Rajiv leaned inward with his ear where the door had been and pitched forward into the office.
Tessa made a sound of disgust, stepped over Rajiv, and stomped off.
“Four kids and a white picket fence!” Brian sang.
He could see his whole bright future stretching ahead of him, starring Tessa, and it was beautiful, the ultimate proof of goodness inhabiting the known universe.
* * *
* * *
7
Real originals and other forgeries
It was a typical Chelsea gallery, which meant I was sorely tempted to burn it to the ground. This could be considered not arson but public service.
José’s warning about the co-op board had put me in mind of finding a gallery to show my landscapes.
Now that I was painting again, and because a few years had elapsed since everything imploded, I was ready to go out into the world with my work once more. Maybe. Almost.
But this was the wrong gallery. It was filled with Damien Hirst knockoffs and Jeff Koons wannabes. I looked at some tags and my ire bubbled up: everything was outrageously overpriced. If I sold even ONE of my beautiful landscape paintings, at a fraction of these prices, I could fund Reverend Pincek’s programs for a year. Two, and I’d be out of trouble with the co-op board.
It had a personal hook too since I’d run afoul of the art world three years ago. I’d labored diligently for years to master my craft and it had all gone up in a plume of betrayal, rumor, and false accusation.
“So much money for so little talent,” I was murmuring. I was triggered, and I couldn’t uncouple myself from the steam engine of my bitterness. “I paint better than this. I have to show my work. I have to get out into the world, so people know they have options, they don’t have to put up with this drek.”
Then I froze. An entire wall was covered with Picassoesque female nudes that were duplicated in checkerboard after Warhol. It was trite-cum-gimmicky, with a soupçon of cheesy, and I knew it well.
Too well, all too well.
My heart almost stopped beating in my chest when I saw the price on the label.
Why did the bad art command these prices?
Why wasn’t good art recognized and valued?
Why did people rush to believe hearsay and refuse to hear the truth?
An elegant, bearded man in a hot-pink suit approached. “I’m Frances Gates, the proprietor of this fine establishment. How do you like these original Cliff Bucknells?”
“Original?” I squeaked. There was nothing original at all about Cliff Bucknell. I knew that first hand.
“Of course, they’re original. I heard about the big scandal a few years ago, but those rumors were just a marketing ploy, I can assure you. Only Cliff Bucknell has a genius this masterfully droll.”
“Masterful,” I repeated, not breathing at all. The volcano inside me was building up pressure.
“Come this way, darling, I have something that will really take your breath away.” He ushered me toward a small grinning skull covered with rhinestones and colored sequins. “Cliff Bucknell’s rendering of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God. Isn’t it witty?”
The numbers on the placard swam in my vision and made the room flicker around me. “It’s. It’s. It’s a million dollars?”
“There are those, and I am one, who think it’s better than Hirst’s!” Gates placed his hand on his chest.
“But, but …” I squeaked, as my throat closed and my past erupted, molten hot and viscous. Why had I ever thought I could elude it?
Was there no way for me to rectify it?
“I can see how moved you are,” Gates said with a sympathetic nod. “Listen, we’re having an opening of Bucknell’s work, his first show in years.” He leaned toward me, to whisper directly into my ear.
“His first show since that scandal, which was completely false, you understand. Here’s an invitation.”
He placed a gaudily-printed postcard in my hand.
“Oh God,” I gurgled. The postcard slipped to the ground as I threw my hands up into the air.
“Darling, do you need help?”
“No, but these artists do!” I cried. I couldn’t help it. I was so appalled.
Gates recoiled. “I show the finest post-modern art in the city!
“You do? So where is it? The finest post-modern art in the city. Where is it?”
Gates gestured with his hands like an orchestra conductor. “What do you think all this is?”
“What do I think it is? Or what do I know it is?”
I grabbed his sleeve and dragged him to a tank in which floated a cubit-zirconia encrusted thighbone.
Price: $300,000. “This is expensive merchandise.
Expensive, ugly, meaningless merchandise. The mercenaries who made it ought to be shot in the kneecaps!”
Gates shrugged out of my grip. “If you’re one of those people who—”
“One of those people who loves real art?” I demanded. In my mind, I stood in the Vatican beneath Michelangelo’s sublime Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Magnificent and awe-inspiring, God reached out his hand to his creation Adam, and a symphonic chorus of Alleluia’s played … .
But my mouth was still moving as if it were a car without a driver careening down the highway. That happened to me sometimes when I was taken over by the bright, fierce spirit who lived within though was mostly occluded. “One of those people who loves the kind of art that uplifts and ennobles people? The kind of art that sees you through your darkest hours and inspires you? One of those people?”
“That’s so archaeological,” sniffed Gates. His words punctured my happy Renaissance bubble.
I stood, once again, in Chelsea, in a gallery filled with tawdry baubles that some sneering, condescending, punitive, mentally challenged art demi-god had deemed worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“There’s nothing archaeological about beauty.”
“If you want beauty, take a taxi to the Met. I thought you admired Cliff Bucknell; you had such an obvious emotional response to his work.” Gates looked wounded.
“Cliff Bucknell is a has-been fraud,” I said.
That pushed Gates over the edge. He turned on his heel and flounced off.
I trailed him. I heard a noise behind me as someone came in, but I didn’t turn my head to look. I was too intent on reaching Gates, on somehow making him understand what he, the art community, and the world at large needed to know: that art isn’t about irony and wit and commercialism and fashionableness and all that superficial glamour that means nothing and goes nowhere fast. Art is about something deeper, more real. Something transcendental that shows us the way to our better, truer selves. Art is about beauty. Art is about meaning.
The meaning to which art inspires us is worth drastic action.
Gates was mincing rapidly away. I grabbed his arm and yanked him around to look at some ghastly purple still lifes. I said, passionately, “People only buy this stuff because it matches their curtains!”
“What kind of hair are you shedding?” Gates wondered, staring at my jacket. “You need a new hairdresser.”
“Mr. Gates, there are artists who have studied their craft and developed their aesthetic out of a valid tradition and who have something to say that isn’t pedestrian!”
Gates held his hand to his forehead and honked.
“I’m getting a sinus headache. Is the barometric pressure dropping?”
What the hell, why couldn’t he hear me? I grabbed him by the collar and shook him. “You can show meaningful art!”
“Not if I want to make a living,” he responded.
He wriggled out of my grasp and closeted himself in his office.
They came in a tidal wave: disgust, anger, sadness—all my old feelings about the silly triviality into which art had degenerated since Marcel Duchamp did us all a disservice and foisted a urinal on us, which had a minute and a half of shock value before the novelty wore off. I mean, it’s been mor
e that a hundred years, and artists, with their lack of originality and creativity, are still doing that urinal. I wandered back to the skull.
Then I couldn’t breath. What?
I was ensconced in a bear-hug like an iron corset.
“Like that skull? It’s only a million dollars,” chirped Brian.
“I hate it, and I want it to go die in a hole,” I whispered, struggling and wheezing for air. “Didn’t I tell you to get lost?”
“How do you know you’re a physicist? You avoid stirring your coffee because you don’t want to increase the entropy of the universe,” Brian asked and answered his own joke. Then he chuckled. That’s right, he was crazy.
“How crazy and delusional are you?” I demanded.
I froze, and maybe the sudden cessation of motion caused him to release me. I drew in a big sweet lungful of oxygen. I was happy to breathe freely. I was also incomprehensibly glad to see Brian—which really pissed me off.
“What I mean to say is, physicists think for themselves. You can’t just tell them what to do. It used to drive you crazy.” He picked up the skull and shook it next to his ear. “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Tessa, a fellow of infinite jest.”
“Put that down,” I hissed and grabbed his arm.
“The rhinestones will come off. It’s only Elmer’s glue.”
“Here, didn’t you ever want to hold a million bucks in your hand?” Brian thrust the objet d’art into my hand.
I gawked. I was overwhelmed by a welter of feelings: disgust, envy, and other, fiercer emotions. I turned it over and over in my hand. “So ugly.”
“People love this stuff.”
“People who don’t know better; they’ve been duped by the corrupt commercial art establishment to think that the only thing art has to do is hang on the wall and get more expensive!” It was everything that was wrong with the art world, which had cost me so dearly.
“Down, girl,” Brian said. He took the skull from me and put it back on its base. “Someone will pay this much for it. A million dollars. Know what I’d do with a million bucks? Take you to Vienna. Mozart’s
’hood. You always wanted to go there.”
There was no answer to his absurdity, and my own was showing its life-demolishing fangs. I stormed off. Brian followed me. When I looked back, he was gazing at me with a melting expression. I took a deep cleansing breath. “Brian, I keep telling you to go away. Why are you still following me?”
“The thing is,” he said, and tilted his head in a bird-like expression of interest, “we’re married.”
“Professor, if you really are a professor, I feel sorry for you, but—”
“We are husband and wife. In an alternate universe. Lots of them exist. Imagine: there’s an alternate world where you love this art, where Cliff Bucknell is your idol.”
“Impossible,” I scoffed. “Cliff is a loathsome, narcissistic, manipulative, deceitful user.”
“No, in this other world, you’re obsessed with his work. In your eyes, it’s the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. There’s a universe where you own it. Maybe there’s even a universe where you love it enough to steal it,” Brian continued. He opened his hands expansively. “You can’t restrain yourself, your passions. The security cameras are out of order, there’s no guard and no attendant. So, in that other universe, you make the decision to slip it right into your bag.”
“No way.”
“It solves all the problems in your life, to possess this skull, which represents the pinnacle of beauty and wonder in the universe,” Brian said. He made one of his unrestrained gestures that stirred me to some distant, unresolved recognition, like a past life memory that could never be recovered—because I didn’t believe in reincarnation.
“You are out of your mind,” I said, though I suddenly glimpsed a certain logic in his madness.
Wouldn’t it just solve a lot of problems if I took the skull? It wouldn’t even be theft, really, for reasons I couldn’t help but remember.
“Nope, just imagining the possibilities. Don’t you do that?”
I glared at him and didn’t answer.
“You have more gumption in my universe,” Brian observed. “Not gumption. Center. Self-possession.
Something. You have bark but no bite here.”
“I do not bark, and I do so have bite,” I said, a little archly, truth be told. I mean, I know I’m a pansy, but do I need to have some cuckoo homeless guy pointing that out to me? No. No, I do not need that. Besides, discretion being the more attractive part of valor, being a pansy is part of my ineffable charm. Such as it is.
Of course, it does beg the question of why I haven’t been out on a date in over a year. I need to start running again and get my ass in shape … . It occurred to me that my imagination, wonderful as it was, was not going to tone my derriere.
I was going to have to take action.
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Brian was saying. “You seem lost and confused, actually.”
“I am not. And this is your universe.” I marched back to the skull and stared hard at it.
Brian was only a half-step behind me. He cupped my chin to turn my head to face him, then he assumed a lecturing posture and an authoritative tone. “One theory in physics says that every possible outcome happens with 100 percent probability.”
I felt myself being stared at and turned my head just fast enough to see Frances Gates peering out of his office door. I waved at him: Please come out!
Maybe he could rescue me from Brian’s lecture.
Gates slammed his door.
“Damn it. He’s afraid of a confrontation with someone who sees art not for its monetary value, but for its quality of moving and uplifting people,” I muttered.
“He’s afraid of you,” Brian said. “That barking thing you do.”
“I could do a lot of good with a million dollars.”
“See, I’ve got you thinking about the possibilities, that’s a good thing,” Brian enthused.
“Oh, I always think about the possibilities,” I muttered. “It’s the unintended consequences that trip me up.”
“You’re learning. Now, come with me.” He slipped his arm around my shoulders in a friendly fashion.
Did he expect me to go with him back to his flying saucer? Was he actually a psycho serial killer trying to lure me to some private spot where he’d murder me with an axe? Somehow—I didn’t know how—I was sure it wasn’t because we were married in an alternate universe. I didn’t think so. Somehow, I thought he was harmless. Possibly even well meaning. But, to err on the side of caution, I asked, “Come with you where?”
“Back to the big bang. Which wasn’t a single event.” He leaned his head close to mine and spoke in a conspiratorial voice. “Imagine, if you will, the velvety black of space, with multiple explosions radiating out … .”
His tone was so soft and persuasive that I could visualize it perfectly. It would make a lovely painting of some kind, but not a serious one, not high art, no … . What the hell was wrong with me? I knew better than to let him draw me into his mishegaas.
Brian was still talking. “In the theory of eternal inflation, there are endless, on-going big bangs breaking off from an underlying substrate of inflating space-time. Each one produces its own separate cosmos. Mine, yours.”
Out of my peripheral vision, I spied a security guard walking in the front door, carrying a paper cup of deli coffee. This was my chance! “Guard, guard,” I called.
The guard trudged over. “Can I help you?”
I shoved Brian at him. “This crazy man is bothering me.”
“I’m not crazy, I’m visiting. I know her better than I know my own self,” Brian returned vigorously.
“I’ve never seen him before today,” I said.
Brian pointed at my pelvis. “She’s got a heart-shaped birthmark on her back, right above the cleft in her ass—show him, Tessa!”
How did he know?
The guard cast his eyes at my ass w
ith prurient interest.
“I’m not pulling down my skirt to show anyone my behind!” I said, outraged. But I was a little spooked. How did this goofball know?
Frances Gates must have summoned a pair of testicles because he marched out of his office, braced as if for battle. He asked coolly, “Is there a problem here?”
“Love that suit, hot damn!” Brian said. He threw his arms around Gates and hugged him effusively.
What was it with that crazy man and hugging?
What was it with that crazy man and his absurd, tantalizing ideas?
“Oof,” mumbled Gates. “A simple handshake will do. You’re spewing germs all over me.”
“I’m Dr. Brian Tennyson, physicist at large,” Brian said, pumping Gates’s hand. “Where’d you get this? Is it custom? It’s awesome. Never felt anything so soft!”
“Isn’t it fabulous?” Gates asked, preening. “I’d tell you the top-secret thing they do to the fabric, but then I’d have to shoot you.”
“I always wanted a red velvet suit,” Brian said.
“There’s no time like now,” Gates said.
“Ain’t that the truth. You always think you have forever, then you find it’s over before you realized,” said Brian.
The guard jumped into this thoroughly inane conversation, and I took advantage of their masculine absorption in gossip to do what I needed to do, and then to slip away.
My bag was a little bit heavier.
And I felt a new gumption surging through my veins.
* * *
* * *
8
A kiss by any other name
T he lecture hall in Leitner Observatory was filling to capacity. Brian stood near the door, his eyes searching the rows. He saw her finally—in the back row. There was an empty seat beside her and he quickly slid in. He saw a sheet of music spread out on her lap, atop her notebook. He noticed that her hands were small and slim, and the fingers of her left hand bore thick calluses. It made him tingle to think of those fingers on his skin, on his neck and his back.
The Love of My (Other) Life Page 3
