Crazy for Cornelia (7 page)

“About Sebastian?”

“You must be psychic. I’m on another call, sweetie.” Her laughter tinkled before she disconnected him.

Kevin felt the gnawing in his stomach smooth out slightly. Jessica’s greedy-merchant giggle promised good news. And she had
invited Kevin to the gallery, not her habit. She practically lit matches to keep her artists away.

Kevin walked eighty-two blocks against the freezing wind to West Broadway, the main street of SoHo. Here, dozens of galleries
dangled Real Art before the leather-and-Lexus crowd. Every Saturday, middle-aged lawyers and dentists struggled to pull their
jeans over growing paunches. Then they drove to West Broadway to buy the kind of art they couldn’t find on Madison Avenue.
This crowd liked the gritty, nothing-to-lose artists of Alphabet City. But their Lexuses could disappear from Alphabet City
in a puff of exhaust fumes, or crackheads might cut their leather jackets off their backs. Instead, they visited the Stinson
Gallery. At the Stinson, SoHo’s premier gallery, Jessica Fernandez showed the work of Alphabet City artists where it was safe
for the patrons to see it. He suspected that Jessica Fernandez didn’t know much about art, but she sure knew how to hype artists.

Kevin entered the vast, well-lighted space, carved out of an old cast-iron building with black Grecian columns. Slabs of glass
faced the street, allowing sunlight to pour in. A tiny plaque outside read “Stinson” in letters designed to be illegible,
to make buyers believe the gallery was their secret.

Jessica Fernandez, thirty-ish, was perched with her legs crossed at a small white desk, holding a phone between two fingers
with nails painted blue metalflake. She looked voluptuous with moussed jet-black hair worn in a wanton, pillow-ready style,
wearing a sleek black dress and silver jewelry. Her eyebrows stood up in little peaks while her eyes lazily appraised Kevin,
and her candy-red lips made an insinuating smirk. But he never heard her talk about anything but business.

“Evan, it’s not selling,” she kept saying into the phone.

Kevin knew she had another forlorn artist twisting on the other end. He felt sorry for Evan, whoever he was. But he also felt
a terrible worm of delight wriggling in his chest.

Another artist taken out!

He hated letting that selfish thought creep in. Young artists in New York fought to survive. They exposed their work bravely,
hoping no one would smell their fear. Most would be poisoned to death. Only
a few would get lucky. Now poor Evan felt Jessica’s fangs locking in through the phone. The good part, although Kevin hated
to admit it, was that Jessica’s getting her venom out on another artist meant she wouldn’t be hungry for a while. He’d be
spared his Art Death this time.

Kevin made a point of looking at other pieces in the gallery before homing in on his Saint Sebastian. It seemed more businesslike,
less desperate.

He started through the sleek but soulless space. The relentless white of the drywall sometimes disturbed him, suggesting a
clinic for sick art.

“Evan, nobody cares what some artist thinks,” he heard Jessica tell the phone, exasperated.

He approached his neon saint. It stood up on its pedestal in a corner of the gallery, roughly where the kitchen door would
be in a restaurant.

Kevin contemplated his Sebastian. Giotto might have painted the first three-dimensional saints, but Kevin Doyle had sculpted
the first saint that lit up.

Emotions laid bare, rendered by simple lines
was the phrase he’d read in his mom’s art book, describing how Giotto made the divine look human. He identified easily with
Giotto, who started out a peasant. He’d cut and stripped saplings for his frames, mixed his own paints from patches of colored
earth he dug from the ground.

It had taken Kevin two years to achieve the level of technical perfection in front of him. Two years and $995 a month to the
New York Institute of Art and Technology—barely made each month thanks to his lousy night jobs, and a little help from his
mom. At NYIAT most students make neon advertising signs. But a lucky few got to work with Max Freuhling, who Kevin considered
a real neon artist.

Max taught him the science of flameworking, how to cut and splice the opaque white-glass tubing that was only a quarter-inch
in diameter. Then how to bend the fragile tube over a fire, careful as a diamond cutter. He showed Kevin how to pump the noble
gases of krypton and argon through the tubing to achieve the bright neon colors. He gave him the ability to take meaningless
tubing, shoot it full of gas, and plug the creation into a wall socket to buzz lightly and throw
off a brazen light that wasn’t beautiful or subtle, but packed a rude look-at-me power.

Kevin had to admit that he brought a certain grace to flame-working. He had carefully sculpted the glass tubing so his simple
design could be instantly recognized, and not just from the arrows sticking out of Sebastian’s chest like a porcupine. His
sculpture laid bare the character and emotions of Saint Sebastian through simple lines and curves. It hummed loudly, almost
proudly, from the electricity stirring the juice of the noble gases pumping harsh and violent color through his saint.

He designed the sculpture to be life-size, but a little smaller than his own body because ancient Romans had been smaller
than Americans. He created it with tubular strokes and squiggles. Sebastian’s profile was proud, an uptown saint. The suggestion
of arch features and curly hair worked, too. He had given Sebastian the outline of a broad chest, and bent two tubes perfectly
to portray sinewy arms on either side of it, tied behind his back.

For Sebastian’s flesh, he used a pink tone, as close as he could find to real flesh color. For the arrow wounds, he added
little red circles around the holes he’d created with thin wires in the blank space of his chest. That’s where he mounted
the slim, pure white arrows. It was hard work getting the arrows right, keeping the shafts pointed out naturally and kind
of gracefully, with the hint of feathers at the end. He could have faked them, made it easy. But, in his art experience, the
easy way was always the wrong way.

Except for the garish colors and the slight bend of the halo, the sculpture was as good as any neon sculpture he’d ever seen.

Still, the track lights several feet over Sebastian’s head made the buzzing tubes look stark and kind of flat. Kevin had struggled
to give Sebastian an inner glow. His instructor’s own neon work shimmered more subtly, although he used the same tubes Kevin
did. Like real art. Kevin could never get that look.

And the saint’s halo still disappointed him. It wasn’t gold like the shiny halos Giotto crafted painstakingly, buying scraps
of leftover gold leaf from artisans known then as gold beaters. Neon gases didn’t burn gold. So, instead, he used the next
best thing—a small curve of light blue that looked like the sky around Sebastian’s head.

In blazing pink and white with little drops of red, Kevin had outlined both the pain and hope of the flesh-and-blood martyr.
At least it felt that way to him.

In the two years it took him to get it right, he tried to ignore the other neon students who had laughed their asses off at
his subject matter, not to mention his attention to detail. But if he didn’t make it perfect, what was the point?

The only thing that could make Sebastian’s colored gases look less like a beer sign was if they adjusted the spotlights on
the ceiling mount over his head. He’d ask Jessica for a ladder to do it himself, to make zero trouble for her.

“I’m hanging up now,” Jessica Fernandez said loudly into the telephone. He heard a short scream escape from the receiver before
it clattered into its housing. Jessica smiled brightly.

“Jessica.” He tried to sound helpful. “I was just thinking…”

Jessica’s smile held. “Kevin, I have to ask you to move your piece.”

“Move it where?” he asked her.

“Out of the gallery.”

Kevin felt dizzy. “It hasn’t even been here three weeks…”

Jessica waved her hand dismissively. “Darling, people don’t really get it. I have a bigger piece coming in and need the floor
space.”

Kevin looked back at the sculpture, his pulse racing and stomach boiling. “I can fix the halo.”

She frowned and waved her perfect metallic-blue nails dismissively.

“Sweetie, a glass saint? I gave you mercy space. I mean, there used to be a neon gallery down the street called Let There
Be Neon, or something.” She wrinkled her nose.

“Where is it now?” Kevin asked.

“My point exactly. Neon’s just too accessible. It’s… mall art.”

Mall art
.

So this was what Art Death felt like. Words like arrows slamming through his deep tissue, piercing his organs.

“Too accessible?” he repeated.

“Yes,” she said.

Kevin walked over to the Hoover vacuum cleaner placed on a
white pedestal. He knelt down and read the card aloud, very deadpan. “Hoover, $38,000.”

Jessica folded her arms. “Don’t be linear, Kevin.”

Kevin saw in her blank face that she’d moved on. He stood up. It had happened just like his mother’s death. You showed up
and got the news. End of story. No appeal. Now all he could do was take his Art Death like a man. Not like some mewling puke,
like poor Evan on the phone.

“Okay. Listen, Jessica. I appreciate you giving it a shot. You did a nice thing for me.”

Jessica’s face came unclenched. She actually walked over to him and touched his arm. “You’re promising, Kevin,” she purred.
“You have an eye. But this isn’t your time.”

Kevin took off his jacket and wrapped it gently around the face of the sculpture.

“Keep in touch,” Jessica lied.

Kevin unplugged the saint. The humming stopped and the bright color fizzled out of the tubes. It stood bleached and frail
now, a skeleton. He made sure his leather jacket fully protected Sebastian’s face and shoulders.

He lifted the piece with great care and balanced it. Kevin’s eyes burned, but he said nothing as he struggled to cradle the
fragile sculpture, eighty pounds with transformer, clutching it to his chest. Keeping the slender arrows sticking out directly
in front of him so he wouldn’t crush them, Kevin fought the door, got outside, and started walking. Jaded New Yorkers, who
wouldn’t miss a step walking around the bodies of a drive-by massacre piled up on the sidewalk, turned to stare at him. He
shivered without his leather jacket.

He walked uptown like he carried a six-foot egg, trying to roll on his heels so he wouldn’t jolt the thin glass tubing, glancing
down to scan for dog shit he might slip on. His hands and eyes stung in the gusting wind. But he soldiered on until he reached
the filthy old cast-iron building on West 14th Street, six stories high, that had been a sweatshop a hundred years before.
He rang the bell labeled “New York Institute of Art and Technology.”

Inside the closet-sized lobby, he managed to maneuver the leather strap that opened the horizontal doors to the tired old
industrial elevator
by pulling with his teeth and the finger of one hand, trying not to squeeze Sebastian’s arrows. He stumbled inside the elevator
cage. With a groan of pneumatics, it lurched up to the trade school that occupied the sixth floor.

Kevin opened the balky elevator door. On this floor, walls had been knocked down to create one large studio. He felt grateful
for the blast of warmth greeting him from the fires that students labored over, usually oppressive even on a cold day. At
twenty workbenches, students bent neon tubes into signs for bars and tattoo parlors. For protection, they wore shiny silver
Mylar protective suits, welding masks, and thick gloves while they hunched over the flames.

When he’d told his mother he wanted to study at the New York Institute of Art and Technology, he charged her up with his own
thrill over “ribbon fires” and “noble gases.” Then her eyes almost popped out when she read the trade school’s tuition contract
and saw the $995 payment he’d owe every month. She told him to never, ever tell anyone else. Then she co-signed.

“At least,” she told him, “if you can’t become a priest, you can make me a Saint Sebastian.”

In the beginning, Max Freuhling shook with hilarity when Kevin asked him about creating a neon saint as good, in its way,
as Giotto’s oils. But Max was a practical man, and warmed to the task of giving Kevin private lessons strung out to cost as
much as his student could earn at dead-end jobs. Kevin was so poor, he lived in an apartment on Avenue B full of cockroaches
that snapped, crackled, and popped like Rice Krispies when he walked across the dark floor at night. The bathtub in the kitchen
needed to be sandblasted before he could use it.

“Hey, Sebastian’s back home,” a student greeted him, and the entire studio body began to snicker, the floor echoing with hearty
laughter.

“Where’s Max?”

“In the john,” a smirking girl making a sign that said, “$8 Haircuts,” told him.

Still clutching his burden, afraid to set him down, Kevin backed into the men’s room. Soot from the studio floor covered the
old sink and toilets. Max was just leaving a stall, a paperback copy of
Lolita
in one hand. He zipped up his fly and stood in front of Kevin, a jagged
face with cool green eyes widely spaced. Max’s hair, still ice blond though he was almost sixty, stood straight up on his
head in oily spikes, and he wore brown corduroy pants and a scratchy turtleneck.

Max’s accent was heavily German, even though he had lived in the United States for more than forty years. Kevin once asked
him if he went to Berlitz for German touch-ups, but Max never laughed at anything except Sebastian. Kevin put his saint down
on the floor very carefully and unwrapped his jacket. The sculpture seemed to look gloomily at a point over Max’s head.

“Jessica told me to take it out of the gallery,” Kevin said. “I guess you never went by to see it.”

Max’s eyes flickered their scorn.

“How could I have made Sebastian better?” Kevin asked him.

“Look at your bends.” Max shook his head sadly. “Disgraceful. If you cannot bend, how can you make a halo?”