by Susan Daitch
The art handlers were often young artists whose day jobs at Claiborne’s involved everything from hanging shows to building crates with the skill of fine craftsmen. They hammered and sawed with the offhand precision of engineers, but they were cool guys who did their own paintings or installations, or whatever, after work. I liked running into them, so I pushed the door open.
No artist-art handler was dipping into Ashby’s Lagavulin before heading to a party in Bushwick. And I wanted to go, too?
Hardly.
There was Jack Ashby, eyes ceiling-ward, pants down, hands on the head of a young man kneeling in front of him. Not only did his eyes slowly descend toward mine; the young Caravaggio-like fellow turned, mouth wet, and stared at me, too. Their backdrop was a huge Jean Dubuffet.
I shut the door, my face burning-red-hot. I leaned against the wall for a moment, and tried to leave as soundlessly as I could, but my feet sounded as if they belonged to a skittish tap dancer performing on marble tiles.
My relationship thus far with Ashby was distant and professional. Not only was, say, the world of kids selling candy on the subway beneath his notice—that was obvious; the tourists buying Monet calendars and Cézanne mugs, those who stood in line at the Museum of Modern Art, people who brought the wrong kind of wine to his parties—all were beneath his contempt. When I met him, I didn’t know how I could ever work with a guy whose feet didn’t touch the ground as I knew it. The answer I worked out was to do my job and stay the hell out of his way. But now I’d seen the thing no one is supposed to see.
Back in my studio, I began to pack my things. Calvin stopped by, leaned a mop against a wall.
“You leaving already?”
“I’m fired.”
“What? Who’s firing your ass at 1 a.m.? What’d you do?”
“I walked in on Ashby…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Getting his bone smoked.”
“Yeah. You could put it that way.”
“It comes with the job. Nobody will tell you that but me, but this is accurate information. Unpack your stuff. For old Jack, getting walked in on is part of the drama.” Calvin had a look on his face that was reserved for talking about silly white people. My family was from Cairo. I was familiar with expressions about the sometimes baffling behavior of Europeans. “Get back to work and forget about it.”
There were no classes at the Art Institute about working with exhibitionists.
The next day I had to hand in my condition report on the Kandinsky to Ashby in person. This was normal protocol. There was no just hitting Send and moving on to the next project. His assistant worked from a small office next door, and told me to walk right in. I wanted to say to her, “You’re kidding, right?” His door was shut, so I knocked. The words “Come in” never sounded more like “Off with her head.”
Ashby stood in front of the black-white-and-red Dubuffet, which looked like a massive jigsaw puzzle, and here and there you could make out a face. He said nothing about what I had witnessed the night before. I handed him my report. He thanked me without making eye contact, and that was that. He was on the phone, or pretended to be.
But that night as I was working on an Anselm Kiefer impasto of paint, broken glass, and lead, clinging to life after being tickled by a forest fire that had spread to its most recent home in Malibu, I heard a sound like someone screaming in great pain against a backdrop of nineties club music. There was no way I was going to open that door. No. Way. I got back to the Kiefer. If the fire had been hot enough and gotten close enough, the lead would have melted. Materials that burn, combined with those that melt, can mean total destruction. The issue becomes: How much should be fixed, and what becomes part of the painting’s history? Should natural fading over time be retouched, and how much? Had that red originally been madder lake or more like raw scarlet? The anonymous owner had gotten an insurance payment, I was guessing, and now wanted to sell. I looked back and forth between the square canvas and the “before” picture I’d tacked beside it.
Then the screaming got worse. I turned on the suction table, used for flattening creased or cockled works on paper. I didn’t need to use it at the moment, but the sound of the exhaust was perfect for drowning out noise. I worked on the Kiefer till two in the morning, at which time I felt as if I’d had a double espresso, so I had a shot of Jack Daniel’s before I left. Sometimes you nibble on one side of the mushroom, sometimes the other.
The next day, bright and sunny, autumn in New York, all was right with the world until Ashby’s assistant called to tell me that I was wanted in his office immediately. I was in the middle of a delicate operation with the Kiefer in terms of glass shards scattered across its surface, but she reminded me that Ashby’s schedule was busier than mine, and that I worked for him.
Ashby’s face was impassive, as if he were looking at one of Yves Klein’s blue paintings, as if he was meditating on a light pattern on the ceiling, as if he were focused on elevator music. His office furniture was designed by Isamu Noguchi, or looked as if it had been. A black Louise Nevelson sculpture had replaced the Dubuffet. While Ashby was quiet, I imagined Nevelson standing next to it, her eyes rimmed with kajal, black turban, sharp nose, asking me if I had any idea how difficult it was to stake your claim in a province that was ruled by men? Did I really think things had changed so much since she began to show her work? I had time to think all this, because Ashby held a silence that I could only interpret as disapproving in the extreme, though I had no idea what I had done.
“Stella, what are your responsibilities at Claiborne’s?” he finally said.
“I assess the structural stability of paintings and works on paper, stabilize and counter deterioration, if possible, and conserve what exists historically.”
“And if you’re working at night, as you do—and, unlike most institutions, we at Claiborne’s appreciate your skill and your eccentricities—or into the morning, and you hear a noise, a disturbance, what do you do?”
“Call 911.”
Ashby shook his head, as if clearly talking to a moron.
“Call security?”
“Come, Stella, let’s not joke. First, you investigate yourself. Only if it’s a real emergency would you contact security, and 911 only as, truly, a last resort.”
So Calvin was right.
I noticed that a wooden knob had been broken off the Nevelson, from the panels of wooden found objects. It was sitting on Ashby’s desk. I knew the knob had been in place prior to last night. I had seen the condition report.
I returned to my studio. Was what Ashby did at night legal? No laws were broken if the adults were all-consenting, and no one was hurt, but certainly he would lose his job if he was found to be playing fast and loose with objects worth millions of dollars that didn’t belong to him.
Late in the afternoon I phoned Ashby’s assistant, Sheilagh, to see if he was in. No, he was at a meeting at the Whitney, downtown. Her voice was brusque and annoyed. She let me know that she was on her way downstairs to check on a catalog. Sheilagh had a BBC accent (the real thing, not like Ashby’s), looked like the actress Louise Brooks, with lacquered bobbed hair and red nails, and seemed to float above the internecine squabbles between Ashby and Claiborne’s director, Fieldston.
The president was speaking at the U.N. There would be traffic gridlock in midtown. I went down to Ashby’s office. The door was shut but not locked.
Ashby’s screen saver was Seurat’s Circus Sideshow, except the dots were pixelated and the figures moved as they played their instruments, nodded their heads, shuffled back and forth. I pressed a button to clear the screen saver only to find that the computer hadn’t automatically turned off. All Ashby’s files were visible, scattered across the field. Most had logical, predictable labels concerning his position at the auction house. One file, labeled “Caravaggio,” wouldn’t have seemed unusual; he was one of Ashby’s favorite painters. Only sixty to eighty of his works are thought to still exist. It’s unknown how many have been lost o
r destroyed in wars or other disasters. Many are located in churches in Italy and cannot be sold by any means, and those in private hands never passed through Claiborne’s. The icon for the file was the face of Dexter Fletcher, who played the young Caravaggio in the Derek Jarman film about the artist’s imagined life: meeting boys, fighting duels, dying at the age of thirty-six. I clicked on Fletcher’s face to find thirty or so subfiles, all labeled only according to date. I clicked on one. That was all I needed. Ashby had recorded himself and a man wearing Balinese masks and penis gourds from Irian Jaya. The man didn’t seem to know that he was being recorded. Or maybe he did. I only watched a few seconds, so it was impossible to know. I didn’t bother to look at the other files. It was enough that I’d glimpsed much of the action in person.
The sound of footsteps paused at Ashby’s door. I quickly shut the file and slipped behind the Nevelson, praying that the screen saver would flip back to the Seurat. The door opened, and someone looked for some papers on Ashby’s desk. It didn’t sound like Ashby’s footsteps, but more like heels, perhaps his assistant. I realized that I should have clicked on “History” to erase my tracks. Too late. The person sat in Ashby’s chair, and I heard the business-like sound of papers being moved, but no computer noises. If it was Sheilagh, I wondered if she ever looked at his screen and clicked on the Caravaggio file, as I had. She didn’t seem like the snooping type, and she never worked late, so probably she knew nothing of her boss’s midnight assignations. Calvin and I were the chosen witnesses. We were vulnerable—unlike Sheilagh, we didn’t float above anything. Finally, whoever it was left, and I slipped out from behind the Nevelson.
Ashby regularly met people in his office in the middle of the night: friends, curators from museums, random people who responded to craigslist ads. This I knew. I walked in on a man who wanted to try on emerald cufflinks that belonged to the last czar. Then there was the fellow who desired a rare Micronesian canoe that the two of them would sit in just to test its durability the night before the bidding began. They tested it naked for a greater feel of authenticity, or so they said when I opened the door. Being discovered by Calvin or me was part of the staging of these encounters. Which is not to say that we enjoyed this. We didn’t. But when you heard those sounds you never knew exactly what it was. Sometimes I ignored the screams. That night, I was sure Ashby left at about eight o’clock. Raincoat over his arm, he made a comment about King Philip of Spain and dwarves, and warned me to begin the condition report on the Velázquez upstairs.
It was just before midnight; King Philip and Queen Mariana were reflected in a mirror in the painting’s background, the faces of the Infanta, the female dwarf Maribola, and other attendants all swam before my eyes. Velázquez included himself in the picture, standing before a canvas, brush in hand. The maids looked at the Infanta, but both Maribola and Velázquez at his huge canvas seemed about to extend their hands out into the room, as if inviting me to join them in the Alcázar Palace. He might have been saying, “We kicked your ancestors out of Spain, but now we’d like you to come back for a visit.” Velázquez was presumably painting the Infanta, but he was facing me, looking at my paint-stained pants, messy hair held up by a 000-size brush, and big golden door- knocker earrings.
Screaming pierced the third floor. The brush I was using to dust superficial dirt from the dwarf’s broad face fell out of my hand. I quickly put on my shoes and walked back into the hall, leaving my door open. No one was around. I’d be right back. Three doors led to three different stairways. Stairwell B was across the hall, and C, down at the other end, was a fire door. If it was pushed open, an alarm would sound. Stairwell A was the closest to my workroom, so I chose that door, descending the stairs slowly, straining to hear. Just as I reached the end of the stairway, the screaming stopped altogether. I paused at the doorway to the second floor. The sound really had stopped. Whoever was in Ashby’s office was probably getting dressed. If I walked in just as they were politely adjusting their ties, and pretending nothing had happened, it would be worse than embarrassing. I hated these dramas, and always felt foolish when I burst in, sure this time that something terrible was actually happening to someone on the second floor. Invariably, Ashby had a way of communicating that my timing was off. So for the second instance during my employ at Claiborne’s I ignored the sound, pretended I was alone with the paintings upstairs, paintings that were records of seventeenth-century Spain, nineteenth-century France, and my collection of vintage Pez dispensers that I’d brought from home to display.
I waited a few minutes, leaning against the wall, then took my hand from the doorknob and returned to the third floor.
The third floor was carpeted, silent, and dimly lit. Milky glass bowls, ceiling lamps suspended from the ceiling left pools of light on the floor. I re-punched the code, pushed the glass door of my studio open a crack, looked inside but could see nothing except the shadows of looming panels of paintings waiting for condition reports. The UV light was still on. There was a heap of velvet rags on the floor near King Philip and Queen Mariana that hadn’t been there when I left. It looked as if one of the figures in the painting had stepped out of the picture and taken off his clothes.
I took a few steps closer. It looked as if someone had overturned a small bin of clothing. A lace collar, black stockings, gold embroidered bits and pieces, poufy velvet sleeves: it was a large heap of clothing. I poked the pile with the toe of my shoe. The basketwork of a farthingale created a peak on the top of the pile, a pair of jester-like men’s shoes pointed outward. I picked up one half-scarlet, half-yellow shoe—or at least those were the colors they would have been under natural light. They looked old, but not that old, as if they’d been used for a couple of plays somewhere, then discarded. Had Ashby dressed in these costumes? In the few minutes I was in Stairwell A, he could have taken the other stairway, B, and entered my workroom for an instant of titillation against a backdrop of one of the most valuable paintings in the world. I moved the edge of a costume with my toe. I was annoyed that he would leave this pile of crap near the painting I was supposed to be working on. His leavings reeked of stale tobacco and spilled drinks. I kicked the heap, in an attempt to punt it across the floor, rather than touch the stuff. Thwap. My foot struck the rags. Thwap. A bloody hand stuck out from the pile. It was a man’s hand, fingers curled slightly; the beginnings of a sleeve appeared at the wrist. The person was dressed in one of the costumes. The arm felt loose, as if it might come off if I pulled too hard.
I felt as if I were swallowing my tongue and choking on it. My studio was suddenly not my studio. Its identity as a place where paintings are conserved turned into a dark background. I moved to pull my phone from my bag, but my knees and elbow joints shifted as if someone had injected quick drying glue into them. I didn’t scream. Even if Calvin were still in the building, screams would be construed as part of an Ashby production. Nobody would hear me, nobody would come.
Shadows adjusted themselves in the depths of the studio. A man’s profile flew across the wall, visible even in the dim light. A glass jar thrown from across the room just missed my head and smashed into a painting beside me. Trying not to inhale the toxic fumes of intense turpentine, I ran to the door as if my platforms were Nike SBs, shards of glass splintering underfoot. The carpeted hall was soundless. I ran past stairwells A and B. At the end of the hall was C. If I pushed the fire doors to stairwell C, alarms would instantly be activated, so I shouldered through the double glass doors, slamming them against the walls. No noise whatsoever. Someone must have disconnected the siren. Down the stairs, opening the door to the second-floor hallway, I could hear running footsteps behind me, but I didn’t turn around. The steps got closer. Thunk. My pursuer slipped and fell on Calvin’s polished marble floor. At the same moment, the platforms on my shoes separated from the soles. The pressure of running had caused the cheap glue to peel and flake away. I threw the bottom part of the platforms down the stairs. It was easier to run now anyway, in just soles, like running in sandals.
When I first began to work at the auction house, I thought I would never remember the complicated layout, with wings and floors that had been added on to the original structure and stairways, which didn’t always lead where you thought they would. If I could get as far as the storeroom in the back of the first floor, he could be lost in its chaotic depths.
Left unlocked from within Claiborne’s, this room contained a lot of junk. It was where men called pickers left their hauls. Lately, pickers were Russians with trucks, a little knowledge, and money, who bought estates or who knows what, and came in with loads of furniture and paintings; most of it had little value. Once in a while something would turn up: a signed Disney drawing, a Shaker rocking chair, a collection of first-edition Flash comics from January 1940. A blood transfusion from the Flash wouldn’t be a bad thing to have right now. I ran around crates and dusty boxes that sprawled haphazardly in the shadows of the cavernous room. After my pursuer’s fall, the pattern of steps had the irregularity of limping, one foot dragging but still in steady pursuit. If he stumbled, no curses were whispered or threats shouted, which made him seem a creature with no reactions, possibly superhuman.