New York for Beginners

by Remke, Susann

  Depressing subject, Zoe thought as she began to write her article. She’d already informed the web designer about the new vertical, which was called “Sex & Love.” Hopefully he was coding diligently and would have it ready for her soon. Zoe wrote the first sentence of her story, then deleted it. It was all rubbish. Writing was sometimes pure torture. She had absolutely no idea what she wanted to write. Actually, she didn’t want to be writing at all. She would rather be sulking and indulging in a little self-pity. It wasn’t fair that such a major disaster had to happen to her, of all people. She had just barely managed to step out of her comfort zone, and everything was already going wrong.

  Thank God (or the Universe, or whatever) Eros Mittermayer stuck his head in her door at exactly that moment. “Would you like to go to lunch with me and my friend Mimi? I have a table for us at Pastis. French food.”

  Stars, or: How to Ignore Celebrities

  It doesn’t matter if Robert De Niro is sitting at the next table, or if Jay-Z and Beyoncé are at the playground with their daughter Blue Ivy. In New York, stars are basically ignored. Do not say, “Oh, look, there’s . . .” No pointing, and absolutely no taking pictures or asking for autographs. Shrieking and fainting are left strictly to the tourists. Real New Yorkers simply take the presence of stars for granted, like the existence of the Empire State Building. After all, one can’t stop and stare with one’s mouth open every time a VIP walks past.

  (New York for Beginners, p. 69)

  “The New York Meatpacking District used to be exactly what its name says it is,” Eros explained, as they shared a taxi down to 14th Street. “Sides of pork, pigs’ feet, mountains of ground beef—and plenty of live human meat all around it.”

  “That sounds pretty gross,” Zoe said.

  “Not at all! A few years ago the yuppies moved in and opened their boutiques and restaurants. Stella McCartney, Diane von Furstenberg, and Theory. SoHo House New York is right around the corner, with a swimming pool on the roof.”

  Zoe and Eros stood outside Pastis in the warm September sun and waited for a waiter to show them to their table. Uma Thurman was sitting at the table next to them, with huge black sunglasses balanced on her nose, a fact both of them mercilessly ignored. Who was Uma Thurman, anyway? Who cared that she’d acted and danced in one of the best movies of all time? On the streets of New York, film and fashion shoots were happening all the time. Only amateurs stopped and bothered the stars and took photos with their phones that they immediately posted on Facebook.

  “How did you get such a spectacular first name?” Zoe asked Eros, who was wearing fashionable aviator sunglasses to set off his artistically stenciled three-day beard.

  “I grew up in Lower Bavaria in the town of Straubing. Eros Ramazotti gave a concert there in the late eighties . . .”

  Zoe was already starting to laugh. Eros Ramazotti was the romantic Italian singer-songwriter. Now she knew how Eros’s parents had fallen in love, without hearing the rest of the story.

  “. . . and he sang my mother’s favorite tearjerker, ‘Musica è.’” Eros Mittermayer made a face like he’d gotten Diet Pepsi instead of the Coke Zero he’d ordered. “And that’s why she named me, her firstborn, after Eros Ramazotti. I’ve never forgiven her.”

  “Very cosmopolitan,” Zoe managed to say. She was laughing so hard she almost spit across the table.

  “Zoe isn’t much better, for a country bumpkin like you.”

  “My father is the village doctor, and my mother is an elementary school teacher. They were missionaries in Africa before I was born. It’s not so bad. I’m named after the prize-winning South African author and poet Zoë Wicomb—and not after some Italian crooner.”

  “Ouch, that was below the belt,” Eros said, lifting his carefully manicured hands in protest. “You got me directly in the heart.”

  “Where is your heart, then?” she joked.

  For a moment no longer than a heartbeat it suddenly fell quiet, as though some unknown power had attracted the attention of everyone in the area. A long-legged creature with an almost alien beauty sashayed toward Pastis. The denim shorts on her narrow hips were barely longer than the broad leather belt she wore over them at a fashionable angle. She was also wearing black biker boots and a tight white tank top. Around her neck was a leather rope with a diamond-encrusted shark tooth hanging from it, bouncing between her breasts with every step she took. Her blonde mane stirred gently in the breeze, almost in slow motion, like something out of a hairspray commercial.

  This creature came to their table, pulled out her iPod earbuds, and said, “Hi, I’m Mimi.” She simply sat down in one of the free chairs. Either she didn’t have the slightest clue how people reacted to the show she’d just put on, or she was so used to it that it wasn’t anything special anymore.

  “Mimi, darling, this is my new colleague, Zoe,” Eros said as he leaned over the table, air-kissing both of her cheeks. She must have been at least six feet tall. Zoe felt a little intimidated.

  “Zoe, this is Morgan Buckley Mellon, also known as Mimi. She owns the Mimi Mellon Gallery for Contemporary Art on 26th Street,” Eros said, and then added reverentially, “She’s a socialite. And a model.”

  “Eros, you suck-up!” Mimi said, grinning. “It’s not my fault my grandparents had money. And the modeling was a lifetime ago. My sell-by date is long past. By modeling standards, I’ve already grown mold.” She pointed out the crow’s feet that appeared at the corners of her eyes when she smiled. “The only thing that could help now is surgical intervention. But I don’t want to end up like Meg Ryan.”

  Zoe was starting to like this woman.

  They drank iced tea. Mimi wanted to know everything about Zoe: where she came from, what she did, and above all what she was doing in New York. And in the process, Zoe discovered that Mimi and Eros had come to know and love each other (purely platonically, of course) at a photo shoot in Mimi’s gallery, and that Mimi, at forty (who would have guessed?) just couldn’t find a guy.

  “Unmarried men in my age group are damaged goods, gay—or they prefer jailbait,” she said. “What’s your current situation?”

  Zoe turned red. Fire-engine-tomato-paprika-red with a few raspberry-colored blotches, to be exact.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Eros said, clearly offended. He immediately realized it would be worthwhile to probe a little. “And I’m your best restroom friend!”

  “Who’s the guy?” Mimi wanted to know.

  Zoe hesitated. She certainly couldn’t tell the truth. “My neighbor.”

  “Is he good-looking?”

  “He looks a little like McDreamy.” It came out before she realized it. She wanted to bite off her tongue.

  Eros’s sensitive antennae had of course picked up on the clue. “McDreamy, huh?” he asked innocently, while his brain was obviously busy putting together the puzzle pieces from their restroom conversation.

  Zoe avoided his gaze and tried to look indifferently at the street.

  “You don’t mean McSlimy, do you?” Eros asked, his eyes narrowing.

  Zoe felt an even deeper shade of red starting to clash with her already complicated coloring, and she couldn’t do a thing about it. She chose to maintain a petulant silence, which of course didn’t help matters the tiniest bit.

  Mimi was confused. “McDreamy? McSlimy? Which one is it?”

  “McDreamy is McSlimy,” Eros explained. “And McGirly here obviously has something going on with him. What’s more, he’s our new boss. Thomas Prescott Fiorino.”

  It took a few seconds for Mimi to mentally sort out the various Mcs. “But Tom has only been back in town for four weeks. When did you manage that?” she asked, amazed.

  “On Sunday, four weeks ago.”

  Mimi laughed. “Good catch!”

  “Why? Do you know each other?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know who h
e is.”

  “Not really. And it was just the one time—”

  “Thomas Prescott Fiorino. Hmm,” Mimi interrupted Zoe with a nostalgic look in her eyes. “We went to the same private school. I messed around with him when I was fifteen or so, until his stuffy, straitlaced mother discovered us, raised a stink, and told not only my parents, but the principal of Dalton. Upper East Side. Forty thousand dollars a year, even more expensive than Harvard. Tom comes from one of the most powerful—and richest—families on the East Coast. His mother is a Whitney.”

  Zoe only stared at Mimi with eyes as big as saucers that said “I’m just a small-town German girl.”

  “Hellooo! Earth to Zoe! Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney was one of the most famous investors in the US. He was a founder of Pan Am, and financed Hollywood classics like Gone with the Wind. His mother, Tom’s great-grandmother, had the Whitney Museum built.”

  Zoe felt dizzy.

  “Tom is the record holder for broken hearts. There isn’t a New York female in my generation of a certain social status that hasn’t had a thing with him. A few years ago he disappeared to England.” Mimi paused to reflect, as though she’d had a flash of amnesia. Then she continued. “Somehow he dropped off the radar. But before that, I would often see him at parties. He always had new arm candy. You know what arm candy is, don’t you, my European friend?”

  Zoe shook her head.

  “Female arm decoration to go out and be seen with. Preferably blonde, size zero.”

  Zoe’s small-town brain required a little time to process this new information.

  “Come to the opening at my gallery the day after tomorrow, and then I’ll introduce you to real New York society,” Mimi said. It sounded more like an order than a suggestion. Then Mimi shook her head. “What rock have you been living under, darling?”

  Maybe Zoe Schuhmacher really had been living under a rock—one called Herpersdorf bei Ansbach. In the rural, middle-class German town she grew up in, there just weren’t any rich people. At least not any she knew. In the seventies and eighties, the people with money were the ones who drove a Mercedes instead of an Opel; the ones who could afford to fly to their vacation destinations, instead of driving to Austria or Italy. Everyone else in the town liked to talk about them. But there was only one person who was actually considered rich: the Ansbach pharmacist. He owned all three pharmacies in town and lived with his family in a bungalow. Zoe’s mother thought it was enviably modern because the pharmacist’s wife “never had to climb stairs.” The pharmacist’s daughter got a horse for her fifteenth birthday. In Zoe’s world back then, that seemed to be the height of frivolousness. Zoe wasn’t even allowed to take riding lessons at the local stable. Her mother told her it was better not to even begin with “a rich-people hobby.”

  When she got older and spent time in Munich, Zoe had observed gossip-column high society from a distance and had her first encounters with people who had at least five first names followed by a von Something-or-Other. As a teenager she attended picnics at various estates, where there had somehow always been fresh strawberries with whipped cream.

  But real, live Rockefeller wealth—or in Zoe’s case, Mimi and Whitney wealth—wasn’t part of her world. For Zoe Schuhmacher, it was something out of a Hollywood movie.

  The Rich and the Super Rich, or: Who Are the Legendary 1 Percent, Anyway?

  “Until I was twelve years old, I thought everyone owned a house on 5th Avenue, a villa in Newport, and a railway line.” Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr.

  These days, a US household must earn more than $380,000 a year to be considered among the richest 1 percent in the country. On average. In New York, of course, that isn’t nearly enough. That will only make you part of the upper middle class. In New York, you have to make at least $609,000 to belong to the 1 percent, and in Greenwich, Connecticut, $908,000 are necessary.

  The superrich, however—the top 1 percent of 1 percent—only count in billions. See also hedge fund managers.

  (New York for Beginners, p. 87)

  8

  Zoe walked along 26th Street, where there was one gallery after another. Andrea Meislin, Lehman Maupin, BravinLee, and of course Mimi Mellon. The top dog, Gagosian, was right around the corner. A little bell chimed as she entered Mimi’s exhibition rooms, but there was no one in sight. Zoe looked around and wondered what kind of conscience-altering drugs she had unwittingly consumed with her lunch. The white walls of the former industrial rooms were plastered with the monumental paintings of the American punk artist Astarot Frist. Identically sized squares in psychedelic candy colors were repeated at identical distances on white canvases. The series was called “The Square Paintings” and was intended at first impression to simply make the viewer happy, it said on an information sheet that was screwed to the wall under plexiglass.

  But the longer Zoe’s gaze shifted from one vibrantly colorful square to the next, and she tried to find some kind of rhythm or pattern to the colors, the more nervous she became.

  “You’re not the only one to react that way,” Mimi said, laying a calming hand on Zoe’s shoulder in greeting. “Not one of the over five hundred squares has the exact same color as the other. He’s purposely trying to create subconscious restlesness.”

  Today, Mimi was wearing a quirky fur vest with pompoms dangling from the collar over a cream-colored silk blouse and black leather leggings. Her hair was woven into an innocent, assymetrical schoolgirl braid. She had huge, black horn-rimmed glasses balanced on her nose. Downtown chic.

  “It looks sort of like an unsorted periodic table,” Zoe said, dimly remembering eleventh-grade chemistry class.

  “That’s where Frist’s idea came from. Every work has the name of a chemical element. You’re standing right in front of Ac—actinium. Careful, it’s radioactive!”

  “And people hang these things in their living rooms?” Zoe asked, wondering briefly if she shouldn’t change professions and just paint lots of colorful triangles or circles.

  “Not only in their living rooms, you philistine.” Mimi said, laughing. “Lanthanum is even hanging in the Museum of Modern Art.”

  “How much does something like this cost?”

  “Up to $3 million.”

  Zoe looked around Mimi’s gallery and did a double-take. “Then you have about $21 million hanging here on the walls?”

  “At least.” Mimi said, grinning. “There are more in storage.”

  “How many did Frist paint?”

  “You mean by himself?”

  “What do you mean, ‘by himself’? Can someone paint not by himself?”

  “Frist hires people to paint for him. He has assistants. All told, there are around eight hundred Square Paintings. He himself painted maybe twenty-five of them.”

  “And art collectors will pay millions for paintings that weren’t even made by the artist?”

  “You can bet your Louboutins. Haven’t you ever heard of Andy Warhol’s Factory?

  Art, Zoe had learned the evening before while eating dinner with Mimi at Sant Ambroeus, had really only started to be seen by the movers and shakers as a serious investment in 2006. Cosmetics tycoon Ronald Lauder shelled out a spectacular $135 million for the Gustav Klimt painting Adele Bloch-Bauer I—the highest price ever paid for a work of art up until then. That was a call to all those who had too much money lying around: the hedge fund managers.

  “Since the hedge fund managers discovered the art market, auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s have become contests to show who has the biggest . . . um . . . wallet,” Mimi had told her. “The ones who drive the prices up—the new rich—only buy works by well-known artists.”

  “No wonder,” Zoe had added. “If you wear Chanel on your body, you want to have Gerhard Richter hanging in your foyer.”

  “It has nothing to do with acquiring an aesthetically beautiful piece anymore, or completing a collection. It’s all abo
ut trophy hunting now,” Mimi said.

  The press conference for the new Frist exhibit would be starting shortly. Zoe decided to view it as research for her new arts vertical. Mimi had told her the artist would be there, which was a promise that something interesting would happen. Frist was known for doing unusual things in public. At an exhibition in London, the press had asked him to stand in front of one of his works. He had done that, but had also pushed his nose up into a pig-like snout while all the cameras were flashing.

  But that was probably art, too, right? And it was a statement, wasn’t it?

  Frist arrived for the press conference on a skateboard, which Zoe personally found a little silly. Mimi obviously found it just plain stupid, because the skateboard left black rubber streaks on her new parquet floor. The thirty-eight-year-old Brooklynite wore a chunky black knitted sweater, retro-style Adidas sneakers, and was covered with bling like an old-school hip-hop artist.

  “We’re delighted to have Astarot Frist with us in person to open the exhibit ‘The Square Paintings, 1997 to 2012,’” Mimi said into the microphone and began her interview with the artist, which had been announced in the press material. Frist’s body stood next to her, looking into space, whistling softly, but Frist himself seemed to somehow not be all there.

  “Where did you get the original inspiration for ‘The Square Paintings,’ Astarot?” Mimi asked. She gave him her best knockout model smile, for which all of the other men present would have happily committed murder.