Slaves of New York (11 page)

"No, I haven't read any letter! George, I just got back from Chicago, I had to spend all week getting ready for the Madrid art fair, I'm leaving for Madrid tomorrow—what's your problem?"

"I don't know if we should talk about it until you've read my letter. Basically, it's about your attitude. I've seriously been

considering leaving the gallery for a long time now, Victor. I don't see how I can stay unless you have a change of attitude."

"Attitude! What attitude! George, why don't you come to me if you have problems? You go around complaining to your friends, this doesn't make me look good."

"How can I come to you, Victor, when I can't even get into your office to see you? This is the first time you've come to my studio in eight months."

He was late for his appointment with his brother; he had a collector coming to the gallery at three-fifteen. "I'll find your letter and call you tonight, George," he said. "I haven't been able to get any sleep in weeks, at three o'clock in the morning I'm awake, lying in bed, busy making notes about strategies for handling your work, where we should go next."

"You're not listening, Victor. Don't you see yourself? How terrible you look?"

"I'm going to call you, George. I would love to stay and talk this through—"

"I don't want to talk! I want you to read my letter!"

He could hear George flinging objects this way and that as he waited for the elevator. He would suggest to George the name of his old psychiatrist. George, whom three years ago he had found working as a janitor, barely able to make enough to buy supplies. What did he want from him?

In the taxi he remembered it was Sistina's birthday; he hadn't gotten her anything. There was something about going out to dinner that night with Schmuel—Sam—and some of her model friends. He looked in his appointment book. There was an opening around the corner he had promised to go and see, and a dinner afterward for Monica Bell, a painter whom he had shown two years ago who was still working on new stuff. Sistina wouldn't be home until eight, he would have to tell her they would have a dinner when he got back from Madrid. Why was he ever born? Beset upon by roaches—one crawled out of his briefcase—tormented by his girlfriend; no matter how much he cleaned up, no matter how many times he told Sistina to hire a maid to come in on Saturdays while she was at home,

nothing changed. She left crumbs everywhere she went, and the roaches came out as fearlessly as a herd of goats to graze on the congealed morass of cat food which the cat itself disdained to touch. Oh, Sistina, such a beauty, with her halo of reddish-brown hair, her fine features and large, humorless eyes. So he had fallen for a girlish demeanor, sincerity a mere disguise for catlike wiles beneath. On the other hand, maybe he was paranoid. Maybe he had driven her to vixen behavior prematurely. Without him it might have taken Sistina another ten years to acquire it. Why must he be the one to be at war with everyone, not a single soul on his side? Even his army of conscripts whined and complained behind his back, shirked their jobs. No matter how many times he explained a thing, something always went wrong in the execution.

He walked into the gallery rubbing his head; Leo, his brother, was standing stunned in front of one of the paintings at the far end. "Sasha," he said to the blond, bored-looking girl who sat behind the front desk. He could feel her bristle as he got near. Literally begin to bristle. This fury, to be met with it in his own gallery! "I have to have something to eat, Sasha. Would you go around the corner and get me a cup of chili?"

"Madrid called," she said. "They can't get the paintings out of customs."

"Don't speak to me," he said. He started to take off his jacket, limp from the heat.

"What happened to your sleeve?" Sasha said. "There's a big hole in it." He gave her a malevolent look. She had been with him since the gallery opened, the only one to stay this long. She had two girls who worked under her; now she was threatening to leave in August. Sasha had plans: to open her own space in the East Village with some German cowboy-type she had been living with since the summer before. Obviously she despised Victor; she acted as if by working for him she had been sold into white slavery. She used her tininess, her blondness, her lank blond hair, against him. A sour little bud of a face. Women's attractiveness was based on how closely they resembled the fetal stage of life. Sash could have been a

fashion model. In some ways she was more attractive than bulky Sistina. She was too short, however. Instead, she had wandered around the world, married and divorced a wealthy Italian drug addict. A bright girl, like a hornet, with a style for dress. Black, soigné, chic. No leopard-skin babushkas or hennaed hair so popular these days with girls on the street. And then there was her coldness, her polish: Why didn't she remain with an uptown crowd? He supposed SoHo held a certain excitement for her; it was strange to think of her as a person with ambition, however. She knew musicians; French jet-set types were always stopping by to say hello. She did her work but was surly; he figured when he was away she probably greeted clients with hostility. "Can't you call up for some food?" she said. "I can't leave, I'm the only one here. Everyone else is out to lunch." She handed him a stack of telephone messages. He began to paw through them. "Leo, Leo," he said to his brother, "go sit down, my office is open. Bring us two cups of coffee, cream and sugar in mine."

Well, he was going to starve to death. The day before he hadn't gotten home until ten at night. What had he eaten that day? A Danish, a bowl of lentils, takeout, from some overpriced vegetarian joint around the corner. "There's some Chinese food in the refrigerator," Sistina had called from the bedroom. "You could reheat it." She couldn't have picked up a steak and asparagus? He paid the rent, he gave her money —she didn't earn $200 a week, after taxes, had no money of her own—he always left $50 or $100 around, for food and her taxis, she never walked and hated the subway. But instead of getting up to greet him she was sitting on the bed, wearing filthy sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a pink rabbit, watching TV. The cat, curled sensuously on the pillow, gave him a superior, baleful stare. "I can't eat that crap," he said. "Old Chinese food? Sistina, I have enough trouble with my stomach."

He might as well have been living alone. He had gone into the kitchen and gotten the pile of takeout menus down from on top of the refrigerator. Meanwhile she yelled out to him from

the bedroom. "So there was this man on TV and he was really amazing. Victor, we've got to try this. He took a watch, and made this woman spin the hands around. He wasn't looking. And then on a piece of paper he drew a watch face, and he wrote down the time on the watch, using psychic perception."

"And did he get the time right?" Victor said. Mexican, Chinese, Indian. He could call the deli on the corner.

"No," Sistina said. "He was about an hour or two wrong. But it was just amazing—" Meanwhile her story, her shrill voice, dragged on and on, lacking point of any kind. How many times had he fallen for this, listening patiently to some elaborate tale that added up to nothing? Also she would tell a story at a party, as if in relation to some subject brought up by someone else. After fifteen minutes of her chatter he would cringe, realizing before the other patient listeners that once again her saga had absolutely nothing to do with anything that had gone before. Nor did it add up to anything else. A story in the
Science Times,
for example. Breeding experiments with cats: the Scotch fold, a short-eared cat. Another, without fur. Mutants.

Yet there was a certain pleasure to be found in watching the faces of the others as they listened intently to her, curiously trying to figure out how she was going to pull off a connection between Manx cats and the previous topic of Joseph Beuys's sculpture. And then the gradual bafflement on the realization that not only wasn't there going to be any connection, there wasn't even going to be a punch line. For Sistina told her stories with animation and enthusiasm; her timing was that of a stand-up comedian. But even Gracie Allen's vignettes added up to a surrealist attitude toward life. While Sistina's were merely outbursts of encyclopedic information, watered down through the television set of her head. Last night she carried out a pad of paper and a wristwatch. "Victor, you draw a circle on this paper, and I'm going to spin the hands of the watch and concentrate."

"Sistina, I'm exhausted. I don't believe in this garbage."

Her full, meaty lips turned down in a pout. Her blue eyes,

smeared with dusky liner, voluptuously fringed, stared at him with childish rage. "Come on, Victor, just try it." She thrust the pad at him. He scribbled hands at the one and three. "Victor! Wait until I'm thinking of the time on the watch! Try and picture the hands in your mind." She ripped the used page from the pad. "Okay, I'm picturing the time on the watch," she said. "Now do you see it in your head?"

"Okay, okay," he said. He drew on the clock, fifteen to seven.

"Let's see," she said. "Look, Victor, look at the watch!" Her wristwatch was set at five thirty-five. "See, it's close," she said. "Only an hour and ten minutes off. Isn't that amazing?"

"It's nowhere near," he said.

"No, it is near," she said. "I mean, you could have written two o'clock, or anything. But you were close." Her tongue, a little blistered flap. Parrots had tongues of the same stumpy variety, pointed, beefy. Her obsession with ESP was perpetual. "What flavor am I thinking of?" "Vanilla." "Close—tomato!" And if he had been able to guess, what would have been the use of ESP of this nature? Often, when she claimed to be cleaning the house, he would come upon her fondling a spoon, attempting—by using psychic energy—to bend it with mind power alone. She insisted this could be done. Yet even if possible, he said, he didn't need or want their spoons bent. "Oh, Victor," she said. "Don't be an old poop." He had ended up with a woman, pretty as a fawn, who used such expressions. "Twat." "On the rag." Words still had the power to offend, coming from a woman. Not by meaning so much as sound.

Years ago, in his artist days, he had written a book. B.B., Before Bomb. The book was called
Mgungu,
it had little text. His wild English friends, decked in sixties' sequins and satins, arrived in Manhattan and posed for a series of pictures: staggering out of a studio-set jungle, indulging in birdlike mating rituals. The book was a spoof. Once he had been an outsider, a marginal figure, capable of making fun. Now he saw things were too serious for that. The world was on the edge of collapse, like a balloon with a pinprick. Yet on this edge it was

possible for exciting changes to occur. The artists he had found were like angry babies, furious, spoiled, needing constant attention. Without his nurturing they would hit their heads against the wall, red and squawling, until they beat themselves into exhaustion and died, or gave up. Only through him could they remain in their childlike state of innocence, carefully tended, receiving enough money and attention to enable them to produce.

His brother was sitting on the sofa in his office. Above his head a painting by Stash Stosz: red speckled chickens, pink Bullwinkle moose heads, a man stuck in a gorilla suit, minus the head, arms flailing at the zipper. $5,000. Less discount, $3,800. Fifty percent went to the gallery: not even enough to keep him open for a week. Leo looked uncomfortable. Wearing a cheap pinstriped suit, his face washed-out, as if he had spent too many years under fluorescent lights. Though he was younger than Victor, he looked older—married for twelve years, two children—his wife was a Yemenite Jew, who never came with Leo when Victor insisted he attend the dinners for the artists following various openings. With Leo's sad little twitches—a squint of the eyes, a nervous cough—Victor could not help but feel sorry for him. He had insisted Leo move from New Jersey with his family to Queens, leave his job. Now Leo would manage the gallery business, organize computer records. This would be a change for the better for Leo, though he claimed not to have been unhappy in his dreary life in New Jersey. Somewhere along the line he had died, figuratively speaking. Victor remembered how sparky Leo had been at eleven, playing both teams of an imaginary cricket game in the backyard, a green chiffon scarf around his neck, keeping careful score in a notebook. A tiny, angelic child with pale curls. At some point that imaginative cherub had been swallowed up by a middle-aged English accountant. Now Leo was talking about the house he had finally rented in Bayside. "So I told Orna to call the landlord again. This is the fifth time in a week, Victor. The upstairs toilet is still leaking, and the water is dripping into the ceiling and all the plaster in the living room

is bulging, about to burst. Finally the landlord said if we wanted anything done, we'd have to pay for it ourselves."

"What are you renting for? Why don't you just buy the place?"

"I don't have the money to buy a house, Victor. I can't even afford to rent."

"Listen, I wanted you to come in last week. I'm going to Madrid tomorrow night, you're going to have to be here while I'm gone. I've set up an office for you in the basement. The contractor said he'd put in new lighting by the end of the week. All those things we went over, Leo—I'd like you to be able to have files set up on every artist, which paintings of theirs we're holding, where the paintings have been sold to, how much money should be coming in for payments and by whom."

"We went over all this, Victor. I don't know why you wanted me to come in this afternoon. Nothing's unpacked at home, I left Orna with—"

"Because, Leo, this is very important that I feel you understand what's going on here. I want to feel you'll be able to handle any problem that comes up while I'm gone. Don't rush in here like that, acting like I'm imposing on your time or that there's something more important you could be doing. I'm expecting to feel that you're just as conscientious and concerned about everything that takes place here as I am."