16
The day after Andrew left New York for Malaysia to shoot Paradise Again with Lily Creed, a day that I wished his being on the other side of the world would magically end so he’d be in New York with me again, Peg called to tell me that I would be having dinner that Friday evening with Tory and seven men. She didn’t say it quite like that—seven men—but as she rattled off their names, a few I knew from reading ArtForum, I noticed they were all masculine. Dinner at an Italian restaurant in SoHo at eight-thirty, did I need directions or could I find it?
I had heard of the place and had passed it many times on my way to and from Sexton Space. It was garnering a lot of attention. The owner was from Milan and had a restaurant there that was famous and essential with the fashion and art crowd, and his New York location was just as instantly in demand.
I would have to juggle my schedule at work, though I didn’t bother Peg with that detail, would have to beg Lydia to cover for me, which she probably would once she heard where I was going and what it was for. Lydia lived for the restaurant scene, and if she wasn’t going, she was happy to live through it vicariously.
On the afternoon of my dinner with Tory and the seven dwarfs, as Carrie was calling them, she and I were sitting at the kitchen table deciding what I should wear. Carrie was suggesting outfits made up partly from her wardrobe and partly from mine while reading aloud personal ads in the Village Voice. We were almost settled on an outfit, though were still going back and forth about the shoes, when suddenly the cat jumped onto Carrie’s lap, startling her into moving the paper which caused the fine corner of the front page to scratch my eye. It didn’t require my going to an emergency room, but the result was a constantly crying left eye. No matter how long I kept a bag of frozen peas on it, a stream of tears kept pouring down, so my right profile looked fine, but from the left, I looked like a weeping Picasso come to life. The two sides of my face did not match.
It was horrendous and there was no way I was going to dinner like that. I was all ready to call Peg to cancel, but Carrie convinced me that would be a bad move—all those important men’s schedules arranged for one night to meet me. Just go and explain what happened, they’ll understand, she was sure. So off I went in an outfit that I felt great in, at least, because the left side of my face still had tears running down it, but hopefully it would be too dark in the restaurant for anyone to really see.
The loud, chic Italian restaurant was perfectly lit for the patrons to look great, but especially to be seen by everyone else since that, more than eating, was the point of the place. In the well-lit space, I had to zigzag through closely packed tables while everyone craned their heads to see who had come in, which added to the ersatz runway experience of walking in. Tory’s table was in a private room in the back with two men in dark suits standing at each side of the door. They appeared to be on guard, and eventually I realized they were—one of the seven men was from a large prominent family in Milan that controlled all kinds of things, is one way to say it, and they belonged to him. Tory spoke to him only in Italian, and seemed to covet his bodyguards the way a person does a private plane. The seven dwarfs were all different ages and heights, but all horrendously sophisticated about art: a critic, a few huge collectors, a prominent artist, and a couple of curators at museums. At various times in the evening, each man turned to me, bearing down with his elegant and educated brain, and gave me a question or two, which I answered while doing my best to hide my still-tearing eye. Though to the man on my left, it was impossible to camouflage, and he kept glancing at the tears as if they were contagious, so I tried to explain what happened, but he was the Italian and didn’t understand. He kept confusing “eye” for “I,” thinking I was cut somewhere else, but only magically expressing it on one side. I gave up, and did my best to converse with him in the little English he knew, but it didn’t go anywhere. Tory was ignoring my eye or didn’t notice, so busy was she at the other end of the table talking in French, Italian, English, and sometimes in all three. Once she said, “From the South; Alabama, I think,” among other words I couldn’t discern, though I definitely heard “Andrew” a few times.
At the end of the evening as we were dispersing on the street, Tory came up to me, grabbed both of my shoulders, and said, “For God’s sake, get some rest.” I started to tell her what happened to my eye with the Village Voice, but she thought I was talking about getting publicity, then one of the men tapped her shoulder to say goodbye, causing her smile to be reborn when she turned to him.
My cab ride home was an exercise in reliving the whole thing and wishing it had gone a lot better—as in great. I told Carrie all about it when I got home. She thought it sounded fine, but I kept wishing I had been more “on.”
“How much could they expect? You’re eighteen, for Christ’s sake, in a show at Sexton Space. That’s plenty cool enough, and you looked great tonight. Okay, the eye, I know, but other than that, you did. They probably all wanted to have sex with you and were just putting up that disinterested front the way boys do. Don’t worry about it.” And she poured me another glass of wine.
Lying in bed that night, waiting for sleep to come, I wished to God that Andrew was at the Ritz-Carlton—or even just reachable by phone—so I could tell him about the dinner, get his reaction, hear his comforting voice, and his reassuring, “You big fucking art star.”
Then for the first time, I doubted it might come true. Andrew had always made it sound so much a fait accompli that I hadn’t really questioned it. Just trusted him and what he knew. And he was so confident about it, why shouldn’t I be? But suddenly in the dark of my tiny bedroom on my lonely twin bed, I realized that there were a lot more hoops to go through than I ever could have imagined before that could come true.
On the following Tuesday, I went into work for the eleven-to-eight shift and found the restaurant in a state of total doom, as if the entire city of New York had died, and as I soon found out, it pretty much had. It was October 20, the morning after Black Monday, the worst stock market crash since 1929. Lunch reservations were being canceled nonstop, including standing reservations for men whose names held court on the pages of the long leather ledger every day of the week, representing a booth along the wall in the barroom or a table by the pool in the main room held only for them until and if their secretary called to let it go. None were coming in. Though a few out-of-towners showed up and I watched Claitor do his best job ever of hiding his disdain for that sort; tourists were not his thing.
One horrendously hot and humid summer day toward the end of lunch, an obviously touristy couple—looking as if they came from Nebraska, but had walked all the way—straggled up the stairs. The dining rooms had already begun clearing out, some tables were empty, and there was enough time to seat them before the kitchen closed. Claitor smiled in his most charming way, and explained that he would love for them to have lunch, but unfortunately, he couldn’t seat the gentleman without a jacket and tie, house rules. A host who was very new and unused to interpreting Claitor’s many tones immediately piped up, Wasn’t that what all those navy jackets and striped ties in the closet were for? Claitor kept the same small smile fixed on his face as if no words had been spoken, and thanked the couple for coming in, then suggested they try La Chanteuse up the street. When the rejected tourists were well down the stairs, Claitor turned to the offending host, saying, “And did you like the way they looked?” Then walked into the kitchen to order his meal.
But Tuesday, October 20, made everyone in the restaurant suddenly extremely grateful for tourists. The city had come apart overnight. In the weeks following, tips for everyone fell to the ground, service-industry jobs disappeared, or if people were able to hang on to them, their income was cut. And the high that the art market had been on came crashing down.
“But none of this is going to stop your work from selling,” Carrie reassured me in late November as my gallery show was looming. “You’re new, starting out. Your prices aren’t exorbitant. You’re exactly what they need to be investing in.”
Though I thought the whole problem with the crash was that so much money had been lost that people had nothing to put into anything, much less an unsure thing, I decided to believe she was right, and it wasn’t like Tory was canceling the show. Which was a relief for tons of reasons, one being that I had missed the deadline to apply for the School of Visual Arts to begin in the spring. Suzanne’s voice was in my head fussing at me about it as she had done on the phone the other day, but Carrie had said not to worry about it. “Your work in the show will sell,” she said. “You’ll quit your job, find a studio somewhere, and just make art all day long. Probably even be asked to teach classes at SVA eventually as a visiting artist, that sort of thing.” I hoped she was right. And Andrew would be back soon from his film, maybe even move here from L.A., or I’d fly out there to see him, drop in for lunch on my way to meet with a collector I had sold to again. What was I worried about? It was all going to be fine.
Peg helped me find something to wear to the opening. I blew a whole week’s paycheck on a black dress at Agnès b., a store I passed all the time to and from the gallery, loving everything in its windows. Peg said it was perfect, and I loved it more than anything I’d ever owned.
So I was on a high when I arrived at the gallery half an hour before the show started, wearing my new dress, about to see my art on display in a SoHo gallery in New York City just six months after I arrived, with Andrew Madden in my life. How much better could it get?
The other artists in the group show were standing around looking at one another’s work when I walked in. I had met them before in the gallery. They were all men, all older than me, and had trained formally at Yale, Rhode Island School of Design, and an art school in Barcelona. We exchanged hellos, then I joined them in looking at their work—paintings that were exuberant, aggressive, and taut—before turning toward the middle of the gallery to see how my work had been displayed. The last time I had seen all my sculptures together was the spring before when they were exhibited at a small gallery in New Orleans. I had felt such pride then, but in a way that surprised me for that word. It felt quiet and having to do with me, yet not. It was a sensation that kept me happily comfortable and able to talk to anyone about my work, more like I had discovered the pieces than made them. Like they had always been around to be found, to be reached out and grabbed, like Keith Richards once said about songs—how they’re in the air and all you have to do is grab them.
But in Sexton Space my sculptures were offered up on high white stands, not on the floor connected to the earth. And in spite of or because of the additional height, they looked diminished, as if they were floating in space. I found Peg, and tried to keep the panic from my voice as I told her that I hadn’t known they’d be displayed that way, they were meant to be on the ground. I wanted people to feel above them, not the other way around, but she assured me that Tory had decided they would have been invisible without the added height—lost in the throng, knocked over even; it was better this way. But I wasn’t so sure. Disassociated from the ground, up close to my face, the whole sense of structure I had created was gone. They might as well have been on burgundy velvet and bathed in black light, they were so far from what I’d envisioned. Then seeing my dissatisfaction, Peg said that it was too late to do anything now, the guests were starting to arrive. I tried to reassure myself that Tory, if anyone, knew how to display art, but I was angry that she had changed our plans without telling me first. It was as though the sculptures and I had lost our footing.
A huge crowd began swarming in, and in a short time the gallery was packed with collectors and critics, artists and actors, models and musicians from all over the globe. A perfectly divvied up demographic of the fabulous and known commandeered the gallery, sidewalk, and street, extending the party into the cold, deep SoHo night.
I was standing in line for the bar to get a glass of wine; the opening was in full bloom. Everyone knew so many there—there were shrieks and huddles and embraces. I tried to remember what I had thought it’d be like. Not this. I’d thought…smaller. Dispersed. People talking quietly. I’d thought…museum, I realized suddenly, not prom night, Vogue, and the Concorde rolled into one.
A six-foot-plus drag queen was in line ahead of me. When he/she had arrived, I’d thought, What an exceptionally tall woman, but so nicely dressed. I recognized the Oscar de la Renta dress from the window at Bergdorf ’s on my walks home from work, and there it was cinching a waist before cascading down in a profusion of flowered satin. “But look at the hands,” the Spanish artist had said in my ear, nodding a couple of times. “That’s how you tell.” Then he walked away to meet him/her.
Suddenly I was bumped. Pushed, really, into him/her. And as I tried to right myself, the wine that was held up high in his/her hand poured straight down the front of my dress.
“My fault,” a man said, as a cocktail napkin–filled hand started dabbing at and rubbing my chest. I wondered if it was the drag queen who had spoken, all decked out in grand femme style, but stuck with a deep voice.
“That’s okay. I’m fine, really, thanks,” I said, trying to end this invasive and ineffective toweling off, but it wouldn’t stop, and the hands continued roaming all over my breasts, more touching them than doing any drying. Finally, I couldn’t take the pawing anymore. “Please, stop,” I said, but the “please” wasn’t heard. My head was down when I said it, watching strange male hands have more interaction with my breasts than anyone had had since Andrew, which made me wish it was him, made me miss him, then my head had moved up for the word “stop,” but no one had heard the word “please,” so it came out a sharp command.
People all around suddenly hushed and stared. The man froze, leaving his hands on my breasts, as his eyes flashed first with puerile, anxious shame, then adult, vindictive rage.
“I was trying to help.” His hands flew off me, the reverse of a slap, but having the same effect. The spectator circle had widened, more were tuned in. “You are a mess,” he declared in a voice that carried well. Then people parted for him to walk away, leaving me standing in an ever-widening silent glare.
I spent the rest of the opening and that entire sleepless night regretting that I hadn’t seen his face before I spoke, the face of a man I had met weeks before at Tory’s dinner. He was an extremely influential art critic who was known for holding huge grudges and exacting revenge in his reviews, which were very well read.
His pen was mightier than a Glock, and the worst part was that I agreed with part of his review—the sculptures had looked displaced. God, what a depressing word. As if in their transfer to New York, their lease for one homeland was lost, while another never came through. Part of me wanted to call him up and tell him it was Tory’s idea for them to be placed way up high on stands, but I knew I couldn’t. I wondered if she would ever admit that she had messed up, but probably not.
The first cigarette I smoked gave me a head rush, or it might have been the strong coffee I had with it. I had walked to the Hungarian pastry shop in my neighborhood after reading the suicide-inducing review, not wanting to be alone in the apartment with it. A Columbia student engrossed in books was sitting near me, serenely smoking his cigarettes. The third time he lit up, he turned and silently offered me the pack, as if knowing my craving before it reached me. The cigarette occupied my body; the rush occupied my mind. On the way home, I stopped at a bodega, bought a lighter and two packs of Marlboros, and threw the newspaper with the review into a trash can that was brimming with empty bottles of beer. I prayed that with Andrew being halfway around the world, he somehow wouldn’t find out about the review. But I knew he probably would.
Peg called the day after the review came out to say that Tory was heading to London and would talk to me in January. There was something to look forward to. If she was going to drop me, why not do it now? Part of me wished I could talk to Andrew to make me feel better about this, and another part hoped that he’d never find out and that the whole experience would disappear.
I stayed in Manhattan for the holidays, not wanting to be in my mother’s house under the attic where my sculptures had been before their New York ravaging. And Suzanne as usual was staying in L.A. with her new boyfriend, so it would have been just the two of us, which sounded beyond dreariness. Working and running and smoking tons with holiday parties thrown in were all semiuseful in keeping me occupied, but mostly, I worried about what Tory would say when she returned and what Andrew’s reaction was going to be when he found out about the opening. A big fucking art star I definitely had not become. I had a feeling that thanks to all the people working for him, he easily kept up with anything and everything that he spent energy on. And recommending me personally to Tory qualified as that.
Oh, God, I just wanted to go back in time and redo that opening. Redo that hour, that minute, that one little twist that screwed everything up, but as much as I prayed, time persisted in its forward path, carrying me with it in a dreadful agonizing march of days.
The bronchitis hit right after New Year’s and put an end to all of my activities, except worrying. I wished it were the other way around, that the part of my brain that worried had the exhausting illness and was too tired to raise more concerns while the rest of me could go along merrily. Not that I knew it was bronchitis. I missed day after day after day of work, took aspirin to no avail, and wondered what never-ending nightmare of a flu I had gotten.
By the two-and-a-half-week mark, I figured I might have consumption. Suzanne had gone through a brief teenage period of wanting to die from that, so we had looked it up. And I was practically living in a slum—hadn’t an epidemic started in apartment buildings like this in the early 1900s? Maybe I’d get sent to a sanitarium where I could quietly cough away my life. That’d be an escape from blowing my big opening. For a few delirium-filled afternoons, that sounded like the best idea I’d had in years. Carrie was still in Mississippi on extended holiday and Ruth was performing on a Caribbean cruise, her room rented out to a tall Danish woman who grimly set out each morning on open chorus calls. When I was able to, I worried how I’d make next month’s rent, not to mention all the bills lying unpaid.
I was dreaming of being at a sanitarium. A blue stream was in the distance with sunlight flitting on its surface; there was a soft wind and rolling hills. Tory was in a wheelchair being pushed by exquisite pale man. He kept ramming the hard footrests into people’s shins while she shrieked, “Off with their heads!” Decapitated sculptures appeared, the heads floating in space like paintings midair. I was running toward the stream, which had become the muddy Mississippi, trying desperately to get there, when a bell began to ring, the alarm that I had escaped! My pace quickened going up the hill, I was panting hard, unable to breathe, a stone appeared in my path tripping me, I fell and hit the ground, and that jarred me awake. I realized that the ringing bell was my phone.
“Hello?” I was still shrugging out of the dream, trying to get back to the real day despite my delirium.
“Hi.”
I had a horrible feeling it was exquisite pale man with rotten news. “Who is this?”
“Andrew.”
I immediately started to cry. Not audibly, thank God, because I sounded dreadful enough, but tears were streaming down. I wished they would cool my blazing face. “Are you here?”
“No, I’m still—are you okay?”
I wanted to throw myself on him and never let go. “I’m sick.”
“With what? For how long?”
He wasn’t happy that I hadn’t seen a doctor, even more displeased when I finally revealed I didn’t have health insurance, never had, so couldn’t afford to go to one, plus all the work I was missing, and—
“Just hang on, Yvette, I’ll call you right back.”
“Promise, soon? Really right back?” I was terrified it’d be weeks or months before I heard his voice again.
“Yes, really, right back. Just hang on.”
The long-distance clicking stopped, and the line went dead. I had to rest a minute before reaching down to hang up.
Andrew called ten minutes later, and told me that his assistant in L.A., Patrick, was finding a doctor in New York for me, and when Patrick called, to give him my checking account information for him to wire-transfer into. I cried through Andrew telling me this, it was like feeling his strong, safe arms wrapped around me from so far away. My thanks was a small arrow making an arc to reach him.
“You just get better. I’ll call you when I’m back.”
I kept myself from asking how long that would be. “How’s it going?”
“It’s…good. It’s going well. I have to go now, sweet-y-vette. I’ll talk to you soon, you just get better.”
His voice was a blanket lying gently on top of me, swaddling me, and nudging sleep to come. I hung up the phone. Maybe he hadn’t heard about the gallery opening. Or maybe he had and didn’t care. Didn’t care that I hadn’t been turned into a big fucking art star. Loved me anyway and that was all that mattered. God, I hoped so.
Patrick was the epitome of polite solicitousness when he called an hour later waking me up. He spoke with an authority tinged with a disposition to please. The doctor he found arrived at my apartment that night, gave me a shot and left large capsules of antibiotics. The next day, a thousand dollars appeared in my checking account. It had never known a balance that high. For weeks, the wire-transfer slip stayed in my purse, and I’d pull it out on late bus rides home from the restaurant like a picture of a loved one.
Tory’s imperative was that I needed new work. She made it sound like an item I could run across at a store for a really good price. The question that had concerned me for months—where to create this?—was answered during her spiel. One of her painters needed an additional assistant—I could have a small stipend or partial use of the studio that his ex-boyfriend had vacated when he moved to Rome. Tory made it clear what my choice would be.
Thank God she wasn’t dropping me. Maybe a bad review wasn’t the end of the world. Here was a chance for me to sculpt, to let my life in New York cut into my work. And maybe Andrew did know about the opening, and it wasn’t as horrible as I thought it was. Tory wasn’t dropping me—that meant something. As I went for a run in the park, difficult as hell from the cigarettes I had returned to after the bronchitis, I framed questions in my mind that I wanted to address in my new sculptures, and mostly, I felt relieved.
Suzanne pretended to be happy for me about the apprenticeship, but made me promise I would apply to the School of Visual Arts to start next fall.
“You need to go to college; this is absolutely ridiculous. You’re already a year behind—what are you going to do, start when you’re thirty? And don’t think you’ll get that money for anything else. At least Mother isn’t in control of that, thank God. This man is ruining your life.”
I didn’t have to ask her who she meant.