Ruth has a point, she really does. A yellow light, a speeding car, a high-impact collision—that would be the best way for her to die, wouldn’t it? Given the current alternative? Ruth would never know what hit her. Except—here is where the thought goes astray—Clara and Sam would be with her. Clara finds her hand on the door latch. Ready to bolt at the next red light and pull Sammy out with her.
“Go down Ninth!” Ruth calls to the driver. They’re already passing Lincoln Center, just before the road splits. “Ninth Avenue!”
Clara can barely stand it. Something about being out in the open with Ruth, speeding down the wide open expanse of the avenue—the Afghan restaurants, the low seedy buildings, the concrete barricades in front of the Port Authority—she feels brittle. Breakable. She sneaks a glance at Sammy. How is she doing? She’s staring out the window, taking in every single thing. No conflicted emotions there. Nothing but excitement. And Ruth: her elegant profile, emaciated, the white scarf appearing like a turban. The dangling earrings—Moroccan gold—that Ruth requested just as they were leaving the apartment. As the car crosses 34th Street and heads down into Chelsea, Clara pulls out her cell phone and punches Robin on the speed dial.
“Robin Dunne.” The crisp, efficient voice, answering her own phone for a change.
“Hey there,” Clara says. Ruth is watching her. Who does Ruth think she’s calling?
“Where are you? I called the house, and there was no answer—”
“We’re on our way to Chelsea.” Clara pauses. “Mom wants to go gallery-hopping.”
“You’re kidding.” A long beat on the other end. “Clara, please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Um—no.”
“Let me talk to her.” Ruth holds out a hand for the phone.
Clara leans back into the soft, comfortable leather seat. At least there’s this. At least there’s plushness and privilege, tinted windows and climate control. She can hear the tinny sound of Robin lecturing Ruth over the cell phone.
“Stop it.” Ruth holds the phone away from her ear. “Robin, I don’t have to listen to this.” She looks at the key pad, squinting. “How do I hang up this thing?”
“Give me that!” Clara grabs the phone away. “Hello? Robin?”
“This is insanity,” Robin says. “She’s going to kill herself.”
Suicide by gallery-hopping. Clara hears beeping in the background, phones ringing. An entire switchboard lit up, waiting for her sister.
“Robin, could you please—”
“Oh, I’ve got to take that,” Robin says hurriedly. “Sorry.”
The line goes dead.
Breathe,
Clara tells herself.
Just keep breathing.
“There’s a show at Robert Miller I want to see,” Ruth says. “Twenty-four artists—‘The Subjective Figure’—and the fuckers didn’t ask me.”
“Mom! Watch your language!”
“Oh, really, darling. When you were a child, you heard far worse.”
“Are you sure you want to see the show, then?” Clara asks. The last thing she needs is an angry Ruth.
“Diane, Jean-Michel, Lucien, Alex Katz, Mapplethorpe.” Ruth continues as if Clara hadn’t spoken. “It’s absurd.” Her hand is wrapped around the door handle, knuckles white.
Sammy is watching them, eyes darting back and forth. How much is she understanding? What can she possibly make of any of this? In Southwest Harbor, grandparents are old people who live in Florida. Tennis-playing, golf-cart-driving leathery creatures smiling from ceramic picture frames.
The car turns right onto 24th Street, a block completely unfamiliar to Clara. What is this neighborhood? She has no recollection of ever being here before. The Chelsea of her childhood was a place to drive through on the way downtown, a blur of crumbling brown-stones and gay bars. Now, all the galleries she remembers from SoHo—fifteen, twenty years earlier—are here: the polished glass expanses of Mary Boone, Matthew Marks, Metro Pictures, one right after the other. As if the whole art world just simply up and moved.
“What happened to SoHo?” Clara asks Ruth. “Are there still galleries—”
“God, no.” Ruth is fiddling with her head scarf. “SoHo’s full of bankers. The artists drove up real estate values. The place is a mall now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Chanel, Louis Vuitton…you name it.” She pauses. “Pottery Barn. Oh, and J. Crew. Banana Republic.”
“So the galleries—”
“One by one, they moved here. Matthew was one of the first. Now, everybody’s on these couple of blocks.” Ruth pulls a compact from her purse, flips it open, and studies her face. Since when does she use a compact? Clara can’t even recall her ever carrying a purse. Nathan was in charge of the money. Ruth was like a queen, gliding through life without such pedestrian necessities as cash or identification or house keys.
“You can pull over here,” Ruth says to the driver. “Just in front of that hydrant.”
Clara climbs out of the back of the car and Sammy hops out after her. A few kids in their early twenties are smoking cigarettes in front of Metro Pictures. They give Clara and Sam a quick once-over, then go back to their conversation. Just another uptown mother and daughter doing a bit of gallery-hopping. Clara goes around back and pops open the trunk. The wheelchair is easier to lift from this angle—still, she struggles under its weight. It bangs against the curb as she tries to open it. Nobody thinks to help her. Why would they? They’re kids. Kids with black portfolios under their pale, emaciated arms: art students, most likely. They’re focused on each other, on this glorious sunny day—on this fantastically unassuming block where the keys to their careers are in the hands of just a few gallery owners who can turn a starving graduate student into a star overnight.
Clara sets the wheelchair on the sidewalk.
Thanks for nothing.
The driver has opened the door for Ruth and is standing at attention, as if expecting Ruth to get out under her own steam.
“Excuse me.” Clara bends over her mother, half dragging her to the wheelchair.
“Let me help.” Sammy grabs an elbow.
“I can do it myself,” Ruth says, her legs flopping like a rag doll’s.
“Please, just cooperate,” Clara says.
The art students stop talking and turn to watch, as if this whole exercise is some sort of strange new installation, a performance put on especially for them.
“Are you all right?” Clara lowers Ruth into the wheelchair.
“I’m fine.” Ruth shifts until she’s sitting up straight. She squares her shoulders and raises her chin, staring at the front door of Metro Pictures. Clara watches as her mother’s whole demeanor—no, more than her demeanor, her very
aura
—transforms.
“Let’s go inside. I must say hello,” Ruth says.
Ah, Clara realizes. Of course. Her mother is summoning every bit of her strength—one last time—to become Ruth Dunne.
The frigid air inside the gallery hits Clara like an icy wave. A shiver goes through her whole body. Goose bumps rise on her forearms. Why keep things so cold? It must be sixty-five degrees. Sammy’s going to freeze in her capris and cotton T-shirt. Ruth isn’t going to be able to tolerate this for very long, in her thin silk caftan, with no layer of body fat to protect her. Well, at least her head is covered.
“What is this show?” Ruth asks, as Clara begins to wheel her around. “I don’t understand it—do you?”
Clara studies the walls. The entire show is comprised of six gigantic photographs, clearly destined to be hung in enormous lofts. The photographs are oddly bright, a kind of heightened acid-trip Technicolor. The background of each picture appears to be a jungle. Superimposed on the dense green thicket are normal, corporate-looking people—men wearing suits, women carrying briefcases—and they are falling, weightless.
“I have no idea,” says Clara.
“An ironic comment on the post-nine-eleven universe,” says Ruth. “It’s a jungle out there. Blah, blah, blah.”
“I think it’s cool,” says Sammy.
Ruth reaches up and grasps Sammy’s hand.
“Samantha, let me explain,” she begins. “Art—real art,
good
art—does not strain the way this work does. Its metaphors are intrinsic, organic to the work itself. Not this overly stylized stuff that thunks you over the head—makes you think it’s
about
something, when really it’s just—”
Sammy’s brow is furrowed. She’s nodding, trying to follow Ruth. And Clara—Clara doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Metaphor? Intrinsic? Organic?
Does Ruth really think these words are in Sammy’s vocabulary?
A gallery assistant appears at their side.
“The photographer is twenty-two,” the assistant says. “This is her first solo show.”
“I see,” murmurs Ruth. “Clara? Can we move on?”
“But I thought—”
“Next!” Ruth says a bit too loudly.
Out on the street, Ruth looks so pale that her skin seems to be molting.
“Ridiculous,” she says to no one in particular. “To think my work has hung on those very same walls.”
Clara wheels her down the street. Sammy sticks close to her mother—nervous, perhaps. And with good reason. Ruth talks the whole time. Where is her energy coming from? Snatches of what she’s saying drift up to Clara like bits of debris from the sidewalk.
Derivative
and
silly
and
conceptual overintellectualized crap.
Ruth looks tiny from Clara’s vantage point behind the wheelchair. Her legs are a phosphorescent white, poking out from the hem of her caftan, useless against their metal rests.
“Over here. Let’s see what Andrea’s up to.” Ruth points to the glass doors of the Andrea Rosen Gallery. “She usually has good taste. Ah, a group show. I always like a good group show.”
Clara pushes Ruth slowly around the perimeter of the gallery. Ruth’s gaze is careful, assessing. She nods slightly at a moody black-and-white portrait of an old woman, a tight close-up by a southern photographer.
“Now that”—she grasps Sammy’s hand again and points at the wall—“that is genuinely evocative. Unforgiving.” She gazes up at Sammy. “Do you know what I mean by that?”
“I think so,” Sammy says. “You mean we can see everything?”
“Exactly!” Ruth beams at her young pupil. They keep moving. Next, a delicate, extremely intricate pencil drawing—truthfully, it looks like an elaborate doodle, something the artist might have drawn while on a very long phone conversation. Then, a large piece—the largest of all—a photograph of a furry extraterrestrial creature in the midst of a fancy cocktail party.
“Lord. Will you look at that,” Ruth says.
Clara peers at the plaque next to the photograph.
“He’s a Los Angeles artist.”
“Would you get me the catalog and price list, Clara?”
No one seems to be in the gallery—literally no one, not even an assistant. Clara picks the price list off a clear Lucite table and brings it over to Ruth.
“Incredible,” Ruth murmurs, looking through it. “All these kids, two years out of art school—”
“What?”
“The prices! Sixty thousand dollars,” she says. “For E.T. drinking a martini.”
Ruth looks around the whole room. “Over there. Samantha, do you see that Chuck Close? Do you know who Chuck Close is?”
“No.”
“A genius,” Ruth says. “One of the greats. And do you know why he’s in this show?”
“Why?” Sammy is nearly breathless. Overwhelmed, Clara can see. Pulled into the force field of Ruth’s vision.
“To lend credibility to the rest of this mediocre stuff, that’s why.” Ruth slaps the catalog on her lap. “I’m disappointed in Andrea.”
“Please, Mom,” Clara finally snaps. “Keep your voice down.”
The familiar embarrassment. The desire to distance herself—to pretend that she has nothing to do with Ruth Dunne.
“Why? No one can hear me. And anyway, if you display your work, you invite criticism. The problem with the world is that everyone is too polite. This is terrible work—terrible!”
Ruth’s voice cracks.
Clara feels a cruel streak rise inside of her.
What’s wrong?
she almost asks.
Are you afraid that when you die you’re going to disappear, just like the rest of us? That your work is going to end up stored in the back rooms of galleries? That—in the end—what you did just didn’t matter that much?
“Let’s go,” commands Ruth. “I can’t bear it.”
Outside, the street is filling up with the lunchtime art crowd. A couple of gray-haired men in jeans and tailored jackets. A tall woman in a black suit, talking into her cell phone. A skateboarder weaves by, carrying a portfolio under his arm.
Ruth really does look like she’s about to keel over. Clara looks up the block for the dark blue town car. Now there are several town cars just like it, idling outside of gallery doors.
“Do you remember that trip, Clara?” Ruth asks dreamily. “When we visited Barbara Gladstone in Todi?”
“Not really,” Clara says.
“Samantha.”
Sam looks up.
“When your mother was a little girl,” Ruth begins, “no more than five or six, the owner of this gallery rented an old rectory in Italy. It was the most marvelous place—”