Jeff shook his head.
“It’s a standard-issue ladder, like a wooden thing you’d lean up against a house, and it stands in the center of the room, but it’s not leaning on anything. It just goes up and into the ceiling. He secures it to the beams above, then plasters over everything, so it looks like the ladder disappears into the smooth whiteness. In performance, he climbs up, rung by rung, and bumps his head on the ceiling. Then he comes down and does it all over again. And when the performance is over, the ladder stays up in the gallery, and you can see on the ceiling where he was bumping his head, an oily spot on the otherwise white surface. The piece conjures up the glass ceiling, of course, and the limited opportunities for black men in America—he’s black—but in my view it also represents the American tendency—the human tendency—to turn everything into fucking ladders, to take the wild, untethered world, always a blink away from chaos, with death staring us down, and instead focus on and put faith in a so-called career path, you know, résumé building, that garbage. I don’t mean to diminish the power of experience, experience is essential, but how are you getting it? That’s the problem with people who have worked in too many galleries, climbed their way up, not by any brilliance, but by not getting fired, or by making a move—they’re all the same person. They think the ladder keeps going, all the way to the top, but it doesn’t. Of course, some types are satisfied to do their little part, stop and perch on a rung for the rest of their lives, and they’re valuable as hell, bread and butter. But the ambitious ones, they’re pathetic, the ladder doesn’t go there. It goes into the fucking ceiling. It’s no way to live, Jeff. Frankly, I don’t understand it.”
Francis took a few breaths, aware that he’d gone off on a rant. He didn’t apologize. Instead, he trained his eyes on Jeff.
“We get one life. One. And then that’s it. There’s nothing after. Who wants to spend it on a ladder?”
He waited for a response.
“Not me,” Jeff said.
“Right. Not you. I didn’t think so. Me either, obviously. But those people out there”—he pointed at the door again, and Jeff wondered whether he meant Marcus and Andrea or the rest of the art world or the world in general—“do it. Every day. They tell each other to keep the faith. What faith? We do what we want, Jeff, or we’re nothing.”
Jeff didn’t think he agreed, but he didn’t say anything.
“You’re lucky,” Francis said. “You’ve got me to show you the way. I wish I’d had me when I was your age.”
“I’m very grateful,” Jeff said.
Francis shooed him with his hand. “Oh shut up. Dinner Thursday. Mr. Chow. Eight p.m.”
It took Jeff a moment to parse the words, which had sounded to him like a kind of code.
“Dinner,” Jeff said.
“For Sasha.” Francis’s eyes were on his desk. “Shut the door behind you.”
Downstairs, Marcus was looking over the price sheet for the show. When he saw Jeff, he stood and presented the chair as a servant might to a king.
“How was your meeting?” Marcus asked.
“Fine,” Jeff said. “He invited me to a dinner.”
“A dinner?”
“For Sasha,” Jeff said.
“Do you even know who that is?”
“A collector?”
Marcus smiled.
“No?”
“Try not to step on too many heads on your way up,” Marcus said.
40
Jeff arrived on time. The restaurant was elegant, with a checkerboard floor and white tablecloths. He felt immediately self-conscious despite being in his best clothes, the same outfit he’d bought for the opening. The hostess asked for the name of the party, and when he said Arsenault, she raised her eyebrows and smiled, asking him to follow her upstairs. She led him to a private dining room, with a table set for twelve, overlooking the main dining room. It was empty. The hostess left him with a menu and returned downstairs. He stood before the table, unsure where to sit. He knew well enough not to take either end, and that he should probably sit with his back to the view of the dining room below, which left him with five seats to choose from. The middle was out—those would be occupied by people of secondary importance to the ones on the ends. This left the corners or the second seat in. The corners allowed for sotto voce conversations with the important people on the end, which made them more valuable than the second seat in. Guessing that Francis would sit at the end farthest from the entrance—as he had in his own home, leaving Alison in the seat closest to the kitchen—Jeff placed himself in the second seat from the end, his back to the view.
Try not to step on too many heads on your way up. He’d shared Marcus’s words with Chloe. She supposed that Marcus was jealous of the attention Jeff was getting. She advised him not to worry about the others, only about himself. And if everything went upside down, who cared, he could get a job somewhere else. She wasn’t going anywhere.
A waiter came and asked if he wanted a drink. He didn’t know what the protocol was, whether there would be alcohol or it would be more of a working dinner, and so he ordered an iced tea. The menu he’d been handed turned out to be customized. Dinner in honor of Alex Post, the artist whose show was currently up at the gallery, the one who had looked like a construction worker. No mention of Sasha. The date and time printed on the menu reassured Jeff that he was indeed where he was supposed to be.
Ten minutes later, a young woman entered, led by the hostess, who handed her a menu and disappeared back downstairs, leaving her standing at the end of the table. She was tall, very thin, not much older than Jeff. But she came from a different universe. She looked like she could have been a runway model but was doing everything she could to dispel notions of conventional beauty, yet without quite making herself ugly. She wore makeup, mascara and blush, hastily applied. Her hair was dyed a number of colors, pulled tight into a bun with a chopstick through it. She wore a thrift-store cardigan over what looked like a very expensive champagne slip dress. She didn’t hesitate in choosing a seat, but went around to the other side of the table and installed herself on the corner, which, according to Jeff’s calculations, would put her at the right hand of Francis. She hung a bag over the back of her chair and sat. Her nails were short and her hands stained with pigment.
Jeff introduced himself. She smiled a pro forma smile and said her name was Astrid. She spoke with an unidentifiable accent, Eastern European, though later that evening it would slip into a pseudo–British English, peppered with American colloquialisms. He asked her if she knew when everyone else was going to arrive. She shrugged, clearly not interested in conversation. The waiter appeared and asked if she wanted a drink. She ordered something Jeff had never heard of, on the rocks. He asked her if she was an artist, and she said yes, with a little smile in the corner of her mouth that said she knew he wasn’t.
Jeff studied the menu but couldn’t make much sense of it. Shanghai little dragon? Drunken fish? Gambler’s duck? Lily bulb with mountain yam?
The rest of the party arrived then, Alex Post in his coveralls, Francis in a blue linen suit with no tie, and a few men and women in their forties or fifties, looking as though they had through wealth escaped into a world without consequences. Funky eyeglasses, a striped jacket, and one woman’s cape made it clear to anyone who saw them that they were nonconformists, people of taste, art-world cognoscenti.
Francis sat where Jeff had expected him to, and as he sat, he greeted Astrid in a friendly but not effusive manner. Jeff saw what the others didn’t, or didn’t care to. Francis’s hand landing on Astrid’s, giving it a squeeze.