Francis didn’t introduce anyone to Jeff, nor did anyone acknowledge him other than with a perfunctory closed-mouth smile. Through the doorway, Jeff noticed a man making his way down the length of the offices, led by a senior Sotheby’s employee in a neat black suit. It took him a moment to realize who the figure was. Francis recognized him at the same moment, told Jeff to wait there, and marched across the offices, arm outstretched, to shake hands with Mick Jagger.
The woman followed Francis, and Jeff was left alone in the small gallery filled with a variety of paintings, some still wrapped, some hanging, some leaning against the wall. He found himself, yet again, searching for something in the work to stimulate something inside him. Eye or no eye, he should have an opinion about these pieces, shouldn’t he? He found the painting by Francis’s artist, a thickly impastoed palette knife production in dark tones that could have just as easily been a patch of dirt in a field somewhere, or a compost pile. The estimate had not yet been posted.
A large painting across the room caught his eye, leaning against the wall, a diptych. He was drawn in not only by its monumental scale but also by its complexity, its energy, its dynamics, and its seemingly unresolved and unresolvable nature. He didn’t look at it so much as watch it. He let his eyes move across the surface, taking in the strokes of dark brown, blue, yellow, orange, lavender, and white; the blobs, the drips, the forceful gestures, the accidents, the way the seam between the two panels bisected the floating cloud, or blob, or explosion, so that it looked as if the left side and right side were painted at different times, from different vantage points, the lines not quite connecting, the right side magnified and shifted up a foot. The canvases almost connected, and, in distribution of color and gesture, the overall image was almost symmetrical, so that if he thought about it—which he did not until later, much later—part of the painting’s overall dynamic mimicked what happens when our eyes cross or are affected by different lenses or are in some way uncoupled from each other. Double vision, a parallax view, an image refusing to resolve into a single perspective. He would look back on this moment many times and feel the same fluttering in his chest he felt upon first encountering this work, and no matter how he tried to reduce his response to logic or reason he would always fail. Only after he’d stood there for who knew how long did he think to read the label to find out who had made the painting. Joan Mitchell. Painted in 1986. Both the plainness of the name and the recent date didn’t fit, for him, the idea of artistic genius, which was, he had been taught, always foreign and always old. The estimate seemed too low for such a profound work, at least compared to the numbers he’d come in contact with while working at FAFA, though when he thought about it in the context of real-world funds, the low estimate comprised ten years of his earnings. And yet even while that seemed ridiculous, it still seemed to him too low. In the distance between these values he felt himself recalibrating. And in the field of energy created by the painting, he felt intimations of an eye of his own.
Francis entered the gallery, vibrating with energy after his encounter with Mick Jagger. He sidled up next to Jeff, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the painting.
“Woof,” Francis said.
45
“He didn’t care for it?” I asked.
Jeff nodded. “But it was my first encounter with the sublime in a work of art.” Jeff pronounced the word sublime with eyes-shut reverence. “I asked him what he didn’t like about it, and all he said was ‘second-gen AbEx,’ which meant nothing to me, but which I assumed, correctly, meant that his woofing had to do with the soft market for the piece. The funny thing is, if I’d had the funds back then, and if I’d gone with my eye, my gut, whatever, I could have sold it later for ten times what I’d have paid. You see, I did have good instincts. I just didn’t know it yet.”
How quickly he moved from the aesthetic to the mercantile.
“Francis saw it in you,” I said.
“If he did, it wasn’t through any particular acumen. Francis was incapable of seeing, really seeing, other people. It was both his superpower and his greatest weakness. As a result, he never saw me for me. But what I suppose was different in my case, as opposed to those he treated with undiluted instrumentality, was that when he looked at me, he believed he was looking in a mirror. A back-in-time mirror.”
“Do you think his having nearly died brought his mortality to the front of his mind?”
“No question about it. In fact, he pulled me aside once, at the gallery—he had been trying to make a point, and Marcus and Andrea weren’t listening sufficiently for him—he pulled me aside to tell me how refreshing it was to have someone around who could actually absorb his lessons. As if I were a sponge. But I think he really did see me as a sponge, as the second-best thing to uploading his consciousness into a giant computer. Which he would have done if he could have. Silicon immortality, it was a side interest of his. This was before anyone talked about it outside of science fiction novels. Francis couldn’t stand the idea that everything in his head—his opinions, his feelings, his memories—would one day disappear.”
“Couldn’t have helped that he was surrounded by artists,” I said.
Jeff went to sip his drink, forgetting it was empty.
“I guess he needed an outlet,” he said.
“Don’t we all.”
46
At the Sunday dinners, Francis treated Jeff more and more like a confidant. One night they had a few more drinks than usual, and while Chloe and her mother were in the kitchen, Francis invited Jeff to come sit with him in the front room and smoke Cubans. He wanted to talk. This was during a period when, at the gallery, Marcus was trying to assert himself more, brandishing his squash racquet and pulling rank on Jeff whenever he could. Francis had somehow gotten wind of this and wasn’t happy about it, but not because of Marcus’s behavior. He wasn’t happy because Jeff wasn’t standing up for himself.
“You should go after what you want,” he said. “Go after everything you want. That’s what youth is for, Jeff. You’re a good kid, I see that, I saw that the first day I met you. But you must understand that there is no good or bad, only advantageous and its opposite.”
Jeff listened, concerned mainly with appearing as though he was taking in Francis’s advice when the vehemence of the way the words were delivered made him want to turn away. His eyes watered.
“There’s no reason to be good, Jeff. I can tell you this honestly. No reason.”
He seemed lost in thought for a moment, and when he resumed, it was in a calmer but more intense register.
“I died once,” he said. “Actually, truly died. They had to bring me back.”
“Oh my God,” Jeff said.
“And you know what was on the other side?”
“No.”
“Nothing.”
“Oh.”
“No white light, no grandparents, no St. Peter, no Satan. Just a blank. Oblivion. I was swimming.” He looked into Jeff’s eyes with fierce intensity. “Just chugging along. I’ve never been particularly fast. I always sort of shoved my way through the water. Not unlike how I move through life.” He laughed. “And the next thing I know, I’m on the sand, coughing up water. Probably what a baby feels like when it’s born. I’m on the fucking sand and the paramedics are there, strapping me up, taking me to the hospital. Which is full of doctors who have no idea what happened other than my heart stopped. It would have been nice to know why, right? These two”—he pointed toward the kitchen—“won’t let me go in the water again.”
Jeff’s palms were slick with sweat. His eyes stung from the cigar smoke. Francis looked at him in silence, drew on his cigar, the cherry shining brightly in the dim room. Was he waiting for Jeff to react, to declare that he had been there, that he had been the one to save him, or was he only watching to make sure his message was sinking in? Jeff copied Francis, took a drag from his cigar, and his head started spinning.
“That could have been it for me,” Francis said. “If someone hadn’t been there…”