Marcus poked his head out of the closest door and invited Jeff inside. Marcus sat across from a middle-aged woman, red hair with bangs, deep-set eyes. In profile, she looked mannish. There was nothing “art world” about her. The way she dressed, she could have been the college counselor at a large public high school.
“This is Fiona,” said Marcus. “Our registrar. She knows more than anyone about what goes on here. Where the works come from, where they go, for how much. She knows where the bodies are buried, and how deep.”
Jeff smiled and shook her hand.
“Are you back from a break?” he asked.
She looked at him, puzzled. “No, I’ve been here,” she said.
He couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that despite having worked at the gallery for over a month he’d never seen her before. Had she walked past him without his noticing? Or come in earlier and left later? And why had he never heard her name in the regular gossip about the gallery’s employees and artists? Her invisibility unsettled Jeff, as if by not participating in the hierarchical skirmishes of the gallery, she was declaring supreme power.
She explained that she was in the process of digitizing the gallery’s records, and that Marcus had suggested they also digitize the Rolodex. She asked Jeff if he knew how to use Microsoft Excel. He said he did, though he’d never used it. He was confident he could figure it out.
He was handed a laptop and the Rolodex.
“You can work at your desk,” Marcus said.
Jeff left Marcus’s office, casting a glance down the hall toward Francis’s. The door was closed.
He spent much of the day going through the Rolodex, entering names, phone numbers, and addresses. Some had businesses attached to them—other galleries, art consultants, auction houses—but many were just a name and a phone number. Jeff knew none of them, other than an actor here and there. Steve Martin, for instance. Looking back, it was hard to imagine that he could have read those names, typed them out letter by letter, and have had no associations go off in his mind, no clue about their profile, their wealth, their tastes, their eccentricities, their desires, their insecurities, their weaknesses…
Shortly after lunch he was typing an entry when he heard shouting upstairs. Francis.
“Why the fuck didn’t you take care of it when I was traveling?” was all Jeff heard clearly.
Then Marcus apologizing, offering to do something, Jeff couldn’t make out what.
“I’ll take care of it myself, thank you,” Francis said.
He came padding down the stairs in his leather loafers. Jeff cast a smile in his general direction, looking for acknowledgment. Only when Francis was more or less on top of him did he realize that he was coming to his desk.
“Can I help?” Jeff asked.
Francis reached across Jeff, putting his body between him and the desk, directly blocking his line of sight, no apology, no “Excuse me,” and grabbed the Rolodex, as if Jeff had been just another piece of furniture. Then he pitter-pattered back up the stairs.
27
“I could smell him. His coffee breath. The soap he used, the sweat, the fabric of his jacket. He was right there.” Jeff put his hand in front of his face. “I could have taken a bite. He was in my space. You know, you’re a writer, that space between your eyes and the screen, just above your half-outstretched forearms, that’s your space. It’s your biome, or whatever they’re calling it. It is self, not other. And there he was, in it, crossing it, violating it, without a word. As if he was entitled to it. Or, more than that, as if it didn’t exist. As if I were the chair. An object. And the problem, the old problem, presented itself to me anew. The surface! I was literally as close as I could have been to Francis, but what had it gotten me? Nothing. Who the fuck was Francis? How would I know? Was he heroic? Troubling? No man is a saint, right? I didn’t think I’d saved a saint, I hadn’t expected to, everyone has their flaws. I wanted him to be good, though, I wanted to feel that I had done a good thing not only for him but for all the people he came in contact with.”
Jeff sat on the edge of his chair, spoke with agitation, as if plunged back into the scenes he was recounting. I envied his faith in language, in memory. For him there seemed to be no distance between what he was recounting and what had happened. He was as engaged in it as an actor on a stage, completely tuned into the vivid illusion he was creating for his audience.
“The problem with working at FAFA was that I was so low on the totem pole, I might as well have been invisible. I had been provided with physical proximity, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the institutional distance.
“I needed to get the old man’s attention. Bring in a collector, set up a deal. All schemes going round in my naive little head, but where to start? I had no idea. Less than no idea. All I could do was look and listen and make myself indispensable to FAFA and, therefore, to Francis.”
“There were many things you could have done.”
“Time was cheap then. I had nothing but time. And if I discovered that understanding Francis Arsenault inside and out was impossible, well, then, I would cross that bridge… But we never really know anyone, do we?”
He stirred the last of his drink, mostly ice, with his finger.
“I mean you could have let it go.”
He shook his head. “You have to understand, it was all I had.”
“Did you get the Rolodex back?” I asked.
He nodded. “Fiona brought it down a half hour later. ‘Don’t mind Francis,’ she said, as if she were talking about the bad behavior of a seven-year-old.
“I made my way through the names, addresses, numbers, doing my best to be accurate, distracting myself from the drudgery of data entry by speculating about whose names I was looking at. Some were stickier than others. With those I felt like I could evoke the person from the name. They summoned for me visions of wealth and excess, institutional power, toadyism, or even carnality, as if a name itself could denote fuckability.
“I don’t remember them all now, of course, but over the years I had the chance to meet quite a few of them, those names for whom I had created ages, looks, lives… And do you know what the correlation turned out to be, between who these people were and who I imagined them to be, based on their names?”
I shrugged.
He made a zero with his fingers and thumb.
“I’m telling you. I didn’t know a damn thing about anything.”
“So you’ve said.”
28
Sometime later Jeff went to an opening at PaceWildenstein, on the other side of Beverly Hills. He had trouble figuring out where it was, since he’d walked over and was on the Wilshire side of the building, where the facade was dominated by a Niketown. He entered the Niketown and asked the guy behind the register if he knew where he could find the PaceWildenstein gallery, and the guy shrugged. Someone overheard, though, a customer, and she told him to go around back. He did so, and found a brick driveway active with valet parkers and various art people making their way inside. It seemed odd to him, the building being divided into a Niketown and an art gallery, both spaces cavernous enough to comprise the whole mass of the building, as if Niketown and PaceWildenstein occupied the same space, but only one or the other could be experienced depending on the observer’s position.