The Genius (2 page)

She told me to go fuck myself sideways and hung up.

Knowing that it was a matter of time before she called back, I left the phone on the front desk and began my morning routine. First voicemail. There were six from Kristjana, all between four and five thirty in the morning; God only knew who she had expected to reach. A few collectors wanted to know when they could expect their art. I was currently running two shows: a series of lovely, shimmery paintings by Egao Oshima, and some of Jocko Steinberger’s papier-mâché genitalia. All of the Oshimas had presold, and several of the Steinbergers had gone to the Whitney. A good month.

After phone came e-mail: clients to touch base with, social machinery in need of grease, arrangements for art fairs, arrangements to look at new work. Much of dealing art consists of keeping one’s plates spinning. A friend of mine in the business wrote to ask if I could get ahold of a Dale Schnelle he lusted for. I replied that I might. Marilyn sent me a macabre cartoon one of her artists had drawn of her, depicting her as Saturn eating his children, à la Goya. She found the image delightful.

At nine thirty, Ruby showed up, coffees in hand. I took mine and gave her instructions. At nine thirty-nine Nat arrived and resumed typesetting the catalogue for our upcoming show. At ten twenty-three my cell phone rang again, a blocked number. As you’d imagine, most of the people I liked selling to had blocked numbers.

“Ethan.” A voice like flannel; I recognized it immediately.

I’d known Tony Wexler all my life, and I considered him the closest thing I have to a father that I didn’t despise. That he worked for my father, had worked for him for more than forty years—I’ll leave the psychoanalysis up to you. Suffice it to say that whenever my father wanted something from me, he sent Tony to go fetch.

Which had happened with increasing frequency over the last two years, when my father had a heart attack and I didn’t visit him in the hospital. Since then I’d been getting calls from him, through Tony, every eight or ten weeks. That might not sound like much, but given how little communication we’d had prior to that, I had lately come to feel a tad assaulted. I had no interest in bridge-building. When my father builds a bridge, you can bet there’s going to be a toll on it.

So while I was pleased to hear Tony’s voice, I didn’t especially want to know what he had to say.

“We read about the shows. Your father was very interested.”

By
we
he meant himself. When I started at the gallery nine years ago, Tony got himself subscribed to several of the trades; and unlike most art-mag subscribers, he reads them. He’s an authentic intellectual in an age when that term has come to mean nothing, and he knows a shocking amount about the market.

He also meant himself when he said
your father
. Tony tends to pin his own sentiments on his boss, a habit designed, I believe, to conceal the absurd fact that I have a closer relationship with the payroll than with the man who sired me. Nobody’s fooled.

We talked art for a little bit. He asked me how I felt about the Steinbergers in the context of his return to figuration; what else Oshima had planned; how the two shows communicated. I kept waiting for the request, the sentence that began
Your father would like
.

He said, “Something has come to my attention that I think you should know about. Some new work.”

It’s always open season on art dealers. Quickly one develops strict submission policies. In my case, impenetrable: if you were good, I would find you; otherwise I didn’t want to hear from you. It might sound elitist or draconian but I had no choice. It was either that or face the endless pleading of acquaintances convinced that if you would take the time to come to their sister-in-law’s best friend’s husband’s half-brother’s debut show at the Brooklyn Jewish Community Center you’d be bowled over, converted, dying to showcase their genius on your obviously bare walls.
Et tu
, Tony?

“Is that a fact,” I said.

“Works on paper,” Tony said. “Ink and felt-tip. You need to see them.”

Warily, I asked who the artist was.

“He’s from the Courts,” Tony said.

The Courts
being Muller Courts, the largest housing development in the Great State of New York. Built as a postwar middle-class utopia, drained of its founding intent by white flight, it holds the ignominious title of most crime-ridden area in Queens; a blight on an already blighted borough; a monument to wealth, ego, and slumlordship; two dozen towers, fifty-six acres, and twenty-six thousand people. Bearing my surname.

Knowing that the artist hailed from that hellpit awakened a sense of obligation in me, one that I had no right to feel. I didn’t build the damn thing; my grandfather did. I wasn’t responsible for its poor upkeep; my father and brothers were. Nevertheless I began to rationalize. There wasn’t any harm in having a look at this so-called art by this so-called artist. Provided word didn’t get around that the Muller Gallery had flung open its doors, all I stood to lose was a few minutes of my time, a sacrifice I would make for Tony. And he had a decent eye. If he said a piece had merit, it probably did.

Not that I intended to represent anyone new. My roster was full. But people like to have their good taste confirmed, and I supposed that even Tony, who I considered the picture of self-composure, was not immune to the need for validation.

“You can give him my e-mail address.”

“Ethan—”

“Or he can come by, if he’d like. Tell him to call first and use your name.”

“Ethan. I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know where he is.”

“Who.”

“The artist.”

“You don’t know where the artist is?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. He’s gone.”

“Gone where.”

“
Gone
gone. Three months he misses rent. Nobody’s seen him. They start thinking he might have died, so the super opens the place up, but instead of finding the tenant, finds the drawings. He had the good sense to call me before tossing them.”

“He called you directly?”

“He called the management company. They called up the tree. Believe me, there’s a reason it got this far. The work is out of this world.”

I was skeptical. “Drawings.”

“Yes. But they’re as good as paintings. Better.”

“What are they like?”

“I can’t describe them.” An unfamiliar note of urgency came into his voice. “You have to see for yourself. The room itself is essential to the experience.”

I told him he sounded like catalogue copy.

"Don’t be snarky.”

"Come on, Tony. Do you really think—”

“Trust me. When can you come?”

“Well. It’s a busy couple of weeks. I’m going to Miami—”

“N-n-n. To
day
. When can you come today.”

“I can’t. Are you kidding? Today? I’m in the middle of work.”

“Take a break.”

“I haven’t even gotten started.”

“Then you’re not interrupting anything.”

“I can come up—next Tuesday. How about then?”

“I’ll send a car for you.”

“Tony,” I said. “It can wait. It’ll have to.”

He said nothing, the most effective rebuke of all. I held the phone aside to ask Ruby for a slot in my schedule, but Tony’s voice came squawking from the receiver.

“Don’t ask her. Don’t ask the girl.”

“I’m—”

“Get in a cab. I’ll meet you there in an hour.”

As I gathered my coat and bag and walked to the corner to pick up a cab, my cell phone rang again. It was Kristjana. She’d done some thinking. August could work.

All twenty-four Muller Courts towers are named for gemstones, a stab twenty-four Muller Courts towers are named for gemstones, a stab at elegance that misses its mark by some distance. I had the driver circle the block until I spotted Tony waiting for me in front of the Garnet unit, his tan camel-hair coat vivid against the brick, sniffing distance from a heap of trash bags bleeding into the gutter. Above a concrete awning fluttered the three flags of country, state, and city, and a fourth, for the Muller Corporation.

We entered the lobby, overheated and fumy with institutional floor cleaner. Everybody in uniform—the security guard inside his bulletproof kiosk, the handyman prying off baseboards near the management office— seemed to know Tony, acknowledging him out of either cordiality or fear.

A reinforced glass door led into a dark courtyard, hemmed in by Garnet behind us, and on three sides by the Tourmaline, Lapis Lazuli, and Platinum units.

I remember once asking my father how they could have named a building Platinum, which even I, at age seven, knew was not a stone. He didn’t answer me, and so I repeated myself, louder. He kept reading, looking supremely annoyed.

Don’t ask stupid questions.

All I wanted to do from then on was to ask as many stupid questions as possible. My father soon declined to look up at me when I approached, finger crooked, mouth full of imponderables.
Who decides what goes in the dictionary. Why don’t men have breasts
. I would have asked my mother but she was already dead by then, which might help explain why my questions so irritated my father. Everything that I did or said served the same purpose: to remind him that I existed, and that she did not.

At some point I figured out why they chose Platinum. They ran out of stones.

Seen from high above, the courtyards from which Muller Courts draws its name look like dumbbells. Each consists of a pair of hexagons, four sides of which are residential towers and two of which taper into a rectangular stretch of community property—the bar of the dumbbell—that features a playground, a small parking lot, and a grassy patch for sitting when weather permits. Between them, the various courtyards also contain six basketball hoops, a volleyball net, an asphalt soccer field, a swimming pool (drained in winter), a handful of unkempt gardens, three small houses of worship (mosque, church, synagogue), a dry cleaner, and two bodegas. If your needs were simple enough, you could get by without ever leaving the complex.

As we crossed the hexagon, its towers seemed to loom inward, weighed down by air conditioners painted in pigeon shit. Balconies served as overflow storage for decrepit furniture, moldy carpet remnants, three-legged walkers, charcoal grills abandoned in mid-assembly. Two kids in oversized NBA jerseys played a rough game of one-on-one, driving toward a basket whose broken rim drooped at a thirty-degree angle.

I pointed this out to Tony.

“I’ll write a memo,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

The so-called artist lived in the Carnelian, on the eleventh floor, and on the way up I asked Tony what efforts he’d made to get in touch with the man.

“He’s gone, I told you.”

I felt uneasy waltzing into a stranger’s apartment, and told Tony as much. He assured me, though, that the tenant had forfeited all rights when he stopped paying his rent. Tony had never misled me in the past, and I didn’t think him capable of doing so. Why would the thought have crossed my mind? I trusted him.

Looking back, I might have been a tad more careful.

Outside the door to C-1156, Tony asked me to wait while he went in and cleared the way. The entry-hall fixture didn’t work, and the rest of the place was very crowded; he didn’t want me to trip. I heard him moving around inside, heard a soft thud and a muttered oath. Then he emerged from the gloom and pinned an arm across the door.

“All right.” He stood back to allow me in. “Go nuts.”

BEGIN WITH THE MUNDANE, the squalid. A narrow entrance opens onto a single room, no more than a hundred and twenty square feet. Floorboards worn down to the bare wood, dried out and shrunken and splitting. The walls waterstained and pricked with thumbtack holes. A dusty lightbulb, burning. A mattress. A makeshift desk: inkstained particleboard balanced on stacks of cinderblock. A low bookcase. In the corner, a white enamel sink, archipelagoed with black chips; underneath, a single-burner electric hotplate. The windowshade permanently down, unable or unwilling to retract. A gray short-sleeved sport shirt on a hanger hooked around the bolt of a heat pipe. A gray sweater draped across a folding chair. A pair of cracked brown leather shoes, soles pulling away from uppers, making duckbills. A doorless bathroom; a toilet; a sloped tile floor with a drain underneath a ceiling-mount showerhead.

All of this I saw later.

At first I saw only boxes.

Motor oil boxes, packing tape boxes, boxes for computers and printers. Fruit crates. Milk crates. 100% REAL ITALIAN TOMATOES. Boxes lining the walls, tightening the entryway by two-thirds. Smothering the bed. Tottering in stacks like elaborately vertical desserts; on the sink; in the shower, crammed in up to the ceiling; boxes, bowing the bookcase and bricking up the windows. The desk, the chair; the shoes crushed flat. Only the crapper remained exposed.

And in the air: paper. That rich smell somewhere between human skin and bark. Paper, decaying and shedding, wood pulp creating a dry haze that eddied around my body, flowed into my lungs, and burned. I began to cough.

“Where’s the art?” I asked.

Tony squeezed in beside me. “Here,” he said, resting his hand on the nearest box. Then he began pointing to all the other boxes. “And there, there, there, and there.”

Incredulous, I opened one of the boxes. Inside was a neat stack of what appeared to be blank paper, sour yellow and crumbling at the corners. For a moment I thought Tony was playing a joke on me. Then I picked up the first page and turned it over and everything else disappeared.

I lack the vocabulary to make you see what I saw. Regardless: a dazzling menagerie of figures and faces; angels, rabbits, chickens, elves, butterflies, amorphous beasts, fantastic ten-headed beings of myth, Rube Goldberg machinery with organic parts, all drawn with an exacting hand, tiny and swarming across the page, afire with movement, dancing, running, soaring, eating, eating one another, exacting horrific and bloody tortures, a carnival of lusts and emotions, all the savagery and beauty that life has to offer—but exaggerated, delirious, dense, juvenile, perverse—and cartoonish and buoyant and hysterical—and I felt set upon, mobbed, overcome with the desire to look away as well as the desire to dive into the page.