Unknown - The Genius

He waved at the canvases. “Something else, huh? Was I right?”

“You were.”

“I know it when I see it.”

“You certainly do.”

“I like this one.” He showed me where Victor had drawn a bridge— Ruby thought it looked like the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge—turning into a dragon whose tongue forked and grew into the air trails of a jet, which flew into an ocean, which itself became the open mouth of a giant fish … and so forth. The pictures tended to nest inside one another, so that every time you had found the largest unit, you discovered, upon the addition of more panels, a more impressive superstructure.

“Wild stuff,” said Shaughnessy.

I nodded.

“So’d you sell any yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You think you will?”

I glanced at Hollister. “I hope so.”

Shaughnessy licked his lips. “Hey, lemme ask you something. You think I might be able to get some?”

For a moment I thought I was being propositioned. “Get some.”

“Yeah, you know.”

“You mean—buy a drawing?”

“Not so much.” He licked his lips again.

“What then.”

“Like a commission.” He smiled. “Finder’s fee.”

In the distance I saw Hollister talking to Marilyn as they headed for the front door. I said, “You want me to give you one of the drawings.”

Abruptly he reddened. “It’s not like they’re yours.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and left Shaughnessy standing there.

Before going, Hollister handed me a card and asked me to call him on Monday. He left a wake; everyone stepped aside to watch him go. They had been tracking him all evening long, eager to learn if he was no longer off-limits as a client.

I turned to find Shaughnessy again and spotted him across the room, furiously stuffing canapes into his mouth. Then he concealed an entire bottle of wine inside his coat, rolled up three exhibition catalogues, and left without saying good-bye.

THE ONE TRUE DARK SPOT on an otherwise bright evening arrived close to the end, when only I, my staff, and a handful of the hardest-core booze moochers remained. Nat, having gone behind the front desk for some promotional postcards, tried to intercept Kristjana, but she blew right past him. He then ran to warn me, but by then it was too late: she had taken her position in the middle of the gallery.

All eyes fell on her. How can you ignore a six-foot Icelandic manic-depressive with a boot-camp hairdo, her mouth sealed with duct tape, wearing a—

“Is that a straitjacket?” Ruby whispered.

It was. A red patent-leather one.

“Asylum, by Jean Paul Gaultier,” Nat whispered.

We were whispering because we knew that we had all been co-opted into a piece of performance art.

It didn’t last long. She held her arms up to the sky, arched her back gracefully, and slowly—very, very slowly—began to peel the tape from her face. The sizzle of glue was audible throughout the entire gallery. It hurt to watch. With a flick of her wrist she sent the tape fluttering to the ground. Then she whipped her torso forward and expelled a shockingly large quantity of mucus smack in the middle of my gallery floor, where it sat, glistening, like a frog.

She turned on her heel and marched out.

The first person to react was Ruby’s friend Lance. Everyone else was still too stunned to move, but he got up from where he’d been sitting in the corner and ambled toward the loogie, which had begun to send out little drippy green tendrils. From somewhere inside his track jacket he produced a handheld video camera. He switched it on, twisted off the lens cap, and knelt to get a close-up of Kristjana’s latest work.

3

he show was a hit. I got good notices in the trades, including one in ArtBox by an old friend who loved nothing more than to swim against the stream, and who I had expected to eviscerate me. The Musee D’Arte Brut, the modern-day outgrowth of Jean Dubuffet’s personal collection, expressed interest in bringing the work over to Lausanne. And somebody must have tipped off the Times, because they sent over a reporter—not from Arts but from the metro section.

I waffled over whether to talk to him. Everyone knows that when it comes to the avant-garde, the Times is all but irrelevant; their report on a trend marks the surest sign that said trend has declined and fallen. Furthermore, I worried about how they would spin me. With very little stretching of the truth I could come off as a vulture, feasting off the remains of the poor and disenfranchised.

In the end, though, I had to agree. Otherwise I had no control over the situation whatsoever; I couldn’t stop them from running the article, magnifying my lack of comment into a self-indictment.

The same traits that make me a good salesmen make me a good interviewee, and when the article came out, I was pleased to see that I had convinced the journalist we were friends. He called the show “hypnotic” and “unsettling” and printed a large close-up of one of Victor’s

Cherubs on the front page of the section. My picture didn’t look too bad, either.

Irrelevant or not to me, the Times carries a certain prestige, particularly in the minds of Culture Climbers. Within days I had gotten several offers far above the ones I’d gotten on opening night. On Marilyn’s advice, I put everyone off until I’d spoken to Kevin Hollister, who she promised would call as soon as he got back from Cap Juluca.

She didn’t disappoint. Two days later he asked me to lunch at a place on the ground floor of a midtown skyscraper that he owned. The restaurant staff hovered and swirled around him, whisking away his coat as he shucked it, pulling his chair out, draping his lap with a napkin, pressing his cocktail of choice into his hand before he had uttered a word. Throughout this frenzy he appeared not to notice anyone but me, asking how I’d gotten into art, how I’d met Marilyn, and so on. We were seated in a private room, where the chef personally presented us with an assortment of gemlike sushi. It was excellent. Hollister called for another round and, midway through it, offered me a hundred and seventy thousand dollars for the Cherubs. I told him that sounded low, especially considering that in giving him a single canvas I’d be breaking up the integrity of the piece as a whole—which really ought to stay together. Without batting an eye he doubled the figure.

We settled at three eighty-five. That kind of money wasn’t going to make any headlines, but bear in mind that not too long ago the drawings had been bound for the landfill. The pleasure I took in watching Hollister sign the check was secondary to the godlike thrill of making something from nothing, cash from trash, creation ex nihilo.

After the deal was done I detected a change in Hollister’s attitude, a surge of confidence. Now that he owned, he knew how to act. Men like him believe that nothing is beyond their grasp—be that thing a piece of land, a piece of art, a brand of savvy, a person. Once they’ve paid and order is restored, they can go back to being masters of the universe. It’s a metamorphosis I recognized from years of dealing with my father.

I RETURNED TO THE GALLERY that afternoon elated by the deal but depressed about the prospect of losing my art. Mine, and I didn’t feel ashamed to say so.

When a show goes well, or I make an unusually handsome sale, I will send my assistants home, close the gallery, and invite the artist over to commune with the object we have created together. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a sentimental ritual. But no one has ever told me he didn’t want to do it. Anyone so jaded that he fails to experience a sense of loss— that person, to me, can neither see art nor experience its transcendency. I don’t want to represent him.