Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  Gael looks around as the discussion finishes up. She’s assessing the space as much as they’re assessing her goods. She knows that this isn’t about them deeming the paintings worthy. Now that she’s here, the only thing that will ensure wall space is her cogency; her taking that space as a given. The audition goes both ways, is the point of her body language.

  It’s one large, rectangular room – wide rather than deep – with a silvery-grey lacquer on the cement floors, white walls and a ceiling that’s pitched asymmetrically so that the spotlights can be directed just so. In the middle of the room, there’s a freestanding panel of wall like the inverse of a stone arch. It’s designed to have one painting hung on either side. It also helps to dampen light on the main back wall, which faces the street. It’s not plywood covering the windows but some kind of gritty fabric.

  ‘Do you need a water or a tea or anything?’ Enn asks.

  ‘Still water, please.’

  She has a feeling that Enn is the tone-setter and she’d rather be left to pitch her own introduction. F could be Sive’s age. She’s wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length, dark vintage dress with a stonework of dark-grey hair bridging her skull to the small of her back and is holding a long-lensed camera in one hand, as if it’s not worth months of someone’s salary. Her right hand is scrunched up in a crab claw, so when she goes to shake Gael’s hand, she tucks the camera under her right arm and proffers her left hand. Perhaps whatever condition she has made a curator of her. Her expression is attentive. ‘Raina is a very special artist. One of our favourites. We had her Patagonian collage show last year.’ She glances to the portfolio resting against the arch in the centre of the room. ‘How do you know her?’

  ‘Raina must be a lot of people’s favourite artist,’ Gael says. ‘She’s one of a kind.’

  ‘She is one of a kind,’ F says.

  ‘Though our connection’s professional–’

  ‘Business,’ is the man’s first word. M. ‘I thought you looked corporate.’

  Gael laughs. He doesn’t.

  ‘You’re on the doughnut hunt.’ He’s well over six foot, stocky, bald, with a walnut woodchip beard. Gael guesses late thirties. His plain white T-shirt is rolled at the sleeves. Classic blue jeans tucked into distressed brown leather boots that come up to the tops of his shins.

  Enn arrives back with a glass of water that’s basically a fishbowl.

  ‘It’s true I’m not an artist,’ Gael says. This halts Enn en route to the portfolio to lay out the work. Gael needs to keep them listening, not looking, yet. Without bending her knees, she places the glass of water on the floor. Then, she removes her coat, folds it and places on the floor beside the glass of water. You can’t win people over in a coat. It’s where all the politicians go wrong. Enn, F and M all watch her, with their heads tilted like the various hands of a clock. As long as it seems like performance art, which they can’t interrupt, she’ll hold court.

  ‘It’s a very rare condition,’ she begins.

  Later, without anyone having so much as cleared their throat, she concludes in the tenor of a late-night radio host: ‘But if he won’t travel, we just have to accept that that is his reality. It’s self-preservation, not self-harm. To try to make him understand, again … would be dangerous and selfish. And traumatic. So I’m here. Bringing an extraordinary mind and talent to light.’ It seems as if the sun has, against all forecasts, broken through the clouds. Enn points to the portfolio as the fabric blinds behind him glow.

  ‘Are these … of the auras?’

  Time to pass on the power baton. Gael will be the one to bend her knees. She will unpack the paintings and space each one along the wall, without anyone’s help. Flee their eye line as soon as she can. F extracts a pair of glasses from the pocket of her dress and cleans them for a very long time, taking in the paintings blurrily. M paces back and forth along the line-up, as if they aren’t autonomous, but Enn has homed in on just one. Wally’s. Put a red sticker on that one had been his order. Enn has one end of the fuchsia scarf bunched in his fist and is holding it against his mouth as if to catch the scent from a lover’s fast-cooling pillow. Gael drains the water bowl and swears she can feel something go slimily down her throat while this silent jurying takes place. They’re getting very close to the paintings now. These people assess art for a living. Guthrie’s secondary-school arts-and-crafts supplies must be glaring. They step in. Her story must not have allayed their need to look closely. From the lobby, a delivery person yells: We’re downstairs. After M’s hand lands on F’s shoulder with a thud, she yells back: Give us a minute.

  A minute.

  Is a minute good or bad?

  Then something has happened, because F and M are approaching Gael, and Enn is carefully returning the paintings to their case. They’re sending them home with her. Apparently, the packaging isn’t satisfactory, so Enn dashes off for more mesh. This is going on in the background. In the foreground, Gael is being read her rights. No. Her Terms and Conditions. F’s teeth are short and stained as peanuts. ‘We take fifty-five per cent of sales. That’s standard. Some galleries take sixty. I set the prices and run those by you. If you want to do advertising, flyers, magazine ads, helicopters, that nonsense, you foot the bill. We don’t press artists to advertise. We get traffic here on rep. You’ll be billed for painting the walls and for the opening night refreshments. Twenty bottles of wine; twenty still, twenty carbonated waters. As a rule, artists pay for framing up front, but I don’t see why we’d frame these pieces. My partners agree they work as they are. The desks are great. Superb.’

  ‘Those big hooked nails on the sides?’ M says. ‘The red rust polluting the white? It’s … evocative.’

  ‘So if you’d like to work with us,’ F cuts in, ‘we’re offering the week of October 14th through 20th. One of our sculptors has had a minor catastrophe with a piece and she’ll need her show pushed back. Otherwise, we’d be talking mid next year.’

  Gael feels her head go up and down. It’s just one step of the dance she’s doing inside.

  ‘I’ll have a contract drawn up.’ F must read something in Gael’s expression she doesn’t like. ‘I hope you realize a solo show by an unknown vacationer in a space like this just doesn’t happen.’

  The older woman puts the younger woman in her place: check. And the beat goes on. To break the so obliged/so grateful pattern, Gael says: ‘A nineteen-year-old unknown vacationer at that!’

  F narrows her brown eyes and twitches restrainedly as a stabled horse. ‘Of course, we can’t do anything with five pieces. We’ll need at least twelve.’ She looks around the room. ‘Fifteen,’ she says. ‘You have fifteen? In the same vein?’

  Enn returns, rapturous. ‘Did you say the artist was a teenager?’

  Gael nods discreetly and slips her coat back on. She lifts the portfolio onto her shoulder and now feels how much heavier it needs to be. She feels sign language going on around her. At last, F holds out her left hand to shake. Gael looks at her crippled right hand pointedly and says, ‘Left hand … Closer to the heart.’

  F drops the handshake, fast, and looks directly at Gael with her jaw set together, as if it has reverted to its statue form. But after a moment, it unlocks just enough to say, ‘I’ve never heard that.’

  Gael kneads the muscle of her aching shoulder. It was something she’d heard Sive say to her soloist during a rehearsal of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the left hand. It had struck Gael as typically urbane.

  ‘One other thing,’ M says. ‘We need a headshot.’

  ‘Of the artist?’

  ‘If we like the photo, we’ll print it.’

  ‘I’ll have a look,’ Gael says.

  M rubs his knuckles roughly into his reddish beard. ‘Look. I don’t mean to come off as … exploitative …’

  F snaps her gaze so abruptly, her grey hair makes motion lines. What’s this? What’s he after without consensus?

  ‘… but if you’ve got a photo of him …’ M pauses, looking rest
ive. ‘Gah. Forget it.’ His eyes are trained on the tailored hem of Gael’s skirt.

  ‘What?’ Gael asks. ‘Of him having a fit?’

  ‘Forget it. I didn’t think that through.’

  ‘Well …’ Gael says lingeringly, taking her phone from her coat pocket and scanning her photo library. ‘You guys are the experts. I’m the middleman. Were you thinking … something … like this?’ She holds out the phone and all three of her marks close in on the electronic image as if its pixels are a mise en abyme. The slashed canvas of Guthrie’s face. The photo she took the night he lost his tooth, just before he drew his head from her lap.

  A dusting of salt glistens on M’s bald head from whatever he sweated over earlier. The grooves in his forehead look as though they’ve been scored. He’s crouched down, resting his hands on his knees to see the photograph, so that his head is at Gael’s chest height. He looks to her with a grimace. Yeah. Yup. Yes. He’d let her beat him like that right now, to a Schnabel. Pollock the lip. Torsion the frame. Twist the rust, not one bit biblically. Hard pulse thuds. Brunting her shoulder ligaments with the luggage is all she can do to restrain it. She lurches to the lift, averting her gaze from the swing that hangs, daring as a rope.

  ‘Kudos,’ he calls after her, but she won’t twirl, no matter how easy it would be. ‘You just made business beautiful. Raina’s got an eagle’s eye … for what’s worth chasing. This kid is gonna be huge.’

  At the corner of 10th Avenue, she hails a cab and tips recklessly. By the time the porter knocks on her room with the portfolio, she is bathrobe-clad and has no dry hand with which to pass him a banknote. ‘So sorry, just in the middle of something.’ Barely holding herself back from straddling the door, she shuts it and leaps onto the bed to writhe seven heavens into a pillow.

  After, her phone reads 15:45. Fifteen. Shit, yes. Next order of business. She uses the Wi-Fi to phone Guthrie. He sounds groggy. He’s five hours ahead. Was he sleeping? He was hanging out clothes, he says. The image of this has a sobering effect on Gael, cashing out the tab on her thoughts. She must pause for too long, because he starts asking questions one after another, as if to relieve her. He wants to know all about the city. They’d been to California as a family once, but hadn’t been anywhere else in America. Has she seen the Statue of Liberty? Is the Ground Zero memorial open? The Obamas were there on the tenth anniversary. It was on the news. Where’s she staying? When’s her interview – what’s it for again? Has she met anyone yet? When will she start saying ‘dude,’ ‘awesome’ and ‘super’? Have taxicab drivers been telling her they’re Irish? And why taxi and cab?

  ‘Yeah,’ Gael says, lying on the bed, looking at the French chandelier.

  ‘It’s so redundant.’

  ‘You’re redundant.’

  ‘Cop on! I’m a stay-at-home dad.’

  Gael envisions him balancing tiny tiny socks on the clothes horse. Blankies. Little leggings with threadbare knees and bottoms. Maybe jumpers Jarleth bought them in pink and blue, to better establish what’s what, this time round. ‘My first time on the subway,’ Gael says, ‘which smells of pee by the way, everything smells putrid here, like you get home from summer holidays and realize you left a bowl of cereal out and the sour milk has condensed to cheese …’

  ‘That’s a very specific smell.’

  ‘Anyway, someone started break-dancing around the subway pole.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Then I switched lines and three black dudes broke into Gregorian chant. Your favourite!’

  ‘African Americans,’ Guthrie says primly. ‘Did you give them a dollar?’

  ‘I didn’t give the black dudes a dollar. You’d spend a thousand dollars a day if you gave a buck every time you’re asked for one, or every time you’re impressed by someone.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ Guthrie says, sounding tired.

  ‘It is. It feels too arbitrary to reward talent when there’s so many people just … struggling. That should be enough of a reason. But, I dunno. People don’t seem that bleak.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Well, some really do. Like the ones who apologize. Drag their kids down the carriage asking for help to feed them. The kids look you straight in the eye.’

  ‘Gael–’

  ‘But mostly, they’re characters. Like, there was this ancient Asian lady riding her Rollerblades down the middle of the road like she was a vehicle. In hot pants and kneepads in autumn. All the cars honking, threatening to run her over, out their windows going, “What the fuck?” I’m shaking my fist here. And she’s like, “Do it, sons of bitches! Obamacare!” She was amazing.’

  ‘It sounds … alive. I hope you’re taking pictures.’

  Gael gets up from the bed and goes to the iPad by the door to turn on the air-con. ‘Speaking of taking pictures–’

  ‘Oh, before I forget, Mum says someone’s been calling for you.’

  ‘Oh. I can guess who it is. I’ll phone Mum later.’

  ‘She doesn’t pick up at work, but you can text.’

  ‘At work, as in at Cash Converters?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘She hasn’t quit yet?’

  ‘I think she’s working something out. Something important.’

  ‘She’s losing it.’

  ‘She’s happy.’

  ‘Ish,’ Gael says. ‘Mum’s never been more than happyish. And that’s pushing it.’

  ‘That was the menopause,’ Guthrie says.

  ‘You’re the menopause.’

  ‘You give me such a hard time when I make that joke and you’ve made it twice in–’

  ‘Sorry,’ Gael says. ‘’Merica’s making my jokes mac ’n cheesy.’

  Guthrie laughs. Gael plonks onto the low gold-velvet chair in the recessed reading area by the window. She puts her bare feet on the footstool and pushes back one half of the gauze curtain. The calm circle of the Pulitzer Fountain is down below, people going here and there, ambling around the flower beds – faceless from this far up.

  ‘So you know the painting you gave me?’ Gael says. Guthrie yawns on the other end of the line. ‘I sold it.’

  ‘Jeez!’ Guthrie says, doing his best American accent. He has softened around the edges since the kids. ‘Get this gal with her sentimentality!’ he says, goofily.

  ‘That’s actually pretty good! That’s convincing! Guthrie the Godfather. But, seriously though. I did sell it. For serious money. To a rich guy on the plane. He fell in love with it, Guth, of course he did because it’s gorgeous and he wrote me a cheque, well, you a cheque. It’s for you. And I’m waiting for it to clear but basically, as of tomorrow, you’ve officially got bank.’

  There’s a pushing sound on the end of the line and Gael imagines her Edvard Munch painting of a brother getting up to check on the twins to help him process this utter surprise. She wonders how his face looks. Has it healed? The tooth would be missing still. An implant would have to be measured and made and so on.

  ‘You sold the painting I gave you?’ He sounds confused.

  ‘With ease. You’re an incredible fucking talent, Guth. I hope you know that. The world should know it. So I want you to be able to paint, properly. We only get one life. I want you to do something for yourself. Not to have to worry about money or health insurance or what school you’ll be able to afford for the kids or what welfare you’re eligible–’

  ‘Gael.’ Guthrie’s voice sounds off. She heard the sound of one door closing and another opening. Then another creaky door and a light switch.

  ‘The fact of the matter is, you owe it to yourself to at least try to make a living as an artist. Not as a–’ She would’ve stopped shy of saying ‘dole bandit’ had he not stopped her first.

  ‘What did you do?’ He must be holding his breath. In the cupboard under the stairs, if you breathe, dust catches in your throat and you cough.

  ‘Okay.’ Do the merciful thing. Quickly. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  ‘What. Gael. Did you do.’

  She realizes that she
too is holding her breath, sitting upright on the chair, feet flat on the carpet. ‘I took the four others with me and they’re going to be in an exhibition in Chelsea.’ She waits. Then adds hurriedly, in case he didn’t understand, ‘In New York.’

  He’s breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, in little whistles.

  ‘A bunch of gallerists think you’re insanely gifted, Guthrie. They wanted me to–’

  ‘Cancel it.’

  Somehow, the silence on the line renders the city hushed, too. Her ‘What?’ is tacit.

  ‘Cancel it.’

  His voice reminds her of the last night she saw him, when he’d made her shadow manifest in black cuttings all around her on the floor – a shadow she hadn’t cast so acutely until then. Of his warning not to make a scene when Jarleth showed up for mass. Of his ordering that dodgy fuck in the park to clean up his dog faeces. It was unwavering. Gael knew he meant it. And meaning, for him, isn’t pliant. But this is a fixed, short-term loss. It will matter less and less over time. Whereas money accrues interest. Money can give him choices he has forgotten exist.

  ‘I can’t,’ she finds herself saying, instead. ‘I’ve already signed a contract. But I swear you’ll feel different when you get a–’

  ‘The twins,’ Guthrie says, ‘they’re crying … Ronan wouldn’t eat. I have to go.’

  ‘Guth?’ Gael takes the phone from her ear and sees that the call has been dropped.

  The weekend rollerbladers, skateboarders, elbow-swingers and off-the-saddle-riders are out in full force in Central Park, which aggravates Gael, as if she has some right, already, to space. But for the few to have a wealth of space, the many must have a scruple. She runs quickly through the busy, paved part of East Drive until Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy Reservoir: her favourite section of the park. The soft cinder path hemming the water. The simulacrum forest. The incongruous skyline of the Upper West Side, seeming much farther away than it is. The space in between: a half-trillion-dollar real estate prospect, forfeited through the kind of obliged philanthropy that leaves more than teeth marks in fists.