Unknown - The Genius

FINISHING THE CALL OUTSIDE, I let myself into the building, hit the button for the freight elevator, and savored my solitude. I tended to show up at about eight thirty, earlier than most of my colleagues and a full hour before my assistants. Once work began, I was never alone. Talking to people is my strong suit, and the reason I’ve been successful. For the same reason, I treasured those few minutes to myself.

The elevator arrived and Vidal pulled open the screeching accordion gate. As we exchanged greetings, my phone went off again. The caller ID read KRISTJANA HALLBJORNSDOTTIR, confirming my hell-of-a-day premonition.

Kristjana is an installation and performance artist, a behemoth of a woman: six feet tall, thick-limbed, with a drill sergeant’s crew cut. She manages to be somehow dainty and enormously heavy-footed, like a bull in china shop, except that the bull is wearing a tutu. Born in Iceland, raised all over the place: that’s her provenance as well as her art’s; and although I admire the work deeply, it’s barely good enough to justify the headache of representing her. When I took her on I knew her reputation. I knew, too, that other people were rolling their eyes at me. It had become a point of pride that I’d kept her in line, putting up her most successful show in years: reviewed well and sold out for well above asking, a feat that left her literally weeping on my shoulder with gratitude. Kristjana is nothing if not demonstrative.

But that was last May, and since then she had gone into hibernation. I’d gone by her apartment, left messages, sent e-mails and texts. If she was angling for attention, she failed, because I stopped trying. Her call that morning was our first contact in months.

Cell phone reception in the elevator is spotty, and I couldn’t make her out until Vidal hauled open the gate and that huge, panicked voice came bursting across the airwaves at full bore, already deep into an explanation of her Idea and the material support she required. I told her to slow down and start again. She drew in a wet, heavy breath, the first sign that she’s about to go haywire. Then, seeming to reconsider, she asked about the summer. I told her I could not show her until August.

“Impossible,” she said. “You are not listening.”

“I am. It can’t be done.”

“Bullshit. You are not listening.”

“I’m looking at the calendar as we speak.” (Not true; I was looking for my keys.) “What are we talking about, anyway? What am I committing myself to, before I say yes?”

“I need the whole space.” “I_”

“It’s not negotiable. I need the full space. I am referring to landscape, Ethan.” She launched into a highly technical and theoretically dense discourse on the disappearing Arctic ice pack. She had to show in June, at the absolute peak of summer, opening on the night of the solstice, and she wanted the air-conditioning off—the heat on—because that underscored the notion of dissolution. Dissolfingshe kept saying. Everything is dissolfing. By the time she got to post-post-post-critical theory, I had ceased listening, absorbed by the problem of my keys, which had migrated to the bottom of my attache. I found them and unlocked the gallery doors as she outlined a plan for destroying my floors.

“You can’t bring a live walrus in here.”

Wet, heavy breathing.

“It’s probably not legal. Is it? Kristjana? Have you even looked into that?”

She told me to go fuck myself sideways and hung up.

Knowing that it was a matter of time before she called back, I left the phone on the front desk and began my morning routine. First voicemail. There were six from Kristjana, all between four and five thirty in the morning; God only knew who she had expected to reach. A few collectors wanted to know when they could expect their art. I was currently running two shows: a series of lovely, shimmery paintings by Egao Oshima, and some of Jocko Steinberger’s papier-mache genitalia. All of the Oshimas had presold, and several of the Steinbergers had gone to the Whitney. A good month.

After phone came e-mail: clients to touch base with, social machinery in need of grease, arrangements for art fairs, arrangements to look at new work. Much of dealing art consists of keeping one’s plates spinning. A friend of mine in the business wrote to ask if I could get ahold of a Dale Schnelle he lusted for. I replied that I might. Marilyn sent me a macabre cartoon one of her artists had drawn of her, depicting her as Saturn eating his children, a la Goya. She found the image delightful.

At nine thirty, Ruby showed up, coffees in hand. I took mine and gave her instructions. At nine thirty-nine Nat arrived and resumed typesetting the catalogue for our upcoming show. At ten twenty-three my cell phone rang again, a blocked number. As you’d imagine, most of the people I liked selling to had blocked numbers.

“Ethan.” A voice like flannel; I recognized it immediately.

I’d known Tony Wexler all my life, and I considered him the closest thing I have to a father that I didn’t despise. That he worked for my father, had worked for him for more than forty years—I’ll leave the psychoanalysis up to you. Suffice it to say that whenever my father wanted something from me, he sent Tony to go fetch.

Which had happened with increasing frequency over the last two years, when my father had a heart attack and I didn’t visit him in the hospital. Since then I’d been getting calls from him, through Tony, every eight or ten weeks. That might not sound like much, but given how little communication we’d had prior to that, I had lately come to feel a tad assaulted. I had no interest in bridge-building. When my father builds a bridge, you can bet there’s going to be a toll on it.

So while I was pleased to hear Tony’s voice, I didn’t especially want to know what he had to say.

“We read about the shows. Your father was very interested.”

By we he meant himself. When I started at the gallery nine years ago, Tony got himself subscribed to several of the trades; and unlike most art-mag subscribers, he reads them. He’s an authentic intellectual in an age when that term has come to mean nothing, and he knows a shocking amount about the market.

He also meant himself when he said your father. Tony tends to pin his own sentiments on his boss, a habit designed, I believe, to conceal the absurd fact that I have a closer relationship with the payroll than with the man who sired me. Nobody’s fooled.

We talked art for a little bit. He asked me how I felt about the Steinbergers in the context of his return to figuration; what else Oshima had planned; how the two shows communicated. I kept waiting for the request, the sentence that began Your father would like.

He said, “Something has come to my attention that I think you should know about. Some new work.”

It’s always open season on art dealers. Quickly one develops strict submission policies. In my case, impenetrable: if you were good, I would find you; otherwise I didn’t want to hear from you. It might sound elitist or draconian but I had no choice. It was either that or face the endless pleading of acquaintances convinced that if you would take the time to come to their sister-in-law’s best friend’s husband’s half-brother’s debut show at the Brooklyn Jewish Community Center you’d be bowled over, converted, dying to showcase their genius on your obviously bare walls. Et tu, Tony?

“Is that a fact,” I said.

“Works on paper,” Tony said. “Ink and felt-tip. You need to see them.”

Warily, I asked who the artist was.

“He’s from the Courts,” Tony said.

The Courts being Muller Courts, the largest housing development in the Great State of New York. Built as a postwar middle-class utopia, drained of its founding intent by white flight, it holds the ignominious title of most crime-ridden area in Queens; a blight on an already blighted borough; a monument to wealth, ego, and slumlordship; two dozen towers, fifty-six acres, and twenty-six thousand people. Bearing my surname.