Chapter Twenty-Six
A day or two later, Gen got a text on her phone while she was busy opening the gallery. It was Ryan:
You should come out here. It’s Kendrick.
What about Kendrick? Was he packing up to leave again? On a drunken bender? Having some kind of wild artist party and tearing up the guest cottage? Frustratingly, Ryan offered no clues. She wrote back:
What? What’s wrong with Kendrick?!
He responded:
Just come and see for yourself.
She got to the ranch late that morning. The sun was warm, and the day was clear and bright. A light breeze tickled her skin as she got out of her car at the guest cottage. The smell of the ocean permeated the air.
Kendrick wasn’t at the guest house. She knocked on the door, but she already knew there was no one inside. The cottage had the feel of emptiness.
Knowing that she was in for some tromping around on the rough paths of the ranch, she went back to her car and traded her spike heels for her track shoes. Properly shod, she followed the dirt path to the old barn, the site of such lovely erotic memories.
The barn, like the guest cottage, was empty. Kendrick’s easel was gone.
The last time she’d seen Kendrick working outside, he’d been set up next to the creek. Gen headed that way, the low buzz of the insects in the grass providing musical accompaniment to her walk.
She didn’t know what she’d find when she found Kendrick. A feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach warned her that there was likely to be a crisis she’d have to fix, a dilemma she’d have to solve.
She followed the path toward the creek, rounded a bend past a grove of trees, and saw him.
Gen was prepared for him to be drunk. She was prepared for him to be neurotic, panicking, possibly angry, or ranting about leaving. She was not prepared for what she actually found.
Gordon Kendrick was standing at his easel, calmly dabbing paint on a canvas, humming something that she identified as Beethoven. And the painting he was working on made her stop short and catch her breath.
“Oh my God,” she said, quietly, to avoid disturbing him.
He turned to look at her. “What do you think?”
“It’s … it’s …” She was sputtering, but she couldn’t gather her thoughts.
“It’s different than my other work,” he concluded for her.
“Yes. Very.”
She came closer carefully, as though she were trying to avoid startling a small woodland animal. As she approached, Kendrick stepped back from the painting so she could see.
Kendrick’s previous paintings had been purely abstract—slashes of color that Gen had found appealingly raw and expressive. This one was abstract as well, with bursts of color creating the illusion that the paint had somehow exploded out from the canvas. But amid the chaotic colors, amid the riotous drips and splashes, she saw nature, she saw the world around him. The trees, the stream, the rocks and birds, the eternal blue sky. The painting wasn’t of those things—not exactly—but they were there all the same. The suggestion of them. The essence of them, if not their literal form.
“God, Gordon,” Gen said. It was the best she could do. She had no words for what she was seeing.
“It’s good, right?” He asked the question with none of his usual Kendrick ego or anxiety. He seemed calm, at peace.
“It’s better than good.” She turned to face him. “It’s a breakthrough.” She let out a laugh of pure joy, and impulsively threw her arms around him. He patted her lightly with the hand that wasn’t holding the brush.
“Oh. Ha, ha. Well,” he said.
She pulled back and appraised him, and she saw that his painting style wasn’t the only thing that had changed. It was as though the demon that had caused him to drink too much, worry too much, and obsess over ridiculous things like thread count and yogurt had fled his body, leaving him comfortable and at ease.
She imagined that she was going to like this Gordon Kendrick a whole hell of a lot better.
Gen was so giddy about the work Kendrick was doing that the happiness she was feeling spilled over into her relationship with Ryan. One clear benefit was that the sex was better than ever.
Since it would have been awkward for her to sleep at his place with his mother and father right down the hall, he usually came to her. Because of the absurdly early hours he kept, he was always gone by the time she woke up in the morning. Sometimes she heard him moving around in the pre-dawn darkness, showering and making coffee. He pressed a kiss to her forehead or her cheek and murmured his goodbyes before slipping out the door.
Over a period of a few weeks, Gen fell into a comfortable rhythm of working at the gallery, checking on Kendrick, spending time with Ryan and his family, and then sleeping beside him in the happy, warm cocoon of her bed.
On a day in early August, she decided it was time to make a move regarding Kendrick. He’d been working steadily, producing more paintings in the stunning new style he’d developed, and enough of his work was ready that she could present it to dealers and collectors. She knew she needed to handle it carefully to get not only the highest possible price for the work, but also the highest exposure for Kendrick. She had to think about the long game, not just the short-term profit.
The first part of her strategy had to be presenting a show of Kendrick’s work in New York. San Francisco would have been more convenient, and Chicago would have made sense since it was Kendrick’s hometown, but New York would lend the work a legitimacy, a cachet, that he would not get anywhere else.
After consulting with Kendrick, Gen settled on a gallery that she thought would be perfect: the Joan Whitley Gallery on 57th Street. She carefully drafted an e-mail to Joan Whitley, giving a brief history of Gordon Kendrick’s career, explaining what Gen believed to be the significance of Kendrick’s newly emerging style, and inquiring about the possibility of a showing of Kendrick’s work at the gallery. She attached high-quality images of Kendrick’s best new pieces.
When Gen didn’t hear back for a week, she called the Whitley Gallery to follow up. She didn’t get past Whitley’s assistant. The woman, who sounded as pinched and uptight as Gen used to be, dispatched Gen quickly and mercilessly: “Ms. Porter, I’m afraid Ms. Whitley’s schedule is completely full.”
Gen asked if she could speak to Ms. Whitley personally, and the assistant informed her that would not be possible.
Because of the time difference, it was still early—just past seven a.m.—when Gen finished the call. Ryan was already gone to start his workday at the ranch, and Gen was hanging out with Kate, having coffee upstairs at Kate’s place while Jackson made an early run to a produce supplier for the restaurant.