Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

Several months later Rebecca fell out of her infatuation with the photographer, and as far as Peter knew they never had more than that one kiss by the nocturnal pool in the Hollywood Hills. He and Uta still work together, as always, more or less as always, though there are times when he feels that they came so close to having sex, fatally close, and that because they didn’t go through with it a certain tension has gone slack, and some enlivening possibility between them is lost forever. They are beginning to grow companionably old together.

“Carole Potter called,” she says.

“Already?”

“Darling, Carole Potter gets up in the mornings and feeds her fucking chickens. ”

Right. Carole Potter, heiress to a kitchen appliance fortune, lives on a farm in Connecticut. A Marie Antoinette–style farm, granted: herb gardens, exotic chickens that cost as much as purebred dogs. Still, you have to acknowledge—she works it. She reams out the chickens’ shit, gathers their eggs. When Peter was there for dinner last year, she’d shown him a newly laid egg, which was an impossibly, heartbreakingly pale blue-green, specked with scraps of feather, smeared along its obverse end with a skidmark of red-brown blood. This is what they look like before we clean them up , Carole had said. And Peter had said (or, more likely, thought), I’d love to find an artist who could do something like this.

A list wants to form in his mind.

New eggs, all specked and bloody.

Bette standing at the mouth of the shark.

Mizzy sitting, every day, in a monastery in Japan.

It’s a triptych, isn’t it? Birth, death, and all the whatever in between.

“Carole wants you to call her back,” Uta says.

“Did she say what it’s about?”

“I think we know.”

“Yeah.”

Carole Potter isn’t happy with the Sasha Krim. It is, as they say, a challenging piece, but Peter had hoped…

“Any other vexations to report?” he asks.

“I love the word ‘vexations.’ ”

“It’s the ‘x.’ Nice to jump off a ‘v’ and bite into an ‘x’ like that.”

“Just the usual ones,” she says.

“How was the weekend?”

“Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?”

“Bette Rice has breast cancer. She told me on Sunday.”

“How bad?”

“I don’t know. Well. Bad, I think. She’s closing, she wants to steer Rupert Groff our way.”

“Fantastic.”

“Is it?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“What do you think about his work?”

“I like it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Then don’t take him on.”

“His stuff is starting to sell. Rumor has it, Newton has his eye on him.”

“Then do take him on.”

“Come on.”

“Peter, darling, you know what I have to say.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She sighs voluptuously. She could so easily be a Klimt portrait, with her wide-set eyes and bony little apostrophe of a nose.

She says, “Taking on an artist you don’t love who sells a lot of work helps pay for the artists you do love who don’t sell a lot of work. Did you really need me to tell you that?”

“It seems I did.”

“It’s probably not going to happen anyway. One of the big ones will grab him.”

“But I’m either going to talk to him, or I’m not.”

“It’s a business, Peter.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t look at me like I’m the devil. Don’t you dare.”

“Sorry. I know you’re not the devil.”

“The trouble, little friend, is you like to think you’re right and the rest of the world is wrong.”

“Is there something even slightly heroic about that?”

“No,” she says. “There’s not.”

Knowing an exit line when she hears one, she returns to her office.

He goes into his office, picks up a file he left on his desk on Saturday, and puts it on top of the file cabinet. There’s no real reason for him to do that, it’s just the Monday morning settling-in, the reannouncing of his presence to whatever low hum of inanimate soul-surge has resided here during the thirty-two hours he’s been elsewhere.

He gets himself a cup of coffee, walks back out into the gallery. He seems, lately, to be wandering alone rather often through familiar rooms, with some beverage or other. Is that how Bacon would have painted him? Horrible thought. He should have bought that Bacon drawing at the auction in ’95, it had seemed too expensive, but it’s worth five times the price now. Another disquieting thought. Stocks rise and fall and rise again.

Here they are. The Vincents. There they go.

And then, briefly, there will be the empty gallery, its white walls and concrete floor. You create a pristine emptiness for the work to inhabit. Peter always loves the short periods during which the gallery is unoccupied by art. There’s something about the austere, perfect room that promises art superior to what any human being could produce, no matter how brilliant; it’s the hush before the orchestra starts up, the dimming of the lights before the curtain rises. That’s what Vincent is all about. The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine, the art the room expects. That’s what Mizzy was doing, that month in Japan, isn’t it? Sitting in an emptiness, trying to imagine something greater than the hand of man can create. Poor kid wasn’t up to it. Who is?

And hey. The Vincents didn’t really sell, did they?

So. There will be a period of nothing, and then the next show. Victoria Hwang, mid-career, underappreciated but starting to attract serious attention for reasons Peter can’t quite decipher—these things can be mysterious, some gut consensus among a small but influential body of people that it’s time, that these objects suddenly matter more than they initially appeared to (in Victoria’s case, a series of enigmatic videos, all of which are shot on the streets of Philadelphia and from which she produces ancillary merchandise—action figures, lunch boxes, T-shirts—based on random pedestrians, all of them obscure and ordinary, who’ve walked briefly and unknowingly past the camera). They’re crazy-making, these sea changes. They’re not calculated, not in the sense of a conspiracy of international art dealers (sometimes he wishes they were), but they’re not exactly about the art, either. They’re impossibly intricate responses to a billion tiny shifts in the culture, in politics, in the ions of the goddamned atmosphere ; you can’t anticipate them or understand them but you can feel them coming, as animals are supposed to be able to feel an earthquake hours before it occurs. He’s been showing Victoria for five years now, talking her up, he’s had a feeling, and suddenly, sure enough, for obscure reasons, people are starting to give a shit. Ruth at the Whitney wants to see them. So does Eve at the Guggenheim. Artforum is doing a piece on her next month.

He’s got Victoria’s show pretty much hung in his mind already, but Vic will of course have ideas of her own. Although she still hasn’t delivered the work, and there’s some question about the reliability of her vows to have it here by tomorrow morning, she is not by any means one of the more difficult ones, and he thanks God for that. It’s the last show of the season, he’s tired—he’d have to say he’s been flirting, every now and then, with actual despair—and is suitably grateful for the precise if strangely languid intelligence of Vic Hwang. She’s slow, but she won’t get the show up and then insist on taking it down and starting over. If the work doesn’t sell, she’ll blame herself as much as she blames Peter.