by Tom Rachman
What better option was there? If Dad were to learn of the Mallard deal, he’d go apoplectic, saying Hands IX was never sold—it’s at a private storage location in Europe! If he came here and found the original, Pinch’s affidavit would amount to criminal fraud. On the other hand, if Bear were to ever hear of the sale of Hands IX, and find that it’s gone, everyone will assume Mallard’s was the original. Provided that Bear never inspects the copy himself. Pinch grabs his own ears, shaking his head. If this falls apart, Bear will probably track down the name of the seller of Hands IX and find it was his own son. At least then, he can throw himself on Dad’s mercy, explaining the mess Birdie was in—while making it clear that she had nothing to do with this. Better to plead before Bear than before a jury. Still, a dismal situation. He shuts his eyes, sickened. Hey—there’s no certainty Bear ever discovers this.
Upon returning to London, Pinch arrives at the Ritz Hotel café to meet with the journalist Connor Thomas. The man’s answering machine message had thrust Pinch into panic, but he proves a less intimidating presence in person, less newshound than artsy youth, a redhead with gelled spiky hair, a black waistcoat worn over a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, torn jeans, burgundy Doc Martens. He clutches his Dictaphone as if it were an autograph book. “It’s okay to tape this, Mr. Bavinsky?”
“Let’s have a normal conversation first. Then we’ll see. All right?” Pinch is curt, establishing himself as the adult. “You said on the message that you’re researching my father. It’s something specific?”
“So I’m hoping to confirm a couple of things. Nothing too tough. We love Bear Bavinsky at Artforum. I shouldn’t say ‘we,’ like I’m on staff. I’m just hoping to contribute at this point. Technically I’m still in grad school. I believe you know one of my professors, Priscilla Barrows?”
“Oh,” Pinch says, sitting up, “sure. That’s a name from the past. She mentioned me for some reason?”
“Just that she dated Bear Bavinsky’s son at college, and actually had an opportunity to meet your father once.”
“Yes, that’s all true. But look,” Pinch says, “what exactly do you need? Does this have to do with Mallard?”
“With what? I’m just looking for background on your father’s career.”
“To what end?”
“A profile. We want to say how unjustly overlooked your father is,” Connor explains meekly. “That’s all.”
“Bear is overlooked again? Isn’t the consensus that my father is just another minor postwar painter?”
“Not in our books.”
“You haven’t spoken to him, you said?”
“I tried; no answer.”
“Going through me is best. You did the right thing.” Pinch is calming down. This kid is no threat. “Shall we get a proper drink?” He raises his arm for a waiter. “Normally, I don’t like to say much about my father. But if it’s just fact-checking, and for a student of Cilla Barrows, I’m willing to help. But not on the record.”
“Oh, yes, I totally get that,” Connor says, evidently delighted. “So basically, my interest is Bavinsky’s recent works. All I’ve been able to dig up so far relates to his old stuff. I know about the early Life-Stills that he sold. And I know about the later Life-Stills that he kept off the market. Then there’s all the rumors about his recent work, which nobody seems to have actually seen. That, for me, would be the mother lode. I’d love to get images of any recent paintings. I talked to his representation at the Petros Gallery, and they said maybe you’d help?”
“They told you that?” he responds, incredulous. “I’ll tell you now: Nobody is getting images of Bear’s new art.” Pinch has studied all the Life-Stills at the studio in France, but has himself never viewed Dad’s ongoing work; Bear has kept it strictly secret for years. Eva certainly has no clue. She doesn’t even represent Bear. Perhaps she’s hoping to tweeze out info herself, using this boy reporter as her proxy. “Let’s stick to your background questions.”
“Right, sure. So, like, my approach is how Bear Bavinsky is this lost modernist classic. The point I want to make, basically, is that Bavinsky is this proto-iconoclast following his own vision.” He stops. “Why are you rolling your eyes?”
“Didn’t realize I had. But I’m a bit wary of art journalism. Most of the time you guys reduce everything to jargon or to sales figures. Neither, in the case of my father, explains anything. If you want to make him look important in your article, you certainly shouldn’t mention past sales, which’ll be worse than any flash-in-the-pan star advertised on every other page of your magazine.”
“Actually, the fact that Bear Bavinsky is not finance driven is what I plan to celebrate. Especially with everything going on.”
“What’s going on?”
“Money, everywhere. But honestly? The magazine is not market driven. If anything, the market follows us. Which isn’t meant as an incentive. Which I know it wouldn’t be.”
Pinch chuckles: This journalist, pitching a tribute to the noble artist who is aloof to worldly rewards—while trying to lure the artist’s son by hinting at higher sale prices! “I don’t doubt your magazine’s high ethics. But galleries do buy all your ads, right? Rather a coincidence that the articles end up reading like their wall text.”
“Have you had a chance to look at us lately?” Connor asks delicately. “We’re not like that.”
“Let’s hear your questions.”
“Okay, so I know your father works mainly in Key Biscayne now, but he summers in France, right? Which is where you and professor Barrows went that time, correct? Now, where exactly?”
“The south of France. You can leave it at that.”
“Cool. And, um, his new works? When will we see those? And are they Life-Stills? Or are they something new and different?”
To remain the gatekeeper, Pinch must assert an air of authority, as if he were his father’s spokesman. “When I visit his cottage in France, the art studio is a separate building, and it’s locked, and I respect that. That’s as much as I’m comfortable saying.”
Despite this scant assistance, Connor and the editors at Artforum piece together a story months later. The cover art is a 1962 classic (Throat and Shoulder XVI). As for the article, there’s no mention of Mallard. It’s fluff about Bear standing apart from other contemporary artists, escaping the post-Pop hangover and conceptualist dogma, exactly as he once defied Abstract Expressionist dogma and the color-field purists. The magazine extols his cult status among those returning to figurative art, speaks of the enduring mystery around his ongoing work these past decades, and concludes by calling him an “artist’s artist”—that term of fatal praise, meaning no normal person knows of Bear Bavinsky anymore.
But Eva Petros is not a normal person.
53
“Heavens to Betsy!” she says. “I am so relieved to get you.” Prompted by the Artforum article, Eva is planning an exhibition of Bavinskys from private collections. She hopes to gather about half of the Life-Stills that Bear sold early in his career.
“That is never happening,” Pinch says, instantly on edge. He needs people to stop paying closer attention to his father, which only cranks up the risk that Pinch is exposed.
Eva covers the mouthpiece and hollers. “Felix, what’s our latest number on the ’vinskys?”
“Nine locked in,” comes the muffled response. “Three more likely, six maybes.”
Eva returns to Pinch. “We’re confident of at least eighteen. And once word gets out about this show, serious collectors will be strangling their grandmothers to get their art in this catalog. It’ll be an adrenaline shot to the valuations. Anyone who misses out is dumb as shit. Needless to say, I would go weak at every pertinent joint to add any Bavinskys you have put aside.”
“Eva, I’m not having anything to do with this.” Already she screwed him once, pointing lawyers in the Mallard divorce to him for the provenance of that p
ainting, washing her hands of the problem and pouring the dirty water over him. Does she think that, when it serves her, people just forget?
“Hear me out, will ya?” she says, fake smile audible. “What we’re hoping for, praying for, making goddamn animal sacrifices for, is an actual fresh contribution from the big Bear himself.”
“Do you know how he feels about your gallery?”
“I know things weren’t all smiles when he broke with us. But my papa was not himself toward the end. Point is, this is the moment to welcome Bear Bavinsky back to the Petros.” She adds, as if parenthetically, “He still lacks exclusive rep, right? I find that fucking scandalous.”
“Before I discuss any of this, I need to know what happened with Mallard. I thought we agreed—no, I don’t think—you promised that the painting was going to stay in place. I told you I needed to keep that deal private. Now it’s being sold somewhere?”
“Don’t get your Calvins in a twist! Mallard’s ex already sold it. And you know who bought it? Mallard himself. I talked him into it, made it clear that your father’s work was only going up. We did the deal anonymously on his side, so his dearly jilted wouldn’t revenge-milk him for a higher price.”
“Wait, Mallard buys the painting from me, with you taking a commission. Then you sell him the exact same painting for a second commission?”
“So what? I’m a charity now?”
“And this show of yours, it’ll include the Mallard picture?”
“That’s looking like a no right now. He’s still feeling a tad ripe about buying it through me twice.”
“But the other Life-Stills you show—you’re selling those?”
“Lordy, no. Most are loans.”
“More charity?”
“Oh, you are so funny! Look, your father is of an age. I see his market heating up. And I want my name attached.”
“He’s ‘of an age’?”
“I just want Bear to know he has a home here. We haven’t forgotten him, never stopped worshipping at the Bavinsky altar. I know your dad will want to join forces. And I’m gonna track him down, by hook or by crook.”
“No you won’t,” Pinch says, trying to stabilize his voice. “I’ll phone him.”
He makes the perfunctory call to Florida.
“They’re fucking rats, that Petros clan,” Bear says. “I’ll sue them if they do this.”
“On what grounds? You don’t own those paintings. Anyway, don’t worry: I’m blocking out all the stupid requests I can. But I wanted you to be warned. If anyone starts pestering you, just send them to me. Okay, Dad? Okay?”
“Why in hell can’t they leave me alone? It’s no wonder I don’t show my stuff to these savages. All they talk about is goddamn Life-Stills that I did a half century ago!”
“And your recent stuff has moved on from there?”
“Where it moved is none of your concern,” he answers coldly. “Now, are you saying I should give this tramp something to put on her walls? That seriously what you’re proposing?”
“The opposite. I’d say do not respond, even if Eva finds you. Hang up on her. Ignore her totally. Do not talk with her, and she’ll fade away. Don’t engage with any of these rats. Agreed?”
“They are goddamn rats!” Bear concurs, sniffing. Pinch knows that sniff—his father inflating with pride. “And they sure are taking notice,” he adds stiffly. “That kid yapping about me—what was it, Julius Schnozzle?”
“You mean Julian Schnabel? That was years back.”
“The guy couldn’t stop praising me. I’m his biggest influence. What a load of horse manure.”
“Not that you listened.”
“I don’t give a flying damn!” he says, sniffing.
“Dad, seriously, I think you should keep away from this. We’re agreed on that, right?”
1996
54
When Bear flies to New York to oversee the hanging at the Petros Gallery, Pinch is expected to be the artist’s aide. This presumption—that he drop everything and rush across the Atlantic to serve the great man—causes Pinch to throttle a towel in his bathroom. Because he must go now. Partly, it’s for self-preservation. But he has another motive, and tries not to dwell on it. It’s the thought of his father—the man is well into his eighties now—doddering around there, tripping up, making mistakes. Pinch shakes his head: the long, loud effect of fathers.
Out of pride, he sets a condition before he’ll attend. Bear must invite all his children to the opening—several have seen his paintings only in reproduction.
The gallery reserves the painter and son a suite at a stylishly underlit Midtown hotel, its employees as sleek as the guests, everyone dressed like hit men (hit men as imagined by Hollywood; lots of black Armani). Pinch winces apologetically to the check-in clerk when his father flirts with her. “I’d give you my room number,” Bear tells her, winking, “but I figure you noted it down already.” She laughs, for Bear is old enough now to find cute. And she perhaps noticed that his room is all-expenses-paid by a SoHo gallery that also left a mammoth gift arrangement of flowers, fruit, cheeses. This guy must be somebody.
In their suite, Bear dispatches the bellboy with a few bucks, closes the door, and slumps in an armchair, his forces spent at having acted as he once was, a front that he drops only around this child. “What does that say?” he asks, squinting at an itinerary left by the gallery. “Read it out for me, would you, Charlie?” Every item draws a sigh from Bear, who grumbles as if he’s above such crap, though it’s really because he’s afraid of managing all this. Pinch promises to cancel everything that isn’t mandatory. “Yes, can you?” Bear says with alacrity. “Please, do that, son.”
Shortly Bear has nodded off in that armchair and must be helped onto one of the king-size beds for an afternoon nap. He is unable to get his shoes off, so Pinch unlaces them. Everybody gushes about how Bear never slows down—he’s as driven today as when he was fifty! Because nobody is permitted to see this.
Dressing that evening, Bear blusters around the suite, cursing this palaver: to be trotted before art phonies, having to endure their imbecilic questions. Pinch stands at the perma-locked window, on the verge of confessing his forgery. What if Eva mentions the Mallard sale? She vowed not to, which means nothing. Pinch must prepare counterclaims. Am I walking into a public disaster? He stares down over West Forty-Sixth Street, remembering his last visit to this city, roaming Central Park, trying to summon the guts to see Barrows. That was right after Natalie died, when Bear told him: “Her pieces were never really first class.” Pinch’s outrage stirs anew at this man who rants behind him—those liver-spotted hands gesticulating, his dry lips flapping about the anguish of art-world attention.
During the town car ride to SoHo, neither of them speaks, each in his own funk. This will be the same gallery they visited together in 1965, though the neighborhood is much dolled up since then: yuppie pedestrians swinging shopping bags, gleaming storefronts, only a smattering of art spaces left. When the artist steps from the car, a welcoming committee awaits on the sidewalk: Eva (“Oh, let me kiss you, glorious Bear!”); a pretty publicist with orthodontically ideal whites (“You guys made it!”); and a bald gallery assistant in pink bowtie (“I am literally exploding with excitement right now”). To one side stands Connor Thomas, now on staff at Artforum, with ginger goatee and black eyeliner, long brown leather coat, and a red Manhattan Portage messenger bag that he clasps, dumbstruck before his idol. Everyone is gawking, not quite at Pinch, but near. It’s intoxicating, people approaching Pinch with earnest whispers, knowing that he alone has the ear of the grizzled legend.
Eva leads them all inside the gallery.
“You folks are all gussied up. I shoulda worn my dinner jacket!” Bear exclaims, inviting only one response, which Eva deftly offers.
“Your only duty is to be Bear Bavinsky.” She touches his arm. “Everything else—
that’s for us to worry about.”
“Being Bear Bavinsky is a job I can just about handle.” Winking, he stuffs a bolt of tobacco into his pipe.
“Ohmigod,” the pink-bowtied assistant says, biting his lower lip. “So sorry: There’s no smoking in here.”
“Felix, I hope you are fucking kidding,” Eva says. “Bear Bavinsky smokes wherever he likes. This is his house.”
“Ohmigod, yes.”
Next she calls over Connor, who wrote the catalog text.
“I’m so honored,” he tells Bear, bowing. “I was thinking earlier how, for me, this is like meeting a figure from history.”
“From history?” Eva retorts. “Bear is very much of this era.”
“No, right, of course!” Connor sputters, blushing. “Just mean I can hardly believe it. Not that—”
“What I’m most jazzed about,” Bear interrupts, heavy paw on Connor’s shoulder, “is meeting the writer who did that helluva magazine piece. Point the kid out, would you?” Bear scratches his beard, glancing mischievously around.
Connor lowers his head. “You’re too kind.” He looks up. “I can’t believe you read that. I’m so honored.”
“You keep being honored,” Bear quips, “then you’ll run out of honor altogether, and you know where that can land a fella!” Everyone laughs to excess. “Word is, you wrote the program notes too, and a damn good job. Here’s an idea. How’s about giving me a guided tour? What do you say?”
“Wait, what?”
“The bum’s name is Bavinsky, am I right?” Bear says, sniffing.
“I would be—”
The toothy publicist interposes, “Do not say ‘honored’!”
