He turned his head. His lips stopped whistling, and his eyes looked straight ahead, right through the journalists and slowly arriving art collectors, as though he was looking through a tunnel into nothingness.
“Astarot?” Mimi tried again to bring him back to Earth. No reaction. “Astarot?”
Zoe would have liked to help Mimi by punching Frist in the side. The whole “I’m a crazy artist” act was getting old. But she didn’t dare.
“OK,” Mimi announced, staying completely cool, “the press conference is over.” This provided material for endless stories that would just make Frist’s reputation more interesting. Bad press was good press, wasn’t it? Zoe suspected Astarot and Mimi had come up with the little theater piece while giggling in the back room before the show started.
In the meantime, the gallery was as full as a nightclub on a Saturday night. Black Town Cars were lining up in rows in front of the door, continually spitting out new visitors. Zoe got herself a glass of champagne from the bar and made her way through the crowd. Between the designer-suit-wearing Upper East Siders and the cool Downtowners all in black were groups of fashionably dressed college kids, who couldn’t possibly have had the kind of money necessary to buy one of Frist’s paintings, unless they were secretly working on the next Facebook in their dorm rooms.
“They’re only here for the free food,” Mimi explained. “And because we don’t ask for IDs when we serve alcohol, like a normal bar would.”
“Really? Then why don’t you throw them out?”
“As long as they’re suitably dressed and well behaved, they fit in fine. After all, they reduce the average age by about twenty years,” she said. Then she raised her drink in such an enthusiastic toast that Zoe was afraid the glasses wouldn’t survive.
“Have you had too much bubbly, Mimi? The gallery owner shouldn’t get drunk before she’s sold the paintings, should she?”
“Already done,” Mimi answered.
“What? Getting drunk, or selling the Frists?”
“Dominik Gunn already bought them. All!”
There were a good sixty miles between New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut. But when this distance was driven in a stretch limo with a bottle of champagne and a chauffeur, it seemed only half as long. It took some time to get used to the fact that one sat in a stretch limo facing sideways, and that the lighting on the ceiling constantly changed between silver, gold, and silver-red-gold, like a light show in a disco.
Zoe was resting her head on Mimi’s shoulder, and through the dark glass windows she could see the Hudson River piers speeding by. They were driving north on the West Side Highway. In the limo, it felt like the mood at four a.m. after a wild party celebrating the World Cup. Copious amounts of adrenaline had been partied off, and a deeply satisfied, weightless calm had overcome the passengers.
Dominik Gunn languorously stroked the perfect thigh of his wife, whom Zoe didn’t dare to observe more closely, because she was reasonably certain she wasn’t wearing panties under her short chiffon dress. The thin material didn’t leave much for the imagination.
“Darling,” he said, “did you let Oscar know he should whip up a little midnight supper for our guests?”
“The staff has been informed, of course,” Darling whispered into Dominik’s ear.
“Dominik Gunn is forty-one, worth $9 billion, and the thirty-fifth richest man in America,” Mimi had whispered into Zoe’s ear as they were getting into the limo. “He manages hedge funds and wagers on all kinds of things, like the downfall of the euro, the bankruptcy of Greece, or gold prices falling—probably on all three at once. He’s one of the most aggressive art collectors of the new millennium, and only buys trophy art.” And then she had added, a touch more quietly, “Apparently, he earns a billion dollars a year.”
The chauffeur left I-95 and turned onto a dark country road. The high trees at the edge of the road cast black shadows. It was a full moon. The driver soon stopped at a gate. The night watchman waved them through politely, although he couldn’t possibly have seen through the darkened glass whether anyone was actually inside. They obviously knew each other. The driveway was about 400 calories long, Zoe estimated—that’s how much you’d burn if you had to jog it.
When Zoe climbed out of the limo, she was instantly awake again. A castle-like building, lit up as though ready for the filming of a Hollywood blockbuster, stood impressively in front of her.
She felt as though she’d landed at Buckingham Palace. The uniformed personnel stood at attention by the pillars when they walked in and waited to take the guests’ coats. There was a maid for every garment.
“We’ll skip the house tour this time,” Gunn announced when they all were assembled in the library, which could have easily competed with a reading room at the New York Public Library.
“Thank God,” Mimi murmured, taking a drink from the tray that a butler was silently offering. “Last time I almost starved to death while Dominik was showing me his golf course, basketball court, and NHL-approved ice skating rink.”
“He plays golf, basketball, and hockey?” Zoe asked, amazed. Gunn couldn’t have been taller than five foot seven, and he had a beer belly that made him look eight months pregnant. Darling, in contrast, seemed to have no body fat at all, aside from a perfect pair of double-Ds. The two of them fit together perfectly, like a yin-yang symbol.
“Of course he doesn’t play them!” Mimi said. “His neighbor to the left has an antique French carousel imported from Paris, and his neighbor to the right has an Olympic-sized pool equipped with a wave machine and an ice-cream parlor. That’s hard to beat.”
On the way to the dining room, Zoe passed paintings by Lichtenberg, Gursky, and Hirst. But she could barely concentrate on the art because her stomach was growling so hard. She entered a gold-paneled room, which looked kind of like a Disneyworld version of the banquet hall in Versailles. Two other works of art were hanging directly behind Gunn at the head of the table. Even Mimi couldn’t tell her anything about them. One was just a white canvas, and the other, which was exactly the same size, looked to Zoe like a child’s crayon scribble in white, black, and gray. An early Jackson Pollock, perhaps?
The gallery sign under the right corner solved the mystery: War Between Pepper and Salt was the title. By Dominik Charles Gunn Jr., aged three.
“Your son is a little artist!” Zoe said to Darling, who was standing next to her. None of the guests had dared to sit down yet. Obviously, rapt admiration of the art was part of the program.
“Yes, he’s a monumental talent,” Darling answered, but made a face as though looking at the childish scrawl gave her a migraine.
“Really, darling,” Gunn broke in. “The story is too good—we must tell it properly.”
“If you must,” she said, grudgingly.
“See the piece on the left?” Gunn asked, waving a hand at the white canvas.
“Yes . . .” Zoe answered hesitantly.
“It’s called Stared At for One Thousand Hours, by Francis Freeman, 2007 until 2012,” Gunn said.
“I don’t understand.” The painting looked like a Rothko without paint. Like an empty canvas from an art store.
“The painter stared at the canvas for a thousand hours,” Gunn repeated.
Stared? For a thousand hours? I mean, really? Zoe thought.
“It’s called conceptual absence, my dear,” Gunn explained, as though he was teaching Art History 101. He obviously thought that Zoe knew nothing about art.
“But what if he only said he stared at it?” The words just slipped out of her mouth, and she instantly turned beet-red. Her question was completely honest, but it was probably also completely stupid.
“But that’s what it’s all about. Did he stare at it or not? Would it be the same piece of art if he hadn’t done it?”
“Oh,” she whispered, but still saw only an empty canvas in front of
her. She wondered what a painting like that cost. Half a million? A million? More?
“But that’s not the story you wanted to tell, dear,” Darling reminded him.
“Oh, yes.” Gunn laughed, pointing first to the Freeman, and then to the child’s work. “This here on the left is not the original. We had him make another one—after our nanny unwittingly allowed our three-year-old to scribble on the first one with crayons. Freeman stared at the original from 1992 until 1997, before my son drew over it in 2007. We compensated poor Freeman for having to stare at another canvas for a thousand hours. Crazy, isn’t it?”
“So that’s the mad world of New York’s rich and beautiful,” Zoe said, as she and Mimi rode back to Manhattan in the stretch limo at two in the morning.
“You happened to meet a very amusing example of it,” Mimi said, grinning in the darkness. The chauffeur had put up the privacy panel and kindly turned off the disco light show so the two of them could relax on the trip back home.
Zoe’s thoughts turned to McNeighbor. She wondered if Thomas Prescott Fiorino belonged to this crowd. Was he one of the 1 percent who have wave pools in their yards, stared-at canvases on their walls, and wives whom they call “darling” instead of by their first names? It certainly must make it easier when they traded them in for new, younger models after a few years. Zoe had intended to ban McNeighbor from her thoughts entirely, but somehow none of this seemed to fit with the man she’d met on that damn Sunday morning.
“Is that really Fiorino’s world?” she asked Mimi. She faked a yawn, hoping Mimi would think this subject wasn’t actually of particular interest to her.
“Not really.” Mimi shook her head. “What you saw this evening was new money, sweetie.”
“And . . . ?”
“Tom’s world is old money,” Mimi continued. “Totally different ballgame.”
Zoe thought about it for a moment. It sounded kind of like a threat.
Fashion Week, or: Which Way to the Tents?
Not only does the New York calendar have a totally different time concept of summer, but two entire months every year have special meaning: February and September, the months of New York Fashion Week. In those two months, spring/summer and autumn/winter collections are shown in tents, in the area in front of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. Of course the fashion shows are not for mere mortals who want to see a few live mannequins strutting down the catwalk. No, there is a carefully chosen audience: buyers from large department stores, journalists, bloggers, filthy-rich customers, and a few Hollywood stars for decoration.
In the evenings there are exclusive dinners and after-parties with even more exclusive guests, the invitations to which are a hot commodity among designers and their PR agents.
(New York for Beginners, p. 63)
9
Zoe had registered for the fashion shows as the writer for StyleChicks, but in the end she’d been able to use Allegra’s invitation. Al had to be at a board meeting and couldn’t come herself. Getting to use Al’s invitation was a nice perk, because as fashion magazine royalty, Al got a seat in the front row, where all the celebrities sat, and where all the gift bags filled with cosmetics and other goodies lay on the chairs. Mere bloggers, on the other hand, occupied the fifth row or were relegated to standing room. Those areas were so far from what was going on that one could barely see the models’ upper halves. Her colleagues at the office called them the “nosebleed seats.”
Madison, the office assistant whom everyone simply referred to now as Blonde Poison, was wearing a Juicy Couture stretch dress of questionable taste in Miss Piggy pink. Even a twelve-year-old would have looked like a prostitute in it.
“Tom wanted me to ask if you’d like a ride to the show today in his Town Car,” Madison said, placing her uninvited ass cheek on Zoe’s desk once again.
Blonde Poison clearly didn’t see a problem in referring to her new boss by his first name. Zoe herself hadn’t seen McSlimy since their encounter in the elevator. Not that she minded. She was still extremely pissed off at him.
“Thank you, Madison. You can tell Mr. Fiorino I’d rather take the subway,” Zoe answered. You had to hit an alpha man where it hurt the most, didn’t you?
Madison looked a little disturbed by this decision. Zoe figured that her few brain cells had to work extra hard to traverse the empty space in her brain and recalculate the information. But as Zoe studied the subway map a little later, it became clear to her that there wasn’t really a subway line from the Chrysler Building to Lincoln Center. So she walked in her three-inch Louboutin heels until she was finally able to hail a cab on 5th Avenue.
The paparazzi were stationed in front of the tents, waiting for the stars. Zoe felt tremendously important as she strode over the red carpet in her Victoria Beckham dress. She had accessorized with a Chloe hobo bag from two seasons ago that she’d snatched up at a sample sale. A PR woman from Ralph Lauren gave her a cool once-over, as though she’d secretly scanned Zoe’s bag and found out that it didn’t belong to the current collection. But when she saw the name Allegra Sollani on Zoe’s invitation, she instantly pasted a saccharine smile on her face and led Zoe into the huge tent with a feather-light hand on her elbow. First row. The place cards to her left and right informed her that she was seated between “It Girl” Alexa Chung and McSlimy.
“Did you enjoy your walk?” McSlimy asked before sitting down next to her.
He wore a fashionable two-day beard, a slim-fitting dark suit, shoes that appeared to be from Savile Row in London and had certainly been handmade by illegal Tamil child laborers, and his charming lopsided smile. His hair stood up in all directions, orderly in its disorder. Doesn’t this man own a comb?
Zoe nodded graciously and made an honest effort to punish him by ignoring him for the rest of the show. Men play only minor roles in my life, men play only minor roles in my life, men play only minor roles in my life, she repeated like a mantra in her mind.
The lights went out, the DJ turned up the bass, and Lenny Kravitz sang “Are You Gonna Go My Way.” It was strange to sit so close to McSlimy in the dark. It somehow felt extremely illegal. He smelled like McNeighbor and Issey Miyake. His arm touched hers very lightly. But then the first model appeared and shook Zoe out of McDreamy’s force field. Karlie Kloss wore a floor-length, high-cut evening dress of smoky-taupe chiffon, which flowed around her size-zero body. The look was accessorized by huge silver earrings. Right before she made her turn at the end of the catwalk, the flashes of the cameras fired like machine guns.
Zoe’s show schedule today was practically laughable:
10:00—Ralph Lauren
11:00—Rachel Zoe
12:00—Calvin Klein
1:00—Elizabeth & James
2:00—Patricia Field
3:00—Marchesa
4:00—Anna Sui
5:00—Reed Krakoff
6:00—Betsey Johnson
7:00—Proenza Schouler
8:00—Marc Jacobs
Every hour of the day was filled with killer heels, brilliant-white smiles, practiced pouts, and of course those endless camera flashes. First in the big tent, then next door to the small studio, back to the tent, to the press lounge for an espresso and a glass of champagne, and then back to the tent. The highlight of the day would be the Marc Jacobs show, which happened off-site in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. Very far from Lincoln Center. McSlimy and Zoe hadn’t exchanged a word with each other the entire day.
“Would you like a ride to the Marc Jacobs show?” he asked when they almost walked into each other at the exit.
“Thank you, Mr. Fiorino, but I’d rather take a taxi.”
“You know, of course, that Marc is notorious for starting late, that it will be ice-cold in the armory, and that it will be much more comfortable in my Town Car?”
“Over my dead
body,” Zoe responded coldly, and stormed off.
Of course it was impossible to get a taxi shortly before eight p.m., when the last show in Lincoln Center had ended. “Of course all the insiders know that,” Zoe muttered to herself with annoyance, and made her way toward the subway station again. She was stressed and in a permanent state of panic about getting sweat stains on her own haute couture when she finally arrived in the no-man’s land of the East 20s (was it Murray Hill? or Gramercy?) and made her way on foot to the Armory. In front of the gates was a line at least two hundred people deep. Some were waving their invitation cards wildly, and others were demanding in shrill voices that they were on the guest list. Doormen in black suits with football-player physiques and radios in their ears like Secret Service men held their positions stoically. At 8:45, forty-five minutes late, Zoe was finally allowed to go inside. The gigantic Armory hall, with its pillars and ornamented ceilings, was still half empty. Zoe took her place on a cold metal bench in the first row. There was no trace of VIPs like Hollywood’s Sofia Coppola or fashion queen Anna Wintour. And no show began before Anna arrived. That was the law. McSlimy was probably still sitting in his warm, chauffeur-driven Town Car, peacefully drinking an Americano and reading a newspaper.
The building was the size of an airplane hangar. It had once been the headquarters of the 69th Regiment. When it was built in 1851, nobody had bothered to put in central heating. It was damn cold in there, and Zoe was hungry. Hunger was a bad sign for Schuhmachers. Zoe actually thought that she was relatively low-maintenance, all things considered. But when she got hungry, bystanders had to beware. Things could get ugly.
Meanwhile, it was five past nine. The show should have started over an hour ago. The audience was getting fidgety. But Anna still wasn’t there. McSlimy wasn’t, either. Zoe’s stomach growled dangerously. She wondered if she should just leave. The whole thing was an affront. People were saying that the shoes for the show had been held up in the airport by customs, and would be arriving in a few minutes. So let the models walk barefoot, Zoe thought. She was cold, she was murderously hungry, and as a member of upper echelons of the fashion elite, she felt completely snubbed. Then, at 9:37, the lights were suddenly dimmed, and a few figures hurried to their seats. Zoe recognized Anna even though she was wearing sunglasses. She also spotted Beyoncé and Winona Ryder. McSlimy glided noiselessly to his seat next to Zoe. He dropped a paper bag in her lap, which smelled sensationally of avocado and grilled chicken.
New York for Beginners Page 8
