As he looked over my canvases, I couldn’t help but pick up on the way people, even professional cynics like Jerry, were watching him scrutinizing the paintings. Jason’s body language was intense and amazing. He would never screw up his eyes or indulge in chin-stroking. He would face the canvas, go totally still, and let his arms fall by his side. He looked like a boxer ready to fight. Then he’d take a backward step, followed by a forward one, shuffling on the balls of his feet, then suddenly dance back, or move to the side. I was producing huge canvases, influenced by Damien Shore, the illustrator of the covers of the Ron Thoroughgood sci-fi novels. I hadn’t realized at first that Shore, like so many people working in that genre, was inspired by the English painter John Martin and his gigantic apocalyptic paintings. Jason did his swagger around the gallery, then took me aside and said in a matter-of-fact way, — You know, I’m going to come back here next week, and if you add a zero to your numbers, I’ll buy a painting. But I can’t do that right now. I would just look foolish.
My mouth hung open by way of a response.
— You have to put a more ambitious valuation on those works. You can’t sell them as junk; that’s worse than giving them away.
I thought Jason was joking, that I was once again the object of ridicule, that the high-school culture of Potters Prairie had followed me out here with my Ron Thoroughgood novels. So I kept quiet about the conversation we had.
But then, when he did show up again the following week, I hadn’t officially changed the numbers, but had taken the tags off just in case, keeping the prices on a list. This practice produced some negative comments from Alex and Gavin Entwhistle, but Jerry was very supportive. So Jason came up to me, accompanied this time by a stick-thin but good-looking magnesium-blond woman. He introduced her as Melanie Clement. — I’ll take this one, he said, looking at
Void
, my biggest piece. — How much?
I steeled myself and quoted the price, with an extra nothing on the end. Jason nodded, sucking in his bottom lip. Then he asked me about my second Martin-via-Shore homage canvas,
The Fall of New Babylon
. Though he was casual, I was still astonished when he wrote me a check right on the spot. (And I never quite believed it until it cleared the following Wednesday!) So two paintings I had on offer for $700 and $900 the previous week were sold for $7,000 and $9,000. I should have been elated. Everybody around me was. I was a second-year student and this was absolutely unprecedented.
Instead I was scared out of my darned wits. I could barely look at Jerry, Alex, Kim, Amanda, Olivia, or any of the others in the room, especially the sneaky Andrea, who seemed to perennially hover close by. And I certainly couldn’t tell them what Jason had whispered to me afterward, as we stood in the corner, sipping cheap white wine, with an almost postcoital vibe humming between us. — These friends of yours, you can never exhibit with them again. He shook his head, in regret, like an enlightened Roman emperor who was personally opposed to blood sports but ruefully forced to concede that the masses needed it. — They don’t have it. Any association with their stuff only drags you down.
I wanted, for about two seconds, to protest, to scream, “How dare you! Those are my friends!” But I didn’t. I couldn’t, not just because I was validated and intoxicated by his words, but because I knew in my heart that they were absolutely true. The others were good: quirky, interesting, maybe, in patches, even great. But there was no compelling voice, no overriding thematic concern, nothing whatsoever that attested to their unique brilliance as artists. And when they did one piece that was decent, they sat back and emotionally dined off it, as childishly grateful as the kids at my school in Potters Prairie. And while I was thinking this, I was looking at Andrea, all thin, angular frame, and gleaming teeth, holding a wine glass, flirtatiously hanging around Jerry. There was no desire. No engine.
One cold but sunny late November, just a few weeks after this, Jerry and I woke up on our mattress in the morning light, to the sound of stage coughing. Alex stuck his head round the side of our partition. — Call for you, Lena.
It was another collector from New York, called Donovan Summerly. He told me he’d heard about Jason’s purchases and wondered if he could arrange a private viewing? I said “sure” as casually as I could, and a couple of days later he came into town and I sold three more paintings, at $8,000, $5,000, and $9,000.
At this point I allowed myself to show my excitement to the world. This gave Jerry, who had hitherto been enthusiastic, the cue to sound a note of caution. — We’re underselling. That guy probably flew first class here from New York and checked in at one of the best rooms at the Drake.
And with these comments he had, de facto, taken over the management of my affairs.
— Now we cool it, no more sales. Let things settle.
But they weren’t going to do that. I was invited to exhibit at the prestigious Cooper-Mayes gallery in the Near North Side. Then Melanie Clement, the girl who had been at the show with Jason Mitford, invited me to show at her GoToIt gallery in New York. She explained that both Donovan Summerly and Jason had kindly agreed to lend their purchased works to the show, so I would have a complete viewing of my pictures. I would call the exhibition
Void
, after the largest canvas. In passing, I mentioned that I admired the sci-fi writer Ron Thoroughgood. To my shock Melanie’s gallery immediately commissioned him to write the catalog copy for
Void.
If I was excited, Jerry went crazy. He’d now graduated, and was spending his nondrinking time taking pictures of the downtown bums who hung out around the liquor stores and halfway houses, panhandling the tourists and office workers. I quickly realized he felt that my New York exhibition was as much his calling card as mine.
At the New York show, as legitimate collectors would be present, we decided it was time to try and sell the rest of the work, with prices revised northward. I was initially shocked and delighted to find that Ron Thoroughgood was present. He looked nothing like the mustachioed wizardlike character of his dust jackets. He was older, a sleazy and lecherous drunk, who made lewd proposals to me, then several other young women present. Jerry befriended him, as despite his highbrow affectations, he had a taste for genre fiction, particularly crime and thrillers. Increasingly inebriated on the free booze and after copious complaints, Thoroughgood was eventually escorted outside by gallery security. It was a considerable disappointment, but nothing could ruin a great night. Jerry’s schizoid intensity was useful; he could work a room. His warm smile drew in the right people. He sniffed out and flattered the buyers, not in an obvious way, yet still rounding them up like a sheepdog; friendly, enthusiastic, and oddly compelling. Conversely, his frozen psycho look made people disinclined to remain in the vicinity. He repelled the wrong interlopers—the bums and hustlers—whom he could scent out like a bloodhound. And now I know why: he was one of them.
We, no,
I
, made a fortune. Next summer, when the lease ran out on the loft, we decided to renew it, but not ask Alex, Olivia, Amanda, and Kim to join us. Blue was, after all, as Jerry explained, the Sorenson brand, and I needed more room to work. Amanda and I had become firm friends but she didn’t like Jerry. She was seeing an architect guy back in New York. She spent a lot of weekends there, or he was here, and our friendship cooled. Jerry convinced me that she was a “straight rich girl, jealous of your talent” and no great loss. Kim stayed friends with me, as did Alex and Olivia with us both.
So we got some drywall partitioning done. The space was divided into a proper bedroom, then an office and a workshop for me, with a photography studio for Jerry, replete with new equipment. But most of all, we retained a large, bright exhibition area with bare white walls. Blue was a proper gallery.
Jerry and I were busy socially, still partying a lot. Bars. Gigs. Shows. Buckets of beer. Shots. Good wine. Jerry was still popular, but he got stuck, while I was thriving. I kept studying for my degree and continued to work hard: I wasn’t stupid enough to think I wasn’t learning technique anymore. But as I bloomed, there were more shows, sales, and features on me as a rising star. The
Tribune
. The
Reader
. The
Sun Times. Chicago Magazine
. Chicago is very kind to its sons and daughters, even its adopted ones, who don’t jump ship to New York or LA at the first sign of success.
So I had a thriving art career while still a student, which was unheard of. I learned that it was impossible to enjoy that kind of success and not excite jealousy, particularly in people from wealthier homes, whose sense of prerogative outstripped their talent. It was just the source that surprised me.
Jerry seemed to get more edgy. One time at a party in Pilsen, at Alex’s new place, he was really drunk and high on coke. A group of us were huddled in the kitchen, talking about our future plans, when he burst into a bitter rant, which culminated in him fixing me with that unnerving stare of his and proclaiming, — I was the one who was supposed to exhibit! Me!
But he didn’t. Because he didn’t have anything worth exhibiting. His photographs, high-contrast black-and-whites, were a rich white liberal’s clichéd and largely patronising view of disenfranchised African Americans. So good at selling my work, Jerry found would-be suitors massively under-whelmed when trying to attract any interest in his own. It got to the stage where he couldn’t even bother disguising his pain when a painting of mine sold.
I came in one day to find a pretty freshman girl naked in his studio. This was his new project, he brusquely informed me, studies of the female nude. I wanted to tell him how pathetic and creepy, but worse, how
artistically mediocre
this was making him appear. Even Alex was losing faith. But Jerry was lost in the self-righteous world of the cokehead. He brought more girls along. As I painted, sculpted, and made my figurines, I could hear them joke and giggle and smoke pot and drink as he snapped them in his studio area. Yes, I was chokingly jealous of all the girls he photographed. But I loved him. So I kept my mouth shut. After all, I was meant to be a liberated artist, sophisticated and worldly, not a frumpy girl from Potters Prairie, MN.
With regard to my mother and father, I could no longer live the DePaul Business School lie. I gathered up a load of my press cuttings, photographs, and copies of bills of sale, and wrote them a letter, explaining that the business college I’d never gone to hadn’t worked for me and that I had transferred to art, and that I was astonishingly successful. They didn’t take it so well at first. Then they drove down to Chicago, and saw the operation—the school and the gallery. I told them that I no longer required their financial support and that I would pay back Grandma Olsen’s college money. Although Mom fussed and fretted, I could tell Dad was quietly impressed. When they were leaving, he just looked at me and uttered one word, — Enterprise, then climbed into the car. I’d never felt so good around him.
It was a mundane fall evening, not that long after, when I heard Jerry making excited noises. He had found some old pictures of me, from when I was a fat teenager. He couldn’t believe that I had ever looked like that. He said I had an amazing ability to lose and gain weight quickly.
And he convinced me to pose nude. At first I was flattered. I loved him so much, and he immediately seemed to lose interest in the other girls. — I was just learning about the process with them, the light, the shade, the angles. It was all just preparation for you, he told me. And those words were so sweet—fool that I was, I couldn’t sense the treachery in them. Like everybody looking out at life through the veil of love, I saw what I wanted to see.
On the first Friday of every month, for one year, Jerry took three pictures of me in black and white: back, front, and left-side poses. All in one identical spot and with the same lighting. But he also encouraged me to eat. He said he wanted to see my body change. It was real art. He was right. I was De Niro in
Raging Bull
. I could gain weight, yes, but I would lose it, easily. I would have done anything for him.
And I was still working hard, still studying. Not only was I taking additional classes at the Insitutute, I was also learning taxidermy. I found this guy, Russ Birchinall, a hale-and-hearty outdoor type, as I realized the breed always was, who specialized in small mammals, and who had a workshop near Western Avenue. Russ guided me thoroughly through all the stages of the process, from the grading of the specimen, to skinning, tanning, coding, mounting, finishing and placing it on a custom-made habitat base. I learned how to inspect an animal’s condition, skin, measure the hide—or
cape
as he called it—the volume of flesh; turn the lips, eyes, and ears; split the nose; code, salt, and tan the cape. I learned custom-form alteration, as well as mounting practices and finishing and airbrushing techniques. I thought I’d be squeamish, but I wasn’t. Once an animal was dead, it was dead, and I loved the idea of restoring it to some sort of flawed approximation of what it was.
Jerry scoffed at me with his now customary derision. Why was I wasting time on this? What was the point? He sounded like my father. The patriarchal voice, the controller’s voice, is always the same. When it’s filtered through the haze of love, though, you don’t hear it properly, and you make allowances. I still ate, still grew, and kept posing for the pictures, but began to dread those Fridays, circled by Jerry in a red pen on the wall calendar.
A lot of the money I had made—big money, from selling my paintings—seemed to be vanishing fast. Disappearing into the dive bars, or the pockets of cocaine dealers. Shrinking, as I grew. And Jerry just kept on encouraging me. Encouraging me to eat. He cajoled and begged, then, ultimately, rewarded me, with food.
And when I changed too much, shortly after the twelfth set of monthly pictures was completed, Jerry told me that it was time for us to leave Chicago.