I only met Carter’s sister after we came to New York. We went to an opening at a little storefront gallery on the Lower East Side. The place had been a leather goods wholesaler, and the signage was still on the window and over the door. Bags, shoes, belts, fancy goods. The sidewalk was blocked by smokers, bikes clamped to every sign and lamppost. I shouldered my way in behind Carter, fishing for the last few bottles of beer at the bottom of a giant bucket filled with mostly melted ice. Leonie was an artist. Or trying to be one. Carter couldn’t decide how seriously to take her. She’s very solemn, he warned. She drops a lot of French names. We squeezed through a crowd of kids in thrift store clothes ironically referencing the nineties suburbia they’d escaped to come and make it in the city. Here and there were signs of money: an older couple protected from the rabble by a slick young man who I assumed was the gallerist, another couple smoking outside, studiously ignored by everyone around them, an instantly recognizable musician and her actor boyfriend.
It was almost impossible to look at the show, which had work by a dozen young artists, but since the place was so small Leonie’s contribution wasn’t hard to find. She’d made a video of herself dressed in exercise clothing and ski boots, stomping about in a studio, crushing pills and capsules underfoot. She kicked about bottles of vitamins and nutritional supplements. After a while, she started to pour big tubs of protein powder on the floor.
—How long did that take to make, Carter fake-whispered. Ten minutes?
—Oh, much less.
Stricken, we turned round. There she was, making a sarcastic face at us. Her tangled blond hair was tied back with a scarf. She wore jeans and a battered biker jacket, downtown uniform for someone who doesn’t want to look like they’re trying too hard. I’d seen pictures, but the sight of her and Carter together was still a visual shock: the same high cheekbones and straw-blond hair, the same blue eyes contradicted by heavy darkish brows. A single image, strobing. As I looked more closely, I saw that her mouth had a slight irregularity, a warp or cast that pulled up her top lip and exposed her teeth, marring what would otherwise have been classical Northern European perfection. It was as if she’d heard unpleasant news, a betrayal or disappointment that had left a permanent trace of sourness. She was three years older than Carter, and though his remark had clearly annoyed her, she leaned over and kissed him in the time-honored gesture of indulgent big sisters, bringing her hand up under his chin and squeezing his face to make his lips bulge.
—You’re an ape.
Carter said sorry.
—I liked it, I said, distancing myself from his rudeness. She looked starkly at me and turned back to her brother.
—If you make the right gesture, craft doesn’t matter. It could take ten seconds.
—You know you’re just covering your ass because you can’t draw.
She punched him hard in the shoulder.
—Go fuck yourself, you’re supposed to be here to support me, not give me a crit.
—So are you going to stay on here for a while? Or do you want to go get a drink?
We ended up at dinner with a big crowd, a waiter’s nightmare of people shifting seats, going outside to smoke and take calls, arriving late and disappearing early. All Leonie’s friends seemed to be from somewhere else, some other city in some other country. It was the first thing they talked about, their geographical otherness. They found Carter intermittently charming, asking him questions about music and listening intently to his answers, yet there was something patronizing about their interest. The conversations were not sustained. Me, of course, they treated with barely disguised contempt. In the pecking order of that table, it was clear who was on top. A trio of artists in haute redneck attire, with full-sleeve tattoos and unruly facial hair, were ordering steaks and expensive red wine, roistering, playing to the crowd. When they spoke, the others turned to listen, particularly when the alpha, a bearish man with dark circles under his eyes and a drinker’s paunch, began to enumerate his beliefs about art. They seemed standard enough to me—he was for tearing down the old and bringing in the new—but he delivered his platitudes as if they were important and shocking, something to be shouted through a megaphone at a Happening. When he finished, his trucker buddies refilled his glass and clapped him on the back like a soldier returning from patrol. In the momentary silence, Leonie tried out a joke.
—I have a simple aesthetic. As long as my mother hates something, I know it must be worth doing.
She sat back, expecting laughter, but the table took its cues from the important painter and he seemed irritated.
—You show your mother your work?
—No, of course not. What would she say? She likes the Impressionists. She carries round a little bag she bought at Giverny.
I thought this was funny, but only one or two other people smiled. The important painter shook his head.
—You probably went there, right? To see the waterlilies.
—Yeah, so? I went to Giverny with my mom.
—She probably took you to Florence too, and the Parthenon and Basel and Venice for the Biennale.
—You want to see my passport?
—No, I don’t have to. I’m saying that, you know, everyone has a role. A position. Maybe you should bow to the inevitable and get into collecting.
The table treated this as a killer punch line, a zinger. Leonie didn’t show she was angry by anything she said or did, but I could see a cord of muscle standing taut in her neck, and her laughter wasn’t well-acted. Soon afterwards she left. Carter sat there, rocking slightly in his seat, giving the important painter filthy looks, rehearsing putdowns he was too tongue-tied to deliver.
It was a thing you soon noticed about Leonie, how she would bring up her mother at inappropriate moments, always to mention some difference of opinion, some disagreement. For Carter, the parent he needed to overcome was his father, but the differences between these two were clear-cut. It was obvious the son would never sit on a board or manage a business. Leonie’s lines were less distinct. I would later find out that her mother was an amateur painter, a patron of DC galleries and museums. Art school was something they had agreed on.
After that evening, I always tagged along when Carter was going to see her. We went to more openings, a dinner in someone’s loft. I was fascinated by her arcane social rituals, the ever-changing pecking order of artists and curators and collectors that governed where she went and what she said there. Before I met the Wallaces I had no idea any of that even existed. Carter, who grew up flicking finger food at movie stars and captains of industry, thought his sister’s scene was lame. Full of Eurotrash, he said. A lot of nobodies pretending to come from money.