A Little Trouble with the Facts

by Nina Siegal

  I strolled through the space and tried to name the paintings: Snow falling on igloos. Bald man quick-sanded in a dune. Cloud descending over a first communion. Ghosts in smocks. I spent about ten minutes at that, got bored, and went back to Blondie. I watched his white skin play against the white wall for a while.

  “I know, it’s tedious,” he was telling his friend on the phone. “The bouncers think they’re the maître d’ and the maître d’s think they’re the cooks, and the cooks, of course, are celebrities! Please. Stop flirting with Courtney Love and get back in the kitchen!”

  Drawn by a dab of color, I got up again and stood before a wall of framed snapshots. There were two dozen pictures, dating back to when Darla was paying fines for her Pollock. I saw from the photos that she was a redheaded pixie with tresses that fell in two cords in front of her chest. I recognized some of the people in the photos: Warhol, Bowie, Mailer, Madonna, and Leonard Lauder—and finally, in one picture in front of what seemed to be her SoHo gallery, Wallace. He was in the back row, all the way to the left, wearing the same smile I’d seen in the 1985 Sunday Magazine shot. I wished I had a pen-sized camera, so I could take a little spy-shot of that and bring it back to Cabeza.

  “Bye, kiss, gotta go, bye!” said Blondie, finally. I turned as he placed the phone in its cradle, and breathed deeply, a yoga Kapalabhati breath. Then he stood up and attempted to smooth the folds in his linen pants. They resisted. He frowned and tried to smooth them again. They didn’t budge. “Hate the summer!” he said to the pants.

  Then he turned his back to me and thrust open the sliding door. He went inside, saying, “This will just take one second.” A moment later, he came out again. “I’m sorry, Miss, what did you say your name was again?”

  He hadn’t asked me before. I cleared my throat. “Valerie Vane,” I said.

  Blondie straightened up as if he’d touched an electrical wire. He thrust the sliding glass door into its casing with a thud. “You?” he said, and then he took another yoga breath. He started again. “You. Are. Valerie. Vane?” He swallowed. “Oh my God.” He scampered toward me, scanning my face. “You are!” he declared. “You. Are. Valerie Vane! Oh my God. I LOVE you! I mean, Lit-er-al-ly. I LOVE you!” He folded his arms and looked me up and down as if I were David, on loan from Florence.

  “But your hair is darker. You’re a little, well, you put on a touch of…nothing, really! You’re gorgeous! And I didn’t realize how tall you were! An Amazon! Oh, heaven have mercy.” He plunked down in his seat again. “I cut out your ‘Blondes’ cover story from Gotham’s Gate two years ago. It’s still on my refrigerator. A work of genius. Genius. Oh you got it dead on. Really, dead on. It made me dye my hair. And it’s still blond!” He put his hand through the moss on his head, surprising himself, and shook his scalp at me.

  “It is still blond,” I said.

  Blondie was just like the gray girl I’d met at the morgue, or maybe the flip side of the same coin. They were both entranced by infamy, but where she found schadenfreude, he found envy. He walked back behind the desk, picking up the phone. He started to laugh, “Oh, my God, I kept you waiting for so long while I was on the…” He laughed a little bit more and started to punch numbers. “Charles will die. He will simply die when I tell him I have the real Valerie Vane right here in the gallery staring at me. You’ll talk to Charles? Will you talk to him?”

  I didn’t say anything, but it’s possible I frowned. Blondie reconsidered the receiver. “Of course, you didn’t come here for that. I’ll go get Ms. Deitrick.”

  He looked like he would go get Darla this time, but he stopped, pivoted, and leaned his knuckles on the desk. “You know, I am so sorry about what happened to you,” he whispered. “That Angelica Pomeroy is, frankly, a whore. Lord knows we all have tacky friends, but please! Can you believe that she—”

  Darla Deitrick stepped into the frame of the sliding glass door. She posed for a moment with one hand against the frame and the other teapotted against her hip. She was no more than five foot one, hoisted up on a pair of scaly red stilettos. Her hair might’ve been called red, but pumpkin was more accurate. Her black Dolce pencil skirt was all business, transacted through Swiss bank accounts. Her face was powdered white and her eyes were encircled with black kohl. Her temples had the stretched-thin look of trampolines. I guessed a Botox buffet, though she was not yet pushing fifty. She wore glasses with heavy frames, black with leopard spots. Against all the white, she looked like a popup cutout.

  “Gideon,” she said, sternly, stepping through the glass.

  Blondie turned around. “Oh, Ms. Deitrick. I was just coming to get you. You’ve got an appointment with Valerie Vane. She’s a reporter from the Style section,” his voice was outright shrill, “and she wants to talk to you about the exhibition. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Darla glanced at Blondie vaguely and her lip turned up a little. “Of course, I recognize your name,” she said, though obviously she didn’t. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person. I am very close with Tyler Prattle,” she said, referring to The Paper’s top art critic. “I hope we’ll see him tonight at the opening. You’d be coming then, I assume?”

  “Ms. Vane is of course invited this evening,” Blondie put in. “Silly me, I completely forgot to give you your invitation.” He turned to Darla. “I’m afraid I’ve made Valerie wait, but she’s been eager to speak with you.” Then back to me. “Is it okay if I call you Valerie? I feel as if we’re old friends.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Blondie clearly hadn’t heard about my demotion, and that was because The Paper kept a lid on internal reassignments; as far as the public was concerned, I could’ve been in Baja or Siberia. Being fawned over had its perks. I felt around in my purse for a business card.

  Darla stepped through the doorway and clip-clopped on her heels a few inches closer. She offered me her hand and shook weakly. Her left eyebrow, plucked almost to invisibility, twitched.

  “I’d love to discuss the show,” she said. “Unfortunately, I’ve scheduled clients for the entire afternoon. If all goes well we’ll be sold out before the case of Stags’ Leap even arrives. Is Tyler coming?”

  I said, “I have only a few questions. It will take just a minute.” I tried to make it sound like a barter: a minute for Tyler. I couldn’t produce Tyler, but I figured I was good for a minute after waiting twenty. Darla shifted on her feet, cocking her head to look at a small old-fashioned alarm clock on the marble desk. She was going to give me a minute. But not sixty-one seconds.

  Darla looked at Blondie now, and ticked her neck to the side, so he’d skedaddle. “So nice to meet you,” I said, and reached out to shake his hand. I pressed my card into it, keeping an eye on Darla. She didn’t notice. Then Blondie scuttled out through the glass door with a slavering smile.

  “It’s about Malcolm Wallace,” I said, once we were alone. “Stain 149.”

  Darla’s face didn’t register any particular expression, but her eyebrow twitched again. “Well, I haven’t heard that name in years. Is he showing again? What is he doing these days?”

  “Not too much,” I said.

  “Ah. And how does that warrant a story for the Style section?”

  If she’d already heard about Wallace’s death, she’d have found a way to say it then. And if she knew but wasn’t saying, her expression didn’t betray her.

  “I have some bad news, I’m afraid,” I said. “Wallace passed away on Sunday morning.”

  “Malcolm?” Her face collapsed, and then her body did too, into the ottoman. Her knees were bracketed together, her fingertips to her nose. She gave the impression of a cocktail umbrella folding. “How?”

  “It’s unclear. He was found below the Queensboro Bridge.”

  She gasped. “How horrible!”

  “I know this is a difficult subject, and I’m sure it will take some time to get adjusted to your loss, but I hoped you might be able to answer just a few questions about Wallace. We’re trying to put together a s
tory about his artistic career. The family said I’d find one of his best works here.”

  “This is terrible news,” she said. “Malcolm was a dear, dear friend. And in his day he was a wonderful artist.”

  What registered on her face wasn’t the loss of a friend, though. She seemed just a tad irked that the joy had been stripped from her opening day, and that now she had to discuss a subject that wasn’t on the agenda.

  “He was such a lovely man,” she continued. “When I knew him he was just a boy. A sweet boy. Well, I was a baby then too! But I’m afraid you are misinformed. I haven’t represented Malcolm Wallace in twenty years.” She was talking to me absently now, as if working on an equation in her head.

  “You were the last dealer to represent him,” I said.

  Darla nodded slowly, and her hands fell to her lap. “Yes, I was. He didn’t want a dealer after he left me. He didn’t want anything to do with SoHo.”

  “Why not?”

  “The eighties,” she said, as if that explained all of it.

  I shook my head.

  “You say you’re putting together a story about Malcolm? Will it be a big piece? When will it appear? I can tell you everything. I can put you in touch with all the right people. But not just this moment; this is a bad time.” She caught herself. “It’s never a good time, is it?” She stood up again, stroking the tresses of her hair. “I’ll tell you what I can now, and then we’ll talk more later. Okay? Will that be okay?”

  I thought this would be the best I could get. I nodded, and then waited, while she assembled her thoughts. Then, without much ramping up, she launched in: “I remember when he first came into my gallery, he was like a Molotov cocktail. I’ve seen a lot of kids who think of themselves as artists, but there aren’t that many like Wallace. I was of course the first dealer in New York to recognize the power of that genre. People dismissed graffiti, but to me it was the next natural step from neo-Expressionism, the last gasp of modernism. There’s a direct line from Rothko to Rauschenberg to Basquiat. Stain’s work had an additional charm—it was evasive, somehow, withholding.”

  Darla was all over the place. Pseudo-nostalgia, self-aggrandizement, a touch of critical theory. I wondered if this was how she processed grief.

  “He did well for you?”

  “Oh, he did fabulously! Probably the best of his group. Some of them had talent, but not like Malcolm. He was genuinely brilliant. And believe me, I use that word advisedly.”

  “You represented a lot of graffiti artists.”

  “Of course. I was the first. People have held it against me for years. Some people said it was ‘fad art,’ but no one would convince me of that. Some people called it scrawls; I said, then what’s Dubuffet? Every artist working today references outsider art and primitives. I got the feeling some collectors just didn’t want people from the outer boroughs in our galleries. They appreciate that much more in Europe. I say: You just don’t know where good art will come from. If it comes from the gutter, it comes from the gutter.”

  She reconsidered what she’d said. “That sounds wrong, maybe too dismissive. Divisive? What’s the word I’m looking for? You’re a writer. You can fill it in. The thing was, Wallace wasn’t really graffiti. He was much more than that, a true painter. Also, he had irrepressible charisma. Let me say that. He was also a gorgeous kid. Beautiful! You could see it emblazoned on his face: ‘I will be famous or I will die.’ Putting his name on things was just a small part of it; Malcolm needed to be recognized the way fish need gills to breathe and elephants need those huge ears to, well…you know.”

  Darla was exactly the kind of creature I’d come to know so well on Style, and maybe that’s why Cabeza knew I’d be able to get her talking. Just feed her ego a little birdseed and she’d go on singing like this for hours. But I didn’t need the entire eighties flashback. I just needed to know one thing. “Do you still have some of his pieces?”

  “No, no, no, no, of course not. I sold everything. All the pieces he gave to me, personally, I sold while the market was high. I would’ve sold more to collectors, too, if he’d given me more. I had a waiting list of buyers.”

  “Why’d he stop giving you things to sell? He stop working?”

  “No! He was very prolific. Constantly working. His studio was wall-to-wall paintings, scraps of metal, shoes, pants. He painted on his pants! Stop working? Never!”

  Darla started clicking back and forth in front of me.

  “Why did you let him go?”

  “I didn’t, exactly. He got back from his European tour and he had this whole new modus operandi. He didn’t want to talk to the collectors. He didn’t want to ‘make nice,’ as he put it. The more I tried to sell, the more he told me that he didn’t belong on gallery walls. His only credentials were street credentials, he said. And so forth. I’m sure you know the argument.”

  “I’ve heard something about it.”

  “The trouble was, he was having a lot of fights with other graffiti writers. Beefs, they call it, sort of like little gang wars. He’d write his name somewhere and someone else would buff it—you know, write over it. Who knows why he still wanted to be doing that. He was famous. Genuinely. He didn’t need to be scrawling on walls anymore, tempting arrest. It was like he still wanted to be the tough kid on the block. And well, there were all these street urchins here all the time and it was getting out of hand and I didn’t really want them wreaking havoc. I was paying for his very high lifestyle. Limos and hotel rooms, painting supplies, trips to Europe, with lots of hangers-on. I didn’t like that. Not too many dealers would, frankly.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can understand that.” I jotted some notes on my pad.

  “You don’t need all this,” Darla said. “In fact, strike that last part. I don’t want to be quoted on that.”

  I didn’t bother to pretend to cross out my notes. She wasn’t watching anyway.

  “Do you really want to hear all this? It’s a sad story. It’s not going to be important for your piece. But I’ll tell you, if it can stay off the record. It got worse. He got deeper into drugs, and then he became very radicalized. Paranoid, if you ask me. He said he didn’t want his art to be sold, so he started painting on his own skin. He showed up at an opening at Sidney Janis one night with the word slave on his forehead. He tapped people and offered to let them examine his teeth. It was all very hard to take.”

  “How deep was he into drugs?”

  “Did I say he was? Actually, strike that too. I don’t know. I try not to get too involved with the personal lives of my artists. Once you get into that territory, there’s no coming back.”

  “What about his friends?”

  “Well, he had that group of sycophants, you know, always around him. I’m sure some of them were dopers. You know kids from that neighborhood, there’s always that element. But dear, I’m telling you. I handled the works of art. I didn’t spend my free time with the boy. He had a pretty rough crowd.”

  The word boy rang in my ears. I didn’t know much about how artists related to their dealers, but a woman like Darla would’ve noticed a lot of things even if she wasn’t using her free time to get to know Wallace.

  “As you can see, I’m a businesswoman. I run a small business where I sell pictures for a fee,” she gestured toward the million-dollar paintings, as if this were a poster shop where a van Gogh sold for twenty bucks. “If you don’t want to sell art, you don’t need me. I think we parted in 1987, but I could be mistaken.” She fastened her lips politely and turned the clasp. Apparently my time was up. “I’d love to tell you more but my clients will be here any minute. We’ll reschedule, yes?”

  I thanked her. But I knew she didn’t have clients arriving anytime soon, at least to buy these works. Nobody was going to be buying works on loan from major museums. She walked me to the foyer of the gallery, stopping in the middle of the space before the Robert Ryman. “Now, this,” she said, “is where conceptual art meets abstraction: emotion essentialized. Have you ever seen
anything more beautiful in your whole life?”

  I looked at the all-white painting. I felt like Scott of the Antarctic.

  “Critics like to say that the white canvas is the endgame of fine art. They are wrong. It is the pinnacle. You don’t get to white immediately. You have to arrive at white. You have to be a perfect classicist—life drawing, color, perspective, mastering figurative painting, exploring abstraction—before you get to white. You strip everything down and you go closer and closer to the essence of expression. White is the last possible painting. It’s a kind of religious moment, a paradigm shift that makes anything possible.”

  We’d finally gotten to the heart of Darla too. Strip down all the exterior varnish and what you’ve got was a saleswoman. The entire time I’d detained her with Wallace, she’d been preparing her pitch. And here it was, as polished as a press release. I had to marvel. “Fascinating,” I said.

  Darla breathed in the Ryman and exhaled. Every time she looked at the work, this was meant to suggest, she experienced a new conversion. “Well,” she said. “At least your visit down here was profitable in the end, I hope. Please call me in a couple of days and I’ll put you in touch with anyone you’ll need for your Wallace story. He deserves a big feature. And in the meantime, we’ll see you later at the opening, yes? Perhaps you’ll travel down with Mr. Prattle. If need be, I can have Gideon arrange a car.”

  We’d come full circle. My payment was due. I looked down. “Lovely shoes,” I said. “What are they, may I ask?”

  “Aren’t they cute?” she said. “Irrawaddy cobra. I just brought them back from Bangkok.”

  “Adorable,” I said. “I’ll send a note to Prattle when I’m back at my desk. Just one more thing. Why do you think Wallace thought you had his paintings?”

  Her eyebrow twitched again, but her face was stolid. “Did he?”

  Darla reached behind me and grabbed the stainless-steel door handle, pulling it open to let in the swelter. “You’re some sort of celebrity journalist, I take it? Is that what Gideon was saying? I’m always pleased to speak with anyone from your paper. However, I hope next time you come you’ll give us a ring and let us know you’re coming down. Just so that we can make sure we give you the proper attention. I hope you understand.”