Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  The space up here was much more beautiful than the concrete zone downstairs. Light poured in through the three huge windows at the far end, diffused by the blinds, which were the near-opaque misty grey of tracing paper. The shine on the floor reflected and threw up the light in a way that would flatter my mobiles immensely. On either side of the room were two white-painted pillars, a relic of the days when this had been warehouse space, but they wouldn’t interfere with the viewing of the mobile. In fact, I might actually be able to use them.

  “It’s wonderful,” I said to Carol, who looked pleased.

  “Good. Good. Now this is Suzanne.” She indicated a tall statuesque woman behind a desk directly on the right of the entrance lobby. Caught up in my appraisal of the room, I had barely noticed her presence. I blinked in shock. I must be more jet-lagged than I had realised: it was the only explanation for how I had managed to ignore a six-foot blonde built like a Varga girl and dressed like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Suzanne was a throwback to the age where men referred to women of her proportions as stacked, and called them dames while whistling between their teeth and tilting their hats back. I repressed the urge to whistle myself.

  “Hi,” Suzanne said, with a little smile. She had more poise than the Statue of Liberty. It was impressive, if not instantly endearing. Carol was continuing:

  “And that’s Kate.”

  The desk up here was smaller and clearly much more of a work area than the one downstairs; it held a computer, at which Suzanne was sitting, and the walls behind it were stacked to the ceiling with files. Off this little area ran a long narrow office, humming with activity, its shelves filled with art magazines and boxes of slides, a giant photocopier squatting at the far end. The woman Carol was indicating stuck her head through the open door, a stack of papers in her arms.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “I’m Kate. Great to meet you.”

  Her thick red hair was cornrowed tightly to her head—not plaited and pinned down, but actually cornrowed. The effect was very striking. She wore a bead choker, a tight stripy sweater and a combat-style pair of red needlecord trousers that fitted so well they had probably cost more than one would imagine.

  “We’re all very excited about your show,” she went on. “Young British artists go crazy in New York.”

  “That’s more Lex and Rob,” I said. “They’re the real chaos and anarchy merchants.”

  “That’s a great accent,” Suzanne said, revealing in the process that she herself wasn’t American. She sounded like a French-Dutch cross; the accent was smooth but had a guttural edge to some of the consonants. “I love the way the English talk,” she went on. “They’re so—”

  “Refined,” said Kate. “So kinda clipped and neat.”

  She flashed me a big smile. I had taken to her at once; she looked positively human, especially next to Suzanne’s daunting example of Aryan perfection.

  “Well, I like your hair,” I said to Kate. “It’s fabulous.”

  She touched it automatically.

  “It’s a royal pain in the ass.”

  “Very hip, very now,” Suzanne said unexpectedly in the campest of voices. Kate cracked up.

  “Sorry,” she said to me, “that’s kind of our catchphrase du jour. It was in this magazine of Suze’s and we can’t stop saying it.”

  “I do need to show Sam around the gallery,” Carol cut in rather curtly. “I have a six-o’clock appointment and we should be getting on.”

  “Yeah boss!” Kate saluted Carol smartly, bringing her heels together. “Tell you what, I’ll go whip myself with the cat-o’-nine-tails so no one else has to take time off from their work to flog me.”

  Carol was smiling, almost as if against her will. Suzanne slapped Kate’s red corduroy bottom.

  “That’s enough insubordination from you,” she said firmly. She smiled at me, and this time it was much more friendly. Kate’s infectious enthusiasm clearly made Suzanne loosen her corsets. As it were. “Catch you later, Sam.”

  Kate wiggled her fingers at me and disappeared back into the office.

  “I’m working!” she called back. “I’m working!”

  “Kate’s such a clown,” Carol said, not unaffectionately, as she led me across the expanse of polished wood and into the smaller room that led off it. “But she has a wonderful eye. I’m going to get her to work with you on hanging your mobiles. She’s a great fan.”

  “I look forward to it.” And I did. Kate and I would have a blast.

  Despite its lesser size, the room in which we were standing was a lovely space, almost a perfect square. The white enclosing walls, blending into the glossy floor, gave it a great sense of calm. Even Barbara Bilder’s “More Scenes from a Sewage Farm” couldn’t completely destroy the atmosphere. I wanted to stay there for a moment but Carol, Ms. Moto Perpetuo, was already crossing the room. She tapped briskly on a door that I had hardly noticed was there; it was set into the far wall so smoothly that a casual glance would have swept over it without even seeing the hinges.

  “Stanley? Are you in there?”

  A voice called: “Come!” from behind the door, and there was a faint buzzing sound. Carol pushed it open and gestured for me to enter first. I was in a long narrow white room lit by streams of daylight flooding through the high windows. There was a large blued steel table in the centre of the room and two extraordinary things hanging on the wall which looked like collages made by a small child who had just discovered Technicolor and egg boxes simultaneously.

  Two men were sitting at the table. One, at the far side, had a bulging, extra-large Filofax, two catalogues, a file box of slides and various other bits of paper scattered in front of him. Skinny as a rake, he was pale as a corpse and wore big black-framed glasses: your classic geeky intellectual, a Jewish Jarvis Cocker without the twisted fashion sense. His hair was messy, as if he had been running his hands through it, his jacket unbuttoned and his tie askew.

  The other man, leaning back in his orange leather chair, was fiddling with a small electronic organiser which didn’t appear to be switched on. He, in contrast, was picture-perfect. Why not? The nerd in the suit was clearly doing all the work. A tubby little man of indeterminate age, with butter-blond hair and the plump rosy cheeks old ladies love to pinch, he jumped to his feet as Carol and I came in. What a gentleman. Immediately he took my hands in both of his and pressed them together in a tightly packed flesh sandwich. I didn’t take to him, particularly as he was smarming at me with a self-conscious, I-am-a-ladykiller smirk as he squashed his palms stickily around mine. A watch that must have cost ten thousand dollars slid down his wrist to join our love-fest.

  “You must be Ms. Jones! I saw your photograph, but it doesn’t do you justice. It’s a real honour for us to have you here,” he said, his voice greasier than a plate of lard-fried eggs.

  I tugged at my hands. They wouldn’t come out. He had started to knead them intimately, which was revolting.

  “It’s the other way round. Really,” I said, pulling harder. There was something particularly frustrating about having my hands incapacitated. And his were getting damper by the minute.

  “No, I assure you—”

  He broke off because I had twisted my right hand round enough for one of my more knuckleduster-type rings to cut into his Angers.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry,” I said, withdrawing my hands from his loosened grasp. “Did that cut you? It’s rather sharp.”

  The nerd made a small sound that I interpreted as a snigger.

  “Sam, this is Stanley Pinketts, a fellow director,” Carol said. “And Laurence, his assistant.”

  There was a tap on the door.

  “Carol?” came Suzanne’s voice. “There’s a call for you.”

  Laurence leaned over to the control panel on the desk and buzzed the door open for her.

  “I wouldn’t disturb you,” she said apologetically, “but it’s Mrs. Kaneda.”

  Carol looked at me, obviously not wanting to seem rude. But I could
tell it was urgent.

  “Go ahead,” I said quickly, “take the call. I mean, I just dropped in, we didn’t have an appointment or anything.”

  “I’ll look after Sam while you’re on the phone,” Laurence offered, shoving his glasses more firmly onto his beaky nose with one thin finger.

  Carol hesitated a moment, then shrugged.

  “Fine. Why don’t you make her a coffee. You’re the only one who knows how to work that thing. Sorry about this, Sam.”

  I held up my hands in a no-need-to-apologise, coffee-sounds-just-fine gesture.

  “Suzanne, put the call through here,” Carol said crisply. Suzanne disappeared at once. “Stanley, would you mind staying?” she went on. “I might need to check the figures with you.”

  Laurence guided me out and shut the door behind us both.

  “I’ll be safe if I stay clear of your rings, right?” he said.

  “More or less.”

  “Good. ‘I might need to check the figures with Stanley,’” he continued mockingly in an imitation of Carol’s über-businesswoman voice. “The only figures Stanley knows about aren’t exactly fiscal. What she means is that Stanley throws a fit over every decision he’s not involved in, so it’s easier to keep him around when the big ones are going down.”

  “Should you be talking to me like that?”

  “Certainly not. But since I haven’t said anything along those lines to you, it doesn’t matter, does it?” He swiped his palm over my face, a few centimetres away from contact. “All wiped clean,” he intoned. “You will not remember any of my previous comments…. Would you like a coffee?”

  “I need a coffee,” I corrected. “I’m jet-lagged and I’ve never been to New York before and the taxi driver who brought me here tried to kill another one and I’ve just met seventeen new people.”

  “So a quieter day than usual in the big city. And it’s sixteen people,” Laurence corrected. “Stanley doesn’t count because he’s a slug. I thought you’d worked that one out already. Nice hand-work, by the way. You cut him bad?”

  “Minor lesions only.”

  We were passing Suzanne’s desk. Laurence waved at her but didn’t stop. We crossed the lobby and paused briefly at a white door with a keypad next to it. Laurence entered a code and the door buzzed.

  “We’re in!” I said. “Everything’s so high-tech here…. My God.” My voice tailed off. The Technicolor-and-egg-box artist had excelled on the far wall. I bet that it contained every single colour on the spectrum.

  “Striking, no?” Laurence said. “They’re very popular. No-brainers always are. This way.”

  He led me into a small kitchen and started doing things to a coffee machine with more switches than the cockpit of a 747.

  “Don’t you need a licence to operate that thing?” I asked, sitting down in a plastic chair of frighteningly modern construction. “Wow, this is actually quite comfortable.” I yawned.

  “Not comfortable enough to go to sleep in,” Laurence warned. “Hang on. Caffeine coming right up. Do you want a cappuccino?”

  “No, thanks. Milk dilutes the effects. Can I have a double?”

  “You Europeans are so un-health-conscious. It’s quite charming. I take it you don’t mean decaf?”

  I made the sign of the cross at him, hissing.

  “Right, I get the picture.”

  “Do you have any biscuits?”

  He stared at me. “You mean cookies, I take it. Are you nuts? Practically every single person here’s on a diet. Anyone who tried to bring cookies into the kitchen would be stoned to death.”

  “You don’t exactly need to diet,” I pointed out. Laurence was as thin as a rail, his shirt sagging at the waist because his stomach was so hollow. The difference between him and Jarvis Cocker was that the latter knew how to dress his bones, while Laurence could make even the most expensive suit look like he’d bought it at a charity shop. I noticed that his fishbelly-white skin was lightly dotted with pinky-brown freckles, and that his brown eyes, behind the thick lenses, were very sharp.

  “Exactly,” he said, putting the coffee cups on a small tray. “So come through into our humble cubbyhole and have some Oreos from my private stash.”

  Oreos turned out to be delicious, besides coming in a really cute tin with a picture of them stacked up inside. And the gallery assistants’ cubby-hole wasn’t bad either. It wasn’t cosy—nothing in this place could remotely be described as cosy—but it was comparatively welcoming, perhaps because the quarters were so cramped that it could make no attempt to seem design-conscious.

  As I drank my espresso, Laurence filled me in about Bergmann La-Touche. I had already decided that I liked him. He had what Don would have called a “draah” sense of humour.

  “There are three directors at BLT You know Carol, of course, and you just met the inimitable Stanley—actually that’s not true, he’s very imitable, give me your hand—”

  “Ugh, no, please, not again—”

  “OK—then there’s Jeannette, Jeannette LaTouche, but she’s never here. She does the social schmoozing and brings people in, but she’s not one for the nuts and bolts of running the place. It’s basically Carol’s show. Stanley wanted something arty to do, to impress his bimbos, so he bought in. His family has scads of money. I think Carol’s regretting it now. Anyway, then there are three assistants—I’m not Stanley’s assistant, by the way, I’m my own man, that was just Carol being cruel—Java, our lovely receptionist, Suzanne, who does the inventory—”

  “Does the inventory? What, full-time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus.”

  Laurence raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, just the scale of the operation—”

  “Hey, you’re in the big leagues now, little lady. OK, who else is there? The archivist—she’s full-time too—book-keeper…oh, and Don, the handler.”

  “Don’t you like him?”

  There had been an edge to Laurence’s voice as he came to Don. Now he shrugged elaborately, adding a fresh sprinkle of dandruff to the grey shoulders of his suit.

  “Don’s very into his image. All that he-man stuff leaves me cold,” he said dismissively.

  “Into his image?” I said incredulously. “Dressed like that?”

  “Oh, it’s the boy-from-the-Virginia-backwoods thing. Country boy in the big city. He thinks it gives him this kind of hokey charm.”

  “Hey, guys.” Kate stuck her head round the door. “Laurence, get your big feet off my desk, boy. Anyone want to come to the bar? It’s past six.”

  The word “bar” had me on my feet and reaching for my jacket.

  “Well, talk about Pavlov’s barfly,” Laurence said, swinging his legs down from Kate’s desk and standing up too.

  “Laurence?” Kate said, nodding at me. “What about Carol? I mean …”

  There was a long pause.

  “Oh, Jesus, she’s still on the phone,” Laurence said finally. “She’s always hours with Mrs. Kaneda. And it’s Sam’s first night here. We can’t abandon her, can we? It wouldn’t be polite.”

  “No, you’re right.” Kate relaxed.

  “So I can come?” I said hopefully, though without quite understanding the by-play.

  “Sure,” Kate said. “We just have to be careful that Carol doesn’t think we’re poaching you.”

  I raised my eyebrows, unable to imagine a situation in my London gallery where Duggie, the owner, objected to my going for a drink with his assistants. Actually he would be amazed if I suggested it, as none of them were at all appetising, but he would scarcely mind. Maybe New York rules were different. But it still seemed strange.

  “But she could be in there for another hour,” Kate was saying. “I’ll just drop in and run it by her. She’ll probably be grateful to us for taking you off her hands. I know she’s got a dinner appointment.”

  “When doesn’t she? You’re in a hurry,” Laurence observed, watching me pull my gloves on as fast as if I were practising it as an Olympic spo
rt.

  “Coffee will only take a girl so far,” I explained. “Now I need some vodka. And do they have any bar snacks at this place we’re going to?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said to me apologetically as we settled into the booth. “Maybe we should’ve taken you somewhere more hip than here. It’s a real dive.”

  “Oh, no,” I assured her. “I like it. It’s cosy and I’m shattered. Anything too designer tonight would have given me hives.”

  “Well, if you’re sure…. We always come here. I don’t know why.”

  “’Cause it’s not posey and the drinks are cheap?” Laurence suggested.

  It was a little bar on Bleecker Street, only a five-minute walk from the gallery. I found this area much more congenial, or perhaps it would be fairer to say familiar, than my lofty perch on the Upper West Side; SoHo was generally constructed on a more human scale. The buildings were lower, the streets closer together, and we had passed a shop with the best array of fluorescent wigs I’d ever seen, music spilling out from the wide-open door in a slow insistent rhythm. It was like Camden with money.

  This place was simple and basic: wooden floors, wooden booths, a glowing bar at the far end and surprisingly low lighting for six in the evening, when it was only just starting to get dark. Soon I would learn that this was one of the factors that made New York bars so fabulous. They were so dark you couldn’t see how much you were drinking, they served cocktails as a matter of course, and they stayed open till very, very late. It was paradise, really.

  “Oh, by the way,” Kate said to me, “Carol asked you to come in tomorrow and she’ll take you to lunch. She said about twelve-thirty.”

  “Come in earlier if you like and I’ll show you some of the stock,” Laurence offered. “We’ve got some weird and wonderful stuff.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” I said. “Get myself out of bed and onto New York time.”

  “About eleven-thirty,” he suggested. “I find that after more than an hour of looking at art, one’s eyes glaze over.”