What Beauty Page 13

CHAPTER 13

  A sandwich board announces the night’s program: “City Art: a conversation palette.” The room at the 95th Street Y has seats for more than a hundred. Steel folding chairs have been set up wall to wall, with three narrow aisles (left, right, center) that bottle-neck the crowd weighing in to grab seats up front. The walls are cinderblock, painted a banana yellow, and give me the idea that this room is used as a kids’ after-school romper room when not the arena of verbal gladiators. A platform the size of a boxing ring sits at the far end. We panelists get to sit on padded chairs, arranged in an arc so that, obligingly, we’ll be able to see each other and address the audience.

  Lively conversation makes the room bulge with sound, meshed like spider’s silk. “I hope we can learn something.” “Jesus, all of humanity has shown up today.” “I have business cards. Spot the gallery owners so we can corner them later at the coffee bar.” “Can someone open a fucking window?” People dress casually. I don’t see a tie in the house, and I’m in a linen blazer over a black T-shirt because the night air was cool when I stopped back home for a shower after working at the Beehive all afternoon.

  Someone touches my elbow and I spin around. Belinda winks. She’s flanked by two men in their forties, one smoothly shaved, with a touch of gray at the temples, the other sporting a trimmed black goatee. It looks like pussy fringe on a skin-magazine model. She introduces them as Michael and Thomas (not Mike and Tom). One is tanned, but pussy fringe is pale, which shows off his red lips like something I don’t want to think about. We shake hands and they wish me luck, as does Belinda, sans kiss to keep up decorum.

  “I might suggest you’re brave to participate at one of these things,” says Michael, “but the fact that you haven’t skipped town for the weekend proves it.” He grins with half his face, a cowboy’s disarming corral gander that stops horses in their tracks, and cowgirls, too.

  I tell him, “That’s the contradiction, right? Makes the trip worth my while.” I supply no grin because I’m nervous and don’t want it to show in a facial tick that might be hard to stop once I get on stage.

  But Thomas won’t let it go. “How do you mean?” His left eye holds me in an inquisitive focus while his right roams the room.

  “I get to say whatever I want today,” I reply. Belinda slips me a bemused smile. “Especially the truth of my daily bouts with self-doubt, if I’m asked to fess up. That’s what people think enhances art, all that personal torture we artists are supposed to endure: anger for artists who stole your success; destructive behavior; public humiliation; black days and looming suicide. Starvation works, too. And all of which can be true, but it hardly ever is, at least not on the scale they imagine it should be.”

  “Chained to the easel?” Michael ventures. “A noose swinging in the breeze over the center beam?”

  “Something of the sort,” I say, alarmed by his needless repetition. I try out a smile, and feel my lips crack from dryness.

  “Can’t that all be a cliché?” asks Thomas.

  I lick my lower lip and feel the sting in the split. I tell them, “Isn’t that the only way to answer a cliché question? I’m hoping for more, of course.”

  I walk away, and make it through the standing crowd to the stage, where to one side the other panelists have grouped in a circle, arms folded, heads nodding, bobbing, serious art faces over folded lips and eyelids, as if they are strategizing.

  “Minus Orth,” says a woman in a crimson blouse. “How nice to meet you. I’m Valerie Brown, the program’s moderator.” Her hair is blond-streaked brown, shaped like a fashion wig, bangs curled in at her thin eyebrows plucked into the shape of new moons. An emerald brooch the shape of a salamander is attached to her blouse.

  She introduces me around to the circle of faces. I don’t know them, but know who they are: Anna, Billy, Archie, and Jane. Two have popped up recently in magazine interviews. A round of handshakes reveal marks of the artist: stained fingers, skin the rough side of irregular, strong grips without visual girth. One hand is as smooth as a baby’s ass. Valerie explains that she was just covering the ground rules for the talk. I’m reminded of a daydream I once had, in which I saw myself as the editor of a top-subscription glossy called “Affected” in which bios of the nearly famous compete with advertising for art supplies and offers for workshop retreats in Michigan forests, Vermont mountains, and on Georgia’s coastal islands.

  “Valerie means to say that there aren’t any rules,” says a fat-as-fat-can-be man, wider than he is tall. He wipes his forehead with a blue handkerchief and says, “It’s hot in here.” He tries a sly smile, but it comes off as belligerent and facetious. This is Jimmy Bells, the art critic writing under the pseudonym Billy James. Valerie has swallowed a reply to his blithe comment.

  “Some of us are artists, Jimmy,” retorts Jane Rohan, the left-wing visual artist (film, collages, and painted large-format negatives from the 1920s) from Queen’s, New York. She’s on the short side, round, with black-framed glasses and curly red hair. “There’s an appreciation that has to trump celebrity. In other words, we practice humility.”

  “Well,” Jimmy says, his voice straining to be overwrought, “practice makes perfect, or so my mother tried to teach. Please, if you will, call me Billy while we’re on stage.” It was his hand that was so soft to the touch.

  Another artist pipes in, “It’s not a stage, Jimmy.” This guy is big and linebacker wide, with a last name, Tower, to fit his size.

  Valerie Brown succeeds in finally relaying the rules, to which we all agree with short nods. I don’t see anyone’s hands, so I fear we’ve all crossed fingers behind our backs. I step out of the circle and tell the group, “I’m going to use the bathroom, then find a bottle of water.” Before anymore can be said, my back is turned and I’m away from the group in three long strides.

  I return five minutes later, water in hand, half empty and feeling the urge to urinate, which I tell myself to forget, it’s only nerves. Valerie is taking the boxing ring stairs. The panel stands single file, according to seating arrangements, which I’ve missed because of the poisonous moment I had escaped. A tall woman dressed in jeans and a green sweater, introduced as Anna Stappel, hair like chocolate mousse, twirls her hand at me and points to the open space between her and Billy James. So I am to sit next to the critic. “You’re late, so you got the short straw,” chocolate mousse whispers to the back of my head. I turn around to say, “I thought this was going to be a nice talk about art?” She blinks at me. “It is,” she says, in a tone suggesting I’m being defensive, but also that she’s not so sure herself what might happen. She adds, “I hope it is.” My breath spills out my nose. “That’s the spirit,” I tell her. “We’re waiting for one more,” she says. “One more what?” I ask. “Artist,” she says softly, as Valerie has begun to call us on stage. People clap after each name is announced, and our line moves forward. I’m third onto the stage, and find water jugs and glasses on tables set between each pair of seats.

  Valerie waits for the clapping to stop once we’re seated. I feel the audience’s bug eyes on me, but not just me so this is okay. I spot Belinda, seated on the left, toward the back, among white, brown, yellow, and black faces. She’s talking with her guests, red mouth moving, hands gesticulating. Suddenly the gym doors open with a metallic clatter. People in the back rows twist their heads around. Through the narrow opening slips Peter N, who gives a sheepish look toward the stage, to those who’ve arrived on time. I beam him a half ‘n half “how gauche” / “how sneaky of you” expression, and make a monkey’s face. To his honor, Pete slips through the SRO crowd and up the side aisle, then quietly takes the stairs and slides his ass onto the end chair.

  “Peter N, everyone,” announces Valerie Brown. A new crescendo of clapping rises, but there’s a note of reprimand in its tone and sarcasm to its tempo. “Your fellow panelists were worried about you,” Valerie says, which is news to me and, by the glances passed across the stage, the other panelists, too. Peter meets
my glare; he flares his nostrils like his porn-star namesake made famous on the brink of every money-shot.

  The set program lasts twenty minutes. We’re asked to say something about our discipline, the life experience that “finds” us here today, and why art is important to city life. Valerie calls on us B-I-N-G-O style, either to keep the audience, or us, on our toes. Anna Stappel tells an animated story of small-town life: she drew faces in the dust as a child; sudden family deaths catapulted her to Wichita in the summer of her junior year in high school, where an art teacher befriends her as autumn’s tri-color leaves drop from the maples and sycamores in the college quadrangle (Stappel gushes over this, then reddens, which makes me wonder if she had not been more than a “befriended” student). Out of these admissions, Anna comes off as less than enigmatic (an artist’s badge of honor in a “Baa!” society) with such sincerity, but “mysterious” could be applied.

  Jane Rohan speaks in a nasal monotone for more than five minutes, within which the highlight is her statement that art is the conversation between the creative and non-creative world. “Like a medium?” Valerie asks. “Sure,” is Stappel’s curt answer, and, “Yeah,” the follow up.

  Billy James gets a laugh or three when he relates his one year at art school, where he discovered his artistic vision did not coordinate with his technical abilities. “The subjects, themes, and colors all went to shit in my hands; to sum up, I had not talent.” Billy’s honesty freshens me the more he speaks; his brash confidence a style, belying the balding pate, stubby limbs, dwarfish stature … to which I wonder if this is not the cause of his wit. The audience shows eagerness as we try not to posture — no hand sitting, this bunch — and they clap politely after each panelist flies his flag.

  I speak about figure sculpture as a live form, in which movement comes through the pose, facial expression, or perceptible muscle tension. All are basic techniques, I say, although to an untrained eye each becomes the artist’s genius stroke. Then Peter speaks fluently but quickly, like he’s arrived from a coffee house’s “Buy2Get3” promotion. Colors are the material of modern life, he says, a distinction from the everyday person’s world of past centuries, which is why art was so proudly appreciated in every square, on the walls of common merchant’s homes as much as those of the aristocracy (“Art literacy was not only common among children, but expected. …”). Archie Tower rounds out the biographical talk with an illustrious memory of meeting Funk artist William T. Wiley in a San Francisco tavern, in which toothpicks, olives, cocktail onions, and a corkscrew became characters in a stage production directed across the bottle-strewn bar.

  Having visited more than a few of these art talks (as audience member), I’m impressed today by everyone’s candor.

  We’re sitting back in our padded chairs after this first round, feeling euphoric, proud, and insecure (me). I hope we’ve not been a soporific to the crowd. Then Valerie opens questions from the audience. A man in red Bermuda shorts asks about the brand of oils we use. The most recognized artist on the panel, Archie Tower, answers loudly, “Whatever is on sale.” A child in a wheelchair talks for a minute about his photography, but doesn’t ask a question; eerily, no photographer sits among us to offer encouragement or a tip. A fashion design student from F.I.T. wonders why artists don’t use more mixed media, in which fabric and other organic products make the piece “more three-D” (Anna Stappel reminds him that she’s a collagist, and that stones, textiles, even bits of trash, find their way into her work). I stifle a yawn, which pops my ears, then plugs them again. The audience has become the attraction, thanks to Valerie’s style. She’s seen too many televised talk shows, but none of Phil Donohue or Tom Snyder’s insightful foraging into background, method, or predictions. I don’t think it’s what the audience has paid for. They appear happy, though.

  A face in the crowd moves behind another, reappears, oscillates, then hides itself. My sleepy mind wakes. Those eyes, the round chin, a hand fixing a length of hair. I sit up abruptly, as if I’ve fallen out of a nightmare. Billy flinches; he must think I’m about to throw up because I lean forward, chest over my knees, shoulders back, nose pointed like a hound sniffing for scent. I’ve just seen Karen K!

  My eyes comb the patchwork of multicolored ovals around the spot where I saw the telltale features, and that chicken-knife gesture of feminine obliquity. This can be her, but now I don’t know that it is, or must be, her. There’s is nothing like this I need right now. Had I drifted into a half dream? Imagined it all? Surely she does things outside her home when not wearing fetid remnants … THERE — partially eclipsed by a white summer hat … aisle seat … the hand again (my eyes water from the strain to see clearly what is a puzzle, the tears blur this small triumph) … she’s uncomfortable in her seat, moving about, her legs reaching into the aisle… the shoes, now they will tell … — but I can’t see them … has she followed me because, because I …

  “The question stands,” I hear Valerie say. “Minus Orth, what is your opinion?”

  Valerie walks from the back, past the row in which the woman who is or might be Karen … I’m unsure; the person with the hat has leaned to her left, and the face of the woman who I thought … and in fact … no, something is wrong. This is all wrong.

  “Minus?” calls Valerie.

  People turn their heads this way and that, looking for some sign. But I’ve missed the question. Something about art, I trust. Stage eyes have focused on me along with audience perplexity. Have I become a piece of stone? They begin to murmur concern. I smell the anxiety in the room’s heat, and a rising spice of body odor. I’ve smelled this on myself for the last ten minutes.

  “Art is a language,” I say, a verbal burst that shields me for a moment from rising titters and whispers. I make a gesture that is supposed to urge speech. Thankfully, it follows. “This is visual first off, a representation of life, or, some might say, the world. Secondly — if the artist is lucky — the language becomes that of words. People talk about what they’ve seen. Talk encourages conversation: ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it.’ I think both are good starts. What is there to like, or dislike, to ignore, or celebrate? Some might say, ‘I like the reclining nude.’ You see where I’m going; these are statements of preference, perhaps seeking the ideal, the ideal that comes out of oneself or society’s norms, or variations on the exotic, or the tension between acceptance and disapproval. I could have just moved art through four years of a movement, or forty years of a cycle, from its birth to its death.”

  “Value!”

  Billy James has blurted the word like a belch or a fart. I ignore him, but some in the audience nod along (perhaps unsure what Billy means by this loaded word, I can only hope).

  “The visual is what artists give their audience,” I say. “That comes before anything. The public wants to see their work, not so much as talk price or –”

  “Buy it so artists can feed their families?” Billy says, louder this time. “Let’s speak of reality instead of palate size, shall we?” More laughter; the audience has found the jester by looking for, and misidentifying, wit. “The reality is, art has become a commodity,” he says, this time in a chiding tone, “whatever else it does for the soul.” He uses his fingers to mark quotations around that charged word.

  Valerie toggles her head. She has agreed, too, but she’s said it under her breath – “Oh, yes, yes.” – a sign that she’s not sure if she should shut Billy up with some kind reminder that this is a discussion and not a political rally. Nevertheless, Billy’s trap is easily avoided: I ignore him.

  “The public absorbs art,” I say, “without needing to buy it. That’s why we have museums. In fact there’s never enough art to go around, regardless of its cost, artistic taste, etcetera.” I focus on the audience and use my hands to guide them away from the mocking critic. “The public can read art’s language when it sees what the artist has put up. If they, the audience, are careful enough, they’ll see themselves in the painting, or as part of the sculpt
ure, photo, film, or dance. You’ve asked questions tonight about all of these. So then the public absorbs more by talking with friends about art’s effect on themselves. To compare or contrast art into ‘I love it, I hate it’ epitaphs — okay, that’s fine. We don’t have to agree which is good because, mostly, we don’t. I don’t like everything done by the people we call masters or the stuff done by yesterday’s artists. Pick your era, this matters little. Anyhow, the public of an era gives reasons for its opinions. This is the verbal language after the visual that I’ve been speaking about.”

  Billy yawns openly, like he’s in a play and I’ve given him his cue. He slaps his knees and sits forward. “Meanwhile,” he says, “the price is listed on a sheet of paper inside the gallery door, right next to the guest booklet asking for mailing addresses and — what’s the new thing called? — E-lek-tronic mail. I admit, it’s all catchy marketing.”

  “Prices have risen,” Valerie says. “Does this affect art sales to a mass audience?” She looks around the audience, like Oprah Winfrey waiting for signs of fealty. A part of the audience shows its agreement like house pets waiting for a treat; in another faction, a rumble spreads through the ranks. Now I know why the words rabble and hoi polloi became popular. Valerie walks forward, trying to pose like a barrister in concentration and probity. I stare at her and think, You knuckled-headed philistine. Serious conversation? She’s moved this event into her own milquetoast, pie-in-the-face carnival sideshow.

  A voice comes from the opposite side of the stage. “Collectors’ wallets have fattened, so why not the artists’?” This is Peter N. “It’s not as if artists use supermarket stamp pricers, stacking cottage cheese tubs in the dairy aisle.” The audience laughs with his use of the logic of economics to sell his point.

  “I wish art was the price of cottage cheese,” yells a voice in the audience. Some of the crowd laughs, others hush-hush this rudeness, and some hiss.

  “Ask yourselves if you’ll accept a raise from your boss on Monday morning,” Peter says over the laughter. “Anyone who claims he won’t is a liar. Why, then, should artists not take the money, any big money on offer? Artistic integrity? That’s bullshit. Collectors and galleries make a profit without embarrassment. It’s time for the artists to cash in, too. If you don’t like that, Billy, and anyone else, then you can kiss my black ass.”

  The audience rears back. A hush dampens their zeal because this is what they’ve wanted all along.

  “That’s all I’ve been saying,” Billy yells.

  “No it hasn’t,” Archie Tower fires back. “You’ve used the words in such a way as to make artists out to be thieves, sell-outs, or mere merchants dealing wares at some filthy bazaar stall.”

  Whistles erupt; catcalls. I look at Peter, who waves the audience down, and I can almost guess what he’s thinking: “Not in my market range.” I raise my hand, but don’t wait for Valerie’s recognition; Robert’s Rules is not part of her world.

  “I never mentioned price,” I say above the noise. “But I agree with Peter and Archie. Nevertheless, art’s value reaches far beyond money. Dollar signs can fly around the room like mosquitoes, and you’ll let them sting us all, Valerie, if you prefer Billy’s cheap jabs to the artists up here. Society listens to art and is the real critic: of its beauty and social value and of course its price tag.”

  “How comfortably naïve you are,” Billy says, his patented byline photo a sneer marring an already pruned face. “If I’d had to guess, you’re one of the outsiders looking in, eager to be listed as a hanger-on at a Schnabel show. Good God, what kind of passive fool have you given this audience today, Valerie?”

  Valerie ducks her chin, but I see her smirk openly. She’s been told to let us rumble. Who’s behind the curtain here?

  Joan Rhoan stands from her chair. “Why must America be so mercantile minded? Has art really become only a commodity? Billy has implied this without any evidence. Of course art is bought and sold, but before either happens, an artist dreams. She thinks how to make that into a visual representation, and then physically labors at the task. Do you shop for art like you choose mustard? No way! Values and tastes aside, what is considered beautiful should not be the most expensive works, the pieces that sell to the highest bidder, or the cheap watercolors you find for ten dollars at a summer art fair. We’ve already been witness to this abomination in literature.”

  I say, “I’d like to know where the representational art has gone to. Replaced by –”

  “Minus, there’s plenty of representational art around,” Joan says.

  “ ‘Around’ yes, but hardly given attention. Crowded out by splattered primary colors, and the shards of broken coffee cups hot-glued onto a canvas for texture. What Beauty!”

  “Sour grapes,” Billy sneers.

  “No — a vision of art and mind and humanity that’s been soured.”

  Billy delivers a loud strawberry.

  Antics, I think, will lose to substance. I try again to address the audience as my ally. “The events on the canvas and the features of the sculpture are what people pay for. There are many other factors, but those are the basis; what viewers see, and how that makes them feel. Hey, if you don’t want to be a critic, be a viewer and appreciate the art. Think about why Manet chose to place a naked woman in a park having lunch with two clothed men. Or why Giambologna chose to sculpt a rape scene.”

  The audience gives collective approval by sitting forward or whispering; some clap. Valerie stands wooden. Someone shouts “Yeah!” from the back of the room.

  “I’d rather be a critic,” says Billy. “It pays better, or at least I get a steady paycheck. Besides, we know all that stuff you’re saying. Already, enough! Professional interpretation is the key element, after price. What are you buying this piece for? Value! What’s it going to be worth next year, in five years? Investment!”

  “Of course you want to criticize,” says Anna Stappel. “It leaves you free to observe only, and not participate.” Stappel hasn’t said much, but her voice is a welcome shot across Billy’s bow. It’s fully now the artists against the critic. Hip-hip, hurray.

  Across the stage I spot Peter, arms folded. He’ll sit out the rest of this melee. The most animated parts of him are his lips, puckered for a whistle that just doesn’t come. I flash my eyebrows at him. He looks away, or more precisely, into the crowd. Now that he’s given them a bone to chew on, he’s content to lean back and watch the dogfight. We’ve had this conversation before, over sandwiches and beer.

  “Critical review is participation, madam,” Billy says. “If we critics don’t interpret for the masses, they don’t have a clue what they’re looking at.” The audience rustles at this. “No, no, don’t complain with your whistles and chirps,” he chides. Then he challenges the artists on stage: “Artists don’t often talk about their work. You don’t want to look like it’s all a contrivance — which it is. You want to claim the muse had come to you and the art is its spawn. You can’t explain your work. Let the audience figure it out! Fine. Now who is afraid to participate?”

  Joan Rhoan bites her nails. Anna Stappel and Archie Tower exchange a look of support, maybe a plan to make a rush at the breach, or the execution of the traitor. Suddenly, Anna and Archie raise a defense for form and function, art for art’s sake. Words fly like flint sparks, back and forth between the two artists and Billy.

  The audience is on the edge of their warmed steel seats. Peter is amused. For a moment I wonder if, had there been a second critic on the panel, a woman, would she have neutralized Billy with something in the form of a natural reaction to art. I quickly push this somersaulting fantasy aside. Critics stick together, is what experience has told me, at least in public. In private or print, critics will act like vipers against each other, spitting poison. Artists, on the other side, like their sorority-girl huffiness displayed in public. Stuff for the tabloids, if America could unglue itself from the television screen. Abruptly, the argument heats up, and I see Valerie has lost control.
My elbows flare from the chair and I want to make myself heard through the crowd, but my voice is overpowered.

  Anna Stappel shouts, “Billy, your cynicism harms art! To you, art’s less than a commodity. It’s something to write about, not to admire.”

  Tower seconds her. “I’m sure your writing is just as shit-filled as what you’ve said here.”

  I look out into the audience, because now I can’t help giving them something they should have realized at first blush. “Don’t you know an insult when you hear one? Come on, people, wake UP. You’ve just been called stupid by some asshole that flunked out of art school. And to get back at the system that wouldn’t have him, he’s become a critic. A self-proclaimed inept, he gets paid to tell you what your feelings should be, how you need to like one art piece but not another. How you shouldn’t listen to your own inner voice. Art is for everyone to interpret, not some clown who writes for a magazine that’s hardly read outside the offices of collectors, auctioneers, or gallery owners.”

  Archie Tower stands and clears his throat. His goatee begins to move, like a rodent peaking up from the rim of its hole. “Let’s get something straight about the artist-critic relationship,” Tower bellows across the top of the audience. “The artist doesn’t have to listen to or read or even speak to his critics in order to survive. His ability to make money — yes, Joan, it’s a mercantile exchange, in the end, and I’m both sad and happy to say that — this market is independent of some criticism. And, my friend Minus, you know well enough that it’s the arts community that ultimately decides. Which means critics as well as gallery owners. Collectors are often a sheep-like creature.” He looks around for attention, and gets it in the calming crowd. “However! That devil we call ‘critic’ is chained to the artist, at least invisibly. Which is all the better.…”

  Laughter erupts. Valerie folds in her shoulders, looks around wildly but is lost in the crowd. Billy sits up, ram-rod straight (perhaps a second pole has been shoved up his ass that none of us has seen). He leans his elbows on the ends of the armrests, turns his head toward Archie Tower and sets a churlish smile.

  Tower will not yield this time, and continues in his speech. “These chains come from his own training and needs. He’s a tick, a leech, a lamprey, a louse, feeding on the work of others, having learnt how he must see an object of art — old or new hardly matters if his training has been in the subjective application of objective-based analysis.” The crowd murmurs. Valerie begins to speak but Tower lifts a hand to keep her down. “Meanwhile,” Tower says, “the artist strives always, always, always –” (he pounds on the table: a drumbeat, a war rhythm) “– always to be new, if not unique, an indescribable term forever harder to live up to within the mist of history clinging to each artist like a disease. But even that doesn’t matter! Form is endlessly malleable and color equally infinite. We aren’t applying lipstick to the bathroom mirror, Billy, even if you like that mélange. We’re making something out of nothing. I’m sorry you failed in your attempt to be an artist, only it seems that now you’re taking revenge on those who have succeeded.”

  Billy jump-dives on the gauntlet just slapped across his face. “My twelve-year-old son can do half the stuff I find hanging in SOHO galleries.”

  “Maybe he can,” growls Archie, “but he didn’t. And that’s the point! Art isn’t done with twenty-twenty hindsight. Don’t you think the same of your critical reviews? Good Christ, man, have some self respect for your craft.”

  Valerie’s voice squeaks in its appeal for the panelists to go easy on each other. And in her own way, she tries to play the rapt moderator/game show host. “That’s profound, Mr Tower.”

  Archie Tower gives no quarter. “I’m sad to say, Valerie, that it’s not profound. It’s simply how it is.”

  Surrender shadows her eyes. She tries to rally, as any good soldier does when all she can do is soldier on. “Is beauty the objective criteria?” she hollers at the stage.

  Tower says, “Beauty, taken as a quantifiable principle of art, among many others, requires the singular form, Valerie. Thus ‘criterion’ is correct.” Tower has achieved what Valerie doesn’t want to do and Billy can’t hope to do: the crowd is hushed, waiting for an answer. Billy takes the bait.

  “What is beauty?” he asks. “Whose beauty?” He laughs hard on the heels of these questions, an obvious fake laugh, one made to incite rage in his opponent. Except the audience thinks he’s laughing at them. The people he has appealed to rain boos on him. Billy waves them off; this is all theater to him, something he can write about for the next issue. “Beauty is determined by the critic, by the public –” He raises a Caesarean hand to the audience, and tips his head. “– and by the investor. The artist, you ask? Just the ghost in the machine.”

  Valerie finds an opening to say, “I’m afraid we’ve run out of time” — as though she’s only now remembered that muffins are in the oven and she must run home. In a whisper of fabric, she spins in her dress to turn her back on the dais. “Thank you, audience members, for participating, today. Allow me to speak for the panelists when I say this has been a good window into the lives of city artists and their … work. Please give New York’s city artists a warm round of applause.”

  So this is it, I think: the rambunctious kids get their room back.

  The crowd claps, and heartily. They’ve gotten their kibble. People stand quickly and shuffle toward the exit doors, rather than linger with the applause they now think is hardly deserved of the time, or the insults they’ve incurred. What they miss, then, is Billy reaching over to shake hands with Anna Stappel, who beams. When he holds his hand out to me, I stare. Are you kidding? He stands and walks around me to chinwag with Archie Tower, whose own sudden good fellowship appears authentic. So were his anger and his comments staged? Perhaps rehearsed? I feel like a secondary character without script, plot, or direction. The talk-circuit sham, now that I’ve drunk from its fount, is not for me. I wonder how Karen K was able to muster control at these shindigs. Perhaps she hadn’t, ultimately. My gaze follows the moving audience. I’ve forgotten to look for her, and now the woman is gone, the crowd having consumed her.

  “Hey, Orth!”

  Across the dais Peter waves at me. He jerks his head toward the door. We follow the crowd like two stragglers behind an exodus. In the hall, Pete pulls me aside and takes a silver whiskey flask from his pocket. We each take a pull.

  “What the hell was that?” I ask. “I need to change my shirt.”

  Peter shakes his head. “You were good, Minus. So you lost a few water pounds. Big deal.”

  “Billy Boy is a real pit bull.”

  “Fucking critics,” he says. “Billy James is a hack. Aren’t they all? You walked right into that one, buddy. Archie knows how to bury the hatchet. Why do you think I kept my trap shut? Okay, not quite, but you need to take it light and look at the silver lining. You’re in tomorrow’s newspapers, and that dickhead will have to write something about you. People should be coming around to you soon.”

  “Then why’d you come?”

  “Marketing. To show my face.” Peter blinks and rainbows his eyes. “People will notice that I’m still out there, and writers will print my name. Just like I said. I’ll let my art speak for me. They’ll remember. I shall remind them.” What he says strikes as a direct contradiction to my own position out there.

  “You sound like a politician,” I say.

  “All politics is personal.”

  In the rush of people still pin-balling to leave, colors and faces and smells blow past us. I look quickly for that familiar face. Nowhere.

  “Say, Pete. Do you remember Karen K?”

  He thinks. “No. Can’t say that I do. What’s her game?”

  I tell him.

  “Can I meet her?” he asks.

  “No! At least, I don’t think so.”

  He looks at me, his eyes dark with wonder. “Then what do I care?”

  Belinda appears behind Peter, flanked by different men t
han she introduced earlier. She uses a voice I’ve never heard come from such a beautiful, sexy mouth. “Gentleman, may I introduce Minus Orth. And you know Peter N. I think we can agree Minus distinguished himself up there as an artist who cares about all art, not just his own.”

  They are art dealers and brothers. Wilhelm and Deiter Hoss shake my hand and compliment me on “fighting the good fight.” Neither man wears a suit. It’s jeans and T-shirt day, with a casual jacket for sporting looks, and soft-soled shoes that don’t shine like Karen’s shoes. They suggest we go to my gallery to see what I’m working on. Peter gives his regrets, says his good-byes, and leaves us.

  Belinda works the conga line we form to get out of the Y and stand in line for a taxi. To the side, I say to Belinda, “I was a buffoon in there, right?” She smirks, “No. You were sincere.”

  Which means the same thing.

  At our loft, The Brothers Hoss say nice things about my older sculptures. Their accents are happily foreign. When they wax philosophic over three of the globes, I feel heat running up from my neck. Such words are not terribly natural for me to hear (at least, not since Chicago). “This is good work.” “Your voice is ahead of us — your older pieces are right for today.” “I like its chances where my clients come from, artistically speaking, of course.” I stand in the center of the room, so its acoustic effect is at its best echo. Of course, the commodity is on the block.

  “When we saw your transparencies we decided to stay an extra day,” Deiter says. “To see a real piece outside its graven image is the fulfillment of a week for us. I want to say that your globes are ideal for someone we know. The other work, while of high quality, is not suitable for the movement in our personal collection, but we’ll carry our suggestion to others. Wilhelm?”

  Wilhelm has been alternately watching his brother with a half frown, and me with a conservative smile. “Minus, please tell us something. What is this that Miss Belinda keeps telling to us about your new work? Give us an idea to take back on the flight tomorrow morning. We so want to talk about something other than the poor food Lufthansa serves these days.”

  I hadn’t expected all of this. The praise was enough of a surprise, but asking for a speech on work I’ve only begun makes me stare wildly between my two inquisitors. “People,” I blurt, like a moron. “Everyday people in classic roles … or, well, not … you see, they are aged. I think. All by degrees. These are my studies. I might sculpt in plaster. Or I might not.” If only this were made up, I wouldn’t feel so mentally crippled (it’s far easier to riff on stuff that you prestidigitate, like a rabbit taken from a hat, because you know you never, never can do it for real). Belinda seems to think I should want this. The Hoss brothers smile, accept my befuddled utterances as the released spirits of inspiration (or something like it, which is fine by me).

  “Is there a theme or motif that you have worked out?” asks Wilhelm, who won’t let it go.

  “Ages,” I blurt again. “Humans — and … figurative people in motion. I think; I’m thinking about these … possibilities. Or, not in motion — seeing, thinking, playing.”

  Deiter can detect a kook when he sees one. He carries himself diplomatically, self-assured in his judgment of what the art tells him, not the artist. In other words, it’s no matter to him that I can barely compose a sentence from my mind.

  Wilhelm touches his brother on the elbow and remarks to him in German, of which no doubt he thinks neither Belinda nor I can translate beyond “guten Morgen.” Their tones sound the seriousness of war, death, or surgery (as even “I love you” does in Deutsch), but they chuckle through the moment. When their English returns, they say good-bye and thank you, and other polite comments transferable between American and European culture. Tonight, later, I’ll forget all that they’ve said, and then I’ll start to think.

  Belinda leads the Germans toward the door. “I’ll be back in a moment,” she tells me.

  When I’m alone in the loft, I hear the soft beats of their steps in the stairwell like ghost images. It’s not my fault, I tell myself. I’m glad Belinda is here to help me. Five minutes later, Belinda returns. “Nice job,” she says. I give her a kiss. “What now?” I take off my jacket and pick up a hammer and chisel. How about a wine buzz?

  “Maybe I was wrong on how to sell you,” she says over her glass. I throw up my shoulders. I know the answer, but want to feel its impact when I hear her criticism. “The shy genius,” she says. When she sees I’ve expected a whipping, she obliges, but in that inimitable tone reserved for privacy. “Okay, the babbling artist who’s let out of his studio to be shown as an oddity, like the freak who hammers nails into his skull.”

  “No comment,” I say.

  Belinda isn’t finished. “This sort of thing worked for Dalí. He shaved his armpits once, before a party, and painted them purple, and wore his bathing suit inside out to show the skid marks. When he saw his future wife out the window, he cleaned himself up as best Dalí could, and came out to greet her, just as weird but without the purple armpits.”

  “I hope you didn’t want me to go that far,” I venture.

  “I offer it as a demonstration, not example.”

  “I don’t think Dalí needed to try much to be nutty.”

  “On the other hand, his eccentricities helped sell his art before everyone saw them as normal — for him, that is.”

  “I didn’t expect tonight to be a PR event,” I say, in defense of my performance. “Hadn’t I done enough already at the Y?”

  “It’s all PR, honey. Don’t start acting like you’ve never done this before.”

  “No, no. Just not on the level of … whatever you’re cooking up.”

  “It’s a stew, Minus. All honest ingredients. Look, just as soon as you turn those sketches into sculptures, you’re the new commodity. I’ve promised myself that much. So don’t stare at me like I’m a pygmy headhunter. If I have to lock you in a room like Jagger and Richards were to discover their righteous truth as original songwriters, not just a Blues cover band, then I shall.”

  “You’ve got a deal.” I don’t admit that her suggestion is a good idea. A great plan. “By the way,” I say, because now I want to be done. “You didn’t see a bag lady in the crowd, did you? Out of costume, of course.”

  “Of course,” she says. Her lined mouth tells me all that she wants to say, but doesn’t out of friendship and whatever else she doesn’t see up my sleeve. “Of course I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I guess I was taking an imaginative leap. It doesn’t matter.”