by Susan Daitch
“What if I refuse?”
“It’s standard procedure around valuable works of art. You must know that.”
She was right sometimes, but handing over your phone wasn’t standard procedure. It was occasional. I handed her my latest disposable, and she looked at it with distaste of the Ashby variety, before dropping it in the top drawer of a Japanese tansu.
“It’s temporary. Mine was lost on a flight from Berlin.” I lied. More like on a subway to Coney Island.
“I promise I’ll return it to you the moment the job is finished.” No doubt she would wear a hazmat suit in order to touch the thing again.
Andrija led me past a private concert hall, a screening room, a bowling alley, and bathrooms that seemed to open out into the stars. No wonder Ilya Grilke or Grilke Properties could buy a remote control to access the crane just outside as if it were no more than a toy. The company probably owned the land it sat on. The kitchen was too clean, though it would be the envy of any chef; it looked as if no one had ever cooked in it. I opened a couple of drawers while Andrija took a phone call. All were empty. In fact, the whole place looked as if no one had ever lived there, or had any intention of doing so. These luxury condominiums are used as commodities that limited-liability companies could invest in. The identities of the true owners were never known, and they hardly ever, or never, appear. If I was hired, it would be like working in a diamond-studded cash box. If I was hired. So far, I’d seen no paintings anywhere.
“Thank you for returning my call,” I could hear her saying just outside the kitchen. “The Grilkes are out of the country. You have dealt with me before. I am their authorized representative. I don’t see the issue.” There was a pause. “Not acceptable, Ms. Rothman. Not acceptable. The Grilkes need their son’s grades to reflect the donations they so generously make to the school.” I could hear the click of her square-cut emerald ring tapping on the wall in impatience. “Ms. Rothman, I really don’t have time now or tomorrow and would like to wind this up, and I’m sure this is a box, you, too, would like to check off.” Andrija said something that I couldn’t hear, then her voice sounded much more convivial. “I’m so glad to hear you say that, and I will convey the change to his parents. Thank you.”
Andrija returned and eyed me up and down as if she knew I’d been opening drawers. I should have realized there would be security cameras in every room, even if no one lived here. She could speak into one phone and watch me on another.
“Nice kitchen,” I said. “Do you hang out here much?”
“What for?” She clearly thought I came from another planet for even suggesting such a thing.
Andrija’s office was not part of the tour. Perhaps it was located on what the doorman had referred to as “the other Grilke floors,” or she just floated from room to room with no need for anything stationary.
“Come, I’m going to show you the bedroom where you’ll be working.”
I didn’t even know Grilke, and I was already in his bedroom. It was pure white, minimalist, a showroom, like the kitchen and the living room. I could see one suit and one pair of shoes in the two-story walk-in closet. The closet had its own bathroom—in case you have to go while you’re trying to decide what to wear, I guess. What was most striking was that every wall of the bedroom was covered with an assortment of pure-white canvases.
“Grilke collects Robert Ryman’s white paintings from the 1960s,” I said. I’d seen the white paintings at the Museum of Modern Art but never worked on one. Grilke must have the world’s largest collection of Rymans. I didn’t know there were so many. The walls had been specially designed for the paintings to fit into rectangular recesses. There were no frames.
When I looked more closely, it became apparent that there were long scratch marks made by someone’s fingernails running around the room at about eye level, linking one painting to the next like horizon lines, as if someone were turning the walls of paintings into a landscape mural, or had just started to. The line ran from canvas to canvas, encircling the white room. More like a snowscape than a landscape. This was what I was expected to repair.
“Can I take this down and look at the back?” I reached for a small damaged canvas.
“No. Apart from restoring the surfaces, Mr. Grilke wants nothing taken down from the walls.”
“That’s going to be difficult, but I’ll see what I can work around.”
“We have everything you will need for the repairs here.”
There is a philosophy among conservators that in some cases, to a certain extent, even damage becomes part of the history of the works. Andrija, as the invisible Grilke’s voice box, didn’t seem like the kind of self-appointed curator with whom you could have a philosophical debate about reasons for leaving faded work, for example, alone, as the fading is part of the natural aging of any pigment. Just do the job and get paid was her attitude toward me, at any rate, and I was inclined to agree with her—at least in this case.
“How did the paintings get scratched?”
“Careless movers.”
The marks didn’t look like the accidents of art handlers. Those guys are well trained, and I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which paintings would be moved from place to place in an unwrapped state. The parallel tracks looked as if a very angry person had torn around the room, fingernails scratching across the paintings.
“The paint used here was lead white,” I explained. “It’s difficult to find, but not impossible, and it’s highly toxic, so I’ll need special equipment for handling it: an exhaust fan, a gas mask. I’ll bring about a dozen tubes when I return.” I figured I could ask for anything here. “It might take me a few days to get the materials together, but the job looks straightforward.”
“No, Ms. Hammersmith. I’m afraid that’s not how we do things. For security reasons, once you’re registered in the building’s system of authorized contractors, for the work you’re doing, there’s no coming and going. You’re not here for a consultation, estimate, or diagnosis. You’re here for an allotted period, and that’s it. Once the job is completed, you’ll be free to go. Grilke Properties takes security seriously. We’ll get you whatever you need.”
The Serbian Ice Queen who would turn out to be from Staten Island was not to be challenged. The job should only have taken a day, and I needed to be paid immediately, if not sooner, so I agreed to her terms. I wondered who had been on the job before me and what other restoration assignments he’d performed. Perhaps, like myself, he was an exile from the museum world or an art student with massive debt who would do anything. Andrija claimed she hadn’t known him very well.
“There is some urgency here,” she said. “These paintings are to be shipped to Zurich tomorrow, so the job really does need to be completed today. I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t contacted us, and for that, on behalf of the Grilke Group, and myself, we are extremely grateful. When the late Mr. Kronstadt passed…”
“Was murdered.”
“Yes.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say the word, I could tell. It was almost pornographic. I changed the subject.
“Can I be paid in cash?”
“If you wish. It would be quite a bit to carry around, but be assured, we appreciate your expertise. Actually, I believe Grilke would prefer a cash transaction for this particular job. Do you have your own private armored car?” Andrija laughed, but I’m certain this was a kind of vehicle she was familiar with. My only plan was that Demetrius would pick me up when I left the building.
Andrija’s eyes flickered for a moment. She ran a bare finger across a canvas, something you should never do, however tempting it might be.
“I never understood the attraction of these, but they begin to grow on you, and you see surface differences in the kinds of white.” A sense of doubt crept into her voice for a moment, and her accent slipped into a hint of Brooklynese from an earlier generation, the kind that says “yuge” for huge and “powah” for power. Perhaps she would confide in me, t
ell me something about the people who owned the apartment.
“How did you come to be working for Grilke?” I ventured into the deep water of “it’s none of your business,” pretending to examine the way light hit one of the white paintings.
“I was in real estate.” That was all she would tell me. She crossed her arms and walked across the room to look at another painting. It was as if an invisible door had opened a crack, then slammed shut. I imagined she was skilled at anticipating the concerns of people like her employers and good at solving their day-to-day problems. Perhaps she had started out by selling expensive apartments and moved on to luxury condos, garnering larger and larger commissions. It was difficult to envision her translating the Staten Island bus system to her immigrant parents, but some people are good at reinventing and compartmentalizing themselves. You would think she had sprung fully formed into the world of wiring large sums of money in someone else’s name, booking first-class flights at the last minute, arranging appointments with the best heart surgeon in Los Angeles, being on a first-name basis with brokers of all kinds, but maybe she was super-adept at code switching—talking about a church supper one minute, booking a suite at the Ritz-Carlton the next.
“We can get you whatever you need,” she said again. “Your predecessor did not grind his own pigments as the original artist did, but Mr. Grilke insists on as much authenticity as possible.”
I wasn’t sure Ryman did grind his own pigment, but I didn’t argue with her.
“We weren’t satisfied with his work, in any case.” Her phone buzzed, but she ignored it. “Tell me what you’ll be needing to complete the work.”
“Lead white is lead carbonate hydroxide. I’ll need sheets of lead you can get from a scrap-metal yard, and vinegar. The lead needs to be exposed to acetic-acid vapor in the presence of moisture and carbon dioxide. I don’t suppose you do recycling here, so you wouldn’t have vegetable peels, fruit, things like that?”
“No.”
Of course not—what was I thinking?
“Horse shit.”
“Excuse me?”
“Horse manure. I need something fermenting, since you don’t have any food here. You can get this from stables, from the horses in Central Park. Fermentation supplies a heat source and gives off carbon dioxide and moisture. Air provides oxygen. The acetic acid converts the lead, forming basic or tribasic lead acetate, which is afterward decomposed by the carbon dioxide to form basic lead carbonate.”
Andrija was the kind of woman whose trash bags were probably stamped with gold LVs. I couldn’t see her shoveling horse manure—not now, not ever—but I had a sense that somewhere within her purview, if not directly on the premises, she could have someone acquire almost anything on the planet. While she made calls to have the manure delivered, I looked more closely at the paintings. Tiny yellowish flecks were visible at the deepest parts of the scratch furrows. I licked my finger and ran it across the scratch marks. Conservators use their own spit all the time. Fingernail-size white flakes came off on my hand. Before I could look more closely, Andrija returned to the bedroom-gallery and asked me what I needed in terms of brushes. The previous restorer had left some.
As soon as she departed, I wet a finger and ran it along another scratched painting. Wet paint smeared my hand. The white paint was fresh. There were no recent white paintings by Robert Ryman. The canvas before me would have to be a fake. Perhaps none of them were real. If Andrija knew, in all likelihood it was in my best interest to play along for the moment and say nothing. If she didn’t know, it might also be in my best interest to say nothing—to just get paid and not rock the boat. It was possible the previous restorer had applied the wet paint, having left before it dried. I ran my finger over the scratch on another painting only to be interrupted by Andrija’s comings and goings yet again. She was pushing a wheeled table containing jars of brushes, cotton rags, solvents, a glass of water. The jar of Scheele’s green that cost Oscar his life was on the cart.
“Did my predecessor leave a tarp?”
“Do you mean a drop cloth to protect the floor?”
“Yes, but I’d also like to construct a small tent over the painting to keep out light and dust. Even white paintings can be damaged by light when the sun rises. I’ll be working through the night.”
“Aren’t you worried about fumes?”
“If there was to be long-term exposure, yes, but now I’m concerned with particulate matter in the air that floats onto the paint and affects the surface texture, which varies from painting to painting, and I’m also concerned with controlling the intense light you have up here. I need to determine how the painting would look due to normal aging.”
None of this was true. I just wanted to work without Andrija necessarily seeing what I was doing.
“How does a white painting fade?”
“There are gradations and kinds of hues, even with lead white. I need to have some sense of the surfaces’ true color when I fill in a scratch. Do you want them to look like what they would have looked like in 1967, or what they would look like now if they were damage-free?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Andrija said, “1967. Give them the full botox and line-filler treatment, or, better yet, full facelift. It’s what the Grilkes would want.”
“The Joker look?” I laughed. “For that I’d have to take them off the stretcher bars and re-stretch the canvas. I’ll need a hammer, obviously, tacks and nails.”
“Absolutely not! Nothing leaves the walls!” Andrija was not amused. “You’re hired because you have skills.”
This was said in reproach, but, true to her capabilities for getting things done, a few minutes later a man appeared and set up a sort of canvas hood over a scaffolding on wheels. I moved it over to one of the paintings. I was alone.
I picked up a rag and wiped paint away from the picture, which was wet. Blue shapes appeared. There was a painting underneath. An arm, a torso. I would guess Matisse. The blue had a Mediterranean quality. Not wanting to damage the picture further, I moved on to another canvas. This one was dry. There was a ridge of flakes along the edges of the scratch lines. I slowly, carefully began to brush away, outward from the center of the furrows, which were only about a quarter of an inch wide. Shapes began to appear in the shallow groove. There was another painting underneath. As I cleaned and brushed away the overpainting, two eyes stared out at me. I’d seen that pair of eyes before. Maribola, the dwarf.
It was Las Meninas. Masuji had been right. There were others.
“How is Grilke like Göring?” I said out loud, Lewis Carroll style, as if asking, “How is a raven like a writing desk?” Here was part of the answer.
The frame had been removed, so from the wall recess it looked like a large white canvas. I wet my fingers and checked a few other white paintings. Every one of them showed evidence that there was something underneath.
There was no way I could rewind the tape, go backward and cover up what I’d uncovered. As soon as Andrija reentered the room, she would see that I knew. She had walked back into the living room. I followed the sound of her voice. I had to get out.
“Yes, I need, I don’t know, maybe fifty pounds of horse manure. She didn’t tell me how much, so I’m just guessing—and deliver it in sealed, sterilized containers. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. The doorman will show you to the service entrance.”
I slipped through the kitchen, down an icy corridor to the elevator. There was no down button. There were no buttons of any kind, only a slot to the right of the polished steel doors where you could slide a key card if you had one. I didn’t. If I knew the number of the doorman, I could call him to send the elevator, but this was a number I didn’t have. Next time you do a job in a building like this, get the doorman’s phone number, I reminded myself. If I ever had a phone again.
I could hear Andrija speaking to the doorman now. “Hendrickson, I’ve told you before. No one but the owners and myself take the private elevator. The painter, Ms. Hammersmith, sho
uld have been put in the service-entrance lift. You’ve made this mistake in the past, and if it happens again I will speak to management and you will be terminated. Are we clear? Are we very clear?” Her voice was condescending, as if she were talking to a child, which I was sure she was not. If I could find the service elevator, that might be a way out, but it was nowhere to be found, as if such a thing would have to be in a part of the apartment that was remote, tucked away, an embarrassment.
I opened a few doors hoping to find a stairwell, but there was none. I was stuck. Andrija appeared, a vision of black suit, tall black shoes, and diamonds.
“Oh, Ms. Hammersmith. The material you ordered will be here in an hour. Well, that’s what they say, but it might well be a little longer. We’re relying on horses here, as well as humans.” Andrija put her hand on my arm.
I brushed hair out of my face. Large flakes of white paint that had clung to my palm got caught in my hair. Andrija picked one off the floor.
“Oh, Ms. Hammersmith.” She sounded almost apologetic as she brushed the white flakes from my hair in a gesture that reminded me of the short march to the electric mixer. “You can’t leave until the job is complete and, seriously, it won’t take long. You just dip a brush in the paint and run around the room, right?” She looked at the flakes that fell from my hair onto her hand. “You said so yourself, and you haven’t even started to make the lead white.”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me back into the apartment, back into the living room. I pushed her away. She was much taller than I was and strong, though she tottered on very high heels. We struggled at the edge of a grouping of white Mies van der Rohe chairs. She thrashed haphazardly, but managed to put me in a choke hold, and I pushed hard against her. She fell into the chairs but was soon up, fresh gash on her perfect forehead, but charging toward me. The only advantage I had was that she was wearing shoes that were designed more for sitting in a chair than for movement. She tackled me, and we rolled across the carpet, across a tile border, and into the pool. Once in the water, Andrija became detached from me. The pool was uniformly very deep. There was no shallow end. Looking down at the specks of people and Pez-like cars seventy-five stories below induced a feeling similar to vertigo but worse. You know glass is solid, like wood or steel, but this glass, like most glass, was transparent. Though, logically, I knew that several inches of molded glass kept me from falling to the concrete, my eyes told me that nothing but air and water separated me from the street. I managed to swim to the edge without looking down again, despite the temptation, and pulled myself out. Andrija had more trouble. She tried to tread water, but her clothes and shoes weighed her down. As she flailed, she drifted to the end of the pool that hung over the street. Looking down seventy-five stories, she screamed.