What Beauty Read online

CHAPTER 6

  When New Yorkers want to escape the masses, the choking car exhaust, the bird-shat park benches, long cinema lines and over-priced restaurant meals (“Home of the $10 hamburger!” boasts a Theater District diner sign), the noise and the smells of four million bodies descended on this small island every day (many unshowered from the night before), NYers escape to their apartments and lock the door. No medieval redoubt must have felt as safe. While it is not entirely quiet inside a NYC apartment — neighboring sounds can be a trickle or a deluge: thump-boom music, marital disputes, truck horn blasts, drive-by gunfire, EMV sirens, energetic sex behind a common wall — at least NYers don’t feel crowded.

  You can’t escape New York unless you leave New York. You are an equal party to this great City’s magnificence. Anyone (you!) that leaves NYC still has NY with him (you again). At the fattest part of Manhattan island, a walk between the collaring rivers, the East and the Hudson, will take under an hour, if you’re a good jaywalker. Yet, you’re on an island. Sure, you can go to Brooklyn or Queens, only they, too, are on islands. More accurately, they are part of the same island, a very long island.

  To find change, therefore, New Yorkers like to get out of their city at the weekend. They take trips — a Cape Cod bed & breakfast, the wooly Poconos forests, Mauntauk’s fishing boats, walks along the South Jersey shore — to commune with nature, find space, shed people, and exalt in (if that’s what one does) the silence of their own thoughts. Any of this can spell the feeling of coming unhinged.

  The five million other inhabitants stay home to ride subways and buses, sit in coffee shops and bars, shop at the markets, walk the gum-strewn streets, or go to work for the sixth or seventh day that week (the true Clydesdales of the City). Some even choose to lie on a blanket next to mine on Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. They are content. I’m satisfied, too, but wish they would move over another six inches.

  People do go insane — all cities have insanity — but NY (my experimental city) has insanity within arm’s reach, from Battery Park to the Bronx Zoo, Chelsea Piers to Rockaway. This affliction comes from crowded solitude, I think. At least, this has been my observation on two occasions. This solitude is humiliating, and you feel its scratch (somewhere near your liver) when large groups are at play. I wonder which of them, the solo flier in the flock, is feeling lonely while the rest of the group circulates around and within its tight formation. You can spot the soloist by his body tics, the jailhouse smile and rubbery glances, her driftwood movement from person to person. All this being my NY truth, I’m passionate for its awes and … the other things. The great City drops all manner of possibility before you.

  I think a human shall find insanity in NY without having someone to call his own. To hold, to talk with as a friend, understand her desires as she understands yours. I had someone long before I noticed the insanity option. Belinda is my girl, my sanity barometer. We met on my third day in the City; she had transplanted from mittleamerika several years before me. Between us, we agreed we weren’t looking for someone because NYC was such an ocean, and so we said good-bye that day. From the next week onward, we became inseparable. I can’t explain why. Not exactly why. Which is helpful for one’s sanity.

  You can get used to all NYC has. All of it. And if you don’t, you become one of those transplants who re-transplants: to the prairie, the mountains, the farm, or another city.

  I call my Dad at least once a week. He sits in a chair most nights, a spot where he can fall asleep under the television’s watchful blue-glow stare. Dad says he prefers to watch sports or a movie thriller, or even some cable-news hate-speak program, because he despises sit-coms and finds dramas ridiculous and sentimental. I can’t blame him. Mom died two years ago. Only part of me is able to understand such grief.

  Dad’s chair, a green upholstered recliner that creaks when he sits in it and groans when he pushes himself out of it with both arms, sits next to the house phone, a black and white cordless model that gets left off the charger stand enough times so that the battery runs down sometime after I call, so we’re often continuing conversations from the day or two before.

  Dad likes to tell me about the Chicago weather, his way of preparing me for what NYC will get the next day or “1 day + x hours” later. He’s convinced this is exactly how the jet stream works. “It’s all about the consternation of calculation,” he says, and deliberates for me weather forecasting statistics. Dad also says things like, “So, how are the dogs?” and “Well, I’ve cleaned the carpets again” and “When’s the last time you talked with your sister?” None are as random as they sound.

  Dad is a mathematician, which is to say he’s a tad analytical. This is how I got my name. I have to be glad his favorite arithmetic calculation wasn’t “multiplication.” His name is Carl, which goes with our basic ScandiWeegie heritage (my looks, however, take after the German side of the family; I was teased with “the little Panzer commander” in childhood, among other Hitlerian references in our wop, polack, Mick, and kraut suburb). In Dad’s world, there is always just one right answer to any problem. Given all of that, and that is a lot, he carries a terrible streak of wit buried just below the surface. Ergo, my name.

  Tonight I dial Dad’s number while Belinda washes the plates and flatware from our fresh gnocci feast. I’d crossed streets at a vegetable stand on the way home and, looking at what the old guy wearing a Mets/Yankees cap (two hats cut lengthwise down the middle and sewn together) was selling from his wagon — red apples and leafy greens pulled from their roots, and yellow peppers and purple grapes — gave me the idea to add spinach to the dish. Belinda took extra parma shavings, and I loaded up on a left-over iceberg wedge. We shared a light ruby cabernet. Now, the smell of wine is nearby, sitting shallow in the glass by my side, my lip marks around its rim wrinkling the light passing through. Garlic odors hang on the air. Belinda stands with her back to me, her shoulders rolling with each dishcloth swipe, while I lean my elbows on the island edge, watching her being domestic. The bulb light spots her from above like a club singer.

  I hear Dad’s voice on the line, sleep-awakened and rough from snoring with his head thrown back on the chair. It’s not eight o’clock yet back in Windy. We say our hellos as he wakens and coughs. He spits, too. I trust that that has gone into a cup or napkin on the side table.

  Dad says, “What’s thirty-two times one-hundred and four?”

  “Some big-ass number, Dad. What do I care?”

  “Come on, Minus. Humor an old man.”

  All our telephone conversations begin this way, his form of male bonding. I tell Dad my answer: 3,327.

  “Wrong … Wait, wait! How can you be one number off? You’re always just one number off. That boggles my mind. Math is an exact and sweet science, but always being one number off? The odds are out of this world. Do you know? Can you plumb the odds? It can’t happen!”

  “I thought boxing was the sweet science?” I like to tease Dad away from his first trail scent.

  “Are you trying to give me a migraine?”

  I walk away from the kitchen island, away from the sight of Belinda’s swaying hips, to go sit beneath the wooden arch. I’ve thrown down a drop cloth to practice chisel work on a block of white marble (a “mistake”), which I’ve placed squarely on a wood pedestal. Here I take a seat on the floor and lean against the stone. It radiates its cold core out and through my shirt. Belinda remains in view but only from the shoulders up. Above me, the arch seems a celestial frame.

  “Maybe I miss the right answer on purpose,” I say into the phone.

  “If you’re wrong in math calculation,” Dad says, “you’re usually way off. Such precision, even in error, would demand genius no mere math kid could possess.” I hear a touch of pride within this accusation.

  His assumption of a teaching voice is both attractive and repelling. The contradiction is on the order of something one must grow up with to appreciate. I can imagine him sweeping his hand through the air, a professorial move tha
t holds drama and, so, is memorable to the class. For the record, I was never a “math kid.”

  “But you’re always just one away,” Dad repeats himself. “That’s the definition of stupefaction. Seriously, son. Mind boggling.”

  “So get a government grant to study my oddity,” I say. “We can spend six months together cruise fishing in the Bahamas. You can quiz my one-off math mind while we struggle with tarpons and sailfish.”

  “That’s not a half-bad idea, son.”

  “My gift to you, Dad.”

  “Ah, but you can’t be away from your work. Can you imagine trying to chisel marble on a rocking trawler? Ho! And the damned boulder would sink the frigging boat anyway, right? Ha! Ha!”

  That’s Dad, surgically removed moles and all. (I capitalize “dad” because this man is Dad to me, not a “dad from down the street” we all knew from our childhood neighborhood. Neither is he Dr. Carl Orth, the name he’s known by his pupils, the public, his dentist, and the DMV.)

  “Have you spoken to your sister?” he asks.

  “No,” I say quickly. When you tear off a bandage on a wound that just won’t heal, you do it fast.

  Mary Catherine is three years older than me. Not a big difference, except that she wed young to a man much older, named Donald, already gray at the temples at thirty-four, heavy around the shoulders (but not the gut, thus giving him a top-heavy appearance that made you wonder if he might tip over, capsize). Mary Catherine was out of the house too soon, in my parents’ opinion. I sort of agreed, but today for different reasons than then. First, she focused on the American Dream, and was heartbroken when her older husband left her for his secretary. Talk about cliché, right? Not too fast: Donald’s secretary was male, and they now own a chain of car washes in Santa Barbara. Second, MC decided the next step was to travel a religious path for “self-examination and psychological protection,” as she wrote her reasons to me in a short reply to my (admittedly ill-advised) shorter letter (“What are you thinking?” was one of my queries, as I recall). Never the best thing a young divorcée could fall back on when she already had the house in Glen Ellyn that gay-Donald left behind by court decree; she had a Ford Bronco (same decree); she had a job with State Farm Insurance. Then Mary Catherine began dating a nice gentleman named Daniel (equally gray templed, but with a happy smile and better center of gravity) that she’d met at a Sunday ice cream social on Chicago’s lakefront, where the church had set up a tented revival area next to the picnic benches dressed in white linen. “Beware white,” Dad said jokingly, after she had described it to us, standing outside mom’s hospital room in her last days.

  “We haven’t spoken for a couple months,” I say to Dad. Belinda has finished the dishes and comes to sit with me. Our legs stretch out side by side. She takes my wine glass and drinks from it, leaving a lip imprint the shade of dried rose petals. I talk into the phone. “Mary Catherine tells me ‘art is the devil’s handy-work.’ How do I respond to this person anymore? The last time I heard words like that was in an American history class. We were studying pre-colonial Puritans. Joseph Cotton. Or was it Cotton Mather?”

  “I get those two mixed up myself,” Dad tells me. His equanimity is laced with that singular Midwestern irony we used to call dry-rot (no need for a laugh or a double take). Dad is joshing me, of course. I’m used to being joshed. We are a family of joshers. Or were. Mary Catherine has given all that up. She used to be the best josher of the bunch. The Bible leaves her no room for joshing, not in her suddenly changed and ever-diminutive worldview. Odd, because in my reading of that book Jesus was the biggest josher-character in all of literature. He had to be, considering his foil was the vengeful God of the Old Testament.

  “Find some common ground,” Dad suggests, not for the first time. “Mary Catherine will always be your sister.”

  “Our shared genes are as close as I can get to her these days, Dad. I don’t know why she’s grown vindictive. Religion is supposed to be soothing, n’est cest’pas? It’s not like we make fun of her. I just don’t understand why she’s coming from the corner she’s put herself in. Probably I shall never know. She takes every word so seriously. All I’m left with is … c’est la vie.” Dad hates when I use my little French.

  “You take your art seriously, son, as she takes her calling. I hear elitism when you speak about such and such.”

  “Hey, guilty as charged, pop. But I don’t spit fire’n’brimstone for dropping church (not that I ever went regularly) — nor do I go around proselytizing Rembrandt’s love for you if only you’d open your heart to him.” I suddenly think I could do this very thing, which frightens me a little. The difference between my sister and me, however, is that I don’t consciously act on an urge to spread the Gospel of Art.

  “Go easy, Minus. She’s in a phase.”

  “She’s thirty-six years old, Dad.”

  I hear a caustic double-click. Dad’s call-waiting has invaded.

  “That must be her now, Minus. Can we do this again in a few days?”

  “Of course, Dad. Get some real sleep tonight, huh? I love you.”

  “Sure. I’ll roll into bed right after –”

  I hear a kick-clunk … kick-clunk and I miss the last of his sentence.

  “Okay, Dad. Tell Sister-Sister that Minus says ‘Word Up’ from New York.”

  Dad laughs. “She might like that.” He can take a joke.

  I switch off, letting him move onto his other child.

  Belinda reaches for the dead phone and lays it on the corner of the wood block. For a moment I look at the incongruity of wood and rock and plastic phone, and think of incorporating the modern with the classical. I blame this on the hour of night because I don’t practice art fusion. It’s enough to live in NYC, finding French-Mex or Russian-Irish restaurants. Belinda takes my hands and we hold each other. From a safe distance we must look as people who are in love look at each other, with all that time in front of us, and wanting no other person in the world.

  In surprise, the words “Yes, let’s get wed!” are on my lips. But I don’t say them. How I answer her proposal is more important than when. She smiles and sort of sniggers. For a second I think she’s on to me. “How is he?” she asks. This isn’t Belinda being polite, she likes Dad. “Okay, but ….” “But?” “He needs a friend,” I say. Belinda arches her eyebrows. Uh-oh, I think. Besides her caring nature, she also loves to play matchmaker. Age of subject is no barrier because she’s able to find a suitable date (if not mate) for a friend from somewhere in a crowd standing at the deli counter with ticket in hand, minding her (his) business and only wanting nine ounces of Scottish lox. Suddenly they find the idea that love might be just around the corner. Her last success was Peter N and Wendy. Thinking of that match gives me an idea.

  “Does Wendy have an older sister?” The thought of dad with a younger woman — one nearly my own age — makes us laugh.

  “Is it out of the question?” Belinda is thinking already of the possibilities, funny or not. “Distance doesn’t matter as much as personality, size, mid-life temperament, dowager-type wealth, or shape. Chicago or Honolulu — what’s the difference?”

  “While I don’t think he would be offended, floating the idea might frighten him.”

  “You don’t know your dad so well, is what I think. He would be terribly flattered.”

  “Okay, I get your female intuition and sense of getting busy. No, I do. But I think I’ll suggest a colleague from the university before suggesting we help him with a fantasy gift. Please?”

  Belinda assents. “How is Peter, by the way? And Wendy?”

  I tell her about my adventure in light meter-land, lunch, seeing Wendy in the garden (“barely a cameo”), and Peter’s lofty encouragement. His words had that quality of the master to the pupil, I tell Belinda, which, upon reflection, irks me. Is it the success of the artist that gets into their heads, or the idea that their work is better, or that their ideas are better and so the work will always be of high quality (highe
r than yours), which makes them say things so naturally what should not be so natural (like, to give advice or criticize)? I shouldn’t want to care. But sometimes I do.

  “I hope I don’t get that way,” I tell her. Deep down, though, I think I already have. Completely unwarranted, of course. And what makes the difference between him and me? This isn’t a question I ask Belinda, because no answer is necessary. It’s the success, actually. Which means I’m jealous.

  Belinda asks me to repeat what Peter told me, and, after listening, says I’m overreacting, but that I’m not so wrong. It’s a cheering analysis. “He’s your friend,” she reminds me. “Otherwise, that’s just Peter. He can’t help himself.”

  “Okay. Sure. Hey, speaking of phone calls,” I say, to get off the subject. “I talked with your mom just before you got home. She was calling to talk to me, so –” It’s been more than a week since the Carley Slope call, but her expression informs me that my subject-changer wasn’t necessary.

  “My mother calls when she knows I’m out,” Belinda says. “Except when she wants to tell me that someone has died.” She yawns and waves off my mounting protest, which must show in my eyes long before speech is able to catch up. This is the last she will speak of the subject, her wave implies. Basta! Belinda’s nonchalance kills me. This is real, not subterfuge. She can go a month without talking to her Nebraska folk. “She’d rather talk with you,” Belinda says. “I think I’m right, because with you she gets reality.”

  I’m able to see inside Belinda more with each new MotherCall. This comes from having, by increments, understood the difference between what is said and what is heard, the same stories told from both sides versus what I already know of Belinda’s background. Alice is a woman I’ve known by voice and photographs only (she’s asked me to call her Alice, not “Mrs” or, god forbid, “mom”). Even the photographs were something of a chore to get hold of, because I had to ask twice and give Belinda the excuse, I’ve spoken with the woman nine times and I need a face to match the voice (to which Belinda answered: “It’ll match, but not fit.”)

  Alice’s natural speaking voice is high and fluid, confident and chatty (with humor attached like a pet’s leash). Whenever I answer the phone to find her on the line, she’s already talking as though the last conversation hasn’t ended. But this is only normal, perhaps, something we know and see in others or, less likely, recognize in ourselves. What is not normal, however, is that Alice has told me things about Belinda I shouldn’t have learned from anyone other than Belinda: when and under what circumstance she got her first period; a list of bratty tantrums like the description of different nails and screws a hardware salesman relates in detail to you; tales of sisterly conflicts, rivalries, and loitering animosity; grammar school grades and early girlhood crushes; and then there were the teenage boyfriend failures. I hadn’t asked for secrets to be revealed, and, mostly, the information came as a surprise. What I mean by this is, in the middle of a story about the latest hometown happenings in Cornville, NE, Alice would shimmy into the conversation some sideways memory of her daughter: “My friend, Claire … I’ve told you about Claire, the mousy neighbor who raises nettles in her front yard … she was over for coffee and a cordial the other night, telling me about her brother Albert and his playboy lifestyle. Seems Al has got his hands full down at the high school again. Not with the students, mind you, but the secretarial staff! I can only imagine. And Claire, she couldn’t keep her eyes off the portrait of my girls hanging over the fireplace … you know the one I’m talking about [I didn’t] … which got me thinking about just what little bitches those girls could be to each other at that age. Back in the day, you understand. Belinda and Rebecca fought like cornered polecats, right up to the time they got their periods. Nearly on the same day, too. Belinda became a woman early, which Rebecca didn’t like at all. She claimed Belinda had stabbed her own palm with a fork and rubbed the blood on the inside of her thighs. All in a day’s battles, I guess. They traded barbs like old men over a checkers board. This that and the other, before they were thirteen years old. Later, Rebecca’s peerless beauty upset her younger sister like all get-out, and you have to believe rivalry grew like Claire’s nettles. I mean, we’re women and pretty and smell nice, but what lurks under the ironed dresses everyone sees on Sunday morning isn’t hardly the truth of a week gone by, now is it, Minus? But Claire, you know, she’s just the pill that choked the horse, because her three boys haven’t married well … town girls, horse-faced and all and with good childbearing hips but without charm … And Claire wonders how life is outside the county....”

  What scorched my ears in all of that was Alice’s “peerless beauty” comment that described Belinda’s sister. Sisterly rivalry maybe, or maybe a rivalry helped along by mom. If it was the latter, and, if such choice words had been leveled at her daughters in their teens (“thrust” might be a better word, or even “parried” against a teenager’s sharp tongue), there’s no doubt what sabotage had razed sibling love. This explains why Belinda looks askance at the phone whenever it rings. This explains why the name Rebecca is not heard in our house. Not that I’ve noticed so much between the two of us, but a good jolt of adulthood will scare mom & dad’s influence to some back room of the mind, and if one’s lucky it will seldom peek through the keyhole — like an old aunty banished to the attic. Alice’s voice in all its guises says much about her past, whose details remain unknown to me (Belinda is yet, I’m loath to say, an unreliable storyteller on this subject).

  Belinda drinks more of the wine and curls her toes through mine. She hands the glass to me so that I get the last swallow. Before I drink, I ask, “Don’t you tell her the truth about your life? She’s your mom, after all, and you’re an adult woman living your own life. Far, far away. So what’s the problem? You never know, you might just blow her mind.” Such questions I understand are unfair because of what I know (or think I know; I am aware of the difference) but I nonetheless probe her psyche for further clues to my lover’s essence.

  “I said reality, Minus. She doesn’t want to hear the truth.”

  Sometimes I wonder about paintings that show several people in obvious conversation, or having just finished talking and then — think takes them over. I often daydream about what might have just been said between such characters. This is the full invention of art, I tell myself, and then feel a mental kick for not having lived in the centuries when realism ruled one’s chisels and brush and palette. Those people in the paintings, the ones I wonder about, have spoken the words that Belinda and I have now traded. Sometimes, life is that simple.

  Belinda sees that I’m thinking hard, and knows that if she doesn’t take me away, I’ll brush the phone off the block and take up hammer and chisel until the wee hours. Little does she know that if I were to tell her all that I knew (and how I’d come to know it), I’d be the banished aunty.

  “Want to go fool around, boyfriend?”

  Her smile, its invitation to … everything … wipes my mind clean. Almost wipes my mind clean. We leave the phone were it stands and race to the bedroom. I grab her hips as she reaches the foot of the bed, pull her back, and get onto the mattress first. You win, I say. She smirks. “Show me my prize.”

  “Minus, wake up.” Belinda jostles me through half sleep. “Honey, open your eyes.” She pushes me, rocks the mattress until the bed squeaks with a familiar rhythm. But that’s not what’s happening. “I have to talk to you.”

  “It can’t be morning,” I say through a pasty mouth. The light is silted black. “I can’t see the wall. I can’t see you.”

  “Turn over,” Belinda says. “I’m right beside you. You don’t want to know what time it is. Time doesn’t matter. You don’t want to see me. We don’t work rat-race hours, so you can sleep again in the morning. Have an afternoon nap. Just concentrate now, okay? And wake up.”

  I turn over. In the darkness I do see Belinda, sitting cross-legged, her hands firmly cupped around her knees. Has she been meditating? I shake my
head to spread some sense across the outer edges of my brain.

  “Listen to me for a moment, two moments,” Belinda says. “Are you awake? Good. Listen. What I’ve got in mind is to help the horse — that’ll be you — that can break mid-race and finish strong. Take the reigns of a spirited –”

  “You’d better not say animal,” I protest. She’s talking hysterically. Never listen to a hyperactive at three o’clock in the morning, their minds are filled with the poetry of their dreams.

  “No, no, darling,” says Belinda, practically in a purr. Her fingers run up my nape hair, around the back, and onto the crown. The feeling stimulates nerves all the way to my toenails. She takes a handful of hair, and another. “Okay, so I did see you as an animal. Sorry. But horses are so beautiful and powerful. Very good imagery. Anyway, you’re also the wind that runs before the force that is you. I’m talking about what you make when you chisel and grind and sculpt. The business side of you, that’s my angle, my edge. It always has been! I woke up from some dream that I can’t remember, but the feeling I had — have — is that I’ve been the one all along that can do this.”

  “Do what?” I ask, in the tone of a simpleton. I’m still a little foggy on facts here, and her ode to me has confused my own reasoning. Her words have flown at me like bats agitated in a cave. “Hey, can we turn on the lamp?”

  I feel her body shift on the bed through shadow and blackness, and then the bedside lamp pops on with overly bright yellow light. We blink at each other in silence, and dust away the glare. Belinda draws herself close to me again. Her hair is a tumble of dark strands. She sits on her knees in her pajama pants, the legs pulled up to show calf, its tawny skin smooth because she shaves her legs at night.

  “Okay,” she says. “As I was saying, your arms are the sculpture’s life force, your fingers its delicate nerve ends firing upwards from its depths … just follow me; this is fun … you have the touch that makes it something. This is your voice speaking to the world, and it needs to be directed at the right people. They must be made to see you as this, this, this guy who makes great art. Because you do, only they don’t see the package. Without the package to start their imaginations, in this market, there’s less chance to notice the art. Do you see what I mean?”

  I think of many emotions to use for objection. One: outrage. No art without packaging? That’s wrong! Yet, in a breath filled with time to ponder, I understand how right she can be. All I need to do is walk into a middle-of-the-block art gallery to find the weird, the quirky, the obvious, the strange and insipid. That’s enough. Only then, it’s not enough. Not for modern art, which only gets more outlandish by the half year. Art is sliding the way of the Hollywood movie: one violent thriller must top the previous hit, your next sex scene dirtier, raunchy. Now sculpture is unnatural (even when it’s meta-figurative): terra cotta dogs in rabid frenzy; broken glass bottles fused together on steel rods à la Alice in Wonderland. I don’t want to take this path (never had). That’s not me, nor how I see the world, as though it’s coming apart at the seams. (I’m simplifying the art world, here, a necessary argument to keep brevity as it should be: girth without breadth. Nevertheless....) Okay, so now there’s room here for affirmation. Her words have sounded like a beautiful combination of Renaissance sensibility and Twentieth-Century pragmatism. Business is business. Unexpectedly, a simple counter argument comes to mind.

  “The art is the commodity,” I say, using the voice of a survey course instructor. “Not the artist.”

  “Says who?” Belinda responds, in the voice of the willful student. “No, you’re right. But let’s look back a skosh; people identify the art with the person. Take Warhol. Good art? Sure. Now see the weird hair, big nose, and hear his funny voice. Suddenly, his soup cans and Marilyn and Mao take on real form. Look at Dalí. Freaky guy, plus freaky art, equals freaky recognition. Your precious Rembrandt, too. His self-portraits made self-love honorable in art. As you can tell, the product identifies the artist, and so looks back to the art.”

  “Sweetheart. I’m not a bottle of soda pop,” I point out, needlessly perhaps. “Even if I were, I’d have to taste good. You know what I’m talking about. The art. It’s the art, not the packaging. It can’t be the package. The art has to be good. It has to be great; well, maybe not so great anymore. Anyway, I know mine’s good … and will be better. You know it’s good. They need to look at the art before they can see what makes it good.”

  “They do? Do they? Have you seen the shark suspended in Jello or whatever?”

  “Hirst. He used formaldehyde.”

  “I can make a case that, in fact, they hadn’t looked at that. Besides, he was already famous for his curatorial work before the shark thing. Otherwise –”

  “Hold on,” I say. “That’s only part of it. Or might be part of it. Jesus, now you have me thinking dark, cynical thoughts.”

  “Not cynical,” she fires back. “Realistic.”

  “Maybe. Okay, maybe. But back to me. They won’t look at my art because … because – because – because. Who knows why! They know, or maybe they don’t know. It’s a question! This isn’t anything new to artists, it just happens to be happening to me. Right now. Not, not, not in the future. The near future.”

  “Exactly!” She yells this to me with her head thrust to the ceiling. I wonder if our neighbors are getting all of this. “That’s the spirit I knew you had inside. Now it’s time to sell your work by showing it and selling you as part of your art: the past you, the present you, the future of you, and the future of your art. Maybe the future of art itself. Product. Packaging. Marketing. Minus-Appeal. I’m thinking out loud here, so work with me.”

  “Sounds ambitious,” I say. “But wait a second. I thought you had people in mind. Experienced agents. My assumption was you had a Plan A, because you said you were going to ask around. Call in some markers. Your art model IOUs, so to speak. Something like that.”

  “Not exactly like that,” she says. Her voice is filled with irony. Her head bobbles in thought. I know the look. She has to tell me something bad. “What I’m proposing is Plan A-dash-a. A small difference. You see, I did make phone calls, lots of them. Not all exactly IOUs. And I dropped in on people. No one wants the job.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Great!”

  “No, listen. It’s fine. It’s not you, it’s them. It’s not your work. They just have more than they can bite off right now, is what they say. Look at the market! Maybe, I suppose (they supposed, too), if you were established, there would be talk. But that’s all their bullshit agent talk, too. What they mean is that you aren’t known for something. See? That’s the marketing thing all over again; the name that bears recognition gets the spotlight before the work is even seen. I mean, come on, Minus, look at the Times’ best-seller lists. The same names selling the same stories to the same readers. Art can take a lesson from that. Maybe it already has, in decades past. Yeah, I think it has.

  “So let’s get you known: for your art, your mouth, your attitude, your views on something. Something that makes a noise! Listen here, because here’s the deal. I’ve worked in the arts; I know people — they’ve moved around, but haven’t died or left for Paris or London. And, it’s time I put my college degree into action. Minus, this can work. Art prices are crazy high these days. Museums can’t compete with collectors on the old stuff, but they can for young, new artists making art now. The number of millionaires tripled in the eighties; billionaires grew by a factor of five! Where have they put their money? ART. Galleries now stand shoulder-to-shoulder from here to Bangkok. We’re in an art glut, and still they want more.”

  She’s done some work on this already, I realize, but all those facts don’t account for the art that is either good or not-good-enough. I’ve read these same things in the trade magazines. She reads about it in the NYT business section. Which is true, or truer? I don’t know. What is good art, though, in the world of money with no eye for the aesthetic, is what money says is good. Or the popularity polls.
Or both. Which of the two leads the other might be the real question.

  “Belinda, do you really think this is the right — wait. I’m not suggesting you couldn’t do the job. More importantly, though, for us both — do you want to be an artist’s manager? And what about Gretchen? The coach business has taken off. You’ve built a good business with time and money, all to get established. Now that you have that, you’re saying you want to start over at something you –”

  “And years and years are all that’s in front of me.” She bobs her head some more. “The coach business is good money. Could even get better. The overhead, though, is the camel’s back. That can only get heavier. And lately, in the middle of the night, I’ve awakened from dreams that have me sitting on that seat behind Gretchen, in the cold, with snow falling on my shoulders, and I’m shivering. I can’t stop shivering. I wake up with the sniffles. The Age of Dickens is not what I had imagined when I saw myself driving that cab. I’m not sure what I imagined, after imagining myself into buying a horse and the hansom cab. Whatever that was and has turned into, I don’t want to be found frozen to the seat. You’d have to peel my boots from the footboard, crack my fingers inside their gloves to pull away the reins –”

  “Okay, okay. You’ve set the scene, Ghost of Christmas Future. But so how long would you last as an arts agent? My arts agent? The pay might be great — sky’s the limit! — but the hours will suck. And the work is routine. You know some of these gallery types. Their middle names are No and their business cards say ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ The only gratifying work in this business, if you ask me, is making the art. Everything else is no different from a sundry office job.”

  “That’s how you would see it. After all, you’re just the artist. You should see it as all of that. That’ll keep you focused on your art. Meanwhile –”

  “Meanwhile.”

  “Meanwhile, someone like me –”

  “Someone like you, or YOU – capital letters?”

  “Me. Look, I’ve been trained in sports and media management. A fucking gold mine, but filled with packs of swinging dicks. The industry just doesn’t like women — unless they type one-hundred words per minute and take dictation in shorthand. No thank you. The art world is different, yet Art hasn’t much difference as a commodity: you make people see the product the way you want to sell it. Hold back, please, on that ‘art as purity’ look, okay? How do you think Dalí became the only surrealist to make it big? Marketing! He sold himself along with his art. Charlie Chaplin did the same thing in film. Erica Jong did it in publishing. Shall I go on? Art has never been only pure, if it ever was that at all. Maybe for the cave wall scratchers. Artists have been in it for business as much as beauty. Do the names da Vinci and Michelangelo ring a bell? Okay. Now we’re in the Nineties, and if the Seventies and Eighties taught us anything, it’s that perception needs to be massaged. Jesus Christ, people have even started liking Nixon again, all for writing a book on diplomacy. Give me a break.”

  I ask myself, as I look at this beautiful demon in front of me, Is it her diminishment of art itself that bothers me, or the commercial sense she wants to apply to me? I’m not sure that I should care, as long as I get to make the art that I want — and be successful for that. Although could I be accused of –? No. That’s not a thought for me to have.

  “What about the art?” I ask again.

  “Yes. Keep saying that,” she says. Her voice is calm, the voice of reason. “That’s good. The art is the perception.”

  “I know that,” I say. “That’s why I asked.”

  “That’s the beauty of the plan,” she says. “In a couple of weeks you’re appearing on that arts panel. The 95th Street Y is a great stage on which to be noticed. Don’t plan, just be you. You’ll say profound things. You’ll say outrageous things. You’ll get press. Then, in the summer, there’s the sculpture symposium. More press. Especially if you win. You’re in a good place to break out, Minus. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “My art needs to break out!” It’s my turn to yell. Only, there’s something else here (among all the other unspokens). “And in three years? Five years? I need staying power from a manager, Belinda. Question: will you get bored, or tired, or feel like you’re frozen to the seat? I’m sorry if this sounds cruel, but I have to ask.”

  She doesn’t miss her cue.

  “Take your fat-ass lava lady that slid off the window, and make her into a life-size whatever, however you dream up the art that you do. That’s when we’ll see our future. You’ll know where your sculpture is taking you. The art takes care of itself. Meanwhile (yes, again: meanwhile: all part of the plan) –” She takes a fast breath to continue, before she passes out. “– I’ll find you buyers. Like those face card pals of yours.”

  “That’s true,” I say. Her words are both harsh and reassuring. Reassuring, I think, for their push against my self-doubt. She’s jarring me loose from the frame, or anchor, or root, of … something of which I’m not certain exists. If that makes sense. I’m not sure it does, though.

  “As for the future,” she continues, “it’s the ‘ole hens in the henhouse story: don’t count them too soon. What I’m saying, mister draw-a-blank, is that we can hire someone who can open castle doors. Later. First things first. Slay the villagers.”

  I’m not so sure of her mixed analogies, but the story sounds like a good story to live as a character. The protagonist, of course, or at least one of his rivals.

  “I guess it can work. It’s worth a try.”

  “Minus. Honey. My job is only to promote you, while you make your art speak to the world. There, that’s how this conversation began. These are not in contradiction. That is my point.”

  Her gesture is catching, and I catch myself bobbing my head to the music she’s playing. But….

  “You don’t mind getting back into that scene?” I ask, with the bite of seriousness.

  “What scene?” She plays it fey, but she knows what’s implied. “So I did some modeling. No big deal. I’ve told you most of that. The best part was the education I took from it all. Only I didn’t exactly know it — recall just how and with what — until like yesterday.”

  I remember what she’d told me, and I don’t remember. It’s funny how knowledge is ephemeral, much of the time; I know a lot and yet very little for certain. It often feels as gut reaction more than stored information.

  “Minus, I can do this. The connections, my business sense. It all adds up to the same thing, except for mountains of experience and a bucketful of haughty opinions about what is good.” She frowns and, in a forced tone of mock conciliation, says, “Not to be indelicate, but I can hardly do worse than you have, all alone.”

  My neck stiffens. “That was indelicate.”

  Silence.

  “Sorry about that,” Belinda says, her tone penitent. “My thoughts came out wrong. No worse than your questioning my staying power. Let me try that again. You need a voice from the field to speak their language for you. I was there, I know how they talk the business of art. So you talk art, I talk the biz, and we’ll find a happy, nutty center.”

  “Okay. Because you say you can do that, I think so, too, because I’ve heard you. But, can you do that? For real?”

  “When you sit for hours as a model, you hear everything. Words, words, deals, deals. After a while, you might think they’re selling soap. And with all the art that’s out there, and all the bars of soap, they might as well be. The difference is, your soap must smell good and make people feel clean. No better or cleaner than the next soap, only just as popular with as many people. It doesn’t even matter what the reason is for their preference. Sure, I’m simplifying, but that’s business. Sell sand to an Arab, and make an artist buy his competitor’s work. Business. Supply and demand is hardly the key to success anymore. It’s image. Get in, make your name, make great art, make your money, and, then, keep making art if that’s what you want to do.”

  I lie back, linking my hands behind my
head.

  “That’s an incredibly commercial take on art,” I say, more to myself, but then, it’s out there between us to cut up and parse. Only, there’s something more on my mind. “I’m sorry, but I must always ask more of myself.”

  “Good. Better!” She again takes my words to use for her own advantage. “I’ll use the same for my motto. Then you’ll see, because I know you don’t see, now. You can’t. Okay. I need to prove myself. I shall. Every day.”

  “Just what kind of business did they teach you at Nebraska?”

  “The kind that works. It gets the job done, because the job is there to be done. Money in the bank, people talking about you, etcetera etcetera. Chuck Close: you know him — he’s got the look and the name to match his art: the faces of everyday Joe’s and Jane’s in close-up, put onto giant canvases. The most common idea imaginable, and he’s a fucking star!”

  I hadn’t known she’d thought so much about art. When I tell her this, she asks me, soto voce, what I think she does all day while riding on the back of her hansom cab. Yes, but … okay. And … so … sure. Her offer is magnanimous, but that word comes with a price tag.

  “Not to be indelicate,” I say, “but we need to sign a contract. Areas of influence, percentages, terms of agreement.” I smile. She returns it just as I predicted she would.

  “Right,” she says. “I think we both agree that simple is better.”

  “Lawyers are simple, my love,” I say. “You pay them cash, and they shark for you.” She gets my drift. “But I think that we can write something up on notebook paper. For now. Before that, tell me more.”

  She doesn’t frown. She doesn’t avert her eyes. She leans into me with an aggressive gesture of confidence and forethought.

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way, boyfriend. Partner. Now, understand. The top people must be excited into backing you. Think of it as going into a pigsty rubbed down with clover flowers.” She rubs my legs but no cricket chirping plays through the room, so she nibbles on my ear. “Now think of me as the clover.” She rubs more. “You need sales, but patronage would be okay, too, for now. You know, to give you time to create something spectacular. Which I think you can. Will you?”

  The issue of a challenge.

  She’s right, and that kind of rightness is its own job and has its own hours. Patronage? She’s thinking of the FaceCards. Her imagery of business action makes me think of a not very traditional girl. How do I tell her that my pound-the-pavement, door-to-door style, is what I really like about showing my work? I don’t say anything. Old fashioned methods aren’t appreciated. Most of the time.

  “I can handle the fastballs, Minus. The curves, too — no major leaguer can make it without hitting a curve ball every now and then.” She sees me taking in another sports analogy, her go-to lessons on life. Some people use New Age affirmations (“The universe loves me”) to make themselves get out of bed. Belinda has her gym bag full of pep talk one-liners. There’s something else in her eyes, too, about the work, an unknown expression to my cataloged history of her ticks and gestures, the moods, the heat within surrounded by charred edges.

  “Let’s do this,” she says. Her hand comes forward, no longer the sea snake but a paw (bear is too big for her, but … fox?). She waits for me to shake on the deal. When I take her hand in mine (really, though, it seems the other way around) the light in her eyes has changed again. It hasn’t returned to the Belinda I know, but has moved onto a third being. Her grip on my hand is dog-bite tight.

  The idea swills in my stomach, or maybe this feeling is the wine, one glass too many and then woken up to this. Nevertheless, and I don’t know if it’s her argument, or the Karen K fiasco, or even the Carley Slope mini-meltdown, something in me lets doubt slide from my shoulders, and I agree to her plan.