“Sorry. I had to change in a Starbucks bathroom that smelled like dead aardvarks and—”
Sara interrupted. “Oh, speaking of—this is for you.” She dug an oil-stained brown bag from her bottomless purse.
Irene peeled back the paper to reveal a single, smushed vanilla cupcake. Little rainbow sprinkles formed a lopsided swirl, winking up like stars.
“They made us buy something. Can you believe it?”
In fact, Irene could not believe it. First, Sara was a rotten liar, and second, everyone knew Starbucks was one place you could use the bathroom without paying for something; it might as well be rule two of city living.
George winked at Irene as she helped slip off Sara’s coat. “Someone was afraid you didn’t eat today,” he murmured.
Sara pretended to object, but Irene kissed her cheek again. “Well, did you?” Sara inquired, and before an answer was given, she reached up to poke the faint spot beneath Irene’s eye.
Irene snapped her head to one side. “I had some grapes.”
She already regretted telling Sara about last week’s CT scan, which meant she’d just keep worrying and eventually she’d ask about yesterday’s follow-up appointment.
“Jacob here yet?” George asked, absently trying to take Sara’s coat so he could hang it.
Irene yanked it back. “Not yet. But he’s always late.”
“But we’re late.”
“He’s always later.”
Then, as Irene moved to close the door, she saw someone approaching—a young Korean man who was shyly inspecting the wall. It took two seconds to see that he didn’t belong there. Distantly, she remembered him from somewhere. He wore a sharp, gray Armani suit and held, in one hand, a bottle of Bollinger Blanc. Who brings champagne to a catered party? Irene wondered as she tried to remember which gallery he worked for. She wasn’t entirely surprised to see Sara give the boy a bear hug.
“William Cho? What are you doing here? Irene, did you know William? He was in Art History II with McClellan. You sat in on that one.”
Irene didn’t hesitate to grip his wet, gloved hand in welcome. He was very thin, with cheekbones that she was sure she’d have remembered if he’d had them back in college. People don’t just go around getting cheekbones, she told herself. Or coal-black eyes like that either. She liked the girlish line of his upper lip; he bit it nervously whenever he looked at her. Normally she wasn’t very interested in shyness, but something about him was making her blush.
Sara turned. “George, you remember William.”
They shook hands politely. “Sure! William Cho, right? We met at that newspaper party with Lisa Schmidt. Sara took over as features editor after Lisa went to Madagascar with that guy with the Rhodes . . . honey, what was his name?”
Sara knew it (Henry Fordham, Jr.), and also that the girl’s name had been Lisa Schlick, but from the look on William’s face, Irene guessed he didn’t know either of them.
“Hang on!” George said, “Before we get caught up, let me grab us all something from the bar.”
It was understood that Irene had to wait until the guests had finished arriving, but Sara said anything involving St. Germain would be terrific. It was only then that William thrust forward the bottle of champagne that he’d been cradling like a football.
George seized it with grateful hands. “Damn. This is nice stuff, William.”
“I stole it,” William abruptly announced.
“Like, you boosted it?” George asked. “Don’t tell me you boosted this.”
Sara laughed. “Boosted? What are you, a thirties gangster?”
George winked at her while William clarified. “Yeah. I mean—no. I didn’t rob a liquor store or anything. But it’s been under the coatrack in my boss’s office since last Christmas.”
Turning the bottle over, George peeled a shiny gift tag off the bottom. “‘To Lenny. From the Berg-Geldorf Family!’ Well thank you, Berg-Geldorfs! I’ll see if the guy can put this on ice.”
He clapped William on the back. Then, while Irene and Sara turned their attention to William, he slipped into the main room with every appearance of happiness.
Truth be told, however, George was feeling unusually nervous. His mind was elsewhere. Ordinarily the gallery Christmas party was his best excuse all year to get all dressed up and feel metropolitan, but this time he was in no mood. He looked around, smiling at everyone and no one in particular, as a sensation crept up his spine that somehow they could tell that he was from the Midwest, that these artists could see the sleepy cornfields in his complexion. Not like he’d grown up on a farm. Fairfield Beach was ten miles from Columbus. His parents had belonged to the yacht club. But tonight he wasn’t feeling very yachty. He was counting on a few drinks to settle his nerves. The accident had been over on the eastbound side, but everyone on his side had been rubbernecking like their lives depended on it. Like they’d never seen a crash before. Oooo look at the flashing lights! How exciting!
He looked up to realize that the bartender was eyeing him. “Do you have a bucket of ice we could chill this in?”
The graying-haired man frowned. “This isn’t a nightclub. I don’t do bottle service.”
Poor guy looked exhausted. George smiled and took a twenty out of his wallet—the only thing in there—and slipped it into the tip jar. This both worked and didn’t. The bartender took the bottle and plunked it into an empty punch bowl that he angrily began to shovel ice into, resentful at the implication that he could be bought, even if he could be.
George fidgeted with the button on his new jacket. Open, the fabric whooshed backward like a cape when he walked too quickly. Closed, it made him look uptight, almost as bad as that William guy. George couldn’t remember having seen him in college, not once. He was quiet, polite, and finely dressed, which meant that Jacob was going to hate him. Just knowing how much Jacob would hate him was making George sweat. Where was Jacob anyway? How was he always, always later than the rest of them? How did he know? Why wouldn’t he just show up, so he could be mean to William and the girls could get upset and George could swoop in to set things right and they could all go home?
When the bartender had finished sourly shoveling the ice, George ordered something off the ornately printed menu called a Death in the Desert. It tasted sickeningly of licorice. He thought about asking for something else—open bar and all—but didn’t want to show weakness. He gulped the drink down and pretended to be deep in appreciation of a nearby painting of a man eating his own bowels. If there was one real artist there, it was Irene. Over the years he’d seen the most outrageous, beautiful things come off her fingertips. She had a sort of effortless, infinite control over the thickness of a line, or the shade of oils, and the proportion of lightness to shadow. Walking through the city’s museums, George was often sure that he’d just seen one of her paintings out of the corner of his eye.
“Wan’nother?” the bartender grumbled.
“Death in the Desert,” George said. “That’s a pretty hard-boiled name.”
“Iss’a poem. All the drinks got names of poems.” He tapped the company logo on the napkins: Dead Poets Society Functions.
“Cute,” George said. “So no living poets? Couldn’t get a Billy Collins in a tall glass?”
“The Wasteland is pretty good,” the bartender offered. “Got tea-infused bourbon in it.”
George was soon handed a cloudy gray drink that tasted like neither tea nor bourbon. In fact it tasted like nothing at all, which was fine by him, so long as it made the party a little blurrier. Then he got Sara a Faerie Queen, involving St. Germain and blueberries, and resumed scanning the room. Finally he put his finger on it. Last year more people had been dressed up. A lot more. In fact he couldn’t see anyone else wearing a suit, except for William. Had suits suddenly gone out of style? There were an awful lot of piratical mustaches going on around him. Two—no, three d
ifferent guys with muttonchops. What was the point of looking different in exactly the same way as everybody else? No wonder all their dumb art was so dumb—edgy but harmless. Pairs of safety scissors in gilded frames.
He turned, and his eyes locked with Sara’s. She was chatting with William over by the doors to the balcony. She gave George just the quickest, tiniest smile, and it shattered him like a pane of glass. Could even one of these people paint that? The feeling you get when you’re having a crappy night and the woman you’re about to propose to smiles your way. With his right hand, George reached across his chest and patted his left jacket pocket. There was the impression of a small jewelry box, containing a diamond ring that had belonged to his father’s mother’s mother. He would give it to Sara tonight.
“Everyone says Gaussman’s going to be the next Rosenquist” came Irene’s soft, sweet voice behind him. She was speaking to a very tall woman and gesturing toward a longish painting of various bright-colored Web site logos. George liked it—at least it was colorful.
“I loathe Rosenquist,” the very tall woman said.
Irene made a face behind the woman’s back as she said, “Obviously. But that’s why—”
Just then they both heard familiar belly laughter. It was Jacob, at last, speaking to an elderly woman in a fox stole. “Did you skin that yourself? The workmanship’s incredible.”
“George!” Irene sang lightly as she passed him. “That’s the curator of the Morrison!”
He didn’t know what that was, but it didn’t matter. He was the designated extinguisher of Jacob’s fires. Still holding Sara’s drink in one hand, George pushed across the room.
As he arrived on the scene, Jacob was inspecting the woman’s fur: “You can hardly see where the hounds got him.”
“Where’ve you been, Jake?” George asked, looking apologetically at the elderly curator, who took her chance to break for the next room.
After taking a sniff of Sara’s drink, Jacob helped himself to a gulp. “Ah, Georgie Porgie pudding and pie. Long day up at the asylum.” Jake clucked his tongue. “Had to wrestle a kid to the ground who thought he was a goddamn ninja.”
Jacob Blaumann worked as an orderly at Anchorage House, a private rehabilitation institute up in Westchester. He kept a short, dark scholarly beard, which if he ever shaved would grow back during a commercial break. Of course Jacob didn’t watch television, or own one, and the real reason for the beard, George knew, was that a boy Jacob madly desired in their sophomore year had offhandedly commented that it made him look “less pudgy.” Likewise, Jacob had worn the same brown tweed jacket every day since he’d found it at Goodwill and Irene had said it made his shoulders look broad. These things went right to his head, it was true, but so what? It was his confidence, more than anything, that George had seen work its magic on all manner of men in bars, train stations, Whole Foods freezer aisles, and library carrels.
Once Jacob had written poetry, but now he was just a poet. He specialized in a certain type of epic that was a tough sell in an age of text messages. “At least my poems don’t fit on a square of toilet paper,” he was fond of saying. Now he tended a herd of mental patients who, upon occasion, needed to be held down and syringed and straitjacketed. A job he’d found on craigslist, believe it or not, which put his size and his psych minor to unexpected use.
“George,” he began, slinging an arm around his old friend, “I’d like to go to a fox hunt sometime. What do you say?”
“Oh, at least once before I die.” George sighed wistfully.
“Let’s set one up right along Madison Avenue. Get some hound dogs. Floppy ears. Keen sense of smell. You and I follow on horseback, naturally. One of us plays a bugle.”
“You know I used to bugle with the Columbus Philharmonic.”
Jacob lifted a cupped hand to his lips. “TOOO DOOO! TOOO DOOO!”
Most of the people in the room were looking at them now. George ceaselessly enjoyed his former roommate’s irreverence, since he couldn’t often bring himself to be rude. With Jacob it was just the opposite: if he ever had impulses toward politeness (and Sara firmly believed he didn’t), they were soon drowned out by whatever he was shouting. George liked to think they complemented each other in this way, each living through the other when it suited.
“Bunch of rubberneckers!” Jacob scoffed, no quieter.
George grinned. “Speaking of, I got stuck behind this six-car pileup today on the—”
“Hang on. Where’s the bar in this joint?”
“Over there. You’ll like it. All the drinks are named after poems.”
Jacob glowed like a thousand-watt bulb. “Who couldn’t love this town?”
Irene shot them an unappreciative look from across the room and then rubbed nonchalantly at her left eye with the back of her right hand as she schmoozed another donor. Feeling George staring at her, she stuck her tongue out at him and made bug eyes at the green-plastic-encased yam that perched at his end of the bar.
George rubbed his stomach and pretended to be hungry. She gestured silently at the moldy yam, and he scratched at his chin as if considering it. He pantomimed taking out a checkbook and writing many, many zeroes.
“Shut the fuck up!” Jacob bellowed. “They have a drink called The Wasteland! Though it ought to be two words: Waste, space, Land. That’s the actual title. Nobody gets that right. Even if it is highly overrated,” he went on, “it can’t touch ‘The Bridge.’ Hart Crane? Now there’s a poem you guys ought to make into a drink. With hints of the East River—”
He’d have gone on, but he got distracted. “Hey, why’s that Korean kid look so familiar?”
George ordered two more Wastelands, plus five flutes of William’s champagne. Now everyone was there. Now things could really get started.
• • •
William Cho never ceased to be amazed. Here he was in the penthouse of one of the most luxurious hotels in Manhattan, in the midst of a great spiral of artists and patrons. Strange accents buzzed past his ears. A Persian woman passed by with owl feathers braided into her hair. There was snow blowing around out on the balcony, and beyond it more snow was falling a hundred stories to the streets. A Somali man by the window gestured wildly, his platinum watchband glinting in a spotlight. Diamonds ringed the neck of a white girl on the bathroom line, who couldn’t be older than twenty. She and a Brazilian boy of about the same age studied a twisting glass sculpture that reminded William of a tidal wave, frozen solid. And here he was among them, feeling strangely rich by association, not least because he was standing there talking—being talked to, really—by Sara Sherman, of all people.
William didn’t kid himself that Sara actually remembered him. Back in Ithaca, these four had traveled nearly everywhere as a pack. While every other college clique experienced seismic shifts and occasional mergers, they had never grown apart. “The Murphys,” people had called them. William had especially adored Irene, the doe-eyed beauty who’d been habitually late for Art History II. The persistent rumor on campus was that she wasn’t actually a student but a townie who had nevertheless been elected Treasurer of the Ballroom Dance Society and had several pieces put up in the Digital Media gallery—all without paying a cent of tuition. William didn’t have a hard time imagining why doors opened for her. She’d used the library, attended lectures, and spent nights in the dorms, forever popping up where least expected, haunting the school, simply belonging. William had never spoken to her or her friends once in four years.
Now they were all at the same party. It wasn’t, of course, a coincidence.
William had been living in Murray Hill and working at Joyce, Bennett, and Salzmann, a boutique downtown investment firm with its fair share of wealthy partners and wealthier clients. He’d been there for three uncomfortable years. Even before Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch had sent everyone into a panic, William had been worried about getting laid off. Just like college
, the real world was all a game of who you knew. When the bosses began sending pink slips to the print server, they’d start with the people they didn’t care for—or even remember. William knew he had no presence. Not at JB&S. Not anywhere. He always skipped the big holiday party, the weekend retreat at Bennett’s house in East Hampton, and even the celebratory lap around the island on Salzmann’s yacht after the Fontainebleau merger had come through, thanks largely to William’s own analyses. He had spent those evenings like all the others: at home in his apartment watching old movies. Which is what he’d have been doing the night of the party, if he hadn’t seen Irene two weeks earlier at the gallery.
Mr. Joyce had sent William downtown to pick up a monstrous mural of deboned chickens that his wife had commissioned from an artist named Xeer Sool who was, apparently, very hot just then. And there she’d been! Irene Richmond! In greasy overalls, beautiful as ever, trying to help an angry Austrian sculptor bolt ceiling fan blades together at precise thirty-nine-degree angles. She didn’t look up, but William knew she’d never have recognized him if she had. He had been wallpaper at school. If they made beige wallpaper you couldn’t even tell wasn’t paint. It didn’t matter. He could not get her out of his head. He had actually had dreams about her—always in black and white, as if she were in one of his movies.
Then the following week he’d seen the invitation for the K Gallery Christmas party arrive with Mr. Joyce’s mail. He knew Mrs. Joyce would be in Vail with her husband anyway and wouldn’t be able to go. So, just like the champagne bottle, he’d stolen it. The Dow was in free fall. They were probably going to fire him anyway. Still, it had been a week of hemming and hawing before he’d decided to go as an envoy of Mrs. Joyce’s—merely hoping to catch sight of Irene again. He’d never for a moment imagined he’d speak to her, let alone that she’d be twenty feet away, smiling at him.
Why We Came to the City Page 2