She said it with as much nonchalance as she could muster. It worked. She could tell. He froze and raised one eyebrow as high as it would go. He was a lot bigger than she was, Saina realized. He was skinny, and he always slouched, but he was at least six feet tall with broad shoulders and big, veined hands. His face was thicker now—too much happy-hour beer and midnight melted cheese. He didn’t feel like a boy anymore. Saina wondered if she should be scared. Would Billy hurt her?
“Did your former fiancé tell you that he’s getting married?”
No. Billy wouldn’t hurt her. He’d destroy her.
Or try to. Once she’d gritted out her bravest smile and boldest lie, assuring him that she knew everything, once he’d left, disappointed, and she’d locked the door and prepared to crumble, to let herself just wash away, Saina found, instead, that she felt blank. A lightness. A widening space inside that was neither positive nor negative. She remembered the weeks after Grayson had first left her, when she sat straight up in bed every morning at four, heart racing, knowing only that something bad, bad, unutterably bad had happened. This already felt different.
Her only thought was embarrassing. It was this: But . . . Sabrina’s not an artist!
Because how could Grayson have loved her, Saina, for all the reasons he said he did if he could just turn around and love Sabrina instead? She pictured him calling his new wife’s jewelry art and felt sick at the lie of it all.
Wife.
Saina focused back on that space. Dark, quiet, internal. It expanded and buoyed her heart up so that it could not sink again, like it had done once before. She made herself remember, instead, a road trip they took to a friend’s wedding, not far from where she was now. The radio played a cheerful little tune and then the host announced that futures were looking good. Grayson cocked his head and looked at her, cute, saying, “Futures? I thought there was only one.” So she’d explained it to him again, trying to remember the way her father had untangled the world of options and futures and puts and shares for her, and for the third time, he’d nodded and said that he understood. Finally, though, she realized that he just liked to hear himself voice confusion, liked to think of himself as an artist who couldn’t be expected to understand base financial matters. Her suspicion was confirmed when she heard him again at the wedding itself, saying to a group of friends who were talking about an upcoming IPO, “How can people buy something that doesn’t exist?” and shaking his head sagely at the wonder of it all.
Your clubscapes don’t really exist, she had wanted to say. They’re a bunch of things that are supposed to make a statement about another thing. Your collectors are buying a series of symbols because critics have conferred meaning upon them. It’s the same damn thing as buying a piece of paper that the banks say represent a group of homeowners’ individual promises to pay back their mortgages. Wasn’t that abstraction the beautiful thing about what they did? Wasn’t that what made it different from painting a house or welding a car? Different from staging a kid’s birthday party or serving a meal in a restaurant? From making a fucking ring?
The things we agree to call art are the shamanic totems of our time. We value them beyond all reason because we can’t really understand them. They can mean everything or nothing, depending on what the people who look at them decide. Everything or nothing. Saina knew it was nothing, and yet she kept on doing it. Grayson thought it was everything, and somehow that made him . . . what? Better? More successful? Worse? Stupider? More self-delusional?
In a way, finance was even better than art. It was nothing but an expression of potential, of power, of our present moment in time, and existed only because a group of people collectively agreed that it should exist. Out of nothing but a shared conviction was born a system that could run the world. It was beautiful and terrible. Saina thought that she and her father would probably see eye to eye on this, if they were ever able to have a conversation like it without arguing.
Saina had decided that she was going to be an artist when she was in junior high. It was because of a story that Morley Safer did. In Saina’s mind, he was a sort of cross between Peter Falk’s Columbo and Walter Cronkite, and the story had a hint of murder mystery to it. She even remembered the title: “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” Portentous, like it should be followed by an ominous chord progression. Safer had focused his skeptical eye on Jeff Koons. The trio of floating basketballs, the vacuum cleaner, they had all felt like revelations to her. I can make anything art, she’d thought then, not realizing that Safer was producing a takedown of the contemporary art world.