Black & White

by Dani Shapiro

  “What do you mean?”

  “Chanel, Louis Vuitton…you name it.” She pauses. “Pottery Barn. Oh, and J. Crew. Banana Republic.”

  “So the galleries—”

  “One by one, they moved here. Matthew was one of the first. Now, everybody’s on these couple of blocks.” Ruth pulls a compact from her purse, flips it open, and studies her face. Since when does she use a compact? Clara can’t even recall her ever carrying a purse. Nathan was in charge of the money. Ruth was like a queen, gliding through life without such pedestrian necessities as cash or identification or house keys.

  “You can pull over here,” Ruth says to the driver. “Just in front of that hydrant.”

  Clara climbs out of the back of the car and Sammy hops out after her. A few kids in their early twenties are smoking cigarettes in front of Metro Pictures. They give Clara and Sam a quick once-over, then go back to their conversation. Just another uptown mother and daughter doing a bit of gallery-hopping. Clara goes around back and pops open the trunk. The wheelchair is easier to lift from this angle—still, she struggles under its weight. It bangs against the curb as she tries to open it. Nobody thinks to help her. Why would they? They’re kids. Kids with black portfolios under their pale, emaciated arms: art students, most likely. They’re focused on each other, on this glorious sunny day—on this fantastically unassuming block where the keys to their careers are in the hands of just a few gallery owners who can turn a starving graduate student into a star overnight.

  Clara sets the wheelchair on the sidewalk. Thanks for nothing. The driver has opened the door for Ruth and is standing at attention, as if expecting Ruth to get out under her own steam.

  “Excuse me.” Clara bends over her mother, half dragging her to the wheelchair.

  “Let me help.” Sammy grabs an elbow.

  “I can do it myself,” Ruth says, her legs flopping like a rag doll’s.

  “Please, just cooperate,” Clara says.

  The art students stop talking and turn to watch, as if this whole exercise is some sort of strange new installation, a performance put on especially for them.

  “Are you all right?” Clara lowers Ruth into the wheelchair.

  “I’m fine.” Ruth shifts until she’s sitting up straight. She squares her shoulders and raises her chin, staring at the front door of Metro Pictures. Clara watches as her mother’s whole demeanor—no, more than her demeanor, her very aura—transforms.

  “Let’s go inside. I must say hello,” Ruth says.

  Ah, Clara realizes. Of course. Her mother is summoning every bit of her strength—one last time—to become Ruth Dunne.

  The frigid air inside the gallery hits Clara like an icy wave. A shiver goes through her whole body. Goose bumps rise on her forearms. Why keep things so cold? It must be sixty-five degrees. Sammy’s going to freeze in her capris and cotton T-shirt. Ruth isn’t going to be able to tolerate this for very long, in her thin silk caftan, with no layer of body fat to protect her. Well, at least her head is covered.

  “What is this show?” Ruth asks, as Clara begins to wheel her around. “I don’t understand it—do you?”

  Clara studies the walls. The entire show is comprised of six gigantic photographs, clearly destined to be hung in enormous lofts. The photographs are oddly bright, a kind of heightened acid-trip Technicolor. The background of each picture appears to be a jungle. Superimposed on the dense green thicket are normal, corporate-looking people—men wearing suits, women carrying briefcases—and they are falling, weightless.

  “I have no idea,” says Clara.

  “An ironic comment on the post-nine-eleven universe,” says Ruth. “It’s a jungle out there. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “I think it’s cool,” says Sammy.

  Ruth reaches up and grasps Sammy’s hand.

  “Samantha, let me explain,” she begins. “Art—real art, good art—does not strain the way this work does. Its metaphors are intrinsic, organic to the work itself. Not this overly stylized stuff that thunks you over the head—makes you think it’s about something, when really it’s just—”

  Sammy’s brow is furrowed. She’s nodding, trying to follow Ruth. And Clara—Clara doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Metaphor? Intrinsic? Organic? Does Ruth really think these words are in Sammy’s vocabulary?

  A gallery assistant appears at their side.

  “The photographer is twenty-two,” the assistant says. “This is her first solo show.”

  “I see,” murmurs Ruth. “Clara? Can we move on?”

  “But I thought—”

  “Next!” Ruth says a bit too loudly.

  Out on the street, Ruth looks so pale that her skin seems to be molting.

  “Ridiculous,” she says to no one in particular. “To think my work has hung on those very same walls.”

  Clara wheels her down the street. Sammy sticks close to her mother—nervous, perhaps. And with good reason. Ruth talks the whole time. Where is her energy coming from? Snatches of what she’s saying drift up to Clara like bits of debris from the sidewalk. Derivative and silly and conceptual overintellectualized crap. Ruth looks tiny from Clara’s vantage point behind the wheelchair. Her legs are a phosphorescent white, poking out from the hem of her caftan, useless against their metal rests.

  “Over here. Let’s see what Andrea’s up to.” Ruth points to the glass doors of the Andrea Rosen Gallery. “She usually has good taste. Ah, a group show. I always like a good group show.”

  Clara pushes Ruth slowly around the perimeter of the gallery. Ruth’s gaze is careful, assessing. She nods slightly at a moody black-and-white portrait of an old woman, a tight close-up by a southern photographer.

  “Now that”—she grasps Sammy’s hand again and points at the wall—“that is genuinely evocative. Unforgiving.” She gazes up at Sammy. “Do you know what I mean by that?”

  “I think so,” Sammy says. “You mean we can see everything?”

  “Exactly!” Ruth beams at her young pupil. They keep moving. Next, a delicate, extremely intricate pencil drawing—truthfully, it looks like an elaborate doodle, something the artist might have drawn while on a very long phone conversation. Then, a large piece—the largest of all—a photograph of a furry extraterrestrial creature in the midst of a fancy cocktail party.

  “Lord. Will you look at that,” Ruth says.

  Clara peers at the plaque next to the photograph.

  “He’s a Los Angeles artist.”

  “Would you get me the catalog and price list, Clara?”

  No one seems to be in the gallery—literally no one, not even an assistant. Clara picks the price list off a clear Lucite table and brings it over to Ruth.

  “Incredible,” Ruth murmurs, looking through it. “All these kids, two years out of art school—”

  “What?”

  “The prices! Sixty thousand dollars,” she says. “For E.T. drinking a martini.”

  Ruth looks around the whole room. “Over there. Samantha, do you see that Chuck Close? Do you know who Chuck Close is?”

  “No.”

  “A genius,” Ruth says. “One of the greats. And do you know why he’s in this show?”

  “Why?” Sammy is nearly breathless. Overwhelmed, Clara can see. Pulled into the force field of Ruth’s vision.

  “To lend credibility to the rest of this mediocre stuff, that’s why.” Ruth slaps the catalog on her lap. “I’m disappointed in Andrea.”

  “Please, Mom,” Clara finally snaps. “Keep your voice down.”

  The familiar embarrassment. The desire to distance herself—to pretend that she has nothing to do with Ruth Dunne.

  “Why? No one can hear me. And anyway, if you display your work, you invite criticism. The problem with the world is that everyone is too polite. This is terrible work—terrible!”

  Ruth’s voice cracks.

  Clara feels a cruel streak rise inside of her. What’s wrong? she almost asks. Are you afraid that when you die you’re going to disappear, just like the rest
of us? That your work is going to end up stored in the back rooms of galleries? That—in the end—what you did just didn’t matter that much?

  “Let’s go,” commands Ruth. “I can’t bear it.”

  Outside, the street is filling up with the lunchtime art crowd. A couple of gray-haired men in jeans and tailored jackets. A tall woman in a black suit, talking into her cell phone. A skateboarder weaves by, carrying a portfolio under his arm.

  Ruth really does look like she’s about to keel over. Clara looks up the block for the dark blue town car. Now there are several town cars just like it, idling outside of gallery doors.

  “Do you remember that trip, Clara?” Ruth asks dreamily. “When we visited Barbara Gladstone in Todi?”

  “Not really,” Clara says.

  “Samantha.”

  Sam looks up.

  “When your mother was a little girl,” Ruth begins, “no more than five or six, the owner of this gallery rented an old rectory in Italy. It was the most marvelous place—”

  Wait. An image hovers just around the edges of Clara’s consciousness. An old village square. A vineyard. A small café table beneath an arbor, and herself—on the other side of Ruth’s lens. Clara had fallen and wound up with a black eye, and Ruth had shot a close-up of her that way: eye swollen shut, looking like a prizefighter. Clara had forgotten where all of that had taken place: upstate New York, the Italian countryside—what difference does it make? Clara and the Black Eye is all that remains.

  “We must stop in to see Barbara,” Ruth says, pointing to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

  “I really think we shouldn’t,” Clara says.

  “Really, Clara, we must.” Ruth sits up straighter. “I want to introduce her to my granddaughter.”

  Clara wheels Ruth inside, across the cracked cement floor. Dread spreads its cold black waters inside of her. This—she can’t—what will Barbara—the comparisons—not not not—Sammy—

  A young woman, dressed in—could it be?—two layers of black cashmere, is seated behind a small desk displaying the usual catalogs and price list.

  “Excuse me,” Ruth says.

  The young woman, her dark hair slicked back into a chignon, slowly raises her swanlike neck and blinks at Clara and Ruth through angular black-framed glasses.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Is Barbara in?” Ruth is erect in her wheelchair but, even so, her head doesn’t come quite to the top of the high desk. The young woman looks down at her. In the bright whiteness of the gallery, her black silhouette is as sharp as a pencil drawing.

  “No, she isn’t.”

  She says this as if the question itself is absurd, somehow brazen.

  The price list on the polished desk has tiny blue dots next to each piece. It’s a Richard Prince show, and it appears to be entirely sold out.

  “When do you expect her?” Ruth asks. A slight edge—undetectable to anyone but Clara—has crept into her voice.

  “Mom, would you like to look at the work?” Clara asks quickly. She wants to wheel Ruth away.

  “I have no idea,” the girl says.

  Clara begins to pull the wheelchair back. In the center of the loftlike main room, a sculpture of what appears to be a car’s hood rests on a wooden block, paint dripping down the sides.

  Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. Clara silently begs the back of her mother’s head. She knows what’s coming, what has to be coming.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” Ruth asks. Petulant and incredulous as a child.

  A pair of perfectly arched eyebrows rise above the tops of the black-framed glasses. The girl is perhaps twenty-one. The year she was born, Ruth was nearing the end of the Clara Series.

  “I’m sorry. Should I?”

  “Ruth Dunne.” Each word bitten off. “When Barbara gets back from Umbria, or from having her pedicure, or wherever the hell she is, please tell her that Ruth Dunne stopped by.”

  Ruth’s shoulders are shaking. She sits there, waiting for the slow dawning of recognition on the girl’s face. A sign that she’s screwed up. That she’s in the presence of unexpected greatness. Something. Anything.

  “Ruth Dunne.” The girl slowly writes the name on a message pad. “Is that spelled D-O-N?”

  “D-U-N-N-E,” Clara chimes in. Please, not this. Not now. Not in front of Sammy. “The photographer.”

  The girl looks up, pencil poised, her face as smooth and placid as a lake at dawn.

  “Fine. And what may I say this is regarding?”

  Ruth reaches up for Clara’s hand and squeezes it. Sam is standing close to her grandmother, close enough to see her trembling. Ruth’s palm is clammy and cold. Does she whisper the words or merely think them?

  Please, Clara. Take me home.

  Chapter Nine

  “WHERE ARE WE GOING NOW?” Sammy is exhausted, no doubt from the morning of gallery-hopping. Showing herself—finally!—to be a nine-year-old child. She’s been acting altogether too mature since they got to New York. She probably needs to put her feet up and watch reruns of Full House for a couple of hours. Or go on Ruth’s computer and e-mail her friends back home.

  Instead, they are standing in the vast lobby of the Museum of Modern Art—the size of a European train station—the sounds of foreign languages echoing all around them as they trudge up a long flight of stairs.

  “Do we have to do this?” Sam goes on. “I’m so tired.”

  It may not be the best timing, but timing is not on Clara’s mind. Something is propelling her, something cold and hard against her back. From the moment they left the galleries, Clara knew what she had to do. First, she took Ruth home and straight into bed, no arguments there. Gave her an afternoon cocktail of Ativan and morphine, pulled the bedsheets up around her. Ruth fell asleep almost instantly, still in her caftan and white scarf. Then Clara found Jonathan, just back from a run in Central Park and still slightly out of breath in his sweatpants and T-shirt. She wanted the two of them to take Sam to MoMA, she told him. Right then—not later. He began to question her, but in an instant he understood. Sam at MoMA. Of course.

  The museum of Clara’s childhood, while not exactly a cozy place, has been replaced by this staggering open space that makes her dizzy. The art itself is immense. Rodin’s Balzac rising like a mountain in front of the sculpture garden. And here—on the second floor—four enormous Twomblys, magnificent in their chaos of color and scribbles. Clara can hardly bear to look at them. They feel like the inside of her head: random words, hard to make out. Everything just slightly out of reach.

  “I know you’re tired, Sam,” Clara says, “but you’ll see.” Trust me, she wants to say. But she isn’t sure she’s earned the right to say it. And she doesn’t want to see that look crossing Sammy’s face, the look that says, I can’t.

  Arrows point in every direction: ELEVATOR. ESCALATOR. STAIRS. She isn’t sure which way to go, but Jonathan leads the way. Jonathan, who has always been able to make himself comfortable in any environment, from the docks of Southwest Harbor to the concrete caverns of high art. As they slowly rise on the escalator to the third floor, Clara sees a sign for the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries.

  “Mom?”

  Clara quickly looks at Sam. Does she get it yet? Does she suspect?

  “I’m hungry. Can we go to the café downstairs?”

  It’s all so elemental: exhaustion, boredom, hunger. Why would Sammy have any idea, especially after this morning? Nothing exists in Sammy’s world, up until now, that would make her even consider the possibility that her grandmother’s pictures might be hanging on the walls of this museum.

  “Maybe in a little bit, Sam. There’s something I need to show you first.”

  The Steichen galleries are in a space more intimate than the lower floors, a warren of rooms that begin with what Ruth would refer to as the granddaddies. Steichen, of course. The streets and churches of Walker Evans. A small group of tourists are standing in front of a whole
wall devoted to Weston nudes.

  Sammy’s eyes widen as she sees the nudes.

  “Isn’t that one in Grandma’s apartment?” she asks, pointing to one in a series called Nude on Sand. An elegant nude—one Clara has always loved—facedown, her long legs open, feet slightly pigeon-toed. Her head resting on crossed arms, a tangle of dark hair.

  “Yes, it is,” says Clara. She’s distracted. Looking around. MoMA has such a huge permanent collection—they rotate it constantly—she isn’t exactly sure where Ruth’s work is hanging. Clara scans what she can see of the next room, but most of it is out of view. Jonathan has walked ahead of them, already there.

  “Let’s keep going, Sammy.”

  Clara leads the way, taking in one image at a time. The room seems to be arranged in some sort of chronology. Here, Diane Arbus’s twins. There, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. The photographers who came of age in the sixties and seventies, one generation before Ruth. Clara’s gaze revolves slowly around the room: she is like a bodyguard, a sharpshooter, looking everywhere for danger. She sees unfamiliar images: a crisp wartime photograph of a boy lying on his side. A single tree rising up from an otherwise desolate field, like a hyperkinetic Ansel Adams. And then—Jonathan is standing in front of them—three photographs, grouped together. Ruth Dunne, accorded nearly the same amount of wall space as the Weston nudes.

  She clenches and unclenches her fists. Repeats the motion several times as if trying to get her blood moving, remind herself that she is made of flesh. The images are a blur so far; she has not determined which of the Clara Series is hanging, only that they are there. The unmistakable silvery prints. A hint of wild grass, open sky. A sliver of skin. A mass of wavy hair.

  A lone young woman with a bandanna tied around her head—an art student, most likely—is standing beside Jonathan. Her head is cocked to the side, appraising. From the back, she looks like every intern who has ever worked for Ruth. There is awe in her very posture. It’s all Clara can do not to rush at her, knock her away. Stop staring! And Jonathan? She knows Jonathan has seen all these and more. From the very beginning, he made it his business to see the photos—to understand her. But she has never seen him seeing. This is the man who has made love to her a thousand times. Who has held her head when she’s vomited. Who has stood and watched as she pushed a newborn into the world. Why does she feel so exposed?