And then there is the next prong of Philip Pierpont, lying in wait for him. His voice changes, signifying that he has a big question. So! How many paintings, exactly, was he showing? How many are ready, and when can they be packed up and brought over?
Patrick has no idea how many paintings. He doesn’t even know how many he can bear to show of the ones that are finished. Or supposedly finished. Not to mention the ones he thinks he will finish before the show, which he believes is not for another few weeks. January 18, is he not right?
Correct, says Pierpont in a funny voice. “But I need numbers for wall space. You’ve done shows before, my artistically complicated friend. You know this.”
He goes on talking and talking, and Patrick is forced to realize that Pierpont would like things quantified to a point that Patrick is not comfortable with. What if he says ten paintings? Is that too many? No, probably too few.
And now Philip Pierpont, as if he’s on purpose aiming to hit all the low points, careens into Point Number Three. Opening night! There will be cheese and wine, of course, and possibly some crudités. Some more members of the press possibly coming . . . invitations sent out . . . Would Patrick agree to make a few remarks? To give a brief overview of the work? Which of course speaks for itself, but the crowd always likes a little something from the artist. An acknowledgment of the attendance perhaps. Of the honor of the thing. Gallery space.
No, decidedly not. Certainly not. NO remarks. Patrick’s heart is pounding as he refuses.
The call ends badly then, the way it began. Pierpont is antsy and angry. Perhaps he has an inkling that Patrick isn’t going to be the big draw he had hoped. No one remembers that he was once an up-and-coming sculptor, and they sure as hell don’t care that a nobody sculptor is now going to try to be a nobody-in-every-sense painter. And one that won’t talk in public, to boot.
What artist would want to talk at an occasion like this one? Well, come to think of it, he’s known a few. Too many, actually. The types that wear their egos right on their chests and who slick back their brilliant artist hair and rub their brilliant artist beards and say pontificating things to the public about art and meaning and symbolism.
If he got up there, he’d say, “Art is pain. It is grief and agony and I hated my life while I painted these paintings. I look at them now, and I want never to see them again. I don’t even want any of you to see them. I have—I have been skinned alive by this work.” And then he would leave. Catch a cab and go somewhere where they couldn’t find him and ask another thing of him.
He wonders if he dares go online and see what the article says.
He’s dreaded it so much that now that it’s here, he’s quite sure he doesn’t want to put himself through any more.
Only he can’t rest. Nothing helps. He paces around, he stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, decides he still looks as bad as ever, he paces some more, talks to Roy who is decidedly unsympathetic. Finally, with great effort, he gets up and lets himself out the front door, goes over to Paco’s, where the magazines had been delivered several hours ago.
“Hey, man of the hour!” says Paco. “Look at you, on the cover of Inside Outside, you devil you.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says. “Look at me.”
“You no worry, Patrick. It’s a good story. We read it out loud to ourselves here this morning. And everybody say the same thing: ‘That Patrick. He’s a real good guy.’”
INSIDE OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
BROOKLYN’S LATEST WORD ON ART
Scarred, Grieving but Unbowed: Brooklyn Artist Mounts a Comeback
Patrick Delaney, 36, doesn’t look anything like the dashing, handsome man he was when he was considered the “Golden Boy of Sculpture” eight years ago. His face, once chiseled and with a jawline that actors would envy, is now lined and scarred by burns he suffered in a devastating fire in a New York loft—a fire that killed his young girlfriend even as he attempted to save her life.
But what Delaney has lost in his golden-boy looks, he’s more than made up for in stature, as a hero and now, as an artist seeking to make a comeback in a whole new medium.
Delaney doesn’t like to talk about the fire, or its aftermath, the months when he lived in a downtown hotel, contemplating his own mortality and vowing that he would never do sculpture, or any kind of art, again. He is a man of few words who grows visibly uncomfortable when asked what that turning point was like in his life.
“I had lost my appetite for art,” he says.
According to police reports on file, it was an ordinary summer day in August of 2010 when Delaney and his girlfriend, Anneliese Cunningham, awoke in their SoHo loft and, as they did most days, got to work creating sculpture. Delaney was working on a sculpture called The Fallen Angel that had been commissioned by the New York City collector Regis Harrington—a piece that would never be completed.
Cunningham, 24, a sculptor in her own right, was working on an untitled piece she hoped to enter into a show in the fall. She went to the little galley kitchen area to start the morning’s coffee. According to fire officials, a gas leak triggered an immediate explosion that killed Cunningham outright, engulfing her in flames.
Delaney raced toward her, police said, and because of his heroics in reaching for her to put out the fire, he suffered second- and third-degree burns on his face, hands and arms. He was transported by ambulance to the burn unit at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was placed in a medically induced coma. Over the next few months he underwent several surgeries to repair damage to his hands and face. It was thought that he’d never be able to do art again.
Today, Delaney has little to say on the subject. His one statement, delivered in a choked-off voice, is, “I couldn’t imagine why she had to die and why I remained alive. And I was not a hero that day. I am not the hero of this story. There is no hero.”
He doesn’t think of himself as a hero because he was unable to save her. In fact, medical records show that Delaney passed out from the heat upon reaching her, and he didn’t even know what had happened until he woke up in a hospital weeks later with his face and hands and arms requiring numerous surgeries. The art world was lost to him.
The months and years that followed took their toll—and in talking to him today, a visitor can see in his eyes the remains of grief and survivor’s guilt. He became a recluse, living in a basement apartment in Brooklyn with Roy, his opinionated orange cat, and writing for a medical website, and venturing out only when he was reasonably assured of not running into other people.
Only recently has his life turned around enough that Delaney is willing once again to create art. Over the past three years, Delaney has started painting in oils again, though not with any real interest. According to gallery owner Philip Pierpont, a friend of Delaney’s, it seemed that at first Delaney had lost the will to try to penetrate the depth of creativity and strive to find its meaning.
“He was hiding. But,” says Pierpont, “in a triumph of human spirit, Patrick kept at it. I always knew that deep down in him, the will to triumph over adversity would come through, and with his reentry into a new art form, I have every confidence that he will show us a return of nothing less than his very soul.”
Pierpont has asked him to exhibit his paintings this January in a one-man show at the Pierpont Gallery in Manhattan, something those who know him never thought would happen.
“I have always been an admirer of Patrick Delaney’s sensibility, his sensitivity, and the soulfulness of his work,” says Pierpont. “I own several of his sculptures, and we have had two successful shows together. I reached out to him and said, ‘It’s time, man, for you to get back into the art world.’ He agreed, although perhaps reluctantly, and now I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. The thing about Patrick Delaney is that you know you are going to plumb the depths of feeling—all feeling—represented in his work. You come away a changed person.”
Delaney was always considered a sculptor of great range and even whimsy, with his depictions of
courtship in Cupid’s Arrow Misses and Friday Night Date Night. His Bird on Two Wires received an American Post Prize and his triptych, titled The Way of Men, was mentioned in Art Today magazine as evidence that Delaney was an “artist under thirty who bears watching.”
Delaney is perhaps understandably secretive about the paintings he is preparing for his show, as well he might be. After all, he was never known for his painterly abilities, especially as an abstract expressionist.
But Pierpont says he has no doubt that this will give Delaney an opportunity to stretch and grow and see what remains now that the past is behind him. “Of course we know that for artists, the past is never fully dealt with and put away,” says Pierpont, “and we expect that Patrick’s work will reflect the full range of his suffering. We are looking forward to welcoming him back into the art world and into a whole new range of possibility.”
Delaney’s personal life has taken a change of course as well. Recently, he and his current girlfriend, the florist Marnie MacGraw, welcomed Delaney’s daughter from a previous brief relationship into their home. Fritzie Delaney, 8, says she is happy to finally meet her father and she loves painting with him in his studio.
“I am a surprise girl,” Fritzie says. “He didn’t know about me until me and my mom looked him up on the internet. And now my mom is in Italy, and so I am living with Patrick and Marnie. And I am trying to cheer him up. I am hoping he will paint about me sometime.”
PHOTO CAPTIONS:
Artist Patrick Delaney, of Brooklyn, in his studio, looks over his work from the previous day. Once a sculptor, he doesn’t want to show his new paintings to anyone until the opening on January 18 at the Pierpont Gallery.
A quick unauthorized peek at one of Delaney’s in-progress pictures, depicting the horror of the fire that killed his girlfriend, the artist Anneliese Cunningham, eight years ago.
Fritzie Delaney, 8, the daughter of Patrick Delaney, says she has only recently come to live with him and his girlfriend. “I didn’t even know him until three months ago,” she says. “Now I know that he’s a hero. He tried to save someone from burning up in a fire.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MARNIE
My mother moves over to Lola’s apartment the day after Christmas. No more Girlfriend Hour after we get in bed at night, complete with manicures, pedicures, and talk about husbands and flings and purple hair dye. It’s just as well. I’m tired, and I don’t like hearing about Randolph Greenleaf, and I certainly don’t want to see my mother’s tragic look when she thinks about Patrick and me.
I guess she and I both imagined that Patrick would now have the chance to move back in our room, but of course he doesn’t take the opportunity.
Too much work to be done in the studio, he says. He looks haggard and stressed out when I see him in the kitchen, and I can barely reach him, is the truth of it. When I try to kiss him, his return kisses are like little pecks on the cheek, the way you might kiss an old disagreeable auntie. Or an ex who was throwing herself at you.
A woman with any self-respect would probably kick him out. But, you see, there’s this child. I can’t bring myself to lose her. And of course, she would have to go with him. That wouldn’t be good for anybody.
Anyway, so on January 2, with school finally back in session, I come into the kitchen after taking Fritzie to the bus stop, and there’s my mom cutting up vegetables for soup for dinner. At eight o’clock in the morning, but whatever. I’m a little ragged because Fritzie is upset that Patrick wouldn’t walk her to the bus stop this morning, which she says is the only time he talks to her lately. He’s frantic now, trying to finish up.
So she’s acting out. She fussed about the need to wear her warm coat and her boots, and then she said Patrick lets her cross the street by herself, which I know is not true. He is the most danger-aware person in the world.
“You have to stop giving me so much trouble,” I finally said to her, and she sunk down into herself, pouting. So then I hugged her, and I told her I loved her so much. She looked up at me with those huge, opaque eyes and then she leaned up against me, and said, “Are things going to get better again when Patrick has finished working on the paintings for his show?”
“Of course they are,” I said. “Everything is going to go back to normal.” And she skipped the rest of the way to the bus stop.
My mother is cutting carrots and onions with the look on her face that people must get when they are killing Burmese pythons in the Everglades, or so I would imagine. She says that last night Dr. Randolph told her that—call him old-fashioned, if you must, he said—but he doesn’t much like it when women wear makeup. Or pants. His sainted mother never wore any, and she was the best-looking woman he ever knew. And she had a nice, low, calm voice, too. Sometimes, he had to admit, women’s voices get on his nerves. My mother’s voice being one of those, for instance, just sometimes. When she’s excited. Only when she’s excited.
I take Bedford off his leash and look at the table, where Inside Outside magazine is lying.
“Oh my goodness,” I say, and my mother says, “Yes. So I won’t be seeing him anymore,” and I say, “Of course not, but ohhh, look at this—Patrick is on the cover of Inside Outside! And it’s here! The story is out.”
“Yes,” my mother says. She’s stirring a pot of soup on the stove for lunch. “I guess it’s not very good news. At least Patrick didn’t think so.”
“Is he in his studio?”
“Yeah. Kind of mad, I think.”
“Oh, God.” Then, after I’ve read the story, I say it a few more times for good measure. “Of course he hates this. It’s just what he feared.” I start tapping on the table. “All this triumphing over adversity and the Golden Boy of Sculpture, the soul of art.”
“Why is this so bad? This says only nice things about him.”
“He doesn’t want to be a hero, Mom. And this isn’t really about him or his art. It’s all about this reporter and the gallery owner needing him to sound like he’s some long-suffering hero staging a huge comeback. Using the police reports. Ugh. Oh God, and they talked to Fritzie. I didn’t think the reporter had permission to do that.”
“But . . . well, he was a hero, wasn’t he? I mean, he tried to save that woman.”
“Yes, he did,” I say. It’s hard to explain, but I try anyway. “That woman was the woman he loved. And she died right in front of him. And this makes it sound like he’s capitalizing on the tragedy. That he’s benefiting somehow from being the Great Sufferer.”
“Well, I didn’t think it sounded like that at all,” says my mom. “If you asked me, the only negative thing about it in my opinion was that they could have said a little less about how he’s not handsome anymore. That would get to me if I was him.”
From the toaster comes a piece of burnt toast, flying out of the holes in the top and landing on the floor. Bedford listlessly lifts his head and goes over to pick it up.
“Oh!” says my mother. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that temperamental toaster of yours. I’m ordering you a new one right after I finish these dishes. First I’m going to send Randolph a text message saying I won’t be troubling him with my annoying voice anymore because I’m never going to see him again. And then a new toaster.”
“No new toaster,” I say quickly. “We love this one. And by the way, texting is considered a bad way to break up with someone.”
“Tough shit,” she says. “I’d hate to make him listen to my screeching over the phone.”
I kiss her on her magnificent, bold, fierce-woman cheek as I head to the studio.
One time, a long time ago, when I first knew I was falling in love with Patrick and he wasn’t letting me in because he was so resolutely miserable and didn’t think there was any such thing as love out there for a man who had scars on his face, I accused him of living on the planet My Lover Died in the Fire. I actually said that. I was mad when I said it, and I stood there in his kitchen, the basement kitchen downstairs, wanting to make love
with him more than anything I’d ever wanted in my whole life, but he wouldn’t do it. I was embarrassed because I loved him so much, so I said that he’d chosen to live in unhappiness and guilt, but that he didn’t have to. I said the fact that he was angry all the time meant that he was healing and that his whole problem was that he hated himself for healing. He wanted to stay stuck in his grief and let life go on without him.
Then, to put an even finer point on things, I told him that I loved him. Which I had never said before.
He said no to me that night—very sadly, but it was still no—and so I gathered what was left of my dignity and went back to my apartment—this apartment, this very kitchen, in fact—and I told myself I had to give up on him. That he would never be ready. I already knew by that point that Blix had wanted us to be together, that she had done spells and magic to bring our love about. That she had peered into the future and had seen that we were perfect together. I’d seen things she’d written in her spell book: our names linked over and over again. So not only did I feel sorry for myself and for Patrick, but I felt sorry that Blix had failed, too, at the thing she most wanted.
But sometimes it hits you that you can’t go about life forcing everybody to do the thing you think they should, even when it’s perfect for them.
So over the next few days I made up my mind to sell the brownstone and move back to Florida. Patrick had already decided to move back to live with his sister in Wyoming. At the time we had the argument about love, the U-Haul truck was parked outside the building for him to put his stuff in it.
I don’t think I can really explain what happened next, except to say that I had given up on him, and sometimes when you surrender to things, all the energy changes.
The next day we awoke to a foot of snow, and school was called off, so I took Bedford and Sammy, the kid who then lived in the apartment where Patrick now has his studio, to the park. And Bedford got lost. Sammy and I searched and searched, but it was snowing so hard, and we couldn’t find him anywhere. My cell phone had no power, so I couldn’t even call for help. I just kept calling and searching for Bedford, frozen through to the heart and feet of me, and fearing the worst.
A Happy Catastrophe Page 23