“To you guys making it here,” Saina said, and waited until everyone had clinked glasses with everyone else—twenty clinks, she calculated nervously—and taken a sip before she let herself pull out the magazine.
It wasn’t a cover. It was never going to be a cover story; Billy must have written it on the train back to New York for him to turn it around so quickly. In the end, it was one in a portfolio of failures—Eliot Spitzer was the cover, and she was one of four other profiles, two thousand words running alongside the more flamboyant failure—something else that Billy probably knew before he smoked her out. She felt a faint, arrogant bit of disappointment at that before flipping to the paper-clipped page. A folded piece of notepaper was attached.
Grace crowded in, reading the headline over her shoulder. “Oh my god, what? Is this about you? ‘The Search for Saina Wang.’ Whoa, that is so cool!”
“Who need to search? I find you. You are right here!” Her father grabbed her arm and then patted her on the head.
“Are you going to read it?” asked Barbra.
For a moment, she considered putting the magazine back in the envelope and tossing it in the recycling bin.
Impossible. Who were those people who insisted that they never read any reviews? It seemed preposterous. “Here, Grace. You read it to us.”
“Wait, aren’t you excited about this?”
“I guess we’ll see.”
Grace nodded back, not looking at her. “Okay, if you’re sure.” She started to read.
THE SEARCH FOR SAINA WANG
Schadenfreude? Gesundheit! Billy Al-Alani on the psychology behind a New York ‘It’ girl’s fall from grace.
It is sometime around April when I first realize that Saina Wang is gone. I try her cell and get sent straight to voicemail.
“It’s Saina. Leave a message.”
She sounds warm, but distant. Trademark Saina. I leave a message, but she never calls back.
I go to Dan Colen and Dash Snow’s Deitch Projects show, sure that she’ll be there with Minni Mung or Peonia Vazquez-D’Amico, part of the tight group of artists and fashion folk that she has surrounded herself with since arriving in New York City to earn a BFA at Columbia. There are plenty of girls with dark hair and long legs crowding the gallery, circulating under the wine-and-pee spitballs, but Saina is not among them.
Saina stared at a bruise on her knee, listening as Billy described in detail his strange, obsessive quest. He made her into some sort of Great Hipster Mystery, hitting up any party or opening where she might be, asking her friends to reveal her whereabouts, staking out her studio, finding out, somehow, that she’d taken a $400,000 hit when she sold her loft, stalking her gallerist until, of course, Billy found Grayson and got him drunk.
Her sister looked up from the magazine. “Do you really want me to keep reading this? It’s terrible! Do you think this is how Jennifer Aniston feels?”
They all laughed painfully. Even Barbra. Leo squeezed her hand.
“Yeah,” said Saina. “Keep going.” The next part was less of a surprise. A dramatized overview of the controversy surrounding her last show, complete with a snarky rereading of the catalog copy, where he called her show “a posthumous beauty contest for victims of war.” He wasn’t entirely wrong, but she still didn’t understand why she’d had to bear the collective anger when it was the photojournalists and the editors who had created those images in the first place.
Grace read on.
We love artists because of the lives they lead. They give us raw id, captured in a frame. In many ways, the art world is best at celebrating the controlled, masterful hand or the wild, impetuous heart. Saina’s work, though, is the cynical, observant head, calculating and precise.
“Wait,” said Saina, “do you all think that?” They all looked at one another, her family, and she suddenly realized that they probably wanted to rest after their long drive. They had to be tired and hungry and in no mood to hear a takedown of her, of the first failure that led to every other failure. “Never mind, you don’t have to answer that. Gracie, let’s just finish it. There’s not a lot more left, is there?”
Grace looked up at her, worried. “Well . . . it’s that old Page Six item. I’m just going to skip it, okay?”
Saina nodded, but it didn’t really matter. She could still recite it word for word, down to the pun that stabbed her in the heart each time she thought about it. Just asking . . . Which socialite artist might find that the uproar over her latest show is nothing compared to the uproar that her fiancé is causing between the sheets with a rival heiress whose name must “ring” a bell?
“Okay, I’ll read this part instead,” said Grace.
Perhaps now is the time to say that every successful artist is the product of mythmaking, and that I, more than anyone else, may have been guilty of constructing the myth of Saina Wang.
Leo wrapped an arm around her. “Who is this guy?”