By Nightfall (19 page)

The Groff urn, it must be said, feels like an object that could hold its own. It has that most vital and least describable of the fundamental qualities—authority. You know it when you see it. Certain pieces occupy space with an assertiveness that’s related to but not exactly contingent upon their observable, listable merits. It’s part of the mystery; it’s part of why we love it so (those of us who do). The Sistine Chapel isn’t just brilliantly painted, it’s like an orchestra. It fills the chapel in ways a flat painted surface cannot, in terms of the ordinary laws of physics.

Peter gets up close. Here on the urn’s side are the inscribed rants and atrocities, orderly as hieroglyphics, done in a controlled, slightly feminine, cursive hand. On the side facing Peter: at least forty repulsive slang terms for the female sex organ; the lyrics to a truly vile, misogynist and homophobic hip-hop song (Peter doesn’t recognize it, he’s nowhere near that hip); a section from Valerie Solanas’s Society for Cutting Up Men Manifesto (he does recognize that); something reprehensible from a website about some guy’s search for lactating women who’ll squirt into his mouth.

It’s good. It’s fucked up, but it’s good. It not only has presence as an object, it has actual content, which is rare these days—content, that is, beyond a fragment of a fragment of a simple idea. It refers simultaneously to all the glossed-over history we’ve grown up with, all those artistic tributes to Great Monuments and Hard-Won Victories that fail to note the grunty human suffering involved, and at the same time presents itself as a thing that could in theory at least survive into the distant future, one in which (sez Groff) different home truths will be told.

Maybe Peter’s been too hard on himself. And on Groff.

And yes, Peter is already preparing his spiel for Carole. In fact, in truth, it’s more than good enough. It’s an embodied idea, a single idea, that may lead nowhere in particular but is not, on the surface, a naïve or jejune idea. Plus, rare these days, it’s a pretty thing. These are assets.

“This is a great one,” Peter says.

“Thanks.”

Carole will (probably) be tickled by the feminism implied by all this vicious misogyny. She’s no fan of shock for shock’s sake (what was he thinking of, trying to sell her the Krim?), but this serene and poisonous object will give her something to talk about, something to explain to the Chens and the Rinxes and the whomevers.

“I’d love to show it to Carole. Does that still seem like a good idea to you?”

“Yeah. It does.”

“And I told you about how she’d like to see it at her place, like,
now.”

“Miz Potter is used to getting what she wants, huh?”

“Well, yeah. But she’s really and truly not an asshole. And if we can get it installed in her garden by tomorrow, the next day Zhi and Hong Chen will see it. As you probably know, the Chens are huge buyers.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Let’s.”

They stand together for a moment, looking at the urn.

“My guys are going up there tomorrow to take down the Krim,” Peter says. “They could take the urn with them when they go.”

“What does Krim put
in
those things?” Groff asks.

“Tar. Resin. Horsehair.”

“And . . .”

“Frankly he’s a little private about some of his materials. I respect that.”

“I heard one of them dripped all over the floor at MoMA.”

“That’s why the floors are concrete. So. What if I got here with my team at noon tomorrow?”

“You work fast, Peter Harris.”

“I do. And I can promise you Carole won’t haggle about the price. Not when we’re doing her a favor like this.”

“Good. And noon is fine,” Groff says.

“I’ll bring papers and things with me tomorrow, I don’t expect you to just loan me the piece.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“Okay, then,” Peter says. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

They shake hands, head back to the elevator. Groff must live in a relatively tiny place behind the studio—the loft can’t possibly be
that
big. It’s a fetish, of sorts, especially with these young guys—the work space is impeccable and the living area tends slightly toward an adolescent’s bedroom. Ratty mattress on the floor, clothes tossed everywhere, toaster oven and minifridge, a truly shockingly dirty, cramped little bathroom. Peter wonders sometimes if it’s compensation for the hint of effeminacy implied by declaring oneself an artist.

Groff rings for the elevator. And now, a brief awkwardness. They’ve said what they have to say, and this elevator is
slooow.

Peter: “If Carole decides to commit to the piece, I’m sure she’d love for you to come up and see it in situ.”

“I always insist on that, actually. This is on trial for both of us, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Garden, right?”

“Yeah, an English garden, a little wild and overgrown. As opposed to, you know, a French garden.”

“Sounds nice.”

“It’s really nice. You can’t see the water from the garden, but you can hear it.”

Groff nods. What is it about this transaction, why does it feel . . . why does it feel like
what?
This is how they always go.

It’s the business thing, of course it’s that, Velázquez and Leonardo and everyone struck deals. Still, there’s something about Groff’s, about most artists’, levelheadedness, regarding the buyer and the work. A certain proprietary calm. And would Peter rather work with hysterics, would he prefer nut jobs who demand shows of reverence, who take crazy offense at innocent remarks, who refuse at the last minute to part with the work after all? Of course he wouldn’t.

But still. And yet.

As the elevator groans its way up, Peter realizes: in historical terms, most of these people, Groff and so many others, are the guildsmen, the carvers and casters; they’re the ones who paint the backgrounds and apply the gold leaf. They feel pride in and detachment from their work. They have the customary array of louche habits but they’re not nut jobs, they’re laborers, they have to be in this economy. They put in their hours. They sleep at night.

Where are the visionaries, then? Have they all been lost to drugs and discouragement?

The elevator doors grumble open, and he gets in.

“See you tomorrow at twelve, then,” he says.

“Yep. See you then.”

The elevator makes its whining way down to level one.

Peter’s gut heaves. Fuck, is he going to be sick
again?
He touches the corpse-colored Formica elevator wall to steady himself. And thinks, suddenly, unbidden, of Matthew, bone now and scraps of burial suit under the still-hard ground of a Milwaukee cemetery (April is still winter out there). It’s too much, isn’t it, all these young men and women doing well or doing badly but alive, alive, when Matthew was (okay,
maybe
he was) handsomer and smarter and more gifted than any of them; Matthew, whose comeliness and grace not only didn’t save him but (terrible thought) helped to annihilate him; Matthew, who lies entombed now a thousand miles from Daniel (wherever Daniel is buried, it must be somewhere on the East Coast), who as it turns out was Matthew’s true and lasting love; his actual Beatrice (is that why Peter insisted on the name?), two young men erased from the world still unaccomplished, still nascent; and who knows what it means, if it means anything, that Peter can hardly bear it, the nothing that Matthew’s life came to, who knows what if anything it has to do with Peter’s need to help, if help he can, in the procreation of something marvelous, something that will endure, something that will tell the world (poor forgetful world) that evanescence is not all; that someone someday (alien archeologists?) must know that our striving and our charms existed, that we were loved, that we mattered not only in what we left behind but in our proud if perishable flesh?

Ground floor. You’ve survived the elevator. Take your queasy stomach and go out into South Williamsburg, take yourself back to your life.

Rebecca meets Peter at the door that evening, has an unusually passionate kiss for him.

“How’d it go?” Peter asks. Fuck, he forgot to call her during the day. Then again, she didn’t call him either, did she?

“Not bad,” she says. As she speaks she goes into the kitchen, to make their postworkday martinis. She’s still dressed for work. She did, in fact, go back to the black pencil skirt and the brown cashmere.

“I think he’s going to make an offer,” she says. “I think we’re going to accept it.”

Peter, according to habit, starts undressing as he wanders around the living room. Shoes kicked off, jacket shed and slung over the back of the sofa.

Wait a minute.

“Is Mizzy here?” he asks.

She drops the ice cubes into the shaker. Lovely, comforting sound.

“No. He’s having dinner with a friend. Some girl he used to know.”

“Are we . . . concerned about that?”

“We’re a little concerned about everything. He seems slightly funny to me this time.”

He’s doing drugs again, Rebecca. Peter Harris, tell your wife that her little brother is back on drugs. Do it now.

“Funnier than usual?” he asks.

“I can’t tell.” She pours vodka into the shaker, and a medium-size dollop of vermouth. Lately they’ve both gone heavier on the vermouth—they’ve taken to actual, fifties-style martinis.

She says, “He left me a voice mail, he said he was having dinner with an old girlfriend, and he wouldn’t be late.”

“That doesn’t sound suspicious.”

“I know. And still, I keep thinking, is ‘old girlfriend’ some kind of code word? For you-know-what. But really, I’ve got to stop this, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Was I like this with Bea?”

“Bea wasn’t doing drugs.”

“Do we even know that? I mean, how would we?”

“Well. Bea is alive and well.”

“Bea is alive. I pray every single day that she’ll get well.”

“Well-
er.
”

“Mm-hm.”

Rebecca shakes the ice and liquor and is briefly a rough-and-ready goddess working in a roadhouse somewhere, she’d need a change of outfit, but look at her, look at the butch assurance with which she shakes those drinks, imagine how she could take you into the back room of some bar and fuck you on top of the beer cases, coolly passionate and dazzlingly practiced, and then after you’d both come she’d get right back to work, she’d slip you a quick sly wink from behind the bar and tell you the next one’s on the house.

She pours the martinis into two stemmed glasses. Peter comes into the kitchen for his, unbuttoning his shirt.

“You know what really pisses me off about Mizzy?” she says.

“What?”

“That I’ve been talking about him for the last five minutes, and I haven’t told you anything about the deal.”

“Tell me about the deal.”

He takes a glass from the countertop. They click their glasses together, sip. God, it’s delicious.

“The main thing is, this Jack Rath character sounded so much better over the phone than we’d expected him to. It’s terrible, I know, but I think we’d all expected him to sound a little like John Huston in
Chinatown.”

“And instead he sounded like . . .”

“Instead he sounded like an intelligent, articulate man who’s lived in New York and London and Zurich, and, you know,
Jupiter,
and has now gone back to his home town of Billings, Montana.”

“Because . . .”

“Because it’s beautiful and people are kind and his mother is starting to go out in public with three hats on.”

“Convincing.”

“He did
sound
convincing. I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.”

“Do we know why he wants to buy the magazine?”

“He wants Billings to become a remote but plausible arts center. Like Marfa.”

Uh-oh.

“So,” Peter says, “let me guess. He wants to move the operation to Billings.”

“
No.
That didn’t come up, I’m sure he knows how impossible that would be. No. In exchange for keeping us alive, he wants us to advise him about culture and, oh, you know. Help him figure out how to
start
something.”

She eyes him warily, sips at her drink.
Peter, don’t get pissy about this.

“What does he want you to start?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” She is patient, she is calm. And, all right, she’s
handling
him, because she knows how he can be about the whole idea of “starting something cultural” in Billings or
anywhere,
all that calculation, that whiff of the corporate. Shouldn’t “something cultural” start itself?

But Rebecca doesn’t want a battle, not now, not tonight.

She says, “It can’t be a film festival or a biennial or anything like that. It’s an interesting challenge. We’ve all decided to think of it as an interesting challenge.”

Peter laughs, she laughs back, they take big hearty slugs of their drinks.

She says, “It seems a small enough price to pay. Don’t you think?”

“I do.”

“Did you go to that guy’s studio?”

“Yeah. The work is nice.”

“Nice?”

“Let’s order something, I’m starving.”

“Chinese or Thai?”

“You pick.”

“Okay, Chinese.”

“Why not Thai?”

“Fuck you.”

She hits speed dial on her cell, orders the usual. Ginger chicken, prawns with black bean sauce, dry-fried string beans, brown rice.

“So,” she says, after she’s clicked off.
“Nice?”

“No, no, much better than that. They look amazing. They have a presence that doesn’t really show up in the photographs.”

Peter drops his pants, steps out of them, leaves them puddled on the floor. He’ll pick his clothes up later, it’s not something he expects his wife to do, but he loves just throwing them anywhere, for the time being. He is now a man with reservations, who is wearing white briefs (small pee stain, barely noticeable).

“Do you think Carole Potter will want one?” she asks.

“I wouldn’t be half surprised. She should buy one. Groff’ll be around for quite a while, I think.”