Better Than This (9 page)

We finally reached the door and I handed the kid our tickets which he scrutinized in case they were forgeries. I found this irritating. The artists inside all wanted to sell their work, hence this exhibition, but they often limited these shows to a select few in the belief that this would somehow induce a competitive bout of cheque book waving. It might work for the uptown galleries and artists whose work is known, but down here in a converted warehouse it simply smacked of pretension.

The ticket checker had long hair tied back in a ponytail. He wore battered leather sandals and a short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to show the leather necklace around his neck. Everything about him, right down to the packet of Gauloise in his breast pocket was carefully cultivated to be anti-mainstream, anti-fashion, anti-bourgeois, anti-fucking-everything, but in fact it looked as if he’d bought his image off the rack in Gap under “Artist’, right next to “Rebel’. A girl stood close by, dressed in what looked like a muslin sheet, but she was stunningly pretty. He kept looking over at her hoping she would notice how important he was. When he handed back our tickets, his gaze flicked over us, and a faint smirk curled his mouth. It was clear he had us pegged as Mr. and Mrs. Suburban Couple. Capitalist pigs shackled to the yoke of commerce, unlike himself who was an

ARTIST.

His face was marked with that curse of adolescent youth, pimples, and I leaned in close and whispered to him quietly.

“There’s a big yellow one right on your nose that needs squeezing, buddy.”

His smirk vanished, replaced with an expression of deep mortification, his eyes darting automatically to the stunning girl. I grinned to myself as I walked away.

That was childish,” Sally told me.

“I don’t care,” I said.

We were in a large open space with perhaps a hundred other people. A girl in tight jeans with a bare midriff and rings through just about every part of her exposed anatomy offered us a glass of something that turned out to be warm, cheap fizz. The invitation named three artists so we wandered around looking for Alice, passing among groups of serious types deep in discussion, and others like me whose expressions betrayed their wish to be someplace else where they could get a beer.

“Why did you want to come?” Sally said, catching my expression. “You hate these things.”

“I hate the phoniness.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Because we were invited.”

“Nobody expected you to turn up.”

“I thought it would be a nice thing to do. And we’re having dinner later, we haven’t done that for a long time.”

Sally stopped suddenly, her expression at once serious, “This isn’t the answer, Nick.”

“The answer to what?”

“You’re here because you think you can fix things with Marcus this way. But it isn’t going to be that easy.”

Before I had a chance to reply somebody called Sally’s name and we turned to see Marcus threading his way towards us. He and Sally smiled at one another as he kissed her cheek.

“You look terrific.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“Glad you could make it,” he said, though his smile slipped a fraction as he glanced at me.

“Pretty good turnout,” I remarked.

“Yes.” He looked around as an awkward moment descended over us, and then Sally asked where Alice was. “She’s over there,” he said, and began leading the way.

I followed them as we made our way through the crowd. Despite the differences Marcus and I currently had, at least he and Sally weren’t affected. They’d always liked each other. She laughed at something he said, her eyes sparkling merrily. Christ,

when was the last time I’d seen her laugh like that? Marcus had a way of putting women at ease. He hadn’t altered the way he dressed for twenty years, he still wore jeans and a “I-shirt pretty well all of the time. With his glasses and longish hair he didn’t look much different from the way he had at college, but I think that was part of his charm. He was kind of ageless, like somebody who’d just decided not to grow up, in some ways.

Back at college I’d asked Sally once why she thought women were attracted to him. At the time I’d just bumped into a girl with striking almond shaped eyes who’d emerged from his room wearing only a “I-shirt that barely covered her butt.

“Wish you were in his shoes?” Sally teased.

I denied it, and it was true, but I was curious. Sally said she thought women felt safe around Marcus because he was non-threatening and they instinctively knew they could talk to him as they would their best friend. He listened. He was genuinely interested in what they had to say.

“I don’t think guys know how unintentionally seductive that can be,” she remarked.

Years later I asked Sally if she found Marcus attractive and she looked at me in surprise, but then after a moment’s thought she’d answered yes, she supposed she did. I didn’t mind. A funny thing about guys is that we want our best friends to think our wives are pretty, and our wives to be attracted to our best friend. It’s a kind of validation of our choice of partner. I think Marcus had always wanted me to like Alice too, and vice versa, and the fact that we plainly didn’t get on had always been a source of regret to him.

We found Alice, who was deep in discussion with somebody on the subject of a framed canvas bearing a splatter of vivid red paint. I read the card underneath. The title of the piece was Rage.

“I was going through a very tough emotional time then,” Alice was saying. “I felt I needed to express something almost…” she searched for a word. “Well, violent!”

The earnest woman with her nodded in empathy, then Alice saw us and said something and the woman melted away.

I experienced the same conflicting sensations I always did when I laid eyes on Alice. An instant dislike at her phoniness teamed with a gut appreciation of how physically arresting she was. Over the years Marcus had dated some pretty attractive women, most of whom I’d liked. Though he usually went for arty types, they had their feet on the ground. Often they worked as designers or copywriters, people he met through work. None of that for Alice though. Physically she was in a class of her own. She was tall, almost five eleven, and had long dark blonde hair and pale green eyes. I thought she looked Nordic, though she claimed her ancestors came from Chile. Her eyes were the most startling I’d ever seen. They were so pale, like emeralds buried in ice. She and Marcus had been living together for two years by this time, and still I sometimes had to look twice.

She and Sally kissed and told each other how great they looked, though there was a certain coolness from Alice. They had never hit it off as the best of friends, partly because they were quite different, but also purely because Sally and I were married which made Sally suspect right from the start in Alice’s view.

I cast my eye over the pictures on the wall, which to me were indistinguishable from something a four-year-old might have done, except Alice gave all hers a fancy title. She finally acknowledged me, and I kissed the smooth cheek she offered.

“How are you, Alice?” I asked.

“Fine. I was surprised to hear you were coming, Nick.”

She made surprised sound the same as disappointed. Despite myself I acknowledged silently that she looked sensational. Unlike a lot of her artist friends she dressed normally, and that night she had on pale khaki pants that rode on her hips and a black figure hugging top. An artist she might be, a starving one she wasn’t. I think Alice had made up her mind a long time ago that being poor was neither romantic nor fun.

“So what do you think, Nick?” she asked, seeing me looking at her paintings. She made no attempt to hide her sarcasm, as if we all knew what my opinion would be and that it was worthless anyway.

The truth was I thought what I always had, that giving a splatter of paint a fancy name doesn’t change the fact it’s still a splatter of paint, but I wasn’t looking for a fight. I fixed my eye on a canvas of muted blues, painted in a swirling seamless pattern. The card underneath said the piece was called Blue.

“I like this,” I said.

“Really?” Then her momentary surprise became suspicion. “Why?”

“I like the colours I guess.”

She fixed me with a condescending look which annoyed the hell out of me but I tried not to let it show.

“You like the colours? What do they say to you?”

They say it’s a nice blue painting, what the fuck else should they say? I thought. To me this kind of stuff was just wall decoration. You hung it because it looked good and it matched a rug or whatever. But I kept my feelings to myself and a pleasant smile on my face.

“It’s kind of soothing,” I replied, knowing that was what she wanted to hear.

She indicated the next one, which was a square of warm yellow bleeding out to orange at the edge. It was called Daybreak. “What does this one say to you?”

I didn’t like it because I don’t much like yellow, and I resented the hell out of her patronizing tone. She seemed to be in even more of a mood for needling me than normal. “Reminds me of sunrise on a summer’s morning.”

“Creation,” she said.

Whatever, I thought.

She smiled thinly, and wasn’t, I think, taken in at all. We moved along the wall past her other works. She kept asking me what I thought of each one, and whatever I said the look in her eye told me she thought I was full of it. But it wasn’t that I didn’t like them, I just couldn’t stomach all the bullshit she liked to wrap them in. All that representative analysis that I always thought was apparent only to her. They were all variations on the same theme. Colours, abstract patterns. The fact was, if Alice thought splashing haphazard colours on a canvas was a fulfilling way to pass her life, that was fine by me, so long as I didn’t have to agree with everything she said. For her part she’d always made it clear she thought I was at best a philistine, at worst a moron. Marcus and Sally had somehow melted back as if to give us space and they looked on with nervous smiles waiting for the inevitable fight to erupt. Then the last of Alice’s paintings caught my eye.

“What’s that?”

I went to take a closer look. The card underneath read simply Spring Meadow. In the foreground a sea of green spread across the canvas beneath a grey-blue sky. Beyond it was a simple farmhouse, and on the porch a figure stood gazing at the vista before him. The grass was dotted with sparks of red and orange, and when I looked closer I saw there were other colours too. Lilac, purple, blue and yellow. It was a meadow lit with wildflowers. Wild poppy, paintbrush, daisies. A wind was blowing, making wave-like patterns of changing shades of green. The figure on the porch stared out at his land in the early evening.

All of this detail was represented by deft smudges of colour and shape. The grass and flowers, the house and the figure were suggestions rather than literal interpretations of those things. Maybe it wasn’t even a house, and the figure wasn’t somebody standing on a porch but that’s what I saw. I could almost imagine the way the house would look inside. Plain but comfortable, the guy going to help his wife bring in groceries from an old station wagon out front, talking about a friend she hadn’t seen in a long time as he helped her put things away.

“I like this. How much do you want for it?” I asked.

She was taken aback and unsure if I was serious. “That’s just something I was trying out. I wasn’t even going to hang it.”

“Where is it?”

She looked away. “Nowhere. From memory. I don’t know where I saw it.”

For some reason I didn’t believe her. I felt that there was a story behind the picture, that it was in fact a very real place, that she even knew the figure on the porch. I’d often wondered what Marcus saw in her. Incredibly good looking though she was, Marcus wasn’t the kind of guy to stay with somebody for that reason alone. Maybe there was a side of her that only he got to see. A real person behind all the bullshit.

“I’ll take it,” I said impulsively.

“You want to buy it? But I haven’t even told you how much it is.”

“So tell me now.”

She hesitated, then overcoming her surprise she met my eye challengingly. “Seven hundred dollars.”

I knew Alice had never sold anything for seven hundred dollars in her life. “That’s a little steep isn’t it?”

“I thought you said you liked it, Nick. Don’t you think it’s worth that much?”

I think she believed I was somehow making fun of her, and that I didn’t really want the picture, so she was going to make me pay for it. She knew I could hardly tell her that no, I didn’t think it was worth it without exposing myself, in her eyes anyway.

“Okay I’ll take it.” It was reckless. Even though I did like the picture I couldn’t afford to go throwing that kind of money around right then. Alice, however, seemed less than pleased. A glint of malice flashed in her eye. I wrote out a cheque there and then, and while I was doing it she wandered off so she wouldn’t have to soil her hands with my filthy money. I gave it to Marcus and asked him to bring the picture into the office.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“I like it,” I insisted. “Why doesn’t anyone believe that.”

A little while later Sally and I moved on to look at the work of the other artists. One of them was a sculptor, if that’s the right term, who made incomprehensible shapes out of junk metal. The other made devices to produce effects of flickering light projected against a whole lot of different surfaces. We stood and watched one that changed from red to green to blue and then red again, a circle against a smooth plastic surface. It was called Change.

“What a genius,” I said under my breath.

Sally threw me a look. “Why did you buy Alice’s picture?” she asked.

“I liked it.”

“Seven hundred dollars is a lot of money. Are you sure it was the picture you were buying?” I didn’t reply.

After the exhibition was over, the four of us went to a nearby cafe to celebrate. Alice had sold two other pictures and at the table she proposed a toast.

“To success!” She looked at me. “I suppose by your standards you think that’s pretty funny. Eleven hundred dollars isn’t exactly retirement money is it?”