by Jonathan Dee
“I think so.”
“So,” Vanessa said, looking at her nails again, “I sort of panicked. Here’s what I said. I said, You know who’d be a good person to ask about this stuff, though, who really knows a lot about painting, is my friend John Wheelwright in the art department.”
“Oh my goodness,” John said.
“He’s a very smart guy. In fact, he was an art major at Berkeley. That is right, isn’t it?”
“Art history,” he said nervously. “So did they know who I was?”
“Of course they know who you are,” Vanessa said. “So anyway, I talked you up to these guys as a real expert. Your ears must have been burning something awful. It was just, like, anything to fill that silence, you know? Anything to get their interest off of me.” She raised her eyes and looked directly at him again.
John leaned back in his chair and put his palms together. It was a little scary, to be sure, to learn that you had been bragged about in front of your superiors like that; but she had only been complimenting him – even if in an exaggerated way. So why would she worry that it would make him angry?
“Vanessa?” he said. “Have we reached the climax of this story?”
She shook her head no, with a meek, childish reluctance that still seemed to have an element of irony or performance in it. She began swinging her feet again. “He didn’t say a word at the time,” she went on, “but the guy at the table who I guess really picked up on what I was saying was Mal Osbourne.”
John started. “Osbourne was there?”
“I know!” Vanessa held her hands in front of her face and pantomimed great fear. “Amazing, isn’t it? He never shows up at these things. It was like seeing J. D. Salinger or something. Anyway, he’s this big art collector, apparently, you probably know that but I didn’t.”
“Sure,” John said. “My God.”
“And apparently he has this thing where he spends one Saturday morning every month studio-hopping downtown, checks out what he wants to buy, what he might want to buy later on. So,” Vanessa said, her voice getting a little shakier, “this morning I come in and there’s this email waiting for me, sent, by the way, at two in the morning.” She shut her eyes tightly to recall the exact wording.
“Oh, this is unbelievable,” John said.
“‘Tell your friend in Art to meet me Saturday at 8.30 a.m. outside his building. I have his address from personnel. If he can spare a few hours, I would greatly value his expertise, and a fresh pair of eyes. Osbourne.’”
“This Saturday?”
“I guess. Why, did you have something planned?”
“Would it matter if I did?”
“Oh, please, please, don’t be mad at me,” Vanessa said, and John, mad as he was, was nevertheless abashed to see that she was actually in tears. The theatricality of her nervousness had been more for her own prompting than for his; real remorse was hard for her. “I had no way of knowing this could happen. I was just trying to talk you up. And besides,” she said, trying to smile, “is it necessarily a bad thing? I mean, if you make a good impression on him, it could really help you out, don’t you think?”
This was true, but John felt it would be immodest to let on that this had occurred to him; besides, the reverse proposition was equally obvious. “Osbourne is, what, forty? And he’s already probably one of the ten or twenty biggest collectors in the city. In other words, he’s a lot less likely to be bowled over by my expertise, such as it is, than you are, bless your heart. And if he decides I’m a moron, well, that’s not going to give my career prospects here a big goose either. Oh, Vanessa, what have you done to me?”
She wiped at her eyes and nodded. “It’s all so fucking whimsical!” she said.
Later, John called Rebecca at work, but she had a client in her office and had no time for a long conversation; so they arranged to meet for dinner at Mahmoun’s, the Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner from their apartment in Brooklyn. They ate there often – neither John nor Rebecca liked to cook. Mahmoun’s delivered as well, but lately the two of them felt that maybe they had been ordering out too much: the endless garbage, the white cartons with their metal handles which lingered in the refrigerator for days, could begin to seem like a small joke at the expense of their new home, as if they weren’t really committed to the idea of it, as if they hadn’t made up their minds to stay. Dining out was at least nominally social. The owner nodded contentedly at them when he emerged briefly from the kitchen and saw them in their usual booth by the window, in their wrinkled business clothes.
“This is scandalous,” Rebecca said, though she seemed more annoyed than actually worried. “I can’t believe Vanessa would do this to you. Put you on the line like that, just to look good. What’s the matter with her?”
“She apologized,” John said. He wanted Rebecca to focus on Saturday, but she seemed determined to extract from him a condemnation of Vanessa, whom she had met at a few parties and did not like or trust.
“So she crosses her legs and apologizes and that makes it okay. Not to mention that she’s doing one of the partners. A real traditionalist.”
“Well, whatever,” John said impatiently, “it’s done. I mean, I can’t get out of it. I can’t refuse to go.”
Rebecca shook her head. “Of course not,” she said.
He was disappointed, and somewhat alarmed, by the way she kept agreeing with him so completely when what he really wanted was for her to tell him he was making too big a deal of it. “Vanessa got my major wrong, too, which is a problem. Osbourne probably thinks I’m still painting, still going to galleries. Wait’ll I tell him I wrote my thesis on Goya, and even that was eight years ago.”
Rebecca, her mouth full, put her hand to her head as she remembered something, and patted the leather tote bag on the seat beside her. She swallowed. “At the end of the day I did a Lexis search on Mal Osbourne,” she said. “There’s not as much as I would have thought. But there was one good article about him as a collector, talks about some of his recent acquisitions. Give you some idea of his taste. Where the hell is it?”
John smiled at her gratefully, even though she was no longer looking at him. Rebecca had an abrupt, distracted way of speaking, when he called her in her office, that sometimes left him wondering if she was paying attention to what he said. Even in the conservative, dark, A-line suits she wore to work she was dramatic-looking, with broad eyebrows, full features, a face that was somehow most naturally alluring when she frowned. Her fingers flipped a second time through a fat accordion file.
“Well, it’s in there somewhere,” she said, annoyed with herself. “I’ll find it when we get home.”
“No rush,” John said calmly. He knew how she obsessed if she thought something was lost. “I’ve got five days.”
They ordered two cups of the bitter Turkish coffee and watched each other in mannerly silence while their dishes were removed.
“So how much do you know about this guy?” Rebecca said.
“Not much more than anyone else. I met him when I was hired, just shook his hand really. I’m sure he wouldn’t recognize me. He doesn’t even come into the office anymore – just stays in touch by email, fax, messengers. Which I understand has pissed off the other partners considerably. Though I only hear that kind of stuff secondhand.”
“From Vanessa, you mean. Hey – do you think Osbourne’s the one she’s sleeping with?”
“Well, that would be good and weird. I’m pretty sure he’s not married. But it’s hard to imagine. Osbourne’s famous for hating parties; I heard a story that he RSVP’d no to Canning’s daughter’s wedding a couple of years ago. He did go to this thing at the Modern, but that must have been just because of the art connection – he’s mostly kind of a hermit from what I understand. I can’t see Vanessa going for that. She’s out six nights a week. I mean, this is a guy who people in the office have disagreements about what he even looks like.”
“He’s a young guy, though, isn’t he?”
“R
elatively. I think he’s forty-two, forty-three, something like that. The youngest partner, certainly.” John shook his head. “He did some groundbreaking work, boy, when he was a writer. He was in on the Apple 1984 ad. He once got a client, a vodka importer, to use their whole promo budget to hire actors to go into trendy bars in New York, LA, Miami, and just order the stuff. Just order it. Performance advertising, I think he called it.”
“Does he really know anything about art, or is it just one of those rich-guy affectations, so we won’t think he’s like the other rich guys?”
John cocked his head. “Beats me. A better question is whether I know anything about art, and if he decides not, do I start looking for another job.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about you,” she said flatly. “You’re the real thing. I just don’t know if you have it in you to be as fake as he is, if it comes to that.” She fumbled in her bag for her purse. “Can we get out of here? I have to have a cigarette.”
At home, a second-floor walk-up, Rebecca made straight for the bathroom without even turning on the light. John stood in the doorway for a few moments, looking at the silhouettes of the scarce, new furniture, the cocked squares of ambient city-light on the white wall, the patient, minuscule blink of the answering machine.
On Saturday morning, John, too nervous to eat, came down the steps of the brownstone a few minutes early to wait for Osbourne, but Osbourne was already there. At least that was the conclusion to be drawn when John saw the black livery car idling directly in front of his stoop, an opera light just visible through the tinted rear window, alien to the weekend quiet of the narrow side street. It wasn’t an ostentatiously big car by any means. Still, uncertain about approaching it, John had halted instinctively on the brownstone’s bottom step; the driver’s door opened and a pale-complected man in his sixties in a shirt and tie walked briskly around the grille of the car, curtly nodded, and opened up the rear door for him.
Osbourne was all the way in the far corner of the back seat, leaning forward, examining with interest the house fronts on the opposite side of the street, where lights were just beginning to come on. He responded to John’s weight in the seat beside him, turning quickly, his expression blank, his eyebrows raised inquisitively.
“John Wheelwright,” John said meekly.
Osbourne nodded, and offered a brief, awkward smile, but didn’t say anything – as unsure of the right pleasantries, John supposed, as he himself was feeling. He remembered that his first limousine ride had taken him to his high school prom. The car rolled on without any more instruction. Osbourne was wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and a floral tie; John felt he had miscalculated badly with his own blazer and linen pants, but he reminded himself that he had had nothing at all to go on. Osbourne had a beard, and small round glasses, neither of which John remembered from their only prior meeting three years ago. He had gone back to looking out his window. John noticed a folded New York Post and an empty Dunkin’ Donuts bag at his boss’s feet.
“I like your neighborhood,” Osbourne said quietly, watching the four- and five-story row houses go by. “What is it called?”
“Cobble Hill,” John said; and then, when nothing more followed, “My … my girlfriend and I bought our apartment here just a couple of months ago.” Girlfriend seemed such a juvenile word, John thought, but fiancée was not strictly accurate, and lover was just out of the question.
“Probably a real family neighborhood?” Osbourne said. “Lots of kids? That’s why you chose it?”
This would have seemed almost aggressively intimate, except nothing in Osbourne’s manner showed that he considered it anything but small talk. “Well,” John said, “that wasn’t – I mean, we’ve talked about that, and of course at some point—”
“Listen,” Osbourne said earnestly, and turned to look into John’s face for the first time. “I’m sorry about the car. I really don’t ride around in limos, you know, especially not on my days off. I love to drive. I would have been happy to drive us around myself. It’s not the driving, it’s the parking; and where we’re going, downtown, you can squander half an hour just looking for someplace to leave your car. So just in the interest of time, we engage Max here to circle. You understand, don’t you?”
“Really,” John said, “it’s quite all right.”
Max maneuvered across the empty lanes of the entrance ramp and on to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was mostly truck traffic at that hour. John looked up through the window at the rhythmic, cathedral wave of the cables. The sky between the lines was low and colorless.
They spent ten minutes traversing clogged Chambers Street; Osbourne said nothing but displayed no impatience either, content to stare out his tinted window at the pedestrians, who stared back inhospitably though they couldn’t see him. Then the limo turned north and slowly nosed its way through the narrow lanes of Tribeca. Vacant sidewalks and shuttered buildings and their quiet limousine. John knew these street names but could never have given directions on how to find them, even after five years in the city. The strategy he had carved out for himself this morning was to manifest comfort in his role as a subordinate, to offer opinions only when asked directly, to patiently play himself down: but such a thoroughgoing silence had permeated the car again that John, remembering he was with one of the name partners, now wondered if it might not behoove him to ask a few questions, to show some initiative, whether he felt like it or not.
“Do you always have this same driver?” he said. “He seems to know the neighborhood very well. If you asked a cab driver to take you to one of these streets, odds are he couldn’t do it.”
Osbourne turned his head just long enough to smile indulgently and nod. He went back to watching the buildings. The modern elements – galleries, boutiques, sometimes a restaurant – fell like silt to the level of the street, while it was easy to imagine the upper floors as abandoned, or occupying a different time.
Well, that was suave, John told himself witheringly.
They pulled up in front of an old six-story warehouse, unretouched on the outside since its days of commercial use; the outer door bore only a large, painted “76” on the frosted glass. “Here’s our first stop,” Osbourne said, unnecessarily. The driver stayed behind the wheel, and the two men let themselves out. The sidewalk was narrow and canted visibly toward the street. Between the outer and the inner door of the building was a graying patch of black and white mosaic tile, a few discarded post office flyers, and an amber St Ides bottle. Wheelwright pressed an unmarked buzzer. A few moments later, they were incautiously buzzed inside.
They walked upstairs in silence; John thought it would only have been polite of Osbourne to mention what floor they would be stopping at but resisted the urge to ask. His boss walked very fast, he noticed, eager to feel he was noticing something.
At the fifth-floor landing one door was left ajar; Osbourne knocked softly and pushed it open. Behind it was a vast, low-ceilinged rectangle easily twice the size of John’s whole apartment. The air-conditioning was on full blast, and shades were drawn over all the windows. In one corner of the loft was a large kitchen area, with a stove and two refrigerators, and a young man making espresso or cappuccino. The woman who came to greet them was long-limbed and gorgeous, and John was guilty of assuming she had to be one of the artist’s assistants; but no, she was the artist, though Osbourne introduced her to him only as Heather.
“Heather, this is my associate, my resident art expert, John Wheelwright.” Ill at ease, John bowed slightly; Heather gave him her hand, then hung it casually on Wheelwright’s near shoulder and left it there.
By that time one of the assistants had completed his walk across the broad floor to ask if the visitors wanted any sort of coffee. “By all means, bring us a couple of espressos,” Osbourne said. He seemed energized since walking into the loft. “I could use something to warm me up in here.” He and Heather both laughed, then turned to walk deeper into the room; and John, wondering more than ever if his presence was really wanted, followed
a step or two behind them.
The first sculpture they stopped in front of was easily recognizable as a nude self-portrait of a seated Heather, but it took a few moments more for John to identify the medium: dark chocolate. It certainly explained the need for the air-conditioning and the window shades, which he had assumed were merely eccentricities. The chocolate figure, a little less than life-sized (though he could tell that only from having the model herself standing unself-consciously nearby), was seated with its hands clasped around one knee. Bending forward a bit in the dim light, John could see, on the figure’s elbows, toes, one breast, and again just at the end of the jawline beneath the ear, teethmarks, as if the sculpture had been gnawed at by someone. Well, not as if, John realized; it had been gnawed at, and he wondered whose job this was – the artist herself, or one of the male assistants. He couldn’t decide which answer presented the more arresting mental picture.
While John was gazing at the self-portrait, Osbourne and Heather moved a few feet away to a large, perfect cube, also made of chocolate, also with one of its sharp corners degraded by someone’s having eaten at it. They stood before it, talking softly. John was about to trail after them when one of the assistants appeared with his espresso.
“Shocking, isn’t it?” the man said, glancing discreetly at the nude. He himself was young and somewhat potbellied, with hair brush-cut to a kind of tennis-ball fuzz; he wore an oversize black turtleneck.
John wanted to ask about the gnawing – not just who initiated it, but whether it was meant as the start of a process, whereby the work of art was distorted and eventually consumed entirely by the owner, or the artist, or the museumgoer – but, even though he had a hunch that these were the very questions the chocolate sculpture was meant to excite, he was worried about inadvertently coming off as mocking or contemptuous.
“She’s found the perfect medium here, for the expression of her themes,” the assistant went on, in a soft voice. “The degradation of women, the violence inherent in our culture’s images of women, the whole consumer idea.” He made quotation marks with one hand; the other still held John’s espresso. “And of course the fragility of the work of art, its impermanence, its vulnerability.”