“What about you? Do you have an ice … person here?” Cooper asked.
“As Calvin Coolidge once said, ‘I have found out in the course of a long public life that the things I did not say never hurt me.’” With this, Tucker wandered away, and Cooper finished off her screwdriver. Now she was sufficiently drunk. She pulled off the Krueger mask and threw it high into the air, not bothering to watch it fall in the middle of the makeshift mosh pit by the stage. She spotted her parka hanging on the NordicTrack that had been shoved into a corner of the gym. On her way over, she passed Birdie and Pearl, who were deep in conversation. “And they have these things called ‘meat raffles,’” Birdie said, his face still flushed from Alek’s samogon. “Meat raffles!”
As Cooper made her way to the door, the lights suddenly dimmed—everywhere she looked, jack-o’-lanterns leered at her, their crooked mouths illuminated by battery-powered votive candles. By the door, she had to force her way through a knot of Beakers dressed as approximations of Christ’s apostles (bedsheets and beards). “Finally, the waiter leaves,” one of them was saying. “And that’s when she leans over and whispers, ‘I don’t believe in carbon dating.’ So I said, ‘I don’t believe we’ll be dating.’”
As soon as she stepped outside the gym trailer, the icy air wrapped itself around Cooper’s midsection, and she realized she hadn’t zipped up her parka. When she tried to join the zipper parts together, the world tilted and she felt certain she could feel the speedy rotation of the earth on its axis. She leaned against the tire of a forklift and steadied herself. Below her boots, though, the ground circulated like a frothy whirlpool. She raised her head and stared in wonder at the sunlight pouring into the long entrance tunnel; she knew it had to be well after midnight, but it was as bright as a Folgers morning. The thought of fresh air pulled her forward.
Halfway down the tunnel, she took a deep breath—the cold air rinsed through her lungs and the world stopped spinning for a moment. Then she saw the row of metal folding chairs blocking the entrance. A large handwritten sign had been taped to a chair. It read: NO, YOU CANNOT GET SOBER BY GOING OUTSIDE! RETURN TO PARTY YOU DUMBSHIT.
Cooper remembered her studio—it was technically under the Dome. Maybe she’d be a better painter drunk than sober. They said Hemingway was. Hemingway wasn’t a painter, Cooper reminded herself. And who was “they”? Hemingway wasn’t a painter. Hemingway wasn’t a painter. She chanted this line out loud as she circled back to the artists’ annex. A couple making out in the cab of a Caterpillar stopped to stare at her.
When she arrived at the door to her studio, she tapped the postcard of Foucault for good luck. Upon walking in, though, Cooper came face-to-face with her Mitten in Winter canvas, and her heart sank. The painting now struck her as revolting. She glanced over at Denise’s desk; a large cardboard box had been set atop a stele of textbooks. Cooper knew it was filled with slightly less than twelve gross Blue Razberry Blow Pops; the candy was circulating among the station population as currency. (Someone had already been called into HR for simulating fellatio on one of them during the sexual harassment training video.) But Cooper wasn’t looking for candy. She wanted the box cutter Denise had used to open the package. When she found it, she pushed the blade up and watched as its geometry changed the farther it extruded. She lay it flat against her forearm to test its sharpness and discovered that a slight change in angle could draw blood.
She turned to her canvas and thrust the blade into it. It didn’t rip cleanly—the canvas resisted and the first cut frayed. It was only when she retracted the blade a few degrees that it became an efficient tool of destruction. Cooper ripped long, jagged lines through the mitten, and the fabric peeled away from the gashes, dropping fiber at her feet. Every sound—the thrumming bass from the party next door, the vibration of the power plant, the creaking of the ice—faded, save her own thumping heartbeat. Then, slowly, she realized someone was pounding on her door. She froze, hoping whoever it was would walk away, but the knocks continued, taking on a percussive quality.
“Who is it?” Cooper called.
“Herbert Hoover.”
Cooper unlocked the door and opened it a crack to find Tucker’s pockmarked face. He was holding two steaming cups of black coffee. As he handed her one through the gap in the door, his eyes traveled to Cooper’s shredded canvas. “Ah, killing your darlings tonight, I see.” Cooper opened the door wide and let him pass through into the room.
She sat down heavily on the stool and sipped the bitter coffee while Tucker took off his parka and hung it on the back of the door. He kicked the ribbons of canvas into a pile and removed the frame from the easel. In its place he put one of the blank canvases Cooper had stretched and prepped the week before in a fit of optimism. As he tidied the room, Cooper could feel the high-octane coffee sobering her up, sip by sip.
Finally, Tucker turned to her, his muscular arms hanging awkwardly at his sides.
“You didn’t mention it on the application,” he said.
“Mention what?”
“That you were a prodigy. The New York Times Magazine thing. Whether you had or had not saved the American Art World at age sixteen. Incidentally, according to my online research, it’s still at risk.”
Cooper’s head swam. “That person no longer exists.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
She fixed Tucker with a glare. “Would you trade on fleeting success fifteen years after the fact?”
Tucker winced.
“I am not an attractive person but I am an honest one. You can ask me anything. I will tell you I am single and a homo. I relate to you because when I was your age, I was also someone who had hopes and dreams. I find as I grow older that I like to give the young people advice. And my golden rule is this: If you are going to be self-conscious, try to be funny about it or insightful. Otherwise, and I’m guilty of this, it is nothing but self-indulgence. And smile more—easier said than done if you have had Botox and a job like mine.”
He picked up her sketchbook and held it out to her.
“What?” Cooper said.
“You’re going to paint my portrait.”
“I don’t do portraits.”
“Just pretend you’re at a wedding. I can get some kale from the kitchen if it would help.”
Cooper looked at Tucker’s face, ruthlessly pitted by years of acne, and yet strangely smooth from all the chemical peels. Despite its imperfections, though, his face was a limpid image, perhaps the only truly clear image she’d seen since she’d arrived at this confusing place. She was starting from zero anyway, so she selected the sharpest pencil from her pencil cup and pulled her sketchpad onto her lap.
“Do I seem straight to you?” Tucker asked as Cooper began to work. “I mean—am I queeny?”
“Why are you asking me that?”