By Nightfall (18 page)

“Will you do me a favor?” he asks.

“Of course.”

“Will you tell me I wasn’t the worst father in the world?”

“No. You were nothing like the worst father in the world. You did the best you could.”

She kisses him chastely on the cheek. And that’s that.

They perform their morning ablutions like the dance team they’ve become. He shaves while she showers, and when she’s done showering she leaves the water on for him because it takes him exactly as long to shave as it does her to shower. Impossible not to see it sometimes as a film montage,
Scenes from a Marriage
(oh, our corrupted imaginations), the synchronized washings and brushings and putting-on of clothes. Peter is the faster and more decisive dresser, which is funny, because he’s more vain and nervous than she is, but for workdays he’s got that man thing in his favor, just pick one of the four suits and one of the ten shirts, all of which go with any of the four suits. Rebecca puts on the dark pencil skirt (Prada, almost immorally expensive, but she was right, she’s worn it for years) and the thin mocha-colored cashmere sweater, asks him if it looks okay, he tells her yes but she changes anyway. He understands—although it’s just a conference call she’s looking for the lucky outfit, the one that’ll make her feel as forcefully herself as it’s possible for her to feel. He leaves her going through the closet, does a quick check of the kitchen for something breakfastlike, decides he’ll just grab a Starbucks sandwich en route, goes back into the bedroom, where Rebecca has switched to the navy blue sheath dress which, as he can tell immediately by her face, isn’t going to feel right either.

“Good luck today,” he says. “Call me after you’ve had the conference.”

“You know I will.”

A quick kiss and he’s off, past the closed door behind which Mizzy sleeps, or pretends to sleep.

The next couple of hours at the gallery are taken up with what Peter and Rebecca have come to call the Ten Thousand Things (as in, over the phone, “What are you doing?” “Oh, you know, the Ten Thousand Things”), their shorthand for the ongoing avalanche of e-mails and phone calls and meetings, their way of conveying to each other that they’re busy but you don’t want to know the particulars, they don’t even interest
me.
All Uta offers regarding Groff is what Peter calls her German look, a Teutonic hauteur that implies precisely what it’s meant to imply:
Little guy, it’s a big world, why don’t you consider agonizing over things that actually matter?
He’d like to have the conversation with Uta that he’d like to have had with Rebecca, the one about compromise and his refusal to dismiss the question as trivial; he’d like, in fact, to have talked to Uta about the idea of closing the gallery and doing . . . something else. No idea what, of course. And why would Uta, who likes her job just fine, who’s happy enough with good-enough art—why does he think she’d want to have that particular conversation with him?

Still. It’d be nice to have that conversation with someone, and although Bette is the likeliest candidate he can’t really have it with Bette. He’s not at all convinced that her sense of discouragement with the world of art sales isn’t a defense—who wants to leave a party when it’s going strong? If Bette pretends to be disgusted with commerce, doesn’t it cede less power to her illness? Does he really want to be a healthy younger man complaining about staying at the very same party she’s being compelled to leave?

He takes the L out to Bushwick (the limo days are over, even if you could still afford them it wouldn’t look good, pulling up in front of an artist’s studio like the king of fucking England, not now, not when you’re asking your artists to understand that despite your best efforts the work just might not sell, because, as you may have heard, the international economy has collapsed). Peter still wears the suits because, well, he’s already
got
them, and he’s become known for a certain Tom Ford suavity. It’s a balancing act, really. You want to reassure the artists that you’re not frittering money away at their expense and you want at the same time to let them know that you’re doing okay, that you’re not asking them to stay aboard a sinking ship. So. You sit reading the
Times
on the L train, Bushwick-bound, in your black suit and your charcoal gray polo shirt.

And then, at the Myrtle Avenue stop, up the stairs among the sparse crowd of the trudging and the beleagured. Eleven forty a.m. on the Canarsie-bound L is not a time or destination for those who are prospering in the world and out into Bushwick proper, which could be the outskirts of Cracow (where, admittedly, he’s never been), or any one of a number of formerly Soviet Eastern European cities that were grimly industrial under the Soviets and remain not only grim and industrial but increasingly decrepit. Like an Eastern European city, Bushwick has sprouted, here and there, struggling signs of new life—a grocery store, a coffeehouse—intermingled with the dying embers of the old new life, a dim and faded bridal shop, a dry cleaner’s where they seem to believe a window that displays a pile of folded shirts under a yellowing spider plant will be good for business.

Peter heads up Myrtle, looking for Groff’s address. Bushwick is bleak, no denying it. Bushwick clearly never intended to be anything
but
bleak. It was always peripheral and utilitarian. The people who built these warehouses and garages and storage buildings surely didn’t imagine that anyone would ever actually live here. Here in the outer boroughs, this one anyway, we find ourselves in the presence of a different set of founding intentions. If Manhattan rose fundamentally out of the grander ambitions of the Industrial Age, all those muscled worker-gods bearing columns, all those ziggurat-topped buildings rising toward a heaven that had never seemed so near, Bushwick (God knows how old it is) is inherently modest and plain, meant (it seems) from the beginning to be outlying, meant for the making of small parts, the warehousing of goods, like the sturdy but limited old uncle in an illustrious family, a decent man without beauty or imagination who does some small job and never married, who is known but not exactly loved.

And yet, behind some of these casemented warehouse windows, artists are at work.

Peter wonders: Does the fringey urban semi-exile in which most artists live affect their output? Sure, young artists are expected to be poor, they’re
supposed
to be poor, but the poor artists of other generations lived in Paris or Berlin or London, they lived in Greenwich Village. To what extent do the Impressionists exist at all because it was suddenly so much cheaper to leave Paris and go to Provence? Yes, they lived meagerly, but they lived in places of real if sometimes decaying beauty; they lived in cities or villages that could be rough but had no doubts about their ancient profundity, their queenly rights not only to exist but to exult in their own habits and particulars. Bushwick, on the other hand, is pretty close to nowhere. Its founders didn’t take much trouble with it; even the oldest of the buildings were obviously put up as quickly and cheaply as possible. In a place like this, wouldn’t it seem a little . . .
silly
to think about producing earnest work that aspired, however imperfectly, to the profound? I mean, hello, Bushwick, hello, America, hello, mega-malls and feed lots. Here’s my attempt to slit the skin of mortality and see what glitters on the other side. How embarrassing would
that
be?

Who was it who said a country gets the government it deserves? Does America get the art it deserves?

And here, now, is Groff’s building, halfway down an industrial block on Wilson. Peter hits the buzzer.

“Hey, man.” A deep cello of a voice, potent.

“Hey.” Peter Harris, cool dude.

The buzzer buzzes and he’s inside the lobby, if lobby is the word for it—he’s inside the flickering fluorescence of the beige-linoleumed entranceway, devoid of distinguishing features save for a faded black board behind cracked glass on which, in intermittently missing white stick-on letters, are listed the names of small companies that have probably been dead for at least twenty years.

Peter gets into the elevator, which smells, oddly, of grape bubble gum. The door shuts asthmatically and Peter thinks briefly about getting stuck in the thing, or worse, getting just short of the sixth floor, where Groff’s studio is, and falling. Try not to think about the rat-gnawed cables that are hauling your ass upward, please God (or whatever tentative deity Peter turns to at nervous moments), don’t let me die in an elevator on my way to see work I’m not sure about, it would be too horribly fitting—Peter Harris meets his end as he endeavors to see an artist whose work is neither protean nor seminal, who is producing something pretty good that Peter thinks he can sell.

When the elevator reaches the sixth floor it pauses, trembling slightly, door still shut, and Peter is embarrassed to realize that he’s actually gone sweaty-palmed by the time the doors wheeze open.

They open directly onto Groff’s studio. Motherfucker has the whole goddamned floor. This would be family money. Even a young hotshot like Groff doesn’t make this much, this fast.

Peter steps out of the elevator into a crepuscular columned vastness, like the grand foyer of some grimy dilapidated palace, all but empty (except for a slightly surreal parlor arrangement, a ratty old sofa and two Windsor chairs, various shades of putty and bone), dirty light slanting in through the sooted windows. And here, preceded by the sound of his boot heels on the splintery floorboards, is the artist himself. Peter knows the drill—they never stand right by the elevator, waiting to greet you. The worst sin, in their world, is overeagerness and a desire to please, though of course most of the ones who succeed are riddled with and riven by both. The ones who really and truly don’t care usually end up as small-town eccentrics somewhere along the Hudson Valley, arguing with whomever will listen about integrity as the only virtue that means a goddamn thing, perpetually preparing for their annual show at some local gallery.

And now, Rupert Groff.

He’s got it down. Pale and pudgy in a rock star way (how do some of these kids do it, how are they ragged and out of shape and yet ineffably cool?), shock of disheveled dark red hair, big doughy endearing face, like a young Charles Laughton. Wearing a tissue-thin T-shirt that bears the Oscar Mayer logo, gray Dickies work pants.

“Hey-ho,” he says. He has, no denying it, a marvelous, rich, musical voice. In another life, he could probably sing.

“Peter Harris. A pleasure.”

He extends his hand, which Groff pumps. Peter is a man in a suit, at least twenty years older than this boy, there’s a limit to how
hey-ho
he’s willing to be.

“Thanks for coming by,” Groff says. Okay, he’s not arrogant, or at any rate not insufferably arrogant. Or is at any rate waiting to let his arrogance show later.

“Thanks for having me.”

Groff turns and heads into the loft’s inner dimness. Peter follows.

“So,” Groff says. “Like I said over the phone, I’ve only got a couple of bronzes right now, but they’re nice ones. They’re . . . they were for my show at Bette’s.”

We’re not going to touch that subject, not yet.

Peter says, “And as I told you, I have a great client, I think she’d be perfect for one of the bronzes.”

“What’s her name?”

“Carole Potter.”

“I don’t know her. What’s she like?”

Shrewd. Even for ready money, you don’t want to sell your work to just anyone.

“She lives in Greenwich. She’s eclectic, and she’s not prim. She’s got a Currin and a Gonzalez-Torres and the most exquisite Ryman she bought back when you could still get them.”

Best not to mention the older stuff, the Agnes Martin, the Oldenburg sculpture in the north garden. Most of the new kids worship some of the older masters and despise others, and there’s no way of guessing which venerable figure will turn out to be a young artist’s godhead, and which the devil incarnate.

“Do you think I’m a little edgy for her?” Groff says.

“The collection needs more edge, and she knows it. Frankly, your piece would be replacing a Sasha Krim.”

“That shit is nasty.”

“Too nasty for Carole Potter.”

Toward the rear of this dim vastness hangs an old mouse-colored curtain from a long iron rod. Groff pulls back the curtain, and they enter the studio proper. He’s decided, it seems, for reasons Peter can’t begin to decipher, to give the loft an absurdly large entrance—a lobby, if you will. Maybe it’s a Wizard of Oz trick, meant primarily for visitors like Peter—a wait-till-you-see-what’s-behind-the-curtain strategy.

Behind the curtain is the studio, a jerry-rigged roomlike room maybe fifteen feet square. Groff is more orderly than some. He’s put up a pegboard wall from which various tools hang, some of them quite lovely, assorted wire scrapers and long wooden paddles and wood-handled awl-like implements, all meant for the shaping of wax and clay. The studio is filled with the smell of warm wax, which is not only lovely but strangely soothing, as if it linked up with a childhood memory, though Peter can’t imagine what infantile ministrations could conceivably have involved hot wax. The first oracle at Delphi was a hut made of beeswax and birds’ wings—maybe it’s racial sense memory.

And here, on a heavy-legged industrial steel table: the object itself. A four-foot-tall bronze urn, beautifully burnished to that green-ochre particular to bronze, with a foot and handles, classical at heart but given pomo proportions, the base smaller and the great looping handles bigger than any artisan in the fifth century
B.C.
would have considered; that hint of cartoonishness, of animal jauntiness, that rescues it not only from imitation but from any hint of the tomb.

Okay. At first glance, it passes the context test. It has gravity and charisma. Although gallery people don’t like to talk about it, even among themselves, this is one of the problems that can arise—the simple fact that in a hushed white room with polished concrete floors, almost anything looks like art. There can’t be a dealer in New York, or anywhere, who hasn’t gotten variations on that phone call: loved it in the gallery, but now it seems all wrong in our living room. There’s a standard response: art is sensitive to its environment, let me come over and if we can’t make it work I will of course take it back . . . But really, more often than not, what happens to the piece when it arrives in a living room is, it lacks the potency to stand up to an actual room, even if the room itself is awful (as these rooms so often are—the rich tend to love their gilt and granite, their garish upholstery fabric that cost three forty a yard). Most of Peter’s cohorts blame the rooms, and Peter understands—the rooms are often not only gaudy and overdone, they have that sense of the conqueror about them, and the painting or sculpture in question usually enters such rooms as the latest capture. Peter, however, has other feelings. He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can’t be undone by even the most ludicrous sofas or side tables. A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake, can Peter suggest a designer to help them start over again?