By Nightfall (9 page)

Uta emerges from her office, coffee mug in hand. Hennaed nest of hair, heavy-framed Alain Mikli glasses. There had been an air of charged possibility between them for a while, a couple of years ago, when Rebecca was in the throes of her crush on the photographer from L.A. It was the time, if ever there were such a time, for Peter to have a little something going on—Rebecca seemed to want him to. Uta was clearly willing, and it seemed that she’d prefer it as a fling (terrible word), a final tipping-over after all the working together, traveling together, living Mondays through Saturdays in that semi-erotic almost-but-not-quite realm of physical proximity. She’d have been sexy and tough and affectionate, no question; she’d have been offended by the suggestion that she might expect more (
Zo, you tink vimmen only fock you to zee vat dey can get for it?
). And yet. Maybe Peter felt he could see it all too clearly: the wised-up, Weimar cynicism, a sweet and weary cynicism, but still; the cigarettes and coffee and banter; the whole bitterly humorous nihilistic
German
-ness of it. Because Uta
is
German,
utterly
German, which of course is probably why she left there, and insists that she’ll never go back.

Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

Several months later Rebecca fell out of her infatuation with the photographer, and as far as Peter knew they never had more than that one kiss by the nocturnal pool in the Hollywood Hills. He and Uta still work together, as always, more or less as always, though there are times when he feels that they came so close to having sex, fatally close, and that because they didn’t go through with it a certain tension has gone slack, and some enlivening possibility between them is lost forever. They are beginning to grow companionably old together.

“Carole Potter called,” she says.

“Already?”

“Darling, Carole Potter gets up in the mornings and feeds her fucking
chickens.
”

Right. Carole Potter, heiress to a kitchen appliance fortune, lives on a farm in Connecticut. A Marie Antoinette–style farm, granted: herb gardens, exotic chickens that cost as much as purebred dogs. Still, you have to acknowledge—she works it. She reams out the chickens’ shit, gathers their eggs. When Peter was there for dinner last year, she’d shown him a newly laid egg, which was an impossibly, heartbreakingly pale blue-green, specked with scraps of feather, smeared along its obverse end with a skidmark of red-brown blood.
This is what they look like before we clean them up
, Carole had said. And Peter had said (or, more likely, thought), I’d love to find an artist who could do something like this.

A list wants to form in his mind.

New eggs, all specked and bloody.

Bette standing at the mouth of the shark.

Mizzy sitting, every day, in a monastery in Japan.

It’s a triptych, isn’t it? Birth, death, and all the whatever in between.

“Carole wants you to call her back,” Uta says.

“Did she say what it’s about?”

“I think we know.”

“Yeah.”

Carole Potter isn’t happy with the Sasha Krim. It is, as they say, a challenging piece, but Peter had hoped . . .

“Any other vexations to report?” he asks.

“I love the word ‘vexations.’ ”

“It’s the ‘x.’ Nice to jump off a ‘v’ and bite into an ‘x’ like that.”

“Just the usual ones,” she says.

“How was the weekend?”

“Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?”

“Bette Rice has breast cancer. She told me on Sunday.”

“How bad?”

“I don’t know. Well. Bad, I think. She’s closing, she wants to steer Rupert Groff our way.”

“Fantastic.”

“Is it?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“What do you think about his work?”

“I like it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Then don’t take him on.”

“His stuff is starting to sell. Rumor has it, Newton has his eye on him.”

“Then do take him on.”

“Come on.”

“Peter, darling, you know what I have to say.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She sighs voluptuously. She could so easily be a Klimt portrait, with her wide-set eyes and bony little apostrophe of a nose.

She says, “Taking on an artist you don’t love who sells a lot of work helps pay for the artists you do love who don’t sell a lot of work. Did you really need me to tell you that?”

“It seems I did.”

“It’s probably not going to happen anyway. One of the big ones will grab him.”

“But I’m either going to talk to him, or I’m not.”

“It’s a business, Peter.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t look at me like I’m the devil. Don’t you dare.”

“Sorry. I know you’re not the devil.”

“The trouble, little friend, is you like to think you’re right and the rest of the world is wrong.”

“Is there something even slightly heroic about that?”

“No,” she says. “There’s not.”

Knowing an exit line when she hears one, she returns to her office.

He goes into his office, picks up a file he left on his desk on Saturday, and puts it on top of the file cabinet. There’s no real reason for him to do that, it’s just the Monday morning settling-in, the reannouncing of his presence to whatever low hum of inanimate soul-surge has resided here during the thirty-two hours he’s been elsewhere.

He gets himself a cup of coffee, walks back out into the gallery. He seems, lately, to be wandering alone rather often through familiar rooms, with some beverage or other. Is that how Bacon would have painted him? Horrible thought. He should have bought that Bacon drawing at the auction in ’95, it had seemed too expensive, but it’s worth five times the price now. Another disquieting thought. Stocks rise and fall and rise again.

Here they are. The Vincents. There they go.

And then, briefly, there will be the empty gallery, its white walls and concrete floor. You create a pristine emptiness for the work to inhabit. Peter always loves the short periods during which the gallery is unoccupied by art. There’s something about the austere, perfect room that promises art superior to what any human being could produce, no matter how brilliant; it’s the hush before the orchestra starts up, the dimming of the lights before the curtain rises. That’s what Vincent is all about. The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine, the art the room expects. That’s what Mizzy was doing, that month in Japan, isn’t it? Sitting in an emptiness, trying to imagine something greater than the hand of man can create. Poor kid wasn’t up to it. Who is?

And hey. The Vincents didn’t really sell, did they?

So. There will be a period of nothing, and then the next show. Victoria Hwang, mid-career, underappreciated but starting to attract serious attention for reasons Peter can’t quite decipher—these things can be mysterious, some gut consensus among a small but influential body of people that it’s time, that these objects suddenly matter more than they initially appeared to (in Victoria’s case, a series of enigmatic videos, all of which are shot on the streets of Philadelphia and from which she produces ancillary merchandise—action figures, lunch boxes, T-shirts—based on random pedestrians, all of them obscure and ordinary, who’ve walked briefly and unknowingly past the camera). They’re crazy-making, these sea changes. They’re not calculated, not in the sense of a conspiracy of international art dealers (sometimes he wishes they were), but they’re not exactly about the art, either. They’re impossibly intricate responses to a billion tiny shifts in the culture, in politics, in the ions of the goddamned
atmosphere
; you can’t anticipate them or understand them but you can feel them coming, as animals are supposed to be able to feel an earthquake hours before it occurs. He’s been showing Victoria for five years now, talking her up, he’s had a feeling, and suddenly, sure enough, for obscure reasons, people are starting to give a shit. Ruth at the Whitney wants to see them. So does Eve at the Guggenheim.
Artforum
is doing a piece on her next month.

He’s got Victoria’s show pretty much hung in his mind already, but Vic will of course have ideas of her own. Although she still hasn’t delivered the work, and there’s some question about the reliability of her vows to have it here by tomorrow morning, she is not by any means one of the more difficult ones, and he thanks God for that. It’s the last show of the season, he’s tired—he’d have to say he’s been flirting, every now and then, with actual despair—and is suitably grateful for the precise if strangely languid intelligence of Vic Hwang. She’s slow, but she won’t get the show up and then insist on taking it down and starting over. If the work doesn’t sell, she’ll blame herself as much as she blames Peter.

Plus she is, it seems, about to have a Career.

Bock Vincent, sad to say, is probably not. Things aren’t going his way—lovely, gentle enigma is not looking like a growth field, and Bock doesn’t have much range. What did Uta just say?
You sink you’re right und die rest of zee vorld iss wrung.
If that’s not Peter Harris, it’s surely Bock Vincent. He was an oddball (even by Bard standards) when Peter met him—faunlike, fragile in a vaguely inbred, Edwardian way, capable of a touching if exasperating earnestness. Bard took a gamble on him. As did Peter.

Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist’s work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed “interesting” or “promising” but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What’s astonishing to Peter is the way the work itself seems to change, more or less in the way of a reasonably pretty girl who is suddenly treated as a beauty. Peculiar, clever Victoria Hwang is going to be in
Artforum
next month, and probably in the collections of the Whitney and the Guggenheim; Renée Zellweger—moonfaced, squinty-eyed, a character actress if ever there was one—was just on the cover of
Vogue
, looking ravishing in a silver gown. It is, of course, a trick of perception—the understanding that that funny little artist or that quirky-looking girl must be taken with new seriousness—but Peter suspects there’s a deeper change at work. Being the focus of that much attention (and, yes, of that much money) seems to differently excite the molecules of the art or the actress or the politician. It’s not just a phenomenon of altered expectations, it’s a genuine transubstantiation, brought about by altered expectations. Renée Zellweger becomes a beauty, and would look like a beauty to someone who had never heard of her. Victoria Hwang’s videos and sculptures are about, it seems, to become not just intriguing and amusing but significant.

Sorry, Bock Vincent.

What happens to these new young stars who don’t deliver? Where do they go when they’re passé at twenty-six?

Okay. Where will Bock go if Peter drops him? Peter can’t afford to show work that isn’t moving. And he likes the work, he likes it a great deal, but he doesn’t adore it, he wouldn’t reach into the fire for it.

Nor would he for Victoria Hwang, though he’d never admit that, to anyone.

Please, God, send me something to adore.

So, the workday begins.

Carole Potter? Not right away. Start off with Tyler and his crew.

Yeah, they’ll be there by noon, 12:30 at the latest, to crate the Vincents,
Don’t worry man, we’ll
be
there
. Tyler is sounding peevish lately; Peter hires him as a favor to Rex Goldman but he’s suspected from the beginning that it’s a mistake, always a mistake, to hire young artists for grunt work, they get resentful as their own stuff continues to go unheralded, they can’t
fucking believe
the crap that’s actually
in
galleries, and before you know it they’ve “accidentally” destroyed something. You want to help young artists, plus of course Tyler is a protégé (and more?) of Rex’s, but Peter has a feeling—this should be Tyler’s last job for him, so really it’s goodbye to Tyler
and
Bock, I’m genuinely sorry, young men, though that of course won’t play, I’m your father all over again, callous and competitive and standing in your way.

Carole Potter? Not yet.

Call Victoria’s voice mail, she’s one of those people who never ever answers her phone. Vic, it’s Peter, just checking in, let me know if I can help with anything, can’t wait to see the new work.
Please, Victoria, be telling the truth when you say all the work is actually finished. Please, Victoria, now that you’re breaking through, don’t dump me for another dealer, though of course that’s exactly what we both know you’re going to do.

Call Ruth at the Whitney, Eve at the Guggenheim, leave messages with their assistants confirming Ruth at eleven on Thursday and Eve at two. Messages also with the assistants of Newton at MoMA and Marla at the Met, on the off chance.

Then on down the list of collectors. Ackerlick through Zelman. No one picks up, for which Peter is grateful. Messages are so much easier:
Hey, it’s Peter Harris, just a reminder about Victoria Hwang’s private opening on Thursday, it’s pretty remarkable stuff, if you’d like to see it but can’t make the opening do give me a call, bye.

Okay. Carole Potter.

“Potter residence.”

“Hello, Svenka. It’s Peter Harris.”

“Hellooo, just a minute, please. I’ll see if Carole’s free.”

A full minute passes.

“Peter, hello.”

“Hi, Carole.”

“Sorry, I was digging in the garden. Are you glad the season is ending?”

“Oh, you know. Bittersweet. How are the chickens?”

“Three of them have some awful fungus. It’s harder to love chickens than I’d thought.”

“I’ve never known a chicken all that well.”

“Frankly, they’re pretty stupid and more than a little mean.”

“Like about half the people we know.”