Jeff said that he’d just graduated from UCLA. Marcus mentioned the excellent art history department, and in his overall nervousness at the situation, Jeff nodded without saying anything else. Marcus took this as Jeff’s having majored in it, despite his never having taken a single class in the subject, knowing that as soon as the lights went down and the slides came out, he would have been fast asleep.
Marcus showed him a single page in a glassine sleeve, told him he would be the keeper of the price sheet. Several of the titles had red dots next to them, Jeff didn’t know why. He was still trying to absorb the fact that the works were, indeed, for sale, and that the numbers were the prices. There were no dollar signs next to them, though they must have been in dollars, but the figures were far too large to be actual prices for actual works hanging on the gallery’s walls. These figures were ludicrous, money a sensible person might use to buy a house.
He didn’t ask any questions, for fear of appearing a rube, and acted as if everything was just as he’d expected.
Marcus explained that Jeff was to let people see the price list if they asked but not let them take it away from the desk. If they looked like they were taking notes, he should alert Marcus by pinging his extension. In fact, if he had any questions at all, he should always ping Marcus. Answer the phones, but don’t take any questions. Take messages. If they ask for Francis, ping Marcus. If they ask for anyone, ping Marcus.
He asked Jeff if he was available to start right away. Jeff said he was.
“Thank God,” Marcus said. “We’ll deal with paperwork later, but as of this moment, you’re hired.”
“I do have a few questions,” Jeff said.
“Later. For now, sit there, look pretty. Shouldn’t be hard for you.” He winked. “Look like someone who would be sitting behind the desk at an art gallery. And don’t let anyone walk out with any paintings.”
What happened that first day? Not much. Relieved of his fear that Francis would show up, Jeff replaced it with a fear that he would be called upon to sell the art. But nobody who came in seemed interested in buying it. They walked through the gallery, pointing at work, and then, usually, left with a quiet thank-you. Jeff tried to make himself look official by scribbling on papers, as he had seen Marcus doing. The job, that day at least, consisted of exactly what Marcus had said: sit there, look pretty. And endure the silence, or, if there were visitors, echoing footfalls and hushed comments. Only one person asked for the price list that first day, an older woman with a pixie haircut and a red pair of readers sitting low on her nose.
“Oh,” she said. “I see it’s sold. Shame.”
That was when he figured out that the red dots meant the work had been sold.
“Do you know if it went for this?” she asked.
He stared at her blankly, then went to ping Marcus’s extension.
“No, no,” she said. “Don’t bother. They’re not going to tell me.”
When the gallery was empty, he found himself looking at the stairway to his left, the sign marked PRIVATE. Marcus was up there, somewhere. Jeff could hear him on the phone. And a woman too. He wondered what could have possibly happened with his predecessor to make her cross the street in tears. Had it been him they would have been tears of boredom. He remembered what his mother had told him when he was a child: “Waiting is doing what you don’t want until you get to do what you want.” He would bide his time in the new sinecure, waiting for Francis.
Day after day, new red dots appeared on the price sheet. Selling was happening, just not when he was there, not in front of him. This despite the fact that he had to sit with the works all day. It lent a sense of unreality to his days.
Marcus, of ambiguous ethnicity and sexuality, driven by some undisclosed privation in his youth, came at Jeff with a flurry of code-switching, trying to get a bead on the new kid’s coordinates. Jeff was called “dawg,” “bro,” “dude,” and “Holmes,” and in each instance Marcus didn’t sound like an old person trying on slang. Each argot, from surfer to hustler, sounded as genuine as the last. He seemed, at least in those first days, like a chameleon, a connoisseur and a merchant, aesthete and peddler. He was always off to meet a “friend,” which could have meant any of a million different things.
Cooler was his cohort Andrea. In her forties, focused and unattached, she was impeccably put together. Rose lip liner, tight bun. At first Jeff thought she was excited only by gossip and money. Then, one afternoon, he heard her going on and on about scuba diving. This was what lay at the center of her life. Everything she did at FAFA was in service of her next trip, her next journey under the surface of the sea, to Belize, or Mexico, or the South Pacific, to swim among fish and coral and seaweed. Jeff found her more easy to understand when he realized that her real life was down there, underwater, absorbed in quiet isolation, and that the world of the gallery—in fact all the world on land—was subordinate to it.
It was impossible to tell what either Marcus or Andrea thought about the artists, or art in general.
Rafe, in shipping, hated Jeff right away, seemingly for no reason. And Naomi, a fellow assistant, had asked him what the hell he was doing there, if he wasn’t an artist and didn’t want to be a dealer. He had no answer for her. There were others, too, and though he didn’t meet them early on, he was aware that news of his arrival had rippled through the small circle of FAFA employees, and that he was initially perceived as a cipher.
21
“There’s power in being a cipher,” Jeff said. “Especially in a business that trades on information. Not that I had any idea.”
He sat back with his hands intertwined behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankles.
“I was so green,” he continued, “nobody could believe it wasn’t an act. I mean here was this kid, just out of UCLA, didn’t know Ruscha from his own asshole, harbored no ambition for making art or selling it, worked a mundane job without complaint, got along with everyone, and so on. Had I declared an ambition I could have diffused all speculation, but because I didn’t, everyone—and I didn’t realize this until later, of course, at the time I was clueless—wanted to know what my angle was.”
“They had no way of knowing what you were up to.”
“Right!” He sat up straight. “And frankly, in the long run, neither did I. Last thing I expected was to end up becoming an art dealer.”
“You’re an art dealer?”
He looked at me surprised. “Of course.”
“I didn’t know.”
“We’ve got a gallery here, in Chelsea. Plus London and Berlin. That’s why I’m trying to get to Germany. For an opening.”
22
One afternoon a few weeks later, as the gallery echoed with the sound of power drivers and the creaking of drywall screws into the wood of sealed crates, Jeff turned to disappoint yet another walk-in visitor through the gap in the partition adjacent to the desk, and saw, in a blur, Francis walk past. He moved across the floor almost silently, in expensive leather loafers, taking no notice of Jeff. Smaller in stature than Jeff remembered, seemingly made of pure muscle but not bulky in the least, as if he had been cut from a giant cable, he moved with no wincing, no hesitation, no distress. He wore a linen suit, no tie, no glasses. There was no sign at all, to Jeff’s eye, that Francis had died and come back to life, had been humbled or transformed by the experience.
Francis ascended the stairs without slowing, calling for Marcus and Andrea before he’d reached the top. Then he was gone. If he’d clocked Jeff at all, it was only to verify that someone was behind the desk.