Initial sales were low and it took effort on Savan’s part to get collectors to pay attention. After six weeks, the show had brought in not even a third of the profits of her first show. May was surprisingly quiet about the situation, but he could hear that when Agnes’s name came up she no longer gushed the way she had in the past.
“There’s still Europe,” Savan soft-pedaled in one of their weekly meetings. “We may be able to recoup our investment over time.” He reported that Agnes had complained that the gallery hadn’t advertised enough or marketed the show to the right clientele. May refused to pour any more of the gallery’s money into advertising and marketing. To distance himself from disappointment, Savan rolled his eyes when Agnes complained, as if he’d forgotten that he’d brought this on himself.
12 NEW YORK
EDWARD ATTENDED THE opening of a retrospective at Dia of the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, known for her displays of words and ideas, like billboard advertisements, in public spaces. The last time she’d shown at Dia was in 1989. If he was honest with himself, he would admit that part of the reason he’d gone to the opening was that he hoped to find Julia. It had been two months since the weekend of the Armory Show. Once Agnes’s show was mounted, Julia was the person he’d itched to discuss it with. To his amazement, he found her standing in a corner of the cavernous space chatting with two other women. A quick rush of adrenaline swept over him. Her attractiveness struck him anew, as it always did when he first saw her. She raised her chin to acknowledge him, and motioned with her head for him to come. He quickly strolled over.
She introduced him to her companions, two artists with studios in Bushwick: Simone Klein and Nancy someone, he didn’t catch the last name. After a round of small talk, he pointed to a piece he wanted to show her against the opposite wall of the open space and they excused themselves, stopping only to say hello or nodding to colleagues he knew, champagne in hand, as they negotiated their way through the crowd.
“It’s good to see you,” he said, once they were alone. Up close he noticed beneath her glasses dark circles under her eyes, making her blue irises appear more luminescent. It gave her a penetrating and unassuming presence.
“What happened?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know. I saw you across the hall at the Armory looking at me and I couldn’t bring myself to face you. I’m sorry.”
Her face looked sullen. Something in it was different.
“Look, can we sit down?”
He wanted to take her to a secluded place, but where? It was impossible. There were people everywhere. He saw a door to the back and motioned for her to follow, and they sat on a bench in the courtyard decked with ornamental trees, still surrounded by people socializing in their own insular pods. Once they sat down, he quickly took her hand and squeezed it before letting it go.
The crowd had grown larger and he could barely hear her over the din. Distracted, she peered into the throng.
“We better go back in. My friends are waiting.”
She wandered back to the group and before he could follow Sam Marcus, a dealer from another gallery, tapped him on the back and Edward spoke to him for a few moments, distracted. His eyes followed Julia over the tops of other heads. He shifted so as not to lose her and watched as she drifted slowly toward the back of the gallery. She still possessed him. It was agony. After Sam peeled off and he spoke to two or three other people he knew, he found her again.
“What is it?” she leaned in and whispered.
“I’m just happy to see you.”
“I’m glad to see you too.”
The tension evaporated and they quickly eased into their easy intimacy. They moved into a quieter corner of the space.
“Did you see Agnes’s show?”
Like other prominent artists living in New York, Julia had an ear for gossip. If you lived in Chelsea or Tribeca, and now Bushwick, Dumbo, and Williamsburg, it was impossible to get a cup of coffee without running into another artist or dealer, and he wondered what the perception of Agnes’s show was on the streets, what she thought of it.
“I’m afraid it didn’t seem to make a loud splash. Is the gallery disappointed?”
“I can’t say that we’re happy about it. It didn’t live up to its promise. And May doesn’t like to lose money.” He stopped. “It’s been grim.”
“Well, maybe it will save her marriage.”
“Agnes’s?”
“I heard they were in trouble. Apparently Nate didn’t come to the opening?”
“He never comes to her shows. She doesn’t want anyone to associate the two of them together. That’s where she draws the line.” He was oddly protective of Agnes. He had possessed—still possessed—such intimate knowledge of her.
“The word is that Agnes is going to be up for the Tanning Prize. My friends, Simone and Nancy, were just talking about it.”
“Really?”
“Simone said Frederick Jackson is one of the judges—I think he’s the chair actually—and of course he and Nate are pals.”
“The Tanning prize. You’re kidding,” he said again.
They walked over to a piece from Holzer’s The Living Series. “I like this one,” Julia acknowledged. It was enamel on metal with black type. The inscription read:
SOMETIMES YOU HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE BUT TO WATCH SOMETHING GRUESOME OCCUR. YOU DON’T HAVE THE OPTION OF CLOSING YOUR EYES BECAUSE IT HAPPENS FAST AND ENTERS YOUR MEMORY.
They turned to each other in mutual acknowledgment. Julia’s fingers reached into her hair. She scooped it back.
“I’m sorry about Agnes. It must have disappointed you. You’ve put so much into her career,” she offered.
“The paintings weren’t quite there yet. I tried to tell her.”
“She should have listened.”
“Enough about Agnes.” He’d thought he’d gotten through the worst part of it, but the long runup to the prize ceremony—if indeed she was up for the prize—would keep Agnes front and center. It would be agony.
“How’s your own work?”
“It’s going well. Do you still want to come to my studio? Since London I’ve wanted to show you what I’ve been up to. I’ve switched mediums. I’m painting, which is crazy. I haven’t painted since graduate school.”
He stood close enough to feel her breath on his neck and heat rise from her thin sweater.
“Yes, I want to see it.”
In London he’d said he was interested in representing her, but he wondered whether it would be a good idea. She seemed to register his concern. “Don’t worry. I want you to see my work, but I don’t want you to represent me. That would be career suicide.”
“Would it?”
“You know it would. Wasn’t it you who said an artist should never mix business with friendship?”
She motioned to where her two friends were standing. “I should get back,” she said, uncomfortable, but unable to quite leave. Her face was in a knot. She looked at him as if there was more she wanted to say and then shook her head, resigned to their circumstances. A wisp of her soft hair caught on his face as he leaned in to say good-bye.
13 CONNECTICUT
HE ENTERED HIS quiet house. He saw Holly’s sweatshirt draped on a chair in the kitchen and picked it up and brought it to his lips. He looked out their bedroom window at the cherry tree Holly had planted. Each spring, the tree would begin to blossom, and every year the tree grew more robust. The extreme beauty of the thick, rich pink and magenta flowers in bloom and quick death once all the blossoms had dropped always caught him short. He withdrew upstairs to his study.
He reclined on the sofa facing the wall where he had mounted his father’s landscapes and attempted to read a draft of a catalogue. He couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t get Julia’s changed look at the Holzer exhibition the evening before out of his mind. He remembered her warm disposition in Berlin and the aggrieved look he observed at the gallery.
He turned another page and tried to concentrate, and then
raised his eyes from the catalogue and gazed at his father’s paintings. He had spent days at the university teaching and evenings locked in his study. But once he became ill, the stream of his thoughts ran dry. In their sunroom he painted the same landscape outside their window, obsessively attempting to pin down something that eluded him. On the horizon of each painting was a cloudlike face and in the foreground a stand of spindled trees. After he died, Edward’s mother aired the sunroom, gathered the paint supplies in a box for the trash. She donated his clothes to Goodwill, packed up his papers in a trunk, and boxed his books. Edward was appointed the literary executor of his estate. The drafty room, emptied of personality, felt as if it belonged to strangers.
He picked up his father’s edition of Keats’s poems and opened it. Inside the front flap his father had made notes to himself in pen. Where are you? Why are you hiding? Who are you? He’d circled key words in the poems, written along the margins, underlined passages. Through his work he constructed a system of hiding and subterfuge. We must be broken in order to heal.
As a kid he occasionally heard his father cursing in his study. He’d come out after a weekend when he’d retreated, emerging only to make coffee, moody, exhausted, grumbling that he didn’t know whether he’d made his manuscript better or worse. He explained how his ideas felt simplistic the minute he tried to pin them down and was frustrated that they did not live up to the originality and brilliance he imagined. He accompanied his father on long walks in the woods behind their backyard with their dog, Beckett. Sometimes his father walked in silence, and other times, consumed by problems with his work, he obsessed. One of his obsessions was with the notion of character. His first major academic work was on Keats; it received numerous academic prizes and had secured his tenure at Yale. Keats described poetic character as having no self but only serving the imagination, as if the poetic self were a mirror to reflect back to readers their own inner lives. Keats strove in his work not to reconcile contradictory aspects of character by fitting them into closed systems. “Human character is essentially unknowable,” his father once said, stripping bark from a branch as he walked. The deeper he delved inside his own intellectual thought, the harder it was for him to be in the world of the day-to-day. “You keep me whole, son,” he confided after they had spent the morning fishing in the stream. His father was fit and handsome, with a square chin and sensitive smile. He always looked better in the outdoors, when color came into his pale face. Years before he became ill he’d been collaborating on a book in private with John Kincaid, a Wordsworth scholar in the department. While Keats believed that immortality could be sought in art, Wordsworth sought it in nature. His father was excited about their partnership, more than he’d been about any project in a long while. Though they argued heatedly at times, his close intellectual bond with Kincaid fueled his work and gave him renewed faith in it. Once when Edward returned from school he heard the two men speaking with raised voices behind the study door. After Kincaid left, his mother confronted him.
“What do the two of you do in there for hours? Don’t you see enough of him at the university?”
His father retreated back inside his study, as he always did when she was critical. His mother returned to the kitchen where she’d been preparing dinner, with tears in her eyes.
“It’s me she’s disappointed in, son, not you,” he said to Edward later that night. Edward didn’t know which was worse: to be ordinary like his mother, or to strive for the perfection that had taken his father away from her.
EDWARD LOOKED OUT the window. It was getting dark and the woods behind his yard vanished in blackness. He turned on the light in the study. The frenzied layers in the paintings disturbed him. In the gnarled trees in the foreground he made out a soft etching of black. He stood up and moved closer. A pair of initials, J and K, was painted into a crook in the branches. He looked closely at the other paintings and discovered in each one the same initials obscured in the crooks and crannies of a branch.
The trunks in the closet held his father’s private manuscripts and papers. After his death Edward found it too painful to read through them. He put off the Yale library’s requests to purchase the papers, not yet willing to let them go. Edward pulled out one of the heavy trunks from the closet. It was coated with dust and its casing was brittle. He opened the latch. Inside were stacks of letters in rubber bands and sheaves of papers and manuscripts with smeared and fading type. He read through some letters. The paper had turned yellow and brittle, crumpling around the edges. The letters were from colleagues and students. He’d been a beloved teacher. He opened another manuscript box slightly dampened by mildew. The Unrealized Self, the last, unpublished book his father had been working on before he grew ill. He began to read. Art is the window to the interior.
The first chapter opened with Blake, whose visionary narratives were idea-driven. Using his own mythological characters, Blake portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from a fallen state through art. In the second chapter he wrote about Wordsworth. The Prelude, the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self, was dedicated to his friend Coleridge. Edward’s father had written that it was Wordsworth who proclaimed the self as a topic for art and literature. In his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Wordsworth contemplated the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives. As Edward read on, his father’s sentences became more long-winded and convoluted; he intuited his father struggling for coherence. He wrote about how the Romantic poets coming off the Age of Reason—the eighteenth-century poets believed it wasn’t man’s business to seek divine Truth—divine truth was accessible in God’s creations—particularly nature—and that “chosen” people—poets (artists)—had the capability of discovering divine truth if they kept at it, were pure in their artistic pursuits of it, and believed in the possibilities of what their poetic search could yield. He wrote about the suffering that resulted from man’s lack of self-expression and not being true to himself. Edward slid the manuscript back into its box. The work had become too insular. A note on Yale letterhead slipped out from the bottom of the manuscript.
Dear Harry,
This has to stop. Nothing good can come of it.
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
Yours as ever, John
The lines of poetry in the letter were from Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” Was Kincaid speaking about their professional collaboration? Or was there something more between them? Edward scanned his bookshelves. Along with inheriting his paintings and papers, he had acquired his father’s library, including his collection of first editions. He pulled off the shelf Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, a poetic collaboration with Coleridge. The two poets were intimate friends. The book was a gift from Kincaid. Scrawled on the title page was an inscription: Your comrade, lovingly, John.
He looked at the letter from Kincaid again. It was dated a few months before his father was hospitalized. He returned the papers to the trunk, closed its latch, and pushed it back into the closet, thrusting the weight of his body against the trunk to move it. He looked out the window; it was completely black. Hours had passed.
Not wanting to think about it anymore, he retreated downstairs to find his wife and daughter in the den curled up on the couch watching a movie, their empty plates from dinner spread on the coffee table.
“Why didn’t you call me to come down?”
“I did, Daddy. You didn’t answer,” Annabel said.
“We figured you were working and didn’t want to disturb you,” Holly added, barely raising her eyes to look at him. “We left a plate for you in the kitchen.”
He wandered into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of wine, heated the plate of chicken, rice, and broccoli in the microwave, ate it quick
ly standing up by the kitchen window, and then wandered back into the den. He looked at the sheer curtain they had hung years ago to frame the window. It was slowly unraveling from its rod. He looked at Holly and Annabel absorbed in the drama on the television, unaware he was in the room. He walked through the dining room and into the living room, examining the empty wooden table shining with wax and the stiff-backed chairs, and then climbed back upstairs to the third floor. He passed the rest of the evening looking at his father’s paintings and then out at the cluster of trees lit freakishly by the moon.
14 NEW YORK
THE RAIN STOPPED. Reflections dissolved in the windows of the train. He climbed up from the depths of the damp Spring Street subway into the brightness of the afternoon. Bundles of pink peonies shimmered in buckets under the awning of a Korean market. He recalled that peonies made her happy and picked a bouquet and let the clerk roll it in paper.
Across the street from her building, anchored between Prince and Broadway, construction workers tore down an older structure. The crane screeched, a grating sound like chalk on a board.
Julia took his coat and led him into an airy space with creaky floors and a tin ceiling. She smelled the flowers. He took in her tender throat, warm bright eyes, and expressive hands as she arranged the peonies in a vase. He felt already as he looked at her that he was imprinting her image in memory.
He examined the studio. Coils of wire and stretched canvases were piled in a corner. Chips and wood shavings and a few oily rags collected on the floor. The room smelled of turpentine. Wood-carving tools were assembled on a butcher block. On another table, paint tubes, palette, brushes and palette knives, turpentine, and jars of varnish and oil. The cement floor was painted gray, chipped and spattered with paint.
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