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By Root 587 0

too insistent, there’s too much of it in too many places, a thousand eyeballs fasten onto every part of it everywhere she goes, mooring it in place, never letting her forget a single inch or gram of it. But Javier’s body is so improbable that it’s like some trick of the air, a puff of wind in a trenchcoat, a spirit clothed in the merest afterthought of flesh. When they make love, she presses herself hard against him to feel his materiality, to reassure herself that he’s actually part of her world. But when they take to the streets together, she finds herself—sometimes exhilaratingly, sometimes even a little terrifyingly—in his world, a mystical wonderland in which people silently passing on the street are anything but silently passing, in which souls are in perpetual communication, whispering to one another in the ubiquitous language of surfaces: a puffy hairdo issuing invitations to contemplate free love and nature worship; a bare waxed scalp humming a counterpoint of quietude, purity, renunciation of excess; a leather coat clamoring for rugged individualism; a transparent handbag retorting with calls for the abolition of private property and a radical rethinking of our attitudes toward death.

This is the world Ursula lives in now, whenever Javier is at her side. Some days they’ll sail around on rollerblades; others, they’ll proceed on foot, slowly, their faces close to the city’s canvas. They may get up well before dawn and claim for themselves an unobtrusive corner in a financial-district diner, or alternatively rise late, pick up sandwiches and iced coffees, and seek out a sunny section of park bench. They’ll sit quietly, sketching the way the stockbrokers drape their jackets over their chairs, or the way the high school kids on their lunch hour tie their shirts around their waists. To use the time efficiently they’ll multitask, interrupting their sketches to copy down the names of any vacation spots, athletic activities, or concerts the stockbrokers or students discuss. Usually they’ll content themselves with silent observation, but if the right kind of person indicates a willingness to talk, they won’t fail to make use of the opportunity. Thus in a coffee shop they’ll talk to a kid with a one-haired Charlie Brown haircut about the thousand-page tome on yoga he’s reading; and on an inner-city basketball court they’ll wind up showing some tag-art graffiti figures they’ve tried doing to a group of kids who will shake their heads pityingly and then bring them up to date on everything from the look of the sneakers to the finer techniques of the drawings themselves.

The airbrushed savage girl has been joined by a whole paradessential clique in Ursula’s sketchbook. She’s learned how to draw men who look at once edgy and healthy; how to draw utility vehicles both rugged and refined; even how to draw food to make it appear simultaneously filling and light. As she sketches, she often finds herself replaying in her mind her years of struggling to make paintings she hoped would pry open the cracks of the world, expose the contradictions, get at the truth of things, and replaying as well the increasing desolation and powerlessness she felt as time went on. Because people don’t want their contradictions exposed, she’s decided. They want their contradictions glamorized, valorized, mythologized. Her airbrushed savage girl did precisely those things, and she saw for herself the power it had over its viewers, a kind of primal forcefulness her art paintings never seemed to achieve.

If the painful lesson she learned from Chas was that people want paradessences, the far more palatable lessons she’s absorbing from Javier are that she doesn’t necessarily have to feel bad about giving people what they want; that contradictions help people cope; that what Chas thinks of as the “broken soul” of a product, if looked at in a more forgiving light, might just as easily be called its magic, its power to suspend antinomies, to let the consumer have it both ways and every way, buying a new pair of sneakers not only to grip the earth but to soar