. It shows her sitting on the edge of the fire escape stair, on the balcony outside the apartment. The focus is on the shapely knot of her knee, one hand resting in the dark fall of her skirt, a black blur. You can only see the angle of her jaw tilted out of frame. It makes her look vulnerable.
When I confronted him about her later, sitting in the window