Slaves of New York (10 page)

all the art history Mark-Paul had been too stoned to bother with.

Meanwhile, his backers were at his throat: though he was asking for more money, they were asking when the gallery would start to make a return. He should never have taken money from the diamond dealer, though Schmuel—Sam—was one of his oldest friends. Now Sam claimed to be twenty million in debt and couldn't keep shoving money into Victor's gallery. Then there was the mistake with the group show last summer: he had bought everything himself, as an investment, and had held onto the work even when the collectors would have taken it off his hands.

He had to do everything, all by himself. He had to go through slides, make sure the paintings went out on time to the art fair in Madrid, insurance, every single thing his staff should have taken care of had to be checked and double-checked by him. And Sistina, the Italian-American princess! How had he ended up with her? The sides of the bathtub were lined with hundreds of bottles of shampoo, it was impossible that any human being should use so many varieties. She had already gone off to work, leaving a coffee cup behind the toilet, a confectioners' sugar of talcum powder sprinkled over the floor, and the cat box uncleaned. One furious paw waved under the bathroom door. The cat was insane, he was allergic to its dandruff, he had told her a hundred times to get rid of that animal.

But what Sistina didn't want to hear, she didn't. This morning he had woken to find the animal asleep on top of his face, trying to suffocate him. What a way to wake up, with a mouth of fur and a fecund odor and the sensation of drowning.
She
was out of the house by eight, a showroom model for Bill Blass —with a great intelligence she insisted on covering up with platitudes and inanities.

Pushing the cat away from the bathroom door, he went into the kitchen. He was running water in the kitchen sink for the espresso machine, which he had to wash first—Sistina drank her coffee and left the hot wet grounds in the machine—when the cat, a moldy, white animal named Snowball, jumped up

onto the kitchen counter, ran across its length, and dove into the sink, splashing him with soapy water.

He would have thrown the animal off the terrace—twenty-seven floors up—if not for Sistina. In any event he would have been consumed with guilt. And his head. He suspected Sistina hit him over the head while he slept, he had the feeling of having been bludgeoned.

He lit up a Player cigarette while the coffee perked. The cat sat preening itself with a reptilian tongue. While he was waiting, in his shirtsleeves, for the operator at the Palace Hotel in Madrid to put him through to Gabriele, the cat came out of nowhere, leapt up, and bit him in the elbow, leaving a jagged tear in the sleeve of his shirt.

The animal was insane, it would have to be put to sleep. The shirt had cost $150. He had never seen anything like this, luckily his skin wasn't pierced, but the shirt was ruined. He lunged out to give the cat a whack but it had already sprung halfway across the room and run off to one of its secret lairs. Therapy! He was going to insist that Sistina go back to her shrink.

He lit another cigarette. Gabriele wasn't in his room, now he had no way of knowing if any of the paintings had made it through customs. Ten-thirty, a splitting headache. Just as artists could be divided into those who were great and those who were merely second or third rate, so the world at large could be broken up: A people, B people, and C. Now, while he hesitated to place himself in the A category, on the other hand surely he was not a C person. At least, eight years before, he had had the sense to realize he was never going to be a great artist, but as a dealer he might easily be among the top-notch. He had a skill, he might instruct artists in how to improve their work. Yet his artists refused to listen to him. Betsy Brown had two top-notch artists. About his own he could not be certain, except perhaps for George Lodge, who painted the same picture over and over again: dull faces like African masks, primitive and heavy-lidded.

He dialed Madrid again, this time a different operator at the Palace: either Gabriele hadn't yet checked in or was already

out. He took his cup of coffee through the sliding doors in the living room and out onto the terrace. Christopher Chin, the well-known fashion photographer, waved at him from the far end. The terrace extended across the length of the two apartments.

He carried his coffee over to Christopher's metal table. "We should get someone up here to paint the terrace," he said. They had both put in money to have a raised wooden platform built out there two years before, lifting the floor up by five feet. Now they could look out over the pillared cement railing.

"What happened to your sleeve?" Christopher said. A plucked-looking man, he wasn't holding up too well. He had just come back from Haiti; the sun had beaten his face into a thick surface of cow hide.

"What can I do?" Victor said. "Do you know anyone who wants a cat? You talk to her, I can't get through to her. Before she moved in, I got the apartment painted once a month, I had people over to dinner almost every night—" He had used his apartment as a gallery for two years before he got the backing for the SoHo space. Now, with Sistina's terrible taste—she had brought with her a giant overstuffed couch, grandmotherly, chintz floral, as well as boxes, chatchkas, a collection of salt shakers in the shapes of cacti, kittens, windmills—his apartment was a mess, there was no educating her.

Christopher was writing the introduction for a book of photographs. His eyes glazed over at Victor's litany. "I can't get any sleep, hemorrhoids, none of my staff are able to follow any of my orders and I end up doing everything myself."

"Relax, you've been this way for too long. Why don't you take Sistina and go away on a vacation? Haiti was fabulous," Christopher said. Christopher Chin. Not Oriental, but the name had apparently affected him: little slits for eyes, puffed up from too much drink. A tuber of a nose, stiff hair, glasses easing themselves halfway down his face, held up only by the budding growth of nostrils.

"Yes? I can't go away. I have too much work to do, there's no one I trust enough to leave the gallery with."

"I thought you were going to get your brother in there as an accountant. You trust him."

"An accountant isn't the same thing. All he knows is numbers, he doesn't know about running a gallery." His brother, Leo, was coming that afternoon. He looked out across Twenty-ninth Street. The roofs of the buildings, tetrahedrons, gristly bricks, dull copper pyramids in shades of lichen green. Meanwhile a taste like salad oil welled up in his throat. Flowers for Mother's Day. He had told his secretary the week before, but it was unlikely Sasha had remembered. His parents had settled, finally, in Arizona. German-Jewish refugees, they had gotten out—to England—just in time, not through any intelligence on his father's part (his father would never have left at all had it not been for his brother, who had emigrated to London back in the twenties). The two brothers were not alike. His father, a dapper hypochondriac, had been a doctor in Cologne. Somehow he had never managed to fill out the required paperwork, take the proper tests, to practice in England. Eventually he went into business with his brother, import-export. The brother, a vigorous man who gambled, smoked cigars. Though married, in middle age he dated Playboy bunnies. Victor had been born three years after the move; they lived in Golders Green, a grim house filled with Oriental junk furniture. Both parents spoke English with heavy German accents. Leo was nearly four years younger than he. His mother's life had been devoted to his father's health. They had never made friends, though they had joined the synagogue. Both he and his brother had been bar mitzvahed; only Leo continued to practice. He never felt himself to be Jewish, or English; he had ended up dropping out of Cambridge. Though he knew everyone in the London art scene, he never really felt at home.

The juice of New York was something he could understand. American rage, freedom from European classicism and the deathly Common Market. Still, he had problems with his stomach. It was fifteen or sixteen years since he had moved to New York. Now his artists were famous for painting cartoon char-

acters, primitive computerlike drawings, rip-offs of Navaho and African art. He was riding the crest of the future, it was better that he hadn't stuck with painting. He had been involved with a revolutionary group, in the 1960s: one of the members had gone up to the offices of a famous art publication and chopped off his finger on the desk of the senior editor. This was a statement. He and two others had bombed the information desk at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a small bomb; none of them expected that a few paintings would receive smoke damage, shrapnel. Only a Miro was beyond restoration. A year's suspended sentence: ten years later, people still tried to fight with him in bars. But his old self no longer seemed to have any relationship to his present one.

He had told George Lodge he would go up to his Forty-second Street studio to look at his new paintings that afternoon; by now it was too late to go to the gallery first. He took a cab uptown. The streets, even this early in the summer, were unbelievably filthy; the pavement seemed to be oozing its own sediment, the reek of grilling meat, hot dogs, shashlik, burnt and greasy, was like the smell of some garbage incinerator. He had to fight his way around the hustlers, past the electronic junk stores, to get into George's building. The elevator stank of roach spray and mothballs.

The radio was turned up so loud he had to bang on the door over and over before George heard him and let him in. "George, George," Victor said, "how can you listen to that junk?" He walked into the room. To work in such squalor. The reek of acetone, a tipsy brain-crumbling shrillness, almost knocked him off his feet. Spray paint, fixative, polyurethane. No molecules resembling oxygen were left anywhere, the air conditioner was apparently out of order and the windows sealed shut. The O and CO
₂
forced out by the tougher, man-made particles, which lacerated the lungs as they floated here and there. George stood sulkily by the door, his long galoot face surly and elegant, as Victor pulled stuff from the racks. Scrawled on various half-finished canvases:

USED AFTER A NON-FINITE OR VERBLESS CLAUSE AT THE BEGINNING OF A SENTENCE: TO GET THERE ON TIME, SHE LEFT HALF AN HOUR EARLY.

USED BEFORE AND AFTER A NON-DEFINING RELATIVE CLAUSE OR A PHRASE IN APPOSITION, WHICH GIVES MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE NOUN IT FOLLOWS: THE PENNINE HILLS WHICH HAVE BEEN A FAVORITE WITH HIKERS FOR MANY YEARS ARE SITUATED BETWEEN LANCASHIRE AND YORKSHIRE.

QUEEN ELIZABETH TWO, A VERY POPULAR MONARCH, CELEBRATED HER SILVER JUBILEE IN 1977.

George smoked a cigarette while he looked. "Someday you're going to have an explosion in here," Victor said. The grim pseudo-African faces, topped with penile projections, reared from their gloomy canvases. "Now, you should go and look at the work of Léger, George," he said. "Take a look at this painting. The composition is all wrong. On the bottom, over here, should be a thick triangle. And all of these shapes, they should have a heavy shadow to the right. You have something here, but it's not there yet. How can you work when your studio looks like a bomb hit it?"

"Victor, did you get my letter?" George's arms were too long, like a gibbon, shooting from imaginary tree to tree.

"What letter? Why don't you get a chair, someplace I can sit?" He went and looked out the window. It was bleak here on Forty-second Street, no sign of vegetable life to prove that the season was spring. Across the way was a peep show, two nude women in neon; one, with the tube burnt out in her leg, flickered on and off. "Give me some paper." George didn't move. Victor peeled a piece of newsprint paper off the floor and took a gold pen from his lapel pocket. "I'm excited about what you're doing, George, but I'd like to see you working from extensive drawings, it would give me the feeling that you've spent time working these things out. See, this is what Oldenburg did. He started with small sketches, let's say for his giant cigarette. He made sketches, these today are worth a hundred

thousand. Then he went out and found cigarettes, hundreds of butts. He studied these. Then he had a craftsman, a master craftsman, make a small cigarette butt from metal. Then he had medium-sized ones made from clay."

"Victor, didn't you read that letter I sent you?"

"Wait, just let me finish. Then you'll talk. This is important, George. This could change your whole way of working. How Oldenburg worked, when he was finally ready, he built his giant cigarette butt in soft sculpture. Whether you like his work or not—"

"Hike Oldenburg."

"You have to agree that the man was a genius. So you have the whole gamut, do you see what I'm getting at, here, George? You have the whole gamut, from sketches to paintings to the final soft sculpture; it's not as if he just got an idea and slapped it onto canvas. When you're working, you should do drawings first, then you should make the painting in squares. Each individual square, a segment of the painting, should be as complete and fully realized as the whole work. Go and look at Léger, George. He knew about composition. That's who you could be like, if you spent a little more time on these things." In his excitement the thick, oily feeling rose up in his chest, as if the stomach contents were backing up the esophagus like a kitchen sink. He fumbled for a Turns.

"Victor, can I say something now?"

"What? George, I came all the way up here this afternoon, just to take a look at your work, and I can see you're already on the defensive."

"Victor, I'm trying to tell you: I sent you a letter listing twenty points that would have to change for me to stay with the gallery, and I don't think you even read the letter."