What Beauty Read online

CHAPTER 8

  It’s a fact that sounds drift unevenly on hot, dense air currents than the cool atmosphere of winter.

  Astride my honeycomb’s threshold, I hear tantric sighs folded between human giggles. Behind this, like a rock bassist holding the beat, are the flagellating strokes upon which Bert punishes his cock while listening to Binny getting fucked, or eaten, or whatever Al is doing to her behind the tied tent canvas. Zeppo hasn’t shown himself since the powwow debacle. Vendulka has also gone into hiding after “reviving” Bert. And if I know her, she’s in her honeycomb (adjacent to Bert’s) making low moans and uttering whispers to jack him up, so to speak. It’s well known (perhaps only by me and Zeppo?) that she has made a peephole in the canvas wall so she can spy on Bert, and to let Bert spy on her.

  How would I, a sculptor, immortalize these people and their habits? Modernity gives me full license. Art’s narrative serves humanity’s basic need to describe the flow of life. In puritanical times, the basest of human desires (needs were confined to house, food, clothing, God) had to be made metaphorical. Along came Michelangelo’s colossus, David, whose cock became the equivalent of anatomical revolt against correctness. Of course, the true halcyon days — ancient Greece — chronicled (and celebrated!) every libidinous act, followed by its natural excess. Later, Ovid pulled back the drapes to let us peek through the windows on ancient love and … congresses. Binny and Alfred are easy targets to sculpt in love’s grapple: add a thorn and a crease to the yin-yang swirl. Indeed, I could carve bees from frozen honey, but the correlation of what I see and hear at the hive won’t come through. Perhaps I could place a bird hovering in the atmosphere, representing Eros, or Cupid? No, that would be kitsch, the amateur’s theft of the Baroque’s yearning to paint his way to a comparison with the ancients and their own crass, brutal leaders. Scratch all that.

  I have to get away from the hive.

  There are these two little mutts I know, Babe and King, who are always up for a tandem walk. They’re West Side dogs, teacup Chihuahuas. They know each other from the neighborhood, and have tracked the other’s scent on solo walks (and left their own as a calling card). I can easily fit them both in my Puppy Papoose, which elevates them to human eye contact, where they can bark at the world and traffic and people as I porter them quickly through these crowded streets to the park. With a few phone calls, I set up a doggy play date.

  I have time to kill, and before leaving my honeycomb I sidle my stool up to the table, eyes level with the previous day’s work. In a few minutes, I feel neither satisfaction nor despair. Last week, when Belinda woke me in the middle of the night with her big plan, our talk had dispersed so many doubts about my direction, a new vision, the throwing technique; I was ready to work, hands flexing and eyes shortening to microscopic magnification of what there was way down close, and yesterday I let myself loose. Here’s what I see from all that: FallenMan looks promising in his death-weight pose, the maggot-size clay shards cover him in a flesh whose texture is grated cheese. HourGlassWoman’s bar-bell shape defies my empathy; her body has, by simple imagination, been pulled inside out; it’s an offense to the human physique. ShadowTree retains a negative symbiosis with the lighting, an effect I could use by polishing the undersides of a metal cast (limbs, nose, ears) while leaving surfaces naturally pitted (to what purpose is yet my fantasy). GumbyDude has sagged from his stick — sunk to the ground, on hands and knees — he looks old, decrepit, a dying vagrant or, to take a judicious twist from the norm, an old man positioned in mock prayer. But … Why ‘mock’? I rotate the base to see the sculpture from all angles. GumbyDude clutches a grin close to his left cheek, an asymmetrical feature that strikes me as one of a thousand human mannerisms almost impossible to capture in art because it is artificial, a truly animal deception without duplication; nevertheless, the clay pieces have achieved an uncanny effect made by the impact, where three saucers have folded onto themselves. And I think: this is why I make art. The prayer posture is a plea for forgiveness, for all our character flaws; or else it’s an end-of-life pose the aged man assumes for spite against fallacious promises. I’m not naturally provoked to sacrilege, but from what old people have told me, I’ve reckoned this: the more years you live, the easier it is to relax for death’s approach. The very thought makes me want to say, “Huh.” To mock death and life in a single gesture is the essence of art.

  Or maybe what I see is Narcissus himself, aged to adulthood, and with adulthood’s reasoned thoughts (one hopes), he has turned his back on his pool of water. No more does his vanity reflect in its glossed surface. I hold this image for a moment, and then … no. Who of us can afford to lose the closest friend we have — ourself? It’s a fair question that leaves all liars mute.

  Finally, then, there is OrchidBloom, which gives me nothing aesthetic to grasp. No feeling. Ambivalence. But then, that’s a feeling. Stop, I tell myself. Back up. This was a first try. Now it’s over.

  King and Babe lick the crumbs off my fingers. I’ve made them share a peanut butter cookie. It’s a dog biscuit, not an over-sugared human snack that’ll cause Adult Onset Diabetes all the medical journals warn about these days. Women on the street stop to stare at the doggies. (Had I known dogs collect women like women collect shoes, I’d have scored more girls in high school and college than those I can only tally using three fingers). They turn around and gawk on the street, their powdered cheeks and reddened lips pouting at the dogs.

  “Lick, don’t bite!”

  The pups drop their ears in cowed submission. Almost as quickly, though, they recover their instincts and go on licking my fingers, their feathery pink tongues lapping furiously. The afternoon has become warm, and I feel the wall behind me hot against my back. Spring has only been a word this year.

  Across from us is the 10th Street Art Gallery. What this gallery lacks in imaginative identity (outdoor latex splattered in a graffito text above the storefront windows), the owners make up for in demanding artwork — if perhaps, outré. It’s why I think my guerrilla marketing can work here. I hatched the plan three minutes ago, after a pair of schoolgirls asked to pet the pooches and I had to shoo them away. Little dogs like to bite little hands. Children howl when bitten by dogs. I looked over the girls’ heads as they walked away disappointed, and saw Earl Hap parking his Dodge outside the gallery.

  I’ve met Earl a few times at NYC openings. He’s big on being closed mouthed about what he sees on his competitors’ walls. Secrecy of thought goes a long way in the gallery community. I have a spiel in mind for Earl, and now that Earl has gone inside, my hands find the ass of my jeans to wipe away dog saliva. “Watch the street for me, mutts,” I say. They lick my face. Traffic on 10th Ave is light, moving one-way going south. I make a dash for the opposite curb. We get a double honk from a slowpoke taxi whose fare sits with a newspaper held high. I wave, and the cabbie hangs us the finger. He wears a turban.

  I grab the gallery door as a guy & guy couple leaves, each with a handhold on a newly wrapped frame. They make bird chirps at the dogs, who sniff heavily at their boy scent, musky and sweaty and a bit ripe. Then we’re inside. The dogs sniff at this new, stale air. The room is cool, humidity controlled. I hear conversation somewhere in the back, through a centered, arched entranceway leading to a second room, where I can see sculptures on square, white pedestals. A lot of ironwork sculptures married to wind imagery. Further on is another room. Other than the voices, we see no one. Babe growls. I tap his head and he holds the next growl in his throat.

  Here in the window-front gallery hang large, rectangular metal sheets with a one-inch lip on three sides. They’re tin trays, or perhaps steel, and have an authenticity to their proportion and weight. I haven’t a clue as to what they were once used for. In colorful Seventies’ Pop-Art shades, the artist has painted a cadaver on each tray, head down, feet up. The bodies’ attitudes are further disconcerted by the colors: purples and hot pinks and lime greens and chocolate browns — and orange, lots of orange tints. The bodies lie dissec
ted, their organs arranged in the exposed cavities, skin sliced from throat to pelvis and pulled aside like a vest on a hot day. The paintings aren’t photo realistic, but impressionistic and real enough.

  I discover a wall plaque along the second wall that gives the legend behind the motif. Each tray is part of an authentic nineteenth century morgue table, reclaimed from British storehouses that Thatcher had decommissioned from public funding. The artist, William Flurry, bought the trays at auction. I like Flurry’s technique, and fear his subject’s creepiness. The top of each tray has no lip for a specific reason, states the legend; this is the run-off ledge, which carried the body fluids by gravity into a rubber hose (the table was tilted for this purpose), whose end fed a disposal barrel that was shifted from one table to the next during the day’s autopsies. I feel my stomach turn (the fidgety dogs against my belly don’t help) and must walk away.

  Through the far doorway I see a desk with a computer whose screen blinks with green characters. It’s either Earl Hap’s office or an installation piece. I place a hand on each of the dogs’ heads and stroke them lightly behind the ears, and walk through to the final room. Earl Hap is in close conversation with his partner, Gaiyl Patel.

  “Hi, Earl. Hello, Gaiyl.” She doesn’t recognize me. “We met at ‘Art New York’ last November.”

  Gaiyl Patel narrows a pair of thin, dark eyebrows our way and replies. “Please take those pets outside,” she says.

  By contrast, Earl is controlled, and puts a hand on Gaiyl’s sleeve because she’s begun to advance, eyebrows leading green eyes that have the menace of a gender-bending Shiva. Earl whispers something to her. She stops, and they confer like pirates, ignoring me. I don’t wait for their verdict.

  “Animal lovers, right?” I start to walk slowly toward them. Gaiyl folds her arms across her chest, but Earl smiles at me like I’m a happy devil. “Your name is Ort,” he says, “Is that correct?” He holds out his hand. I take it for a swift shake. The dogs begin to bark, shrill snaps that ricochet off the walls and threaten to split our eardrums. Earl and Gaiyl wince, and look wildly at their consignments as if the paintings and sculptures will crack under the high-pitched yaps. I cover King and Babe’s little snouts into my cupped hands.

  “The name is Minus Orth,” I say. “I’m a sculptor.”

  “Of dogs?” says Gaiyl.

  “You saw my globes, Earl. Oblong spheres cast in bronze.” They nod, but their eyes settle on the dogs’ heads. I grimace as they keep their distance from the dogs, or me, or both. My annoyance at their wooden behavior pokes through.

  “They won’t hurt you,” I say in snappy assurance. “Park Avenue mavens come to openings cradling their own mutts. I think dogs can be inspiring. What other breeds are popular these days? Those little Westies, and Italian greyhounds. I welcome pets into my studio because the silvertops warm to my art when they have their own warm’n’fuzzy friends cuddled between their arms.”

  “Silvertops?” asks Earl.

  “Yeah. You know, Gray Mares.” He’s not getting me. “Customers, Earl. The Silver Foxes with treasure in their purses to spend on beautiful home decorations.” I wink. This gets Earl Hap to gesture humorously, but his Pashton partner (Brahman stock, I’ve read in Sculpture News) seems put off. I need to address her directly. “Sorry, Gaiyl. I’m speaking indecorously, but my East Siders all claim they invented the term. Alicia Greene, in fact, told me something like that right in this gallery. She recalled how ‘we silvertops are all aglitter tonight.’ I think you were showing the Argentine, Paola Escobar. Her Patagonian landscapes. I heard they sold well. Odd, for landscapes these days, but classic painting always wins over the gaudy deconstructionist pap, right?”

  “We don’t allow dogs in the gallery,” Gaiyl says.

  “Yes, you’ve already said that.” I try to hold their attention with business-savvy eyes, an expression I’ve seen posed by captains of Industry on the covers of Time and Newsweek. The dogs start squirming in the papoose. I almost want to incite them to bark again. “Okay, a moment of your time, please. I’m not here to browse –”

  “Mr Ort, we have no wall space for new artists,” Gaiyl puts in quickly, “if that’s why you’re here not to browse.”

  “That’s Orth. Thanks. And I’m not a new artist. I’ve had shows in Chicago and New York. I’m working on fresh pieces that’ll be ready in a few months.”

  They take a beat to look at each other. I’ve met with enough gallery owners to know when there’s direct interest and where there’s a brush-off coming. This is something in between, like when an artist painting outdoors is fighting with the light and can’t decide if the color inside a tree’s shadow is crimson or maroon. This problem didn’t plague Monet in London, genius being what it is, because he simultaneously painted eight or ten canvases in his Parliament cycle, changing canvases as the day’s light changed. If that’s not genius, it’s at least practical — and thrifty. I make one last maneuver that is not so genius as practical. “May I leave my card? You’re invited to visit my loft, where I have a viewing gallery and –”

  “You’re welcome to submit slides, Mr Ort,” Ms Patel says.

  “Orth. There’s a th sound. Minus Orth.”

  “We prefer slides,” Earl says. “You have to understand, going around to artist’s lofts is time consuming and –”

  “Inconvenient,” Gaiyl finishes.

  Now I can’t help myself. “You know, I recall reading a piece on Pollock where, after one of the Guggenheim daughters wanted to buy a painting, or help him out – can’t remember which – she walked up five flights to his dump of an apartment. I mean we’re talking Pollock here. Years before he became THE guy.”

  I have with me in my backpack a handful of color prints, five-by-sevens, that Peter helped me take for my files and insurance cataloguing. There’s no way I’m pulling them out, though, not now and not with their attitudes inflamed. It’s principle, at this point.

  “House calls aren’t exactly part of the trade, these days, Minus.”

  “Did I mention Peggy Guggenheim? Warhol gave Basquiat space at the Factory.”

  “Are you Basquiat?” Gaiyl asks. “Or Warhol?”

  I sigh. “Oof, that’s harsh. Would if I could, and then I wouldn’t even be standing here, now would I.”

  I am under no illusion that art snobbery has not held me in any less mortgage than collectors & dealers themselves. It’s only a shame our personalities stand on opposite sides of a thick door. Nonetheless, how we approach the market holds equal importance, and potentially perilous consequences. But you see, I have nothing to lose, and my value can only rise, if I make the bold move.

  “Minus, we’re busy planning a show,” Earl says. “Besides, we’re booked through 1995.”

  “At least,” says Gaiyl.

  “So — perhaps in the event of the artist’s death?” I must live up to my smart-ass self.

  Gaiyl-of-every-answer answers. “In that case, an immediate retrospective would be engaged.”

  “With a forty-percent rise in prices, I imagine,” I say as an aside. I see through their droll expressions, the baggie cheeks, the Mona Lisa crimped-lips: my presence has worn a hole in their enthusiasm. I leave my card and walk out.

  Dad always told me, “If at first you don’t succeed, try again.” He also added this Chicago signature, “The next joker might just be hard up.”

  King and Babe deserve some sprint time while I scheme, so I take them to a dog run in Dewitt Clinton Park. They tear around and bark, nipping at the big dogs’ tails, and otherwise do what dogs do, while I roll through my mind a list of nearby galleries.

  Drop-in marketing never hurts, despite what just happened with Earl, and Belinda’s game plan to the contrary. I’ve got it. Deitricht Arts. It’s somewhere between 10th and 11th Avenues, but further south, down on 33rd Street, where the rail yards send a mist of burning oil into the air year round. Deitricht’s shows appear occasionally in the Sunday New York Times arts page. They�
�re new, about a year since opening, which means they should be looking for talent. I call the pups over, helped by fresh biscuits, and scoop them up to head to the A-Train subway in a skip-walk of happy energy.

  Under the soggy fluorescent glow of the subway platform, surrounded by sausage halitosis and sour body heat, I favor a quartet of thoughts. 1) GumbyDude teases my emotions more than my intellect (I note this under the Good column). 2) Karen Kosek’s homeless getup is an escape, but does she want to be invisible? (Bad column) My guess is yes, but only for a while, her way to pull society inside out. I don’t know why she might want to do this, but my time is worth the answer I could get. I might ask. 3) Belinda’s marriage proposal-cum-ultimatum has consequences I’m not yet aware of, or don’t want to face. 4) There’s no other way I can live my life.

  I walk up from the subway, subdued.

  “Sculpture is difficult to show in any space. Too small, and the people crowd out any effect the pieces can make. Too large, and the sculptures fade into the carpeting. Then there are things like lighting, staging, and of course security. Oh my god, the security risks!”

  This is Terry Doon speaking, forty-ish, black hair with wisp-o-gray temples. We’ve known each other since I came to NYC; he was yet cutting his teeth with an auctioneer. Look at him now. A bodybuilder’s trunk, but swan necked, and fingers as long as a spider’s legs; his eyes are brightly virescent with money. To sculpt Terry would be Agony of Dimension. I’d be accused of carnival mirror gimmickry.

  We used to meet at gallery shows, opening nights mostly, for the drinks and cheese and crackers and network schmoozing. I told Terry one night how I was reading this book by another Sixtie’s radical cultural critic, this one going by a single letter for a last name. This was months before I ran across Karen lugging overstuffed plastic bags in the park. “I heard she turned vampire against friends at a party,” Terry told me. “Insults, champagne tossed into faces, spitting bloody vitriol, and all of that. She became a pariah.” I told him that I hardly believed that; on the page, she comes off smooth and level, and always in control. “Careful of your hero’s, pal,” he quipped, but he saw my doubt. “So don’t believe me. Look it up on the Times microfilm. “Talk of the Town” would have written something up, too. She was a devil. But she did like artists.”

  “Sculpture sells big, Terry,” I now tell him. “It sells big for two reasons. There are those who’ve run out of wall space for paintings, but still love the buzz of that new purchase. So they look for alternative forms, something they haven’t thought much about, or have even seen because they’re always looking at walls. They need a different fucking medium. Three-dimensional objects that fit great on tables, desks, sideboards, or a corner pedestal. And of course you can’t forget about people who like the world cast in bronze, brass, or pewter.”

  “But the space!” Terry reaches up and tugs at his collar with a long spider leg. He’s wearing a white button down shirt with red tie, no jacket, and dark blue pants; the daytime uniform of the gallery manager. I’m getting nowhere with this guy.

  “Terry, if you invest in two dozen pedestals and store them in the basement, you’re always ready. There’s no fright element here.” I feel as if I’m selling aluminum siding to an Appalachian inbred. “The gallery can still have paintings on its walls, while the sculptures act like pin-ball bumpers to the crowd. That’s a joke, but listen: sculpture takes their minds off the pretty pictures and helps them refocus, adjust to the three-dimensional world again.” I let the image and story sink in. Terry has mellowed. I spread my hands. “How can you lose?”

  He hooks his thumbs into his waistband. His eyes switch to the floor at random intervals, but I can see he’s begun to visualize twenty-four pedestals standing in his gallery like load-bearing posts. He inhales and suddenly blows his cheeks out in a Sachmoesque furry, or a used car salesman.

  “Tell you what, here, Minus,” he says, touching the tips of his fingers to hold the pose. So it’s to be the car salesman, then. He says, “Can you bring over some slides? If you can drop off slides, we’ll get back to you in eight weeks or so. And, if you don’t mind, I prefer black and white to color.”

  I can’t believe this guy. “What if my sculptures are colorful?”

  When I get home, a note from Belinda sits on the table, propped against a bud vase with a fresh rose standing up. Her words sling arrows at my twice-wounded pride:

  Dear Minus,

  I’m out with gallery owners and dealers. They liked your slides! They like your AGENT, too! Isn’t this exciting?!!!

  x x x – Belinda

  My first thought is that the three Xs are kisses. Except, Belinda’s carnal appetite might be playing on Triple-X, as in … you know. I wonder if she’s promising some action when she gets home, a treat for finding easy success after taking the management helm. Maybe “promise” is too hopeful a word. How about suggestive? Sounds good to me.

  The second thought is really a voice in my head, calling for coffee. I make preparations: a Sumatran dark roast, no. 5 strength on the Wake-the-Fuck-Up scale, boiled properly in our little two-cup Italian stovetop espresso jobbie, which I get to unscrew along its narrow waist to load its belly. The surge will help me hammer chisels through rock, because that’s what the day has made me want to do.

  As I fiddle with the primitive coffee maker, my memory mocks me. Years ago, I made a chance meeting with a private collector hunting through the Miami Art Fair. I was twenty-four, or a bit older. Harvey Dorward was an established Texas collector who used the services of a run-about agent, a guy that was younger than myself. I was there crashing the VIP lounge, a room where no art can be found in the otherwise overstocked expo center in downtown Miami, miles from the beaches and the heat & surf and sweat-drenched, tawny bodies.

  Miami is no summertime arts & crafts show that every city center hosts — white tents erected side-by-side, selling water colors or home-made jewelry to the Bermuda-shorted crowd, people barely willing to part with ten dollars, much less tens-of-thousands that fine artwork fetches. Miami is an extension of Art Basel, the annual Swiss fair where influential gallerists, brokers, and collectors meet to glean, kibitz, lament, and deal. Six-figure sales are the norm. I’ve lately read in ARTFORUM and ARTnews that moneyed Reaganists — American new money — are battling European old money. The art pool has been shrinking while market prices have risen. Friends have heard me on this subject already. Of course, you’d think this automatically opens the market for artists, but the opposite is true. The market tightens because galleries are hanging on to “sure bet” artists, a formula that milks collectors for as much as possible. Is this bad for artists? Certainly for some, although making art (not creating art) merely for market demands is sure to make just three people happy: the artist (whose vision and talents will diminish), the collector (who doesn’t know great art from a mediocre New York strip steak), and the galleries (whose pitch seems always to be the smarmy phrase, “I’m just trying to find good homes for my artist’s work.”) Surely, then, the love of money is the root of evil.

  I found myself talking with Harvey, whose hometown was Dallas. Harvey talked about what populated his collection — how he had found each piece, the emotion in the work — but never mentioning its value. This was a good sign; a signal that he was knowledgeable, savvy, and held a love for art more than its investment “flip” value. He’d made his fortune in commercial real estate, “and I’ve got enough lubricant,” he reported. “Art is a splurge that comes from the heart. Hell, I want paintings in the office, not pictures of high-rise birdcages!”

  Harvey wore a gray three-piece suit with a gold watch chain strung across a bulging belly built on Texas BBQ and long days in an office chair. His dark brown hair, just speckled with salt, belied his seventy-plus years. He’d been going to Basel since its inception in 1970. Back then Basel was a backwater show where dealers were seen carrying in rolled up paintings under their arms. A bijou show in a backwater town, but within a few years Harvey w
as meeting with world-class dealers and gallery owners, auction houses and fellow collectors.

  All this was fine, except that Harvey admitted to being too “set in” with what he had, and so could not intelligently see what was leading or ahead of the market. This is where his art consultant earned his money. I asked about him. Harvey said he’d make introductions. Later, the young man walked into the hall and joined us. Alex was a sandy-haired twenty-five-year-old, and looked like an art student, not a jet-setting consultant to a handful of private Dallas collectors.

  “There are two kinds of collectors,” Alex explained over his gin and tonic. “New and Old. Dealers call them something else, and auction houses have picked up on those, but they’re too formal. Any-hoo, the names don’t refer to money or collectors’ ages. New collectors go for new art, fresh from the studio. God only knows why. Name recognition helps, but galleries are also bringing along their artists. A territorial lot, gallery owners are. Any-hoo, old includes collectors buying masterworks from the major artists. I mean like, from the moderns — let’s say Seventies and no later — back to, like, whenever.”

  Alex liked to talk and, I soon learned, pontificate. He wore a striped button-down shirt, cuffs rolled to the elbow with the tails hanging loose over a pair of stylish jeans and brown loafers. I still haven’t decided if he was acting a part, or was arrogant by nature, or had the gift for seeing what art, whose art, would take hold where and when. Of course, Harvey watched Alex and really listened to his line, even though this kid hardly had the experience (it seemed to me) to be given proxy to veritable blank-check orders for new works at auction, or hanging on gallery walls from Pittsburgh to Tokyo. On the other side, I soon realized from their back and forth, more collectors were looking for investment pieces they could flip in five year’s time, passing up on substantial masterworks that were “blue-chip stock” (in Alex’s parlance), which was Harvey’s sole interest.

  Throughout our conversation, I didn’t pass myself off as anything other than what they took me for: an unknown artist who’d crashed the VIP lounge. The fact that I didn’t sell myself like a Southside whore went a long way, in Harvey’s mind. He ordered champagne and we three talked about art and what it meant to create it and what the feeling of buying a great piece made to one’s life. Then the inevitable came. Harvey asked the bold question, but when I answered, Alex took the reigns of a diatribe I haven’t forgotten.

  “At your age?” he said. His hand erased the air, and with it everything I’d said; my entire reason for living. “You’ve either made it by now or you’re not worth looking at.”

  I sipped champagne. “What about Grandma Moses? The austere style. American icon imagery. Or a dozen other artists going back as far as, say, last fucking year.”

  Alex smirked. “All fucking fairy tales; lightning strikes. So what?” He glowered with self-assurance; I saw it as self-importance. “The one-hit-wonders of art. Trees falling in the wilderness. No one cares! Look, if you want to keep at your art, Mr Minus, then I suggest you get some backing. Patronage. Or open your own gallery.” He couldn’t help but look at my clothes, a cool glare from shoes to haircut. “If you have that, I’ve got people who might think about showing you. It would have to take place in one of the outer boroughs. I’m talking New York, of course, not … uh, Milwaukee, that’s where you’re from, right?” He sighed, a sort of horse whinny. “Otherwise,” he began to break toward a big finish, but….

  The completed sentence I didn’t wait to hear. Harvey hadn’t spoken a word since the kid began to trash me. I put my champagne on the table and left. While Alex hasn’t been right, in the years since, he hasn’t been exactly wrong, either. My uncle Frank used to say, “You eat shit, you talk shit.”

  Coffee in hand, I wander over to the block of marble under the wooden arch. This block isn’t a work in progress. I carve petroglyphs into the five sides, “studies” of dimension and objects. Playtime, for when my mind needs to wander but the hands want activity. Out of one corner peers a three sided face, blighted Asian features, one eye and the nose pecked out, while its cheek and chin are roughly abraded; a gargoyle with carrot-stub nose and exaggerated, fat-lipped mouth. Above this is a human ear, its dimension four times larger than what we stick our fingers in on the sides of heads to clean or forage, or where little kids store their dinner peas. Into a second corner I’ve chiseled a lion’s head wearing Hitler’s toothbrush mustache. Across the stone’s table are further abrasions that expose the casing, face and mechanics of an old-fashioned alarm clock. One of its clacker bells cracked on me when I blinked and hammered at the same time. The clock was my original purpose for this marble; the crack changed its raisson d’etre into my practice stone. Had I tried to salvage the sculpture as Echeandia did to his coal roses, I’d have felt like a plagiarist.

  I stand over the block to examine it while pulling on thin leather gloves and safety glasses. A portion of the smooth table catches my eye, left of center and up near an untouched corner. The table shows its various layers of dark sedimentary veins curving to a high arc along the edge, before dropping precipitately to form a sort of camel’s hump design between thicker marbling. I pick up a cape chisel and hammer, set the bit against the rock, and strike the end four or five times. Each strike rings sharp, like an anxious lover tapping at his sleeping paramour’s window in the middle of the night. Bits of stone spit from the chisel’s nose, a fine three-sixteenth’s bit. I follow the line between sediments, and steadily hammer the nose into the rock at a thirty-degree angle. Progress is slow, steady, taxing. After five minutes, I blow out the dust in the newly chiseled runnels and slide my fingernail along their arc. The sediment lines, when raised by this chiseling, will be as dramatic against the white rock as a woman’s eyebrows, plucked and lined for a night on the town.

  Quite suddenly, though, I don’t want to hear hammer strikes in my ear anymore, or sneeze marble dust the rest of the night. I need to get out of the loft, take a walk — give myself a walk. I gulp breath and barely feel my feet scamper across the floor.

  I show up at the Beehive after seven. I expect a dark room and the moist air of an empty cave, but the elevator door lifts onto full light and happy-talk chatter. A small party sits around the powwow table. Heads turn. The five Bees are there. They have female guests, two models, their robes draped around shoulders, hanging loosely down their chests. Beer is the drink of choice, bottles in hand, elbows pinioned on the table. A case of empties litter the center like sacrificed chess pieces, a battle between pawns. From this distance I can see eyeballs glassy with inebriated logic, set into rueful, penitent faces. They call my name; beers are raised high. It’s a peace gesture, offerings of no hard feelings. The stench of doubt lingers in the air for me, and I tread lightly to gage this neutrally festive atmosphere. If everyone has done work today he can be proud of — or perhaps have at least found satisfaction with — I’ll feel the vibes once I sit with them. Anyway, my mother raised me to be forgiving, and she would roll in her grave if I should be so rude as to ignore them.

  The head bench has an open seat next to one of the models. She scooches over near the edge when I sit, as though I might have cooties, but her slurred grin shows friendly appeal. Bert hands me a beer; Al pours a few drams of Jameson into a square shot glass and slides it in front of me. He passes the bottle around the table. I hold up my beer and toast to healthy imaginations. We all take a swallow, and I follow mine with the shot of whiskey. The liquor flows hot and sandy down my throat and a moment later spreads summer sunset across my stomach.

  “Remember Dalí’s warning,” I say to them, “ ‘Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.’ ” They look at me with sozzled comprehension, and also a little fear. I was making a joke; but it is no joke. Everyone goes back to what they were doing when I came in, which is to drink and talk shit for a few steady hours.

  The woman next to me introduces herself as Tina, and immediately tells me she’s not so beautiful, body-wise, but her face is
asymmetrical. Painters like asymmetry, she says. Out of politeness, I agree with her. Otherwise, I sense no mastodon proportions beneath her peach cotton robe, open in front and showing, from my angle, a moon-glow crescent of firm breast. While she talks, my eyes casually jump back and forth between her and the drones. A black crescent shines around Bert’s left eye, the center of which puffs out like a muffin top, but, oddly enough, he’s using it just fine. The trace of a bloody stain, kite-shaped and with a long tale, streams across the sclera. Al and Binny sit shoulder-to-shoulder, arms linked and hands clasped in love. Zeppo talks a blue streak across the table with Vendulka, though his voice doesn’t carry this far. Her lips move in lagging translation.

  The second model frowns over a plastic fast-food tray on which sit two pyramids of marijuana. One is built with small buds, the other of seeded weed, crushed fine and ready for rolling. Her fingers are sticky with green flecks as she picks up rolling paper and makes a fold along the third of the skin, drizzles enough pot into the fold to roll a pinner. Between her elbows lie five other thin joints. She’s the most concentrated among the group.

  Bert is explaining how he came looking for me after waking to Vendy’s care and holding a bag of frozen peas over his eye. He asks me what the clay figures in my honeycomb are all about. I tell him I don’t know what they’re all about; practice, maybe something more. From his wandering eye (the good one) I see he doesn’t believe me. But I haven’t anything more to tell him. The joint-rolling model flares one of her creations. Everyone takes a hit, and the stick is dwindled to a brown hyphen by the time it clocks around to her again. She lights another. Vendy is finding it harder to keep up with Zeppo, whose mercurial mouth sends sputum onto the table between them.

  Maybe it’s the effect of the pot, but it occurs to me that everyone has begun to shout. I’m shouting, too; I want to be heard. We’re not saying much, nothing worth taking notes on, but we are nonetheless competing. Only fear makes you shout, say the psychologists. What did we fear? The future and the present, that’s all. No wonder. I try to take refuge in hearing Aurelius’s advice: don’t let the future disturb you; you’ll meet it with the same reason you use against the present.

  After a while, the leaky estuary of our ambitious voices slowly calms us. This isn’t art, the image I’ve imposed on my fellow drones, merely human emotions unbottled by liquor and drugs. It’s only that we always expect to step onto pavement, terra firma, but too often find mud climbing over our ankles. Other days, it’s the opposite. I look past Bert and this other woman — I remember: Tina — to lengthen my focus.

  The model at the far end is older than Tina. My guess is middle fifties. But this isn’t a criticism. The waxed fruit shine on her wavy black hair makes it appear fuller than it is, yet the length reaches away from her head instead of falling naturally, as though an updraft has control of its gravity. I’m reminded of the witchingly odd Medusa, a ravishing beauty in Ovid’s story. I don’t know whose model she is (probably Zeppo’s, although I’ve caught her winking at Vendy twice. Lesbian come-on? It’s possible.), and her drop-in quality of an outsider-looking-in doesn’t exactly hold with how she’s comfortable in her seat, one knee balanced over the other, lots of thigh showing from a hip-length robe, her posture is spine straight, and her green eyes move around the table like an inquisitor whose success is had by listening to the wails of her prisoners. Her hands and arms are veiny, the musculature of a light eater and exercise addict. A face with lines but whose attractiveness holds together with attitude and verve. I don’t want to meet this woman, because my illusion of her beauty would fade quickly when I’ve listened to her life story, one which I don’t try to gather from imagery that’s already coming, but I fight this away successfully by seeing her as art object, to copy as stone oval, wooden rod, dental floss knots, crystal shards, or leaves painted chartreuse and oxblood. Caravaggio painted Medusa in open-mouthed agony (having your head severed by a sword will do this to you, I imagine, as Caravaggio had shown us). A ghost’s chilling touch compels me to look away.

  She could be Karen K, I surmise, slipped out of her bag lady costume after the day’s performance, freshly bathed and pampered in a silk robe, possibly a kimono. If I were to sculpt Karen K, as I saw her on first sight, she would be cast in plastic, an injection mold, a version of her plastic bags but crimped like those bags she keeps in a drawer. But this is only the false representation of a person who is making a representation of someone not herself. How do I get through that façade? Karen K is an artist herself, that type that is a seer, a writer, one who looks at the world to find meaning in what others want to see but can’t quite get there, by choice or inability. She gets to see the simplest objects subjectively: language, photographs, the park, all the tourists changing colors and shapes daily; the subway and bus riders belonging to that distinctive home-city caste; and authentic bag ladies who know (they know) that she isn’t one of them. She, Karen, sees them while they see through her.

  The party floats on when I leave the Beehive at eleven. Near midnight, Belinda corners me in our bedroom while I’m undressing. One sock hangs from my hand.

  “Dogs in a gallery? Silver mavens? What’s up with that?”

  “How did…?” I drop the question. I drop the sock. I pick out a Midwestern country-twang voice to make my ploy look acceptable. “I’s just being folksy, in a city-ish way.” The beer and whiskey still have their grip on me, and “city-ish” comes out “shitty-ish.” Belinda folders her arms and taps her nails on one elbow. She’s not angry, and even seems mildly amused. I tell her, “Don’t blame me if those Ivy League assholes can’t take a joke. Isn’t art itself one big –” Her hand shoots skyward, its pink palm stopping me.

  “Okay, Minus Mouse, I get that. But honey.…” She shakes her head and sighs as deeply as I’ve ever witnessed a human pull off one of these yearnings. She takes another breath. “I’ve started something. Its design is meant to generate an image of you. For you.” She stops and straightens herself. So I’m to be read the riot act after all. I pull up my legs on the bed and sit Indian style. She says, “Let me give you an image, as Artist Dude: we want collectors to visit your studio. This loft, the co-op, wherever. It’s time to cut out the galleries if they don’t want to play, or until they see that the people who normally buy art from them have already gone to the source of the art. You know what I mean about this. Your card players fit into the idea.

  “Now, getting your sculptures into the right homes is essential. And quickly. Any paintings you have in the vault, like those mobiles you did a couple years ago — take all of it out. One hand washes the other. Right? Okay, so we can’t just sell to the maven dangling the largest diamond earrings from her stretched lobes. When other collectors and auction houses hear of who owns your art, then those gallery parasites will call us to see your work. Don’t worry, I’ve seen this stunt work a dozen times.”

  Something inside me wants to ask who she thinks I am. I also want to know how the art-into-the-right-home concept works. She reads this, and tells me who I am, adding unsolicited examples. What surprises me is that I agree with her. Down to the blue socks I wore with brown shoes today.

  “Who have you seen?” I ask, my voice filled with proprietorial angst.

  “Anyone who’s let me in the door. I have to break some eggs here.”

  “But I did that.”

  “You tried that. They missed the bowl. Galleries don’t want to see artists. Not until they’ve been given a nod. They think it’s too hard on the artists to reject them in person. Where have we heard this before, right? Anyway, they think the rejection hurts them – the gallery squids – worse than it hurts the artists. Isn’t that the cat’s meow? What gall. Do you want to know what I think? I think these people — smart, sincere, knowledgeable, some are real art lovers — are projecting.”

  “O balls!” I say.

  “No. Really. They want to find good art. Imagine how crushing it must feel to see crap all day long. There’s far more
shit out there than shinola.”

  “You’re kidding. This is not a joke? Okay, well … did they tell you this?”

  “A few were extremely confessional. After a while, it’s like they’re reading from a playbook. That’s when I switched over to the dealers.”

  “You mentioned success –”

  “What success? Did I say that? Honey, I’ve been rejected fifty-seven times, got ten ‘maybes’ and three — count ‘em, three — said yes to a meeting. Three. Not a good average, but Babe Ruth struck out over three thousand times to get just seven-hundred-plus homers. Practice makes perfect, so goes the moral.”

  “Funny, I read the opposite recently,” I say. “Someone on good authority.”

  She waits for me to tell her the punchline, but when I hesitate she shrugs and sits down on the edge of the bed. “Whatever. Okay. So I’ve got time. It’s a place from which to build. Next step –”

  “When have you done all this? The time, the – where have you found the time? I thought you’d been driving the hansom cab.”

  “All day? Minus, I leave the house before you get up in the morning.”

  “I thought you were brushing down Gretchen. Or something.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m paying a kid at the stables who loves horses to take care of Gretch mornings, and have her ready for me after lunch. Smart girl, eh?”

  “Wow,” I say, like an imbecile. “But, how did you learn all of this? The information, and getting inside so, so quickly.”

  “Not inside, but – that’s the easier part, boyfriend.” She’s up from the bed and starts taking off her clothes as she talks; folding, stripping, hanging, tossing. “Most of these gallery owners and dealers, collectors and artists, too, they just love to gab, no matter what game-play look they give you and the proletarian public. All without trying to say anything. It’s like attending an actual, honest-to-the-Christian-Christ, pissing contest. What they don’t realize is that someone who’s really listening has just got access to the same chow line. Or slop house. Take your pick, because in my experience we’re dealing with pigs at the trough.”

  I don’t think there’s a lot of room for cynicism in the art world. Not for artists. But even as I think this, I become aware that, except for the artist (mostly), Art is either used for idle entertainment or exactly as how Belinda wants to use it.