Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

“Doesn’t every famous artist have these stories about the odd jobs they took before they made it big?”

“That doesn’t mean that everyone who does odd jobs goes on to make it big,” Eddie answered, having considered the point at some length. This wasn’t an attractive response, but for the moment he felt no need to be attractive.

“When you do make it, it’s going to be that much nicer to know that you worked for it. I see it with the artists at the gallery.”

After years of work at an auction house, she explained, she’d recently moved to a gallery in Chelsea owned by a dealer named Carl von Verdant. She hoped the change would let her work directly with artists, instead of just rich collectors.

“Some of them have been struggling for years. But they’re just so committed to their art. And then Carl discovers them, and like that their lives are changed. Maybe that will happen to you.”

“Do you represent anyone I might know?” Eddie asked, though he didn’t know any contemporary artists at all.

“Have you heard of Graham Turnbough?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“His work is very painterly.”

Did this just mean he was an actual painter? Eddie wondered. What made one painter more painterly than another?

“He’s going to be in a group show going up next week,” Susan said. “You should come by to check it out.”

The previous year had treated his confidence so badly that he might not have taken up Susan’s offer had it not been so obvious that he’d been brought to the party for the purpose of meeting her. At the opening, Susan found him drinking a beer he’d taken from an ice-filled trash bin and looking at an installation piece made of string and melted crayons, presumably not the work of the painterly Turnbough.

“I like it,” he told her.

“Do you?” she asked. “I think it’s kind of empty and dumb. But Carl doesn’t care what I think. I’m hoping once I’ve been here longer that will change.”

She laughed nervously, and Eddie could tell she’d had a few drinks in advance of his arrival.

“What kind of work do you like?”

“I guess this seems old-fashioned,” she told him, “but I like art with real belief behind it. Stuff that isn’t just about provoking people.”

“That doesn’t seem old-fashioned,” Eddie said. “When I was growing up, my parents didn’t take me to museums or anything like that, so the only art I saw was in churches.”

“That’s just it,” Susan answered, as though he’d said something very profound. “When I studied art history in college, I specialized in the Renaissance, when all the great art was religious. Of course I knew that things had changed a lot since then, but I wanted to find that strain in contemporary art. Then I got out of school and started working in the art world, and I can’t even tell people that I believe in God. They find it ridiculous. But look at the ridiculous stuff that they believe in.” She waved at the piece in front of her, then laughed again. “I guess I shouldn’t be saying this so loudly.”

Her face was bright now, as if illuminated by wonder, and Eddie felt again the warmth he’d felt at Annie’s apartment. He hadn’t gone to the gallery that night with any particular expectation, but seeing that look on her face made him ask, “Can I take you to dinner when this thing ends?”

At dinner he’d asked the question about whether deep down she’d wanted to be an artist herself. In retrospect, it might have been an insulting question, since it suggested failure, but after all, he was unapologetically a failure himself. Susan hadn’t seemed offended. She’d spoken passionately about what art had meant in her life and her desire to live around it. She was in awe of great artists, and the idea that she could be one herself simply hadn’t occurred to her. She wanted instead to help great art get out into the world. She’d taken some studio classes in college, because she’d wanted to know more about the process she planned to spend her life thinking and talking and writing about. She hadn’t been very good at it, but that only gave her more respect for the people who did it well.

It was painful for Eddie to remember this side of Susan, mostly because remembering it meant admitting that he’d forgotten it for a time. Perhaps he’d just stopped seeing it, but it seemed at least as likely that it had been worked out of her over time. By years of menial treatment from Carl at the gallery, years of living with Eddie’s disappointment. She had turned from these things to the prospect of motherhood, which had only brought more disappointment. The girl he’d sat at dinner with that night years before was on track to become the art world veteran of Sandra’s depiction. It had never occurred to Eddie that this might be another part of Susan’s disappointment. And now it seemed there might be a remedy to it. She didn’t have to play the part of long-suffering assistant. She didn’t have to play the part of childless wife. She could play whatever part she wanted.

AT THE BEGINNING OF his third week at the Cue, Eddie went to the lobby newsstand to buy his magazines. This trip was already developing into a kind of weekly ritual, a way of marking the passage of days that were mostly spent alone in his room. He could follow Susan’s life — to some extent, he could even follow his own — hour by hour online or on TV, but there was something more meaningful about these pages held in his hand, which told only those stories that had risen above the daily chatter and solidified into something slightly more substantial.

He took the magazines from the rack and paid without looking at them, eager to get back upstairs before being caught on his errand. There was no sign that anyone in the lobby recognized him, but he had already learned that someone was always watching. On his second morning at the hotel, having realized he’d be staying a while, he’d gone shopping for clothes. No photographers waited when he left the hotel, and no one stopped him outside or even paid him any particular attention that he noticed. But the next morning, a report on CelebretainmentSpot documented his slide into shopping addiction, complete with a list of every purchase he’d made the day before. An anonymous friend expressed worry that Eddie’s new lifestyle was ruining him.

When he finally left his room again a few days later, the seeming normalcy of the world outside was enough to lull him back into complacency. That evening his entire day was documented online, in bits and pieces, videos Teesed out, eyewitness accounts on gossip sites. He’d responded politely to a flirtatious barista at the coffee shop, but in the photo he was leering at her. A sneeze at the lobby bar became a drunken scowl.

All the magazines spoke of their “spies” in the streets. They used the word self-mockingly, but it was exactly right. Eddie felt like a man awaiting trial in a police state. None of the evidence would be falsified, because if you followed someone everywhere you eventually found something real you could use against him. Actual police states, he knew, hardly needed spies. Instead, they taught their citizens to spy on each other. This was how it seemed to him — he was constantly being watched, but there was no one doing the watching. In such a world, no one could be trusted. So he stayed in his room. Ignoring it all might have been easier than locking himself away. They could write what they wanted; no one was making him read it. But these magazines and gossip sites were his only sources of information about Susan, who still wouldn’t answer his messages. So long as he kept up with them, he had nearly as much access to her as he’d had when they were living together. She’d become a top story. CelebretainmentSpot’s Bump Watch tracked her belly on a daily basis. On This Morning Live, a celebrity obstetrician held up an artist’s rendering of the fetuses and recited a long list of possible developmental complications.