‘I’ll do it myself.’
He’d sighed. ‘Fine, just drag that folder over there and right-click to open the browser.’
‘If you fuck with me,’ Gael had said, seeing what could be going on with a drunk’s clarity, ‘I’ll pay the hitman extra to …’ She swept her hair from one side to the other. ‘You know … make it sting-y.’
The guy let his wide slopey eyebrows slug towards the cabbage leaves of his ears. Gael took a bill from her blazer’s breast pocket and tapped his glass with it. ‘Now. Let’s hire a fraud with Monopoly money.’
That evening, when she’d sobered up and brushed her teeth, she did as Xavier (said fraud) had directed in their encrypted instant messenge conversation. She went to the Mall section of Central Park, opened the portfolio and exposed one painting at length, the way a flapper-era hooker might expose a juicy thigh. She didn’t know if he’d arrived and left, or had even walked by, but when she returned to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, a TorChat message awaited her: ‘Yes can do. Will neg $ in person. Meet at 8pm at 116th and Manhattan Ave.’ Only when Gael looked up the address did she note it was practically in Harlem. Plenty of time to think that over while she shopped for a very robust backpack and less restrictive clothing. It was Pretty Woman on the flip side. She made no move to hit rewind.
The subway stop was within holdup distance of his place: a crammed 220-square-foot artist’s alcove studio with a microwave for a kitchen and a mezzanine that hadn’t gone through building inspection. Once she’d sized it up and decided the guy seemed decent, if cagey (much as anyone might be who wears a fanny pack), she’d asked how long it would take to create ten iterations of the samples she’d brought. He’d inspected the paintings with a pout made unreadable by his harelip. ‘They’re colour studies.’ Flipping through them like records in the discount section, he said, ‘If I’m given the materials – the desks, nails, the right paints, which don’t look like oil paints all through by the way, there’s some household stuff in there, mixed with a thickener … K-Y Jelly or something – call it a full day’s work per painting. Eight, ten hours apiece?’
‘Fifty bucks an hour. Five hundred per painting. Half in advance. Cash.’
He had barely widened his eyes to say ‘Deal’ when Gael began adding fine print: ‘Obviously, I’ll have to oversee the project. There’s a timeline and I’m here on behalf of the artist, who has a very serious physical condition, very sensitive, so the whole job is confidential. Strictly. I’ll have you sign an NDA. IP stays with the artist. It’s sensible for me to stay here for the ten days or so it takes you to get it done. I’m fine with the sofa. You won’t know I’m here. Unless it turns out you can’t paint. Then you’ll know.’ Gael removed her backpack and put it in a corner, where it would stay. Xavier looked tentatively appalled. He was one of those people who thought before he spoke. When his lips moved it was to do the multiplication. Five K for, at most, a fortnight’s work. Gael counted out the first instalment of bills as loudly as the bank teller hadn’t. ‘Oh, and do you have a van?’
It had taken over two weeks to get down to the last painting. The copy of #8, Wally’s order. She can’t very well tell M.F.N., The one you all crowded round worshipfully was already sold, sorry, but here’s a bunch of others. The copy will have to go to Wally. Octogenarian eyesight blurs nicely. To make up for the fact that he’s getting a painting worth one per cent of what he paid, she’ll hand-deliver it to him, wearing something that could be mistaken for a negligée. Not today, though. The copy won’t be finished until tonight and it won’t be dry for several days.
Busy Sharpieing the last pair of desks, Gael considers the fact that she’ll have to leave all the paintings here until they’re fully dry, if she doesn’t want to be hung out to do the same by M.F.N. With blue biro, she grooves WTF into the wood. The desks had been the cause of the scheduling setback. She’d had to ransack every thrift store in Harlem for them. Old-school, graffiti-free desks – a rare commodity – which she had spent the rest of her time defiling. American slang would’ve been a giveaway.
It’s too much effort to read #8’s graffiti through all the paint, so they’re making some up. It’s the only direct copy she’s asked Xavier to do and he’s holding his tongue on questions. But she can hear the slip of tongue against hard palate. ‘Tyler hearts Pedro 4eva?’ He holds the craft knife like a scalpel. Prepping the desks has been Gael’s job, for good reason.
‘There’s literally no one called Pedro or Tyler in Ireland,’ Gael says. The blue biro is tucked behind one ear, a red one prongs her ponytail and now she uses a technical compass to incise a scrotum.
‘Do you have smiley faces?’
Gael looks at him unsmilingly. ‘Think: school kids who haven’t gone through a metal detector to get to Civics.’
Xavier wears a long-sleeved T-shirt and drawstring trousers, both weighted with dried paint. Gael still doesn’t know if he’s straight or what. In over two weeks, they’ve barely asked each other anything of consequence. Gael’s wanted to ask lots, but he has a way of making her feel (without stating it) that conversation isn’t part of the service. And she respects that. She has to. He’s done most of the painting work at night, after day shifts as a lift maintenance technician. She did ask him once if he’d gone to art school. Columbia University takes up a huge section of the neighbourhood and they’d shared a moment student-watching from the window while he smoked. His parents had lived a block away. They died young, in ’82, in a brewery explosion where they worked. Xavier was one when he went into the foster system, but he’d always planned to come back to where he should have spent his childhood. This was the only answer he gave to Gael’s question on what art school he went to.
‘That’s how the kids had the knives to carve with,’ Gael adds. ‘No metal detectors.’
‘I’ll just do a leprechaun and a pot of gold.’
‘Swap the leprechaun for a Celtic tiger.’
‘Celtic? You mean a green tiger?’
‘Why not. Coated in banknotes. Pissing in its pot of gold.’
‘Jesus.’
Gael shakes her head. ‘Jaysus,’ she says. ‘Here, I’ll make you a list.’ She writes: ‘Niamh needs to take a bath. Mr Monaghan’s bad at wanking. Eat your carrots so you can read this. Postman Pat Rulz. Pray for your sins and they’ll come to you. Go home Tommaso ya foren prick. Gerry Adams. What a tweedledick. Today I did this many poohs |||||’
Xavier starts gridding out Sudoku puzzles.
‘If in doubt, draw tits.’
Tight-mouthed in concentration, they work to the calming sounds of blade on school desk and drill on pavement. They sit seiza on tatami chairs: cushions on wooden frames coming just high enough off the ground for them to tuck their legs under the cushion part. It looks as though they’re sitting on their heels. This is one of Xavier’s space-saving tactics. Gael admires his organization. Collapsible furniture. Paints in shoeboxes. Palette knives for cutlery. Rags and sponges on a line strung up by the window, which looks out onto a fire escape. His own cityscape etchings balanced on clear thumb-tacks on the walls, the smaller boards stacked in DVD racks. Shallow shelves circumnavigating the walls. Beside a set of nunchucks, a vintage Japanese military gas mask hangs, buying him a few hours to catch up on prayers in the event of chemical warfare. His easel and all the drying paintings take up the main space beneath the mezzanine, so the gas mask is occasionally required to get to sleep. The reek of white spirits is so pervasive that Gael can’t smell it anymore.
One thing he had told her was that Silk Road had been, for him, a one-off experiment. People paid well for good forgeries. (Gael could imagine: Look at this Hirst we inherited from Auntie Ivy; no one spots the difference.) But then, those clients were too freaked to use a site like Silk Road and didn’t know how, so Xavier would’ve ended up working for some art pimp. Gael’s was the only job that had transpired from his listing. His income as a lift mechanic wasn’t quite enough for White Harlem. ‘It’s the Upper Upper West Side,’ he told G
ael. ‘You won’t be the only yuppie on the block.’
‘I’m still telling people back home I stayed in Harlem. And I’m not a yuppie, thank you very much.’
‘If you get off on poverty tourism, yes you are.’
They had glanced at each other in recognition of a point well made. A warranted insult.
It’s October 4th. Nearly a fortnight till the show. A week till the work’s fully, fully dry and ready to cart downtown. A week’s a long time to leave your figurative chequebook on a stranger’s bedstand. Gael untucks her legs gracelessly from the chair and gets up. ‘I’m definitely not turning Japanese. Where’s the nearest cemetery so I can drop my knees off?’ She goes to her bag and starts changing into her running gear, her profile to Xavier. ‘I won’t get the chance to work up a sweat for a while. You’re welcome to join.’ She looks at him squarely, in just a sports bra and leggings. ‘Clear your head of white spirits?’
Suddenly channelling his inner vandal, Xavier graffitis with newfound vigour. ‘I need to get this done today.’
‘Great,’ Gael says, still the employer. She pulls on her black compression top and lifts a foot onto the steel mezzanine ladder to tie her laces. ‘I don’t feel the need to oversee the last one. You’ve got it.’ She smiles and takes her phone and earplugs, purposely leaving her backpack slightly unzipped. ‘I have the spare key. When I get back, I’ll pack up and get out of your coif.’
Xavier stops. ‘But the work won’t be dry.’ He puts down the craft knife and looks worriedly at his studio, seized by fifteen burdensome auras.
‘I’ll take the five originals, to clear up some space. But what say you to an extra two hundi to keep the rest for the few days till they’re dry? Then you can send me a message and I’ll have them picked up. I have to hand it to you, buddy, you’ve done a great job. Just what I had in mind.’ She surveys the paintings, able to differentiate the originals mostly by where they’re set. ‘I’d hire you again.’
‘Thank you. It’s been good working for you–’ He hesitates before adding, ‘Ms Koons.’ Gael frowns at this. ‘But,’ he continues before she can ask Ms Who? ‘Honestly, I’m not that social. I’m grateful and all, don’t get me wrong. I’d be open to doing this again, but it won’t include digs, next time. I need my space.’
Gael zips her key into the pocket of her waistband. ‘That wouldn’t be an issue, Xavier; now that I trust you. Your skills. I wouldn’t need to stay here and supervise. Anyway. Have productive alone time. I’ll make it a long run.’
It wasn’t, of course, that she trusted him. It was that she understood the perils of risk aversion. The larger risk of two months’ opportunity cost in New York (if the paintings disappear or are even so much as documented while she leaves them with him over the coming days) is offset by doing this test run: temporarily leaving a forty-thousand-dollar envelope with a guy who fixes lifts and dabbles in black market trades.
It’s bugging her that she missed Xavier’s reference, so she stops running to look it up on her phone. ‘Ms Koons Artist,’ she types. ‘Jeff Koons: Shiny on the Outside; Hollow on the Inside.’ No, that doesn’t seem right. But after opening a few more results, she sees that it had been. Shit. Had she missed a warning just then? Bitch, I’m gonna clean you out. She reads as fast as she can.
With a portfolio valued at more than one billion dollars, Jeff Koons, whose wife works with him in the studio, acts as a kind of art foreman. Seldom physically involved in the process of making his artworks, he has 150 people on his payroll. He provides them with the concepts and paint-by-numbers instructions, he himself never wielding a brush. ‘I enjoy readymades,’ one Guardian article quotes Koons. ‘It’s a way that I can communicate a form of acceptance, that everything is perfect. It’s about accepting ourselves and accepting others.’ He talks about his art as an extension of the democratic principle – the moral dividends to be gained from ‘participation.’ Who knows how his apprentices ‘participate’ in the (upwards of) twenty million dollars individual sculptures fetch at auction. Once a commodities broker on Wall Street, Koons now works from a studio-factory in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.
‘No way!’ she says. ‘Chelsea!’ Then looks around for a notary, getting completely sidetracked from her thoughts about art and commodities and whether Xavier felt demeaned to be somewhat of a Koonsesque line worker. She’d sprinted through the rather sketchy Morningside Park and now finds herself at the spectacular, gothic Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Before her stands a bizarre, grandiose bronze sculpture of a slayer-angel in a dry fountain. Given its setting, Gael takes a guess that the sculpture’s narrative is one of good and evil. A plaque reads: ‘PEACE FOUNTAIN CELEBRATES THE TRIUMPH OF GOOD OVER EVIL.’ Ah, she’d missed the capitalization. The Archangel St Michael beheading Satan. A big smiling sun, a sleeping moon. Many peaceful, playful giraffes. A crab trying to pince Satan’s decapitated head. A lion and a lamb chillaxing in God’s kingdom, where lions don’t eat lambs if they’re posing for art. Subtle as a Koons. One thing going for it, though, is that it’s honest in its delusion. There’s no way the artist believes this story of virtue’s triumph, the way Guthrie believes in the hallowed auras. This is a sculpture about narrativization; proclaiming our nostalgia for a simpler time and ethic. Sizing up Satan’s knuckle of a penis, Gael starts to laugh at the whole absurd congruence of things. But the laughter isn’t freeing or irreverent. It doesn’t feel cheerful or deliberate. No. She’s nervous.
‘Xavier?’
It’s a stupid thing to do. Calling out. Were he there, she’d see him. And he her. She counts the paintings. All still there. On the easel, the #8 duplicate is underway. He’s done a good job on the nails, soaked in salt water to make fresh, bloody rust. The bag. It’s there still … but askew … Hadn’t she faced it the other way? Opened it an inch less? She cracks her neck and takes a long controlled breath as if through a straw. Then clears the room in one stride.
Pulling out the cash, she sheds the envelopes like ice cream wrappers. She’ll have to count. Too easy to miss a thousand. A thousand here, a thousand there. If he’s taken any amount at all, then the paintings won’t be safe here. An unknown number lights up on her phone on the kitchen counter but she doesn’t hear it because the earplugs are still in and she’s on her knees on the floor, building a cash castle. It had been a mistake to test him. It had been too risky. In truth, it had been unfair. Sirens scream past the window to what sounds like a frat party a block west, spilling its wide-necked intimidation and bad music onto the stoop. Twenty-one thousand two hundred … Gael loses count when she hears the unmistakable sound of a key in a lock. Oh. My. God. She has time only to gather a hug’s worth of cash and drop it into her bag before the door opens and Xavier freezes in the entrance. One arm holds a brown paper bag to his chest. An egg carton peeps from the top. For breakfast, he microwaves eggs and eats them from a mug. With a spoon.
Gael pretends to barely register he’s there, after glancing back. ‘Hi, can’t talk,’ she says and makes as if to continue counting. ‘Twenty-one th … hundred and … Fuck. Where was I … We said five, right?’ Now she looks up. Xavier is stood in the doorway, his harelip the next best disguise to a gas mask. Still, aspersion leaks through the filter like asbestos. Not only is this bitch devious, paying piss-all now that her wealth is laid out on the floor, she also suspects him for a thief – the labouring artist whose roof she’s been under for weeks.
At this stage, it’s probably safer to leave the paintings with the ass-slapping frat boys. To fling them out the window like divorce papers. She can’t suddenly ‘change her mind’ and take them away this minute, still wet; can she?
‘Buddy,’ Gael says, all aggro. Act sure. ‘Earth to Xavier!’ She is shaking like a junkie, but she can see only one way to play this and there’s no time to weigh pros and cons.
He says, throatily, ‘What?’ His eyes are going from Gael’s bag to her hands, red with cash. ‘Midas,’ he says, and Gael guesses this is Cuban for stinky-cunt-about-
to-get-rinsed.
‘Five minus half up front is twenty-five hundred. Here. Take it. When I come to collect the paintings, I’ll throw a tip at you, if not my fucking body. You talented bastard.’ Gael shoves all her belongings into the bag frantically and rapidly packs up the portfolio. Xavier puts the groceries on the kitchen counter. He doesn’t say anything, but that’s his way. ‘I am so fucking late,’ Gael says. ‘Can you check the bathroom for me? My toothbrush …’
He doesn’t oblige. Gael pretends not to notice. She packs in the last of the Styrofoam and zips the portfolio shut.
‘Your phone’s ringing,’ Xavier says, his back to the counter, looking sideways at the caller ID.
‘Don’t answer it,’ Gael says. ‘I haven’t come up with an excuse yet. Okay kay kay kay kay kay.’ She grabs her phone from the counter, then runs to the bathroom for her toiletries. Shoves the last bits into the pocket of her coat, which she criminally puts on over her sweaty sportswear.
That she doesn’t have time to shower is meant to be the convincing part. That she hadn’t been checking if he’d robbed her. That she actually has somewhere to go – somewhere with showers and bottled water and dry cleaning for fine wool coats.
‘If you’re that late,’ Xavier says, ‘I’ll take you.’ His keys are still in his hand.
Gael watches the VW key of his work van swinging from his middle finger like windscreen wipers when you wanted the indicator. A penknife key ring.
She tells something like the truth. That she can’t afford favours. But thanks.
No cab could come quickly enough, so she found herself descending the subway stairs at 116th with the portfolio like a double pram, Manhattan momentarily empty of people to assist. Lucky, then, that the C train serviced that station and would take her all the way to 14th: to Chelsea, four blocks from the gallery where, evidently, she was headed, with some urgency. Flushed. Luggaged. Her bright blue Nikes dancing a kind of tap so that she might be thrown a dollar if she wasn’t careful. Looking like a true artist. Or a bag lady. Or a tightrope walker, without the balance pole.
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