The opening was like the one at FAFA, but larger and with better wine. The artist was Agnes Martin. She stood in the middle of the room, wearing a muumuu of natural fibers, her short gray hair looking like she’d cut it herself. People approached her with reverence, because of her age, Jeff thought. He didn’t think much of the work, square paintings with baby blue and pink horizontal lines on them. He wondered if she’d run out of time before the show.
He recognized some faces in the crowd, people who had come to the FAFA opening, no doubt a number of them appearing in Francis’s Rolodex, but he didn’t know any of them, so he tried to find a way to occupy himself until Marcus or Andrea arrived. He got himself a cup of wine and, for lack of anything else to do, made his way around the room looking at the paintings. Up close, the attention to detail was more apparent, but he couldn’t fathom why they had been made, and why people would be interested in them. Even more than what was hanging at FAFA, these works puzzled and irritated him.
He was into his second cup of wine when he became aware of a young woman standing next to him, looking at the same painting. In his peripheral vision, he noticed her stealing a glance at him. He cleared his throat and asked her what she thought. She asked him what he thought. He said he asked her first. She said that her name was Chloe. He introduced himself. She asked if he’d been at the FAFA opening. He said yes. She said she thought she’d seen him before.
She was a senior at USC, majoring in fine art and art history. She’d come to the show because she was “interested,” she said. While they talked he tried to size her up. She wasn’t dressed like a college student, or at least any that he’d known at UCLA. She wore a designer dress, simple, black, and long, with spaghetti straps. She wasn’t wearing an excessive amount of makeup, but she’d spent time in front of the mirror. Her hair was dishwater blond, cut in a style popular from television at the time.
She seemed both interested in him and distracted by whatever was going on behind him, like she was trying to do two things at once. He hated when people looked around the room while they talked with you, looking for someone better or more important. He turned and looked over his shoulder, trying to see what she was so interested in, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Perhaps she was avoiding someone, he thought, using him as a shield.
Then she took his hand and asked him to come with her. Next thing he knew, they were standing in front of Agnes Martin, flanked on either side by gallery people. Chloe stepped forward, shook Agnes’s hand, congratulated her on the show. Her confidence was strange. Jeff couldn’t put his finger on it, she didn’t seem to know Agnes Martin, and Agnes Martin made no sign that she knew Chloe. And yet Chloe felt utterly entitled to step into the center of everything to pay her respects to the artist.
Chloe stepped to the side and gestured at Jeff.
“And this is Jeff,” she said, “Cook. Jeff Cook,” as if introducing a person of import.
Agnes Martin turned her eyes to Jeff. She had a wrinkled face and pursed mouth, eyebrows slightly raised. Her look, to Jeff, was one of doubt or worry, as if it pained her to meet him. He put out his hand, said it was nice to meet her. She shook his hand but instead of letting go, she brought up her other hand and held his hand between hers. She stared into his eyes as if she were trying to read his mind. He was totally unprepared for her intensity and smiled involuntarily. She blinked a few times and said something like “My pleasure,” or “Yes,” or “Nice to meet you as well,” and let go of his hand and broke the gaze.
29
“I had no clue who she was,” Jeff said. “Knew nothing about her artistic credo, her hermit-like life, her status in the art world. I knew only what I saw in front of me, which was an elderly woman painting in blues and pinks. I figured she’d had a tiny stroke while shaking my hand.
“Only later, once I learned a thing or two, once my appreciation for her work grew to match—and even surpass—her reputation, once I’d spent time with her writings, did I look back at that meeting and feel what I feel today.”
“Which is what?”
He leaned forward, lowered his voice.
“She knew.”
“What did she know?”
“Things I couldn’t have foreseen. She touched me and stared into my eyes as if she were meeting the Dalai Lama. She saw something in me. I was a fellow traveler, marked for an uncommon life.”
“You really believe that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Sometimes I do.”
30
He and Chloe went out after the opening, to Kate Mantilini. They sat in a booth with a window looking onto Wilshire Boulevard. They ate and drank and talked, pausing only when a fire truck or ambulance passed outside. Chloe crossed herself every time but made a point of saying she wasn’t religious—it was a habit leftover from her Catholic school days.
They went back to his house, the actor’s house. She complimented him on it immediately, throwing a jacket over a chair as if she lived there, and he told her he was house-sitting. Her eyes scanned the room, taking in the various antiques and artifacts of the actor’s travels around the world. For a friend in Vancouver, Jeff continued, who’s the regular house sitter. He explained that the house belonged to an actor who had multiple homes and was currently off shooting somewhere, New Orleans or London or someplace. She wandered over to a series of pictures hanging in the hallway.
“Don’t tell me this is his house,” she said, saying the actor’s name.
31
“You’ve got to tell me the actor’s name,” I said.
“I promised Dylan I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“That was years ago.”
“Fair enough. It was Brad Pitt.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s huge.”
“That’s exactly what she said.”
32
“Holy shit,” Chloe said. “That’s huge.”
“I guess,” Jeff said.
“At least let me look around. I mean, this kilim is astonishing. And where do you get a lamp like this?”
Chloe didn’t know, she couldn’t have known, that she was running roughshod over the stories he and G had created around these objects, the imaginary world they’d drummed up, just the two of them, for their own benefit, a world in which the house was theirs, the memories had all been laid down, the roots had grown into the soil, and they were adults, real adults, bandying around names for future offspring. She was, by her mere presence, but also with her eye, cutting it to ribbons.
He welcomed it.