Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  ‘Is Miz Schiada an American citizen?’

  ‘She’s from Las Vegas.’

  ‘I’mma ask you that again: is Miz Schiada an American citizen?’

  Gael can feel how wide her eyes are. She tries to relax. ‘Yes, she is. Sir.’

  ‘I’mma need Miz Schiada to verify what you’re telling me is true.’

  ‘But it’s a gift!’ Gael says, faux-heartbroken. ‘Telling her what I’m bringing would ruin the surprise.’

  ‘United States Customs has no interest in surprises. Matter of fact, we hate surprises.’

  Gael sighs. Nods.

  ‘This right here looks like commercial goods to me.’

  ‘No, sir, it’s not.’

  ‘Ma’am, I’mma need you to call Miz Schiada to confirm your story. You can either do it right here right now, seeing as you’re a first-class passenger and there’s no one standing in line, or you’ll be taken to a private room where you can make the call at your leisure.’ He pronounces ‘leisure’ so that it rhymes with ‘seizure’.

  ‘I’ll phone now,’ Gael says. She takes out her phone and finds it extremely difficult to locate the right contact with her heart racing and the customs officer’s face contorting as he uncaps a red marker and circles her arrival card.

  Without looking up, he says: ‘The address you put down here. This is the address of the elderly gentleman I let through right before you. Have you got an explanation for that?’

  Gael covers the mouthpiece of her phone, waiting for Harper to pick up and save her. ‘I didn’t write down Harper’s address yet, because she’s coming to meet me in New York. So Wally just told me to put that down – we got to know each other on the plane. I’ll probably visit him.’ Why didn’t I just write down the fucking Ritz forfuckssake.

  ‘Ma’am.’ This was a whole sentence, Gael could hear. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. ‘The address you write on your arrival documentation needs to be a bona fide address. Not a false accommodation. It’s the address you’re staying at tonight. We put it in the system, where you’re staying at. That’s our procedure. I do not like one part of this. I’mma need to see your return itinerary, ma’am.’

  Gael holds up a finger and looks attentive and serious, to show that she knows he’s in power and he can send her home on a whim and she can’t very well tell him she doesn’t have a return flight. This situation might just require tears: the next best thing to getting her on her knees. But Gael’s more worried than anything at the heat behind her eyes that she hadn’t yet solicited and the break in her voice when she says, ‘Harper?’

  Most of the seven hundred pounds on her credit card disappears with the forced purchase of a return ticket, on the spot, via airport Wi-Fi, so that the customs official is satisfied she can afford to leave the country. (She picks the farthest-off date her ninety-day visa will allow. Mid-December.)

  Up fifty. Down one.

  Not terrible, she tells herself, as a bead of sweat travels from her underarm, beneath the portfolio strap, all the way down her side. She has to make the portfolio look light, so that her carrying it herself, along with a rolling bag, seems like a choice. As she passes through the automatic gates into the arrival hall – not all that automatic, after all – she wonders: if she takes the chauffeur service, will she have to pay?

  7

  Opportunity, Cost

  September 2011

  I

  The American Dream is best dreamt on one of the seven pillow options at the Plaza Hotel. Goose down; the valerian-infused aromatic pillow; the cloud pillow filled with ten million synthetic microbeads to cry one’s Rosary into; buckwheat, should one countenance neither the animal nor the synthetic; the sound pillow with soothing rainforest noises to drown out the city’s cacophony of road works, hydraulics, air-conditioning relics, sirens, anachronistic horse-and-carriage clatter and, above it all, ricocheting between the tallest, glassiest of skyscrapers: talk. Gael, though, doesn’t sleep on a pillow. She sleeps belly-down with her arm for a headrest. Wakes with Rodinesque knuckle imprints on her chin.

  It’s been a week. She’s no longer dreaming, but assessing the cost of her mistakes.

  When the airport chauffeur had asked Where to? she’d envisioned a lobby full of Wallys and replied: the Plaza. No harm multiplying my options, she’d thought, with the city glittering at her in the Lincoln town car; making goldilocks of her profile, commiting her to dine with bears. As the hotel concierge made an imprint of her credit card and photocopied her passport, he quietly declared it six-ninety-two-per-night excluding tax and city charges. There wouldn’t be funds on her card for one night. She wouldn’t be able to check out. Seeing her flush, the concierge asked if she was averse to heights. ‘No,’ she’d said. ‘No no. The seventeenth floor is fine.’ The concierge looked relieved – as if it would have been his embarrassment – and assured her it was the very best room in that price range.

  She took the cheque to its issuing branch the next morning and the cashier looked at her passport the way a midlife-crisis-stricken-woman looks at a pregnancy test shelved beside menopausal bone density supplements in a pharmacy. Vacantly, she recited: Due to the size of the sum (won’t fit your pencil sharpener vagina), without a second form of ID (a passport where you’re older and uglier) and a letter addressed to you (the kid inside the blanket fort, Mom’s house), we can’t cash this cheque at this institution (lodge it elsewhere). Gael stuck out the staring contest. Or you could wait for it to clear, which takes five to ten working days minimum. We’d need a phone number to let you know if and when it’s processed.

  ‘You can reach me at the Plaza. Shall I give you their number?’

  That silly little chest-jut had double-locked her into her new abode. She made the requisite moves to lift the limit on her card and applied for new ones, but she couldn’t afford to dwell on cash flow. Moving the paintings from the hotel-room floor onto gallery walls would require all of her focus and industry.

  But here too she had erred, thinking portfolio meetings would be the way to get the work seen. She’d been sending out requests for appointments since the night Guthrie’d cut her hair, but, as with Sive’s scores, this was looking more and more like a dead end. She began phoning galleries, wringing information from the interns manning the front desks. Credentials are everything, they told her. Artists eventually shown in galleries are often first discovered in an academic context. Others explained that if a curator spots an artist’s work at a fair or another gallery and is impressed, they might arrange a studio visit to see the artist’s body of work. To get a show in Manhattan, an artist already needs to be on the Ladder of Divine Ascent, was the message.

  Gael had lost whole days researching how best to present her brother as an artist with credentials (degrees are purchasable; posters of past exhibitions are fudgible; fake reviews are publishable) before it dawned on her that many interns in Manhattan sleep on goose down pillows and would dream accordingly. Broke and overworked, yes, but choosing to go practically unpaid in the city because the alternatives make less sense, because of the dream’s promise and because they can. She had to get back on the phone and find the insomniac among them, falling short of rent and belief.

  ‘What would it take?’ she’d asked. ‘For an outlier? No sugarcoating please. I’m diabetic. I just want to know. Under what circumstance would a gallerist give a walk-in artist a shot, if she came in holding the most astounding, thrilling, undeniable art you’d ever seen? What would it take? How good would it have to be? Who’d have to see it?’

  The guy hesitated, perhaps to imagine such a cheapening of the establishment. ‘Ye-ah,’ he drawled, ‘none. No circumstances. I mean, it’s never happened. A nobody walking in with incredible work … but it wouldn’t. Happen. That’s not how we find artists. It wouldn’t matter how good the work is. That’s just not how it goes in this city. In any reputable gallery. At least since the ’80s. Maybe it’s different where you’re from. Or in like, Arkansas. Do you go to school here, or�
��?’

  So unlikely, so unexpected that she might just pull it off. But this city has a keen radar for chancers and she doesn’t feel like being taken for one. There is another, narrower route to take – tricky terrain but much more immediate. Who is it that described a net as a series of holes connected by a string?

  The gold-trimmed hotel-room curtains are open, showing fast September cloudshift like an 8mm film. Spitty rain: vintage scratches on the reel. Playing journalist with ArtNexus magazine, Gael is interviewing Dr Raina Menendez, whose exhibition (Gael saw in SoHo) involved a series of hyperintricate paintings of alternate-history scenes, hooked up to canvas-length dispensers of paint stripper. Solvent began pouring over the paintings at erratic intervals, sending audience members scurrying from one piece to the next to take them in before the images were liquefied. Beneath each, long transparent boxes caught the paint drippings. These were the artworks for sale in the gallery: plastic buckets of paint smoothie. That anyone would pay six figures for a painting’s residue was the challenge the gallery had taken on and perhaps they only did so because of Raina’s reputation. Or they knew that buyers would want to prove their appreciation that one form was not a reduction of the other, but a translation. This was the sort of pandering palaver found in reviews online. By Gael’s measure, Raina wants to be put to task intellectually and to be spared personal questions. ‘You’re satirizing value attribution, not only between states of composition and in capitalism’s mechanism, but in the subject matter: politically charged photorealist townscapes, rather than, say, fauvist still lives or colour field works. The loss is more tragic. The obscene generosity of time weighs on the viewer, rushing from canvas to canvas, unable to commit to one narrative disintegration.’

  ‘Is this a question?’ Raina asks.

  ‘You’re exposing art’s potential for radical responses in the moment, followed by political inaction once the narratives stop being reported on.’ Gael continues, undeterred, needing her vexed. ‘But above all that … is the begging … for acknowledgement that art and the artist – the body and the body of work – won’t remain in a state of aesthetic acceptability; that the sacred terrain of beauty and orderliness be trespassed; that time and output and bloom – which we treat reverentially and with such effort of conservation – be humiliated. No?’

  She had to go through this whole rigmarole and several tea refills before she had Raina where she needed her to be. Subsided. Convinced. Conversant to the point of spilling her tea. Retrieving a towel for Raina’s lap, Gael finally draws her gaze along the array of paintings, which are out of their portfolio and draped in packing mesh.

  Raina stands. ‘I’m tired of my voice. Send me the magazine when it’s out. 128 Central Park South. It will find me.’ The photosensitive lenses of her glasses tint a little darker as she takes a step towards Guthrie’s paintings. ‘Did you find something good at the fair?’

  ‘Oh. No,’ Gael says. ‘Well, yes, but I didn’t buy anything for myself. I brought those with me. My sister’s an artist with a disability and she can’t travel. I thought I’d squeeze in an appointment or two to help get her work shown in the city. But it turns out gallerists demand studio visits and they don’t rate Irish art degrees and it’s all a bit of a boys’ club. No offence. I mean, for outsiders. I don’t usually see things from the artist’s side. I studied art history and I have a master’s in journalism. So, I forget what it can be like. Should’ve known. Even though my sister’s the most talented person I know, I wouldn’t trade places.’ Gael raises her brows and goes to the bed. ‘Don’t forget your coat.’

  When she holds it up for Raina’s arms, Raina has uncovered two of the paintings. ‘What are they called?’

  Gael clears her throat. ‘One, two, three, four, five.’

  Raina glances back at Gael with a frown and sees the coat held up. ‘Her titling needs work.’ She feeds her arm into the sleeve.

  ‘Those are the subtitles,’ Gael says. ‘The series is called “Miscarriage”’’.

  Raina, facing the paintings, doesn’t move. After a moment she tugs the coat away with her. When she turns back to Gael, her glasses are clear and imperilling. It was too direct. She had found it buried way back in the documentation of Raina’s past shows – an early exhibition, twenty years ago, involved a bloody, grisly painting with extracted cancerous uterine mass. Her interviews around that show had been the most radical and raw. Gael feels her own uterus lurch.

  ‘It’s not a boys’ club,’ Raina says. ‘It’s difficult. But it’s not like that. Not yet.’

  ‘No,’ Gael says, ‘that wasn’t fair.’

  Raina closes the buttons of her coat. A man’s coat, so the buttonholes are on the wrong side. ‘M.F.N.,’ she says.

  Gael says nothing.

  ‘M.F.N. Gallery … Call them. Say I’m sending you over.’

  As if a bill had been squeezed into her hand, Gael demurs. ‘That’s very kind, Raina, but …’ I have a wage. ‘I’m not in town for long–’

  ‘So go there now.’ A current of anger charges Raina’s mouth and Gael isn’t quite sure how to conduct it. She stands at attention. Lets her arms hang defencelessly by her sides.

  ‘And I’ve changed my mind,’ Raina says, pointing to the tea service. ‘I don’t want to read this. Don’t send it to me. I explain too much.’

  Chelsea has a very different vibe to the ironed-clothing know-where-you’re-going keep-right district of Midtown. It’s quieter, in an industrial way, with wide roads and freshish air coming in off the brown Hudson River to counteract the trudge of cars stopped at rusty yellow traffic lights dangling from steel poles like bellworts. Besides the large residential complexes, the buildings are stocky and low-rise. Two-storey offices, kooky boutique shops, cheap corner delis, grim-looking tenements and tree-shaded brownstone row houses contribute to the ’80s milieu, in among newer apartment blocks and big-box retailers. The odd person in overalls not strictly for fashion. As with everywhere in Manhattan, construction scaffolding brackets most corners.

  Set between the whipped-cream-shaped glass tower of InterActiveCorp’s headquarters and the riveted steel High Line viaduct, the gallery isn’t even at street level. Gael doubts that the people who come here to visit it have money. She checks her phone for a missed call from the bank. Probably closed on weekends. It has to clear on Monday. She calculates how much she’ll have left in cash if she gets a taxi home. The brick exterior wall is painted black; their sign graffiti’d in white stencil:

  M.F.N. Gallery

  Before pressing the buzzer, she pauses to collect herself, to control the factors of perception. The hidey-hole gallery puts on one-week, one-artist exhibitions with absolutely no advertising other than word of mouth and an email invite to their mailing list. Their website is a static page with a list of what’s currently showing, contact details and opening hours. Gael only had time to do the most cursory research, because they’d said on the phone: ‘At three, Ploennies’s large-scale metalwork installation arrives. So we’ll be buried. If you can come in the next sixty to ninety minutes, we’ll see you. Otherwise, it’ll be a couple weeks.’

  She buzzes #3 and looks up. The industrial grid window with an air-conditioning unit hanging out looks to be covered from the inside with plywood. For some reason she tastes the familiar annoyance that precedes a waste of time, like a fling offering to hang around for breakfast. A voice cracks through the speaker – ‘Yup’ – and cuts out before she can utter a response. The lift doors ping open inside. Manoeuvring the portfolio in, she doesn’t know what button to press as the doors shut. There’s movement, snail-like in comparison to the acceleration of the Plaza’s express elevator. She’s trying to figure out how they got the lift doors to open downstairs when they open on the third floor. A black brick wall greets her, with the same white-stencil M.F.N. logo writ large above a wide pop-art-style painting of five identical women sitting on a couch, each holding a different technicoloured muffin on her lap. The women look solemn. Gael relaxes h
er expression and her aching shoulder.

  To the left, a cluttered reception desk and bench are tucked into a nook by a divider wall, forming a little foyer of this section, presumably so the gallery space is disconnected from the comings and goings and admin. Rising from his chair (a leather-cushioned swing, hanging on thick industrial chains from the high ceiling), a smiling, thirty-something, lilac-afro’d man juts out his hand and follows it to where Gael’s standing. ‘Welcome! I’m Enn.’

  ‘Gael. Nice to meet you. Are you the guy I spoke with on the phone?

  ‘No.’ He hesitates for a moment. ‘You spoke with M.’ The press of his lips suggests she’s already said something wrong.

  ‘Nice scarf,’ she tries.

  ‘Oh,’ he looks down. ‘Thank you! That’s sweet of you to say. My niece crocheted it for me. She’s like, three.’

  Gael smiles, glancing at the skinny fuchsia-pink scarf that’s so long the ends hang down past the knees of his grey leather trousers. Then she frowns. ‘Three?’

  ‘Oh, three or five or twelve. Who cares. She lives in Maui. Her making me a scarf was basically an up yours, frigid. So let’s take this into the space and give it some context.’ Enn lifts the portfolio from Gael’s shoulder, a little unexpectedly. Not to plan. She follows him into the gallery where two other people stand conversing.