So much of what she did was schmoozing and socializing. Today she had a lunch with a wealthy couple who kept a weekend place down in the exclusive Sea Clift Estates neighborhood. He’d made a fortune in the pharmaceuticals business, and she had old family money. Their “weekend place” was more like a palace, with a back yard perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean. Justin and Colleen McCabe collected art not because they loved art, but because they believed it was what cultured people did. Knowing that they, themselves, didn’t have a feel for quality—or for what might increase in value over time—they relied on Gen’s tastes to guide them. She’d placed a number of excellent abstracts with them over the years, sales for which she took a hefty forty percent commission. That was how the doors of the Porter Gallery stayed open—the deals she made with the McCabes and others like them.
She’d prepared for today’s lunch by speaking with a number of artists whose work she thought would be suitable for the McCabes, to see what they were working on and what might be available. But even that wasn’t straightforward. The artists who believed their work was hot—and Gen wouldn’t be talking to them about the McCabes if it wasn’t—usually hemmed and hawed about how they worked with a New York dealer and not with a nobody from Cambria, or about how the McCabes weren’t the kinds of collectors who would build the artist’s reputation, or about how they’d promised their best work for a solo show in Los Angeles.
You’d think that, in the end, it would come down to price. That’s what the McCabes believed, and they didn’t see why it was sometimes an effort for Gen to acquire a desired work of art for them. But, in truth, it was about so much more than money. It was ego-stroking and reassurance and strategizing; it was promises made for future deals with people Gen hadn’t even met yet.
It was exhausting.
She loved it.
She looked at the clock on her laptop and saw that she still had an hour before she had to leave to meet the McCabes. She looked over the images of the artworks she’d selected for them, e-mailed to her by the artists. For the McCabes, name recognition was key. They wanted to collect artists who were being talked about, whose work appeared in Art in America, who were profiled in The New Yorker. That was good for Gen, because it meant big-ticket sales that would keep the lease on the gallery space paid for months to come. But as profitable as such deals were, she saw them as short-sighted.
She pulled up an image of an abstract work by a young artist from Chicago. The canvas was all reds and blacks and brilliant blues, with slashing brushwork that suggested a raging storm. This artist wasn’t being talked about—not yet—but looking at the painting, she had a nagging feeling that he was on the verge of something. Some kind of artistic breakthrough, some revelation that would transform his work from promising to brilliant. She sighed. She would show this to the McCabes, tell them her thoughts about this artist’s bright future. And, of course, she’d push hard her belief that buying his work now, before he became the darling of the premier galleries, would be an outstanding financial investment. But the McCabes would never go for it. They wanted to collect artists who were impressive now, not those who might be impressive ten years from now.
She snapped the laptop shut.
That was one of the frustrating things about her job: having the vision to spot true talent before others did, but being unable to persuade anyone to act on it.
The lunch went the way Gen had expected. The McCabes had cooed over the artists she’d known they would. She had instructions from them to pursue a particular work that she may or may not be able to get for them; it likely would involve promises to also take lesser works that the artist hadn’t been able to move any other way. If she could swing it, the commission would provide her with a nice financial cushion.
But the deal with the McCabes was just one thing to think about.
She also had to think about how to get back to New York.
Cambria was nice—you’d have to be blind not to love it—but it was a small town tucked away in the middle of nowhere. Her ambition to become a player in the art world wouldn’t happen here, no matter how many rich couples like the McCabes she cultivated, no matter how many artists she cooed to and pleaded with over the phone or on her occasional trips elsewhere.
She had to go back to New York, but it wasn’t as simple as selling the gallery and packing her stuff. She had to develop a reputation first. She had to get some buzz, some gravitas, or she’d get eaten alive in New York.
She needed a plan.
Chapter Two
Ryan Delaney was up early the morning after the party. He was up early every morning, before sunrise, regardless of what he’d done the night before. Running a cattle ranch didn’t allow for sleeping in.
By five thirty, he was downstairs and in the kitchen, pouring himself a cup of black coffee from the pot. His mother was already there, busy at the stove, frying eggs and bacon for his father and his uncle.
Coffee mug in hand, he kissed his mom’s cheek.
“I’ve got some oatmeal going for you,” she said, giving him the usual morning side-eye. “Though my life would be a lot easier if you’d just eat the eggs and bacon like everybody else.”
“You don’t have to cook for me, Mom,” he said. Like the side-eye, it was also part of their routine. “I’ve been a grown man for a while now. I can make my own oatmeal. You don’t need to trouble yourself.”
She grunted. “I can’t very well cook for your father and your uncle and just ignore you, now can I?”
Ryan had been a vegetarian for six years, and his family had yet to adjust to it. Having raised beef cattle for generations, the Delaney family could not make sense of the idea of foregoing steaks and burgers in favor of salads and brown rice. His mother viewed his dietary choices with suspicion, and his father and uncle simply scoffed at him as though not eating meat were comparable to announcing that he’d be wearing only blue from now on, or hopping from place to place on one foot. To them, it seemed frivolous and arbitrary. But to Ryan, it was the natural result of getting up close and personal with the eventual providers of the steaks and burgers.
He couldn’t eat them when he’d raised them and sometimes even bottle-fed them. It surprised him that the rest of his family could.
Sandra Delaney, a woman in her midfifties with dark brown hair now starting to gray, fussed around at the stove, deftly managing the eggs, the bacon, and the oatmeal at the same time, an apron wrapped around her middle, fuzzy slippers on her feet. She wore Levi’s and a San Francisco 49ers T-shirt, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. Sandra was trim and small but strong and wiry, the result of a lifetime of hard work outdoors.
“Well, don’t just stand there. Grab a bowl,” she said.
Ryan grinned as he opened a cupboard over the counter and took out a bowl. His mother’s perpetual ill humor amused and comforted him for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand. Sandra was Sandra, and if she ever stopped being Sandra—if, say, she ever became warm and nurturing, with a kind word and an easy smile—he’d take it as a sign of the impending apocalypse. She was a deeply loving woman, but that deep love was buried beneath a layer of porcupine quills. Her constancy, her predictability, was north on the compass of his life.