Jonathan Dee: Palladio

“What are you working on?” she said.

“Doucette,” John said, amiably; but when a few more seconds went by and she didn’t seem to want to say any more, he started drawing again.

“Listen,” Vanessa said, and she swung around to sit normally in the chair, in profile to him. “You like me, right?”

John felt himself start to blush. He sat back in his chair, but even as he struggled to find something to say, she waved her hands and frowned. “I mean, you like me as a person, a friend, am I right?”

“Well, of course I do,” John said. His accent still crept defensively back into his voice at moments like this.

“And when you like a person,” Vanessa went on — he could hear that there was some irony in her vulnerable, cautious tone, that she was acting something out — “you accept that they might have bad points as well as good points. That they may have flaws.”

“Everyone has flaws,” John said patiently.

“Or not flaws, so much. That they might make a mistake from time to time. They might blurt something out sometime, because, because that’s what people sometimes do, right, in social situations? They blurt things out.”

John put his pen down. He couldn’t help smiling a little. Out in the lobby, the bell for the coffee trolley rang.

“What a word, right?” Vanessa said gaily. “Blurt.”

“Is there something you’re trying to tell me?” John said.

Vanessa grimaced and stood up. The skirt, John observed, never creased. What could it be made of? She went to the door of his office and shut it. Her long arms folded, she stood in front of his desk. Striking was the word that sounded in John’s mind.

“So last week”, she said in a lower voice, “was the MPA Awards dinner? You remember?”

“I remember people talking about it.”

“Right, well, so, I went, and during dinner there was this—”

“Hold on,” John said. He leaned forward and put his hands flat on the desk. “You went? ”

Vanessa made an impatient gesture.

“That was three thousand dollars a table,” John went on, enviously. “That was partners only. And you went?”

“I went,” Vanessa said simply; her eyes moved all the way to her left in a manner that was simultaneously coy and uncomfortable.

“With whom?”

“Never mind.”

“With whom?”

“Never mind . The point is that they had this dinner at MOMA, right, and so of course at some point the talk turns to the art, somebody says, like, Hey, have you seen the Francis Bacon show here, it’s monumental . So then a couple of them start discussing Bacon, and Anselm Kiefer, and whether Basquiat could draw or not, and before long everybody’s got their dicks out, you know how it is when those guys get together.”

John had been lagging behind her narrative just a little bit, hung up as he was on the question of which of the partners Vanessa was secretly dating — though apparently it wasn’t much of a secret anymore — but the affectless coarseness of her language brought him back to the present. He’d never really grown accustomed to women who swore so casually. His inclination was to hear it as a sign that the speaker didn’t take John seriously in the masculine realm.

“And of course it dawns on me, while they’re talking, the arc that this conversation is going to follow: at some point, they’re going to patronizingly drag the women at the table into the argument. The ‘feminine perspective,’ you know? Like they care. I swear, put these guys, any guys really, into a tux and stick a cigar in their mouths and they turn into their grandfathers. I’m sure you’re the same way.”

John raised his eyebrows and pointed to his chest.

“So anyway.” She sat down sideways in the chair again, facing him, her knees nearly as high as her chest; conscientiously he looked into her eyes. “This is the bad part. What I know about painting you could fit on the head of a pin. I mean, I know the names . But in this of all situations, you don’t want to conform to their stereotype. Right? So when Canning finally asks me—”

“Was it Canning?” John said. “That took you?”

“No. When he asks me who are some of the living artists whose work I admire most — well, these are my bosses, in the end, and you don’t want to look like an idiot in front of them. So I mumble something about how I used to like Julian Schnabel but you never hear about him anymore, and then about Keith Haring, because I forgot for a second he was dead, and I notice that the men are all looking at me in this way. In the way my father used to look at me when I came downstairs in my pajamas because the party was too loud. You know what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“So,” Vanessa said, looking at her nails again, “I sort of panicked. Here’s what I said. I said, You know who’d be a good person to ask about this stuff, though, who really knows a lot about painting, is my friend John Wheelwright in the art department.”

“Oh my goodness,” John said.

“He’s a very smart guy. In fact, he was an art major at Berkeley. That is right, isn’t it?”

“Art history,” he said nervously. “So did they know who I was?”

“Of course they know who you are,” Vanessa said. “So anyway, I talked you up to these guys as a real expert. Your ears must have been burning something awful. It was just, like, anything to fill that silence, you know? Anything to get their interest off of me.” She raised her eyes and looked directly at him again.

John leaned back in his chair and put his palms together. It was a little scary, to be sure, to learn that you had been bragged about in front of your superiors like that; but she had only been complimenting him — even if in an exaggerated way. So why would she worry that it would make him angry?

“Vanessa?” he said. “Have we reached the climax of this story?”

She shook her head no, with a meek, childish reluctance that still seemed to have an element of irony or performance in it. She began swinging her feet again. “He didn’t say a word at the time,” she went on, “but the guy at the table who I guess really picked up on what I was saying was Mal Osbourne.”

John started. “Osbourne was there?”

“I know!” Vanessa held her hands in front of her face and pantomimed great fear. “Amazing, isn’t it? He never shows up at these things. It was like seeing J. D. Salinger or something. Anyway, he’s this big art collector, apparently, you probably know that but I didn’t.”

“Sure,” John said. “My God.”

“And apparently he has this thing where he spends one Saturday morning every month studio-hopping downtown, checks out what he wants to buy, what he might want to buy later on. So,” Vanessa said, her voice getting a little shakier, “this morning I come in and there’s this email waiting for me, sent, by the way, at two in the morning.” She shut her eyes tightly to recall the exact wording.

“Oh, this is unbelievable,” John said.

“‘Tell your friend in Art to meet me Saturday at 8.30 a.m. outside his building. I have his address from personnel. If he can spare a few hours, I would greatly value his expertise, and a fresh pair of eyes. Osbourne.’”

“This Saturday?”

“I guess. Why, did you have something planned?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“Oh, please, please, don’t be mad at me,” Vanessa said, and John, mad as he was, was nevertheless abashed to see that she was actually in tears. The theatricality of her nervousness had been more for her own prompting than for his; real remorse was hard for her. “I had no way of knowing this could happen. I was just trying to talk you up. And besides,” she said, trying to smile, “is it necessarily a bad thing? I mean, if you make a good impression on him, it could really help you out, don’t you think?”