Compulsively Trying to Please People Who Never Liked Me

Compulsively Trying to Please People Who Never Liked Me

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

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A New Book of Grotesques by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

How had we turned out this way? My friend and I were plumbing disappointments over slices of cake. That was one of the best things about this country—people regularly ate Kuchen. It was normal.

Not so normal, alas, were our relationships.

“Are they that harsh with you?” I asked. Of those men who had recently caused me pain—I paused to take stock on my fingers, one, two, three—at least two were mutual acquaintances.

“No,” my friend said. “On the other hand . . . .”

It is easier, I find, to speak about certain topics in a language not your own. For example, the superhuman ability of some people to take a remark you’ve made, twist it like a steel pipe, and thrust the mangled weight back into your stomach with a thump: here you go.

“I think,” I said, groping for vocabulary, “I think the problem is a kind of masochism. I sought out those people who could never be pleased, whose feelings for me grew around a seed of hate. Then I made it my goal to please them, one after the next.”

Everyone has problems. My friend signaled for the check.

If this were a fairy tale, I might have tracked down those ex-friends and -lovers and asked them what they thought. A quest! In a foreign land! But this was no fairy tale. Or rather it was, but of a different type: I was on my very first sabbatical leave with a giant grant to research sixteenth- and seventeenth-century goldsmiths, in particular Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch. The fairy tales were in my work, not my life. They manifested in Jamnitzer’s prints, woven into goblets and coats of arms, anthropomorphized in armored crustaceans carrying cornucopias of fruit. They wound round the gilded face of a clock. For the entire history of art history the elaborate collection had been dismissed as nothing more than accomplished frivolity, utterly devoid of an ethic or politics, not to mention a historical conscience—

No one was more surprised that I’d received the grant than me.

This is to say if I could have quested, I would have. Instead I was on my way to the grocery store with a carton of glass bottles to deposit and a birth control prescription to fill. Never mind that I was celibate. It was gray, gray, gray—no one had warned me how perfectly miserable Berlin can be in January—and I was using the pills mostly for off-label purposes, i.e., to skip my period. Once a month struck me as basically all the time. One has to preserve one’s strength.

I took the route past the park, making up etymologies along the way, as was my habit—Schicht is layer, Geschichte is history, time is a mille-feuille pastry in a window display—when one of the very men I would hypothetically have liked to question came round the corner, looking distressed. The tails of a severed bike lock hung limply from his hands. I glanced back over my shoulder, amazed. How did he get here? I’d left him on the other side of the ocean. In fact I’d moved here in large part to leave him behind. Had he forgotten how awful we’d made each other feel? And now he’d been so careless as to return. I was totally unprepared. He waved the ruined halves of the lock.

“Aren’t you going to help me?” he asked.

My ex had been in Berlin for nearly a year, as he explained over beers in the nearest bar. I was taken aback. He smiled cruelly, which is how I knew he was about to mangle my surprise. “Of course I’m in Berlin,” he said. “Everyone’s in Berlin. If you want to be original, try Riga.” I was stung by the comment, jealous to learn he’d never tried to look me up. Those were the unwritten rules of divorce: if the one moves away, the other is obliged to avoid wherever it is she ends up. Furthermore, to feel abandoned either way. Cliché that I am, I said, “But you knew I was in Berlin.” He shrugged and sipped his beer. I noted, with wounded satisfaction, that my German was far better than his.

So much better, in fact, that I wasted upwards of two hours there in the bar fielding phone calls to help him find his stolen bike. In return, my ex told me that I was wasting my life. He implied that I was a cliché, with my nothing interests and public funding and ignorance of contemporary trends. I swallowed it all as unthinkingly as a teenager might a pearly bolus of cum, and left the bar feeling perfectly sick.

Can you believe the mistakes I was already making? My friend and I were back in the café the following day. I ought to have pointed out to him, I lamented, that I was at least one iteration ahead in mass-cliché production, that it was he who’d moved to my current place of residence, that it was I who had left him. These stabs were the basic maneuvers on which our duels had thrived. Touché! He always aimed to draw blood. It was wrong that I let him, worse that I so quickly forgot why he did it, the answer to which was obviously to protect himself. From me.

My friend pushed her plate away. Outside, the street was cloaked in gray. It was three in the afternoon, and already night was beginning to fall. We listened to the sorry sounds of people schlepping by. Outlined in January’s cautious luminosity, her profile nearly broke my heart. She took a huge bite of apple cake. Her cheeks bulged beneath high bones. She’d found herself in a similar situation once, she said, one where it seemed her opponent would always have the upper hand . . . .

“Well, what did you do?”

It was at the party of a friend, she said. A certain Sylvia. They’d been close once, but a sudden chasm had opened between them. It was unclear why my friend had been invited to the party, given this geological event. But there she was. The apartment was chic but tiny with a long, narrow artery of a hall that branched into the ventricles of three small rooms, which on that evening pulsed with music and people and light. It was like one of those dreams, my friend said, where the hallway you’re traversing keeps growing longer and longer and the door at the end ever farther away the more urgently you try to reach it. She set off through the crush of socialites. Half an hour later she found she hadn’t progressed at all. The rooms she was trying to reach—and really something wonderful was happening within them, she was sure, chances at love and enlightenment and beauty were being snatched from the air—seemed even more distant than before. A moment later the hallway was empty, and she was standing alone with Sylvia the host, who was flanked by her famous, much older boyfriend.

“You,” Sylvia said, like it was the first word of a curse. “I remember the first time I saw you.” She was quite drunk. Her older boyfriend looked on with trepidation as Sylvia described having spotted my friend sitting on the library steps near the office where they worked. “You were wearing strange shoes,” she said. There was something in the memory that gave cause for resentment. Now, at the party, she placed a palm on my friend’s forehead and pushed, pinning her to the wall. The three of them stood there. My friend, the host, the host’s famous boyfriend. They were all waiting for Sylvia to remove her hand, but the moment never came. They might have been three children playing a one-sided game of London Bridge. It was hard to escape. The host stood just out of reach. And few things are more pitiful, my friend was learning, than swatting limply at your captor’s wrists. “Love, that’s not nice,” the boyfriend crooned.

My friend paused her story in the last silvery burst of light. She took a final bite of cake.

“What happened next?”

“Well,” she said, very matter-of-fact, “I grabbed her, too.”

The idea had come to my friend in a flash. Of rage, perhaps. She was angry at being made a fool of by this woman who held some secret grudge against her. She doubted Sylvia herself knew what the problem was. A dull pain gathered behind her third eye, beneath Sylvia’s palm, and so in a quick movement, my friend reached out and seized her breasts.

“That’s not what I was expecting at all,” I said.

My friend sighed. “I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would.” She scraped her fork against the empty plate. “The point is, I don’t recommend revenge.”

I shuffled home through the early whisper of a snowstorm, resolving, for the umpteenth time, to be more like my wonderful friend.

Though my first thought when I woke up the next morning in my ex’s apartment, far too early, was that I never would be like my wonderful friend.

The room was dark and quiet and smelled of sleep. The lofted bed brought the ceiling close, and the empty socket of a chandelier fixed its vacant judgment on my ex-husband and myself. If you could really call him that. A marriage that lasts less than a year might be better described as an annulment.

Outside, the nickel swell of dawn. It was time to go. I carefully descended and shivered across the floorboards, picking out my clothes from precarious stacks of instruments and books. In a previous life, I would have snooped around to see what he was reading, but that morning I had no interest—perhaps people do change after all. I stood in the door for a minute, considering the warmth and the smell of him. Then I was in the stairwell, buttoning my coat, grateful I hadn’t jettisoned the birth control. That’s the problem with living, as I always did, with one foot in the past. I never gave up hope that things would return to the way they’d been.

I didn’t see my friend for two weeks after that. Life intervened. I caught a flu that left me bedridden for a week. Next time we should get sick simultaneously, I suggested over email. Then we could still hang out. We still can, she wrote back. I have an extremely strong immune system. I wasn’t surprised. I was tempted to tell her to come round with juice and lemons and broth, but I still cared what she thought about me too much.

By the time I could sit up, I’d lost three pounds and was due immediately in Zürich for a presentation on my area of research. Or not exactly my area—no one but me was in the area of research that was A New Book of Grotesques—but adjacent enough that I’d been invited to share my thoughts on guilds. The panel was organized around the development (or not) of intellectual property law among artists of the Enlightenment. Can socialist values be adequately expressed through mediums dominated by cults of genius? Toward what does contemporary solidarity flow? The Swiss have funding for everything.

Having walked no farther than the hardwood stretch from bath to bed for over a week, I struggled to make it to the Hauptbahnhof on time. In the station, the salty undertow of currywurst colluded to slow me down. Nauseous and wheezing, I reached the platform just as the night train was beginning to glide.

Thirty minutes outside the city, I caught my breath. I found my cabin and collapsed onto the cot.

“Hallo?” came a voice from the Murphy bed above.

“Entschuldigung,” I choked.

My cabinmate and I went back and forth in German for a time before realizing we were both American. Then a certain cynicism set in. We spoke about our work. He was an architect. “Oh, architects never stop working,” I said—I knew because I’d once roomed with one. “That’s correct,” he replied. In fact he had to work tonight. But where? In the lower bunk immediately across from ours sat the model he was to deliver to the Basel office in the morning. It looked very official, enclosed in a bright white box.

“Try the dining car?”

“That’s a thought.”

He was very stressed about this model and the work that remained to be done. He’d been studying, apprenticing, racking up debts and paying dues for nearly seven years. This was a big opportunity for him. Unlike most architecture apprentices, he did not come from wealth to begin with. His brother was in the Army, his father a vet and trucker who’d died young of a heart attack. They all of them had weak hearts, he said. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised by the sort of person he was now forced to deal with daily, the associates who exploited assistants like him for years, under-paying and overtaxing them. But it was disappointing. I was just beginning to think there was something familiar in the hardships of my cabinmate’s biography when two tube-socked feet appeared on the upper rungs of the ladder, introducing a uniquely shocking stench. I will be the first to admit that I was no paragon of human behavior at the time, but those socks left me newly amazed, putting all stirrings of déjà vu to rest.

We sped through Brandenburg. The architect took a phone call with a colleague back in Berlin. They were redesigning a museum façade, I learned. An exoskeleton for the original building that would lie within. The reading lamp in my berth illuminated my lecture notes, and passing streetlights flickered erratically in the window of the train. I idly reviewed my outline until the tube socks appeared again, this time traipsing down the ladder to the end. It was only then, when the architect was standing right before me on the navy carpet of the night train’s floor—oh, poor carpet, what endless disasters and fluids it had seen, it isn’t right to carpet floors in times like these—that I realized I did in fact recognize the architect. I was ashamed of my delay, also hurt that he still did not recognize me. It’s true I have one of those faces that transforms dramatically, depending on the day, and that it was many years since this man and I had been friends. We’d roomed together, as you’ve probably guessed. It was he who’d taught me how to fry a perfect egg; how to fight without crying; how important it is to keep on top of one’s laundry.

Those years returned to me in a painful rush. Thursday movie nights. Communal dishes. Pasta Fiesta: noodles plus anything that was about to go bad. It was very devastating for our apartment when he was not accepted to architecture school the first time round. I’d tried to remind him that plenty of brilliant people end up applying twice. I found a letter by Henry James: “You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not to melt in the meanwhile.” I knew better than to stick it to the fridge. He slipped away into a bitter depression, eschewing movie nights and communal pastas of any sort, until it seemed we hardly even saw each other in our two-bedroom railroad. We were two more trains passing in the night. I hardly knew if he was alive. One morning, I stormed into his room, not caring if I caught him doing who knows what. “You!” I could have pinned his forehead to the wall. “You,” I said, “have too much talent to waste! Do your laundry and get out of bed!” There was a rule in our apartment, given our platonic situation, that you always knocked. It is a good rule for any living arrangement, but one about which we were especially strict. He was pissed. I’d found him shirtless in bed, the window open to let the stench out and the winter in. A slow, cruel smile spread across his face. “What’s this?” he said. “A pep talk?” A monologue that began this way could not end well for us, I knew. Yet I stood frozen, as if under some spell. He was sick of women like me, he said. Women who skipped through life tilting quotas away from him. He casually stretched his arms overhead, flashing the dark of his pits. The exaggerated gesture revealed just how shocked he himself was by the depths of his resentment. But it was too late to turn back. “After all,” he said. We’d ridden violent waves to the land of Milk and Honey. What right had such mermaids to monopolize the attention of the admissions officers? What right had we to—? I grabbed the nearest book, a coffee-table edition of Bauhaus principles that I’d gotten for his twenty-first birthday, a truly expensive gift, and threw it as hard as I could. It was a fight to end fights. Or at least our friendship. In the resulting scuffle, I punched his exposed pectoral, just above the genetically weakened heart, with a force and conviction that alarmed us both. Ten years later, the slap of my knuckles against his skin returned to me with perfect pitch.

The architect pulled on his shoes without untying them and lifted the model from the cot. He cradled the white case to his chest as tenderly as a wedding cake.

“Dining car for me—want anything?”

I shook my head. He slipped the key from the compartment lock. I cried out, “It’s going to be great!”

He paused in the door, surprised.

“Your presentation, I mean. I have a sense for these things.”

He worked the whole night and didn’t come back.

My talk in Zürich was also a success. I couldn’t have known that beforehand, however, so I arrived at the station a bundle of nerves. And regret. I ordered a coffee at the first kiosk in sight and came away even more thoroughly shaken: six francs fifty. The desk in the hotel room was set with a lamp and a binder titled Useful Information. I sent a picture to my wonderful friend, adding that they ought to include a note on exploitative Swiss pricing. Her response was immediate. That’s just what food is supposed to cost in a protectionist economy with a livable wage and high social trust.

On certain winter days, my hair can take on a reddish tinge. These are lucky days, and this was one. I put on a green, high-collared dress and stood before the mirror to pile my chignon. Outside, the street filled with the contented sounds of people buoyed by social services and trust. I was alone. In quiet moments such as these, preoccupied with tasks like chopping vegetables, editing footnotes, securing a chignon, my mind often wanders toward the people I’ve lost. There is something mollifying about slicing onions or pinning up your hair. It leaves you vulnerable to regret. Perhaps this was why the third man, the one I was afraid of yet longed to see again, who’d broken my heart more thoroughly than all the others combined, had always preferred my hair down. It was he, in fact, who’d first mentioned to me the Neuw Grotteßken Buch. That’s how I’d learned. And here I was, years later, studying it. Out of unrequited love or scholarship, I wasn’t sure. I looked into the mirror. My mother had told me always to pin up my hair in professional settings. You had to think about these things. You had to appear severe and strong. I wondered what percentage of the advice I’d received in life was faulty. There is no advice, really, for getting what you want, except to recognize when it arrives. And then to hold on.

The scholars gathered in the library. No one was in the mood to chat. We crossed and uncrossed our legs, buttoned and unbuttoned our jackets. The moderator tapped a pen against the table’s edge. As we filed into the lecture hall, I recited a few lines from Jamnitzer’s epigraph under my breath: “Useful for everybody, for those who like art / . . . Those who don’t like it can lump it.”

I am not an impressive person day-to-day. But on a stage, with my slides, and my hair pinned just so, I assure you I am in command: “A New Book of Grotesques includes sixty single-page etchings produced as inspiration for gold- and silversmiths in seventeenth-century Nuremberg. The extraordinary alchemy of styles in the Gothic scenes evidence Mannerist, Baroque, and Italian influences. [1] The creatures depicted here have escaped a child’s nightmare. Armored shellfish and spear-wielding sea creatures coil beneath limericks scrawled on floating scrolls. Though best known as a goldsmith at the time of publication, Jamnitzer catapulted himself to the vanguard of the immoderate imagination with these engravings, enjoying wide circulation throughout the land—”

Next slide.

“Up until important work published by certain of my colleagues in the 1960s, [2] Jamnitzer’s engravings were primarily received as whimsical dreams, a cabinet of curiosities amounting to no more than the fantastical sum of its fantastical parts. In The Bug Market, for example, shown here to the right, a robed vendor delivers a snail. Note the inscription: ‘The Bug Market commissioned for this purpose / Take from it what you like!’ Now look at images four and five. In these objects, kilned some fifty years later, one notes the same creatures warping the handles of goblets and the bases of candlesticks. Such figures, wrought from gold, must continually announce their beauty to the world. Their form is a plea not to melt them down. [3,4] They are arguing for their own humanity. And by open-sourcing blueprints for such heirlooms, Jamnitzer went beyond advertising his own talents. [5] Plunder me to make yourself, these etchings say. Please, do not melt me down, say the objects that result. The cast is an existential argument that the objet d’art is worth more than its weight in bullion. And this is the same tension, I argue, of the individual placed in her social context. We make ever more elaborate plans to justify our existence in the face of all that came before.”

I clicked forward to the end of my slides, feeling for all the world like a figurine struggling to justify her existence against the poverty of her form.

The thing to do is not to melt in the meanwhile.

Applause.

My friend and I spent the rest of the winter nibbling cakes and flipping through reproductions from A New Book of Grotesques. We met in the café nearly every day, as if time were running out. I brought copies of rare prints. Whole afternoons slipped away in the gray light and the diseased air—the general malaise of late February. Together, we investigated. We studied the prints for hours, our cheeks nearly touching as we searched for details no one had noticed before. She had a child’s capacity for fascination, my friend, and yet nothing about her was harmless. Her attention was disfiguring. It made me want to start over on myself. Our heads bent low over these ornaments, I was overwhelmed by regret over the person who’d first mentioned to me the Neuw Grotteßken Buch. My friend flipped to a goblet opened wide to the world.

“I’d drink from that.”

I told her about my talk, about what I’d said of the effort to assert the value of one’s form. It was an existential argument. The gray of the street merged with her face. She too had a very mercurial face. It was the source of formal problems of her own. She looked at the goblet. I got up to order more hot water for the tea dregs. We were at our favorite table, sharing our favorite cake at our favorite café, leafing through the pages of our favorite book. I didn’t want the afternoon to end. When I returned, she sat in profile, lost somewhere out the window. I had the terrible feeling that she was disappearing right before me, slowly becoming someone else. Of course she was. We all were. I set the teapot down. The corners of her eyes tightened, as if she’d experienced a sudden pain. The café was very feminine, trading in cakes and candles and vases and décor.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

We left just as the snow was beginning to fall. On the boulevard, I turned, surprised to find my friend was already halfway down the block.

“Wait!” I called.

She stopped. A silence passed.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “do you have plans?”

“Of course tomorrow.”

Then she disappeared into the white. I watched her go. Who knew what she meant. I fixed her image in my mind. All that mattered, I thought, was that we’d find each other again.

1. Wick, Peter. “A New Book of Grotesques by Christoph Jamnitzer.” Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, vol. 60. (1962): 83–104.
2. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Rabelais and His World. (MIT Press, 1968).
3. Brisman, Shira. “Christoph Jamnitzer’s Speechless Defense of the Goldsmith’s Strengths.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 83, no. 3 (2020): 385.
4. Brisman, Shira. “Contriving Scarcity: Sixteenth-Century GoldsmithEngravers and the Resources of the Land.” West 86th. vol. 27, no. 2 (2020): 147.
5. Viljoen, Madeleine. “Christoph Jamnitzer’s ‘Neuw Grotteßken Buch,’ Cosmography, and Early Modern Ornament.” The Art Bulletine. vol 98 (2016): 213–236.