“Well, that’s just …” Gen plunked her cell phone down on the coffee table, frustrated. “I’ll bet she didn’t even show Whitley the photos. Shit.”
“So what are you going to do now?” Kate stood in her tiny kitchen in sweatpants and a T-shirt, stirring sugar into her second coffee of the day.
“I don’t know.” Gen shook her head.
“Try another gallery?” Kate suggested.
“It’s probably going to be the same everywhere,” Gen said. “The New York art people—they don’t know me anymore. I’m just a … a nobody who owns a souvenir shop out in the sticks.”
“So what are you going to do?” Kate asked again.
Gen got up from her seat on the sofa and paced around the room in her bathrobe and socks. “I need buzz,” she said.
“Buzz.”
“Yeah. I’ve got to get them talking about me, about Kendrick. Then they’ll know our names, and then we won’t be nobodies anymore.” She turned to Kate. “That’s how I get them to take my calls.”
“All right.” Kate nodded. “That sounds promising.”
“I need a collector. Somebody with some influence.”
“The McCabes?” Kate suggested.
Gen waved off the idea. “Nah. They’re all money and no taste. I need somebody who’s respected. I need a tastemaker.”
“A tastemaker.”
“Right.”
“Like Oprah,” Kate offered.
“What’s Oprah got to do with this?”
“You know art, I know books,” Kate said. “Back when Oprah still had her TV show and she was doing the book club thing, all she had to do was mention a book and it sold a gazillion copies.”
Gen snapped her fingers and pointed at Kate. “Exactly. Like Oprah.”
“Okay. So who’s like Oprah, but with art?”
Gen thought she knew the perfect person. But getting his attention wasn’t going to be much easier than getting Joan Whitley to answer her calls.
“David Walker.” Gen announced the name to Kendrick later that morning at the guest cottage. Kendrick was getting ready to head out to his spot by the creek. Gen had caught him just as he was packing up his supplies.
“What about him?” Kendrick inspected a brush before placing it in a sheath to take out to the creek.
“I’ve got to get him to buy one of your paintings.”
Kendrick gave her a look that was half amused, half incredulous. “Good luck with that.”
David Walker was a self-made multimillionaire who’d earned his fortune in the office supply industry. What had started as a single storefront selling staplers and paperclips had developed into a chain of stores that spanned the United States. Once success had hit, Walker had taken an interest in art, and had started a modest collection with the help of some astute advisers and his own uncanny eye.
The modest collection had grown over the years into one of the best—and most valuable—private collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. Walker was, indeed, like Oprah—a nod of approval from him could set off an avalanche of high-priced sales and publicity that could have Joan Whitley and her ilk approaching Gen, and not the other way around.
Kendrick’s skepticism about getting Walker’s attention was not misplaced. Walker was several rungs higher on the art-world ladder than Whitley, and that meant Gen would probably be getting a no not from Walker himself, or even from his assistant, but from the random guy who answered his mail.
“Hmm,” Gen mused as Kendrick continued to pack up his paints and brushes.
“You can’t just walk up to David Walker’s door and show him a painting,” Kendrick said.
“Huh.” She thought about that, and then thought about it some more. Walker lived in Palo Alto, just a few hours’ drive up the coast.
“Why not?” she asked Kendrick.
“Why not what?”
“Why can’t I just walk up to his door and show him a painting?”
Kendrick stopped what he was doing and looked at her.
“This should be interesting,” he said.
Gen made the three-and-a-half-hour drive up Highway 101 on the following Monday, a clear day with temperatures in the mid-70s. She’d asked Ryan to come with her, for the company and also so they could have a date in the Bay Area, but apparently it was time to castrate the bull calves—a prospect she decided she’d rather not think about—and he couldn’t afford to take the time off from the ranch.
She was hoping to come back the same day, but that was a best-case scenario. It was much more likely that she would have to stay in the Palo Alto area overnight, so she’d packed a small bag and put it in the trunk of her car.
She didn’t trust the painting in the trunk—her overnight bag or some of the other random items she kept back there might roll onto it—so she wrapped it carefully in a cotton sheet and put it on the front passenger seat of the car.
The drive was going to be long, so she got an early start—though not as early as Ryan. He’d already been gone from her apartment two hours before she took a quick inventory of her things, climbed into the car, and headed east on Route 46 toward Paso Robles, where she could get on Highway 101 north toward the Bay Area.
Gen didn’t know exactly how she was going to approach David Walker once she got to his house, but she had a lot of time to think about it during the drive. As she headed through places like San Miguel and Bradley, San Lucas and Greenfield, she pondered the various scenarios she might encounter.
Scenario A was that Walker would open the front door, exclaim over the brilliance of the painting, and make an offer to buy it. As appealing as that idea was, she considered it to be wildly improbable.
Scenario B was that she wouldn’t get to see him at all—either he wouldn’t be home, or he’d have a security gate and the voice on the other end of the intercom would decline to let her in.
Scenario C was that he would be home, and he would let her in, but he simply wouldn’t like the painting.
Of course, there were infinite possible variations on each of the three scenarios; she understood that she’d have to think on her feet once she got there. She rehearsed her pitch in her head. She had long versions and short versions, polite versions and direct versions, but in the end, they all came down to this:
Mr. Walker, I know it’s presumptuous of me to show up unannounced like this. But I have an artist whose work you need to see.
If all else failed, she would thrust the painting in front of his face and hope the artwork would speak for itself.