Dear Money (4 page)

"Stunts like the black Jesus do us in," said an earnest-looking man as I insinuated myself into the cluster that held Theodor. The speaker was a tall guy with freckles and flaming red hair. He gesticulated dramatically, knocking the drink of the blond boy standing next to him. It spilled on the front of his pink oxford shirt and he dabbed at it abstractedly with a cocktail napkin. "No concern," he said. "It's fine." I noticed he wore cuff links.

"The what?" I asked as I said hello. I knew some of the cluster from Jane's other parties and from the artistic youth circuit: a gay poet, a painter, two heterosexual novelists—one tall, one short. Jane collected people with interesting faces and thrust them together as some sort of performance art in combustible human energy, but she was well loved for the effort because everyone enjoyed the parties and, we liked to think, since we ourselves were included, she chose people well. Always she engaged in postparty gossip, keen to know the details of who went home with whom. She kept track of these relationships as some people keep track of their stocks, taking a certain pride in the successful match.

I could feel Theodor's doubtful eyes land on me, a tactile pressure as he tried to make sense of who I was, checking me out with sidelong glances and looks of detached appraisal. Unlike the other women at the party, who now made their way into the room, plopping into the chairs, finding cool spots by the open window, a pretty dye cast into clear water, I was wearing an expensive black dress of silk chiffon that my mother had given me for Christmas with the hope, I believe, that it would attract the right sort of man. The thrift-store aesthetic had never been mine. I imagined Theodor saw me as I saw the blond with the cuff links—out of place. I wanted him to know that I belonged, for it was like a club, this world. I had just sold my first story to
The Literary Review
and I was still a bit smitten with the success, but I knew better than to share the news. News like this you let people discover on their own, while leafing through the magazine's pages. Theodor was big and tall with a ruddy broad charm, and the vodka made me feel a little reckless.

"Stuff like that enrages the Christians, the Catholics, the Republicans. It's all over the news," the blond shouted above the din.

"The chocolate Jesus," someone explained to me.

"Oh, that," I said. The artist had sculpted the figure entirely from chocolate and had left him, also entirely, unclothed. A black, naked, edible Jesus, the Christmas Sensation. Outrage poured through the television screen as the Christian holy season fell upon us. Comparisons with chocolate Allahs and Buddhas and the like were summoned up. How
WOULD YOU FEEL?
was one headline of the gossip pages. A photo of the sculpture captured front and center the genitalia blocked out with a black rectangle. Another headline read:
EAT ME?

"This kind of stunt—and it is a stunt—is self-serving, but so what?" said the gay poet. "I mean, look at us. We're talking about it. The
Post
is talking about it. It's a success."

"Art becomes advertising—and we're all okay with that?" said one of the novelists, the tall one with enormous hands. He'd received a big advance for his first novel and spoke with authority, though no one I knew thought much of his talent. Everyone liked him all the same.

"That's the oldest trap in the book," the other novelist blurted, sloppily draping an arm around me with a smile, and then removing it with a sincere and disarming apology—he'd mistaken me for somebody else and suddenly became drunkenly bashful and solicitous, offering to fetch me another drink. "Don't mind me, I'm incoherent as a general rule, alas." He was like the rest of us, living on tips from two restaurant jobs and sending out short stories to literary magazines in Nebraska and Seattle.

"Free expression suicide," said the blond with the cuff links, as if trying to convince himself, a bit out of his league, it seemed. I wondered if he was a banker scouting the young art market, looking for long-term investments. Shrewd boy. The discussion turned to funding for artists. The gay poet rolled his eyes. "Writers," he said, "everyone pecking fiercely at a carcass, fighting for scraps of flesh, so little to go around." He turned on his heels, decamping for the kitchen.

Theodor caught my eyes and held them for a moment, and a generous sweetness, mixed with a dash of bravado, poured from him to me. He wore checked pants that would have looked preppy on the blond but on Theodor had a stylish flair, black loafers with no socks and a black T-shirt. He seemed to understand something. I didn't know what. But it sat there on his beautiful lips, making me curious to learn whatever it was. He had a girl's long eyelashes.

"That's what the government wants," said the blond guy. "What do you want to bet at some point this fraud received funding from a government grant? It gives them license. 'See how taxpayer money is being spent?'"

"Don't be paranoid."

"Paranoid? The government wants to control everything—art, philosophy, law, the air even, the air we breathe, you breathe."

"It shows that they really care."

"Art reduced to a state of servility, having to depend on the likes and dislikes of government lackeys," said one of the novelists, allowing himself to be carried far away from the chocolate Jesus.

"Lackeys? Really? You sound like a drunk Socialist Party newspaper." The redheaded man tossed back the rest of his martini. He jutted the empty glass out in front of him. Theodor took an imaginary bottle from his pocket, filled the glass, then raised his own and said, "Here, here. We struggle for the sake of art, and art"—he paused for emphasis, like a car going over a cliff— "
art
is a very important thing." The group laughed. "Interrogate the chocolate," he continued. "What kind of chocolate did the artist use?"

"The artist's aesthetic concern, of course," said the tall, untalented novelist.

"What kind of chocolate?" I repeated. The silliness made me giddy.

"If you can't eat it, the rest is nonsense, right?" Theodor both asked and stated, ceding a little of that something that he understood, like a fisherman who lets out his line only to be more certain of hooking the fish. He raised his glass to mine, eyes sparkling as he estimated the impression he had made on me.

"You mean if he uses cheap chocolate, what's the point?" I asked.

"I mean if it is supposed to be edible—and it's Jesus we're talking about—then it better be good."

"For example, Godiva?" I asked.

"That would do."

"Teuscher?"

"Belgian Callebaut would prove he's serious."

The blond boy said, "The great one speaks." He did not seem to be joking.

"The great one," I said. "So who anointed you?"

"He's just won the Austria Prize from the Kunsthistorisches," said the blond with what seemed to be a perfect accent.

"The what?" I asked.

"Come on," said Theodor—whose name I did not yet know. "No résumé-building. Tonight I think we are all drunken socialists, no?" I didn't believe that. If he was anything like a male writer, résumé-building was exactly what he wanted.

"Do you know each other?" I asked. Someone had knocked into me, pushing me closer to the blond and to Theodor so that we became our own constellation, the others fading away one by one.

"I'm his dealer," said the blond boy.

"Dealer." I laughed. "Ecstasy? Pot? You look like you're still in high school."

"I work for his dealer," he confessed bashfully, vodka flushing his cheeks. He had an adorable mouth, fine straight white teeth. His cuff links were blue Wedgwood. An aspiring assistant. His determination was ferocious. He'd be somewhere in a few years.

"What do you do?" I asked Theodor.

"Is this a test?" he said, tilting his gaze up to meet mine.

"Yes," I replied.

"I'm a collector," he answered. "A trash collector."

"Oh, please," I said. He too was bubbling with the alcohol. "You won the Austria Prize for trash?"

"It's true," he said and looked to the blond.

"Scout's honor," the boy said.

"Just so you know," Theodor said, "and by way of offering a blanket apology, nobody here, including myself, will ever be remembered—for anything." The blond smiled, a telling knowledge of his friend, and retreated quietly to another conversation.

"That's optimistic," I said. "A real upper."

"I'm a realist," he said.

"Trash?" I repeated.

"I collect junk and reshape it and then sell it. It's a value-added service." Then he looked me over again with an awful, awful appeal, and added, "And you're a rich girl."

"I'm a novelist," I said defensively. But I liked the notion, myself as a rich girl.

"But you're also," he said, raising his glass and pointing his forefinger, "a rich girl."

"Will you speak to me if I'm poor?"

"The dress gives you away, my darling." I felt suddenly darling and cocked a cute little smile.

"Perhaps I stole it." I liked that notion too, the idea of stealing a beautiful dress. The idea seemed to give him pleasure. It was hot in the room, everyone pressing together, waves of human movement.

"A thief," he said, raising his left eyebrow. "Interesting." We were shouting above the din. He stood up from the arm of the couch to move closer to me. We were pushed against a bookcase—Waugh and Yeats and Freud and Borges.

"A thief," I confirmed. His eyes brightened.

"It just so happens I'm in need of a thief," he said.

"You're in luck, then," I said. I felt dangerous. A bottle of cheap champagne appeared in his hand and he filled our glasses and we drank them down and he filled them again. The vodka and the champagne mixed in me in a daring combination.

"What are we going to steal?" I asked. "More trash?"

"Trash," he confirmed.

"I don't like that."

"Rich girl!" he said. His curls were wild and unruly, ferocious.

"India," I corrected and reached out my hand to him. "I'm India Palmer."

"And I'm sub-Saharan Africa. Nice to meet you," he said and took my hand in his. He had long slender fingers, a cool palm. A small mole vanished into his dimple as he smiled.

"It was the dress," he said later. "I wanted to take it off of you."

And he had (if my mother only knew), in his studio in Green-point, in the brightness of New Year's morning, the sun streaming through the big paned window, the streets below a foreign land with signs in unfamiliar Polish, advertising unfamiliar Polish foods. In the silent hours of the new day, the New Year, I pretended to be a dangerous woman, a thief. I'd followed him home, out of Jane's party and across the Brooklyn Bridge, shivering in the New Year, lips blue, teeth clattering—not a very alluring thief. On the bridge he tilted my head upward, showing me the weave of cables, filigree against the midnight sky, both of us in a drunken rapture over the intricacy of the design. The American flag fluttered boldly from one of the towers. "Hypothermia and romance," he'd declared, enveloping me in his coat and arms. "Beautiful together."

We walked all night across Brooklyn, from the bridge to his studio. I'd followed him along the banks of the Salvage Stream, as he called it, the big swath of garbage that cut through the city like a big river snaking across the continent, or perhaps the Gulf Stream spanning the world's sky, as he plucked from it the garbage of others, metals and ceramics that he intended to reinvent in his sculptures. Beauty from ugliness, he wanted to prove a point, but he was too drunk (and so was I) to be any good at the task. "I'm showing off for you," he said, pulling a cracked vase lined with green slime from rotted flower stems, holding it proudly before me, a trophy of his cleverness. The thing was hideous, almost laughable.

"You need to work harder, then," I said. "The vase smells." It did, of the dank rot of foliage. He looked at me with those curls, trying to come up with an intelligent response, and examining the vase once again, sniffing it, he said, "By George, you're right," and set it gently on the sidewalk so the glass did not shatter. I remembered that detail, how carefully he set it down. As filled with vodka and champagne as we were, he would not let the glass break. As it turned out, I was right about a lot of the junk he wanted to claim. But even so, we had fun. He was trying his mightiest to succeed before me, to pull off a layer of the city like a real estate agent lifting up a shag carpet to show a potential buyer the parquet floor beneath. I'd followed him because what he understood was simply what he wanted. I'd followed him because he was leading me through the gates of Parnassus, showing me that entry there did not depend on credentials. That's what I found in the trash. Alchemy. Something from nothing. You either had it or you didn't. That's why the artist has never had to doff his hat to the king. I followed him. It did not feel like a choice.

"I followed you," he'd say later.

We married at City Hall. Theodor carried a bouquet of daisies, wearing a white suit from a thrift store, his black curls falling here and there about his lovely face. I wore my mother's wedding dress, stolen from her attic, cream-colored with age, long with a full skirt and one hundred satin buttons running down the back to meet a bustle. We borrowed another eloping couple to use as our witnesses and then walked to the subway and took the train to JFK and flew across the country (still in our wedding clothes, showered with the smiles and good wishes of strangers). From Seattle, we took a bus and two ferries and hitched a ride to a small hotel called the Tiger Inn, which was also a commune.

Theodor had heard about it from his nomadic artist friends, heard that they welcomed anyone; they especially loved artists. They allowed their guests to help out in some way if they couldn't afford to pay. We stayed in the "honeymoon suite," a small room built into a tree with a view of Puget Sound and the seals that lay lazily on the inn's small rocky beach. We helped in the kitchen, causing guests and communards alike to love us because we knew how to cook. Theodor carved a Ganesh out of wood, a small offering. The owners were converted Hindus and the property was thick with lingams and Shivas and Parvatis, but it did not have a Ganesh, the elephant god, the god of household harmony and success. We stayed ten days and then flew home to a life in which everything was new and ours, and ours to design.