Detail, Time Square

Dr. Marty, Week 4, Part 1

Not surprisingly, I arrived first. Surprisingly, Dee texted me:

in meeting still there in 30 min

I preferred to hear my music, not Dr. Marty’s. I turned up the volume on Cry Baby by Janis Joplin. My iPhone, still named Ghosty, had played one of her typical, nasty jokes, probably to put me in a proper, aggravated mood.

I bought Janis’s Greatest Hits shortly after our first lifecoaching session. I did not want Dr. Marty’s influence to go any further. I love the way this song starts with a howl:

Honey, I swear I’ll always, I’ll always be around
If you ever want me
Come on and cry, cry baby, cry baby yeah, cry baby, yeah,
Oh daddy, welcome back home, yeah.

As I enjoyed my own personal revival, listening to Janis, I poked Dr. Marty’s Richard Estes poster. It was behind glass, but somehow, since it was photorealism, smudges and finger prints seemed necessary. He’d have to clean them off.

The painting is of a cityscape brightly reflected off of many panels of warped, shiny glass. The warping distorted and repeated the reflections. The building receded to the left, tumbling the eye off the canvas as it trailed after the next shiny distortion. It was like reading text the wrong way, following the long lines of a run-on paragraph. Too much, too tiring.

“That’s one of my favorite pictures,” Dr. Marty said, walking over.

“What? Did you get it from poster.com or something? Richard Estes is rather obscure.”

“From a New York gallery. Details, Time Square and it’s one of 45. It cost me $4,500, too. I guess I’m glad that it wasn’t one of 120.” He lifted the poster off the wall and showed me the print details and the NYC gallery listing.

“Do you like it?” he asked and then flipped it back over.

That much money for a poster? It’s funny, but I understood.

I said, “If you read it from left to right, the panels and the reflections get larger and larger. It builds on itself like a good story.”

“The middle third is dark and in shadow, almost black and white, kinda like the middle part of any story.” Dr. Marty waved the print before me as if to point. “And actually, the middle part is a muddy red, liked dried blood after some kind of epic fight interrupting the liveliness of the world on either side. It’s hard to look at with the panels of color and light to the right and left. Plus, there is a certain wildness that’s a call to fun and action and amusement. After all, Times Square is the ultimate amusement park.”

We both looked at it together. I didn’t turn to him. Our relationship existed in the confines of his office.

“Where’s Dee?” he asked as he turned back towards his office door.

“We took separate cars. I took mine to the shop. She’ll be late. Good thing I didn’t need her to pick me up.”

It wasn’t a good thing.

“You could call her, tell her not to come. Part of my plan is to work with the two of you separately.”

… continued