The Infinite Blacktop

by Sara Gran

  She also painted. Her paintings were different from Carl’s and Merritt’s—Carl and Merritt painted colors and shapes; Ann painted people and animals and plants and insects and things that were combinations of all of those categories: a woman who was half wolf and part bee; a flower that was equal parts vulture. Like her sculptures, her paintings looked like nature had taken over. But somehow, in Ann’s rendering of it, nature was a little smarter and a little wittier and a little more compassionate. It seemed willing to cut you a break, if you were paying attention.

  The next day I went to the library. The newspapers from when Ann died were recent enough to be on the internet. I paid a few bucks to use the terminals. I found Ann’s obituaries from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and a long profile of her in ARTnews. I printed them all out for two cents a page. One hour and two bucks later I had fifty pages to read and an empty stomach. I went to an Armenian falafel place for lunch and read about Ann Davidson’s life. And her death.

  Armenian falafel is its own strange beast. Ann was born in Mississippi. In one interview she said she’d grown up in Bay St. Louis, a small, unwealthy town on the coast; in another she said she’d come from an estate outside Oxford. I figured neither of those stories were exactly true and the exact truth probably didn’t matter much—at least not to me, not right now.

  The stories all agreed on the rest of it: Ann got into CalArts on a full scholarship, packed up, moved to Los Angeles, graduated, got in a group show right after graduation, and sold every piece. There was success, defined: selling for double. After that she got a top dealer and, as one newspaper mention put it, with no small disdain, “the stars aligned and the magical alchemy of the art world—turning one’s creative vision into cash—was at Ann Davidson’s fingertips.”

  I printed out three photos of Ann, which later that night I would tape up to the wall of my hotel room in chronological order. One was a photo of her from that first group show just out of art school in 1983. Ann looked small and young and glowing; she had short dark hair and wore a short black dress and chunky black shoes. Her arms were bare and white.

  The next photo was from a few years later. She was older now, and although she of course wasn’t taller, and not much fatter, she somehow looked bigger. Maybe it was her energy that was larger; she seemed to take up more space in the room. Or maybe she’d just learned how to pose for the photos without giving quite so much away. In the first picture she looked a little wide-eyed and maybe too grateful; in this second picture, a professional photo taken in a studio, she kept more to herself. Her outfit was again a black dress, but this one more polished and stranger, her hair was longer and arranged just so. Her arms were bare in this photo, too, and she’d begun her tattoos, images that would become nearly famous in their own right—vines and flowers that curled up her arms, fantastical and organic. The flowers, I would read later, were flowers she’d invented. She’d planned to eventually make a book of them—a field guide to the flora and fauna of her own imaginary landscape. She died before that happened. In the picture she had a kind of half-smile on her face—a kind of knowing look that seemed to see more than it revealed.

  The last photo was from a few months before she died. It was from Vogue, part of a photo-essay of female artists modeling expensive clothes. Barbara Kruger in an Armani sheath. Kiki Smith in a Dolce & Gabbana corset dress. And Ann Davidson in a Galliano gown. They each had their own double-page photo standing in what was either a very tidy woods in the South of France or a very elaborate set. Around each of the women was a little tribe of taxidermied foxes and squirrels and robins and blue jays and one very large hawk.

  I didn’t know much about clothes but I didn’t think the dress Ann was wearing was something a person was actually supposed to wear anywhere other than a photo shoot: it was black and voluminous, with layers of fabric and lace pushing the outer layer out easily a foot on either side. The dress had no sleeves and you could see her arms were now etched with pale vines and flowers.

  In this photo Ann seemed huge, as large as the trees. She looked directly at the camera, and didn’t smile. Her eyes were perfect and said nothing except maybe a little tiny fuck you.

  She looked like a sculpture. But not one Ann would make. A sculpture made by someone else. Someone not as interesting as Ann, and not as good an artist.

  By the time I was done reading, it was time for my date.

  * * *

  I reached the heavy iron gate that stood between the world and the house in Malibu at 4:28.

  Deuteronomy 4:28: “There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell.”

  I sat in my car and did nothing until 4:34, when I pushed the button on the intercom just outside my car window. I figured at least ten minutes to drive up the driveway and go through security but the driveway was short, and there was no security, just a housekeeper, and at 4:41 I was sitting in front of a glass wall overlooking the gray and angry Pacific, at the largest wooden table I’d ever seen, made from what seemed to be a single piece of wood. The Pacific made the Atlantic look like mother’s milk. The house was large and though I wasn’t sure I thought likely concrete. It was cruel and modern, as if beauty had been made illegal. Maybe it was less heartbreaking on a sunny day; the rest of Los Angeles was bright and hot but out here by the ocean it was overcast and chilly.

  For three minutes I sat there and watched a seabird dive into the ocean again and again, trying to hook a fish he just couldn’t catch. It was like watching a movie. At 4:44 I heard a voice behind me.

  “The DeGraw case bought me that view. Back then I wasn’t sure if I’d ever make any money again. I put every last cent of it into buying this land. Took five more years before I could afford to build the house.”

  I turned around.

  Frank Richter was older than I’d imagined. He was a tall man with a long face, bones struggling to stand up, gravity pulling his flesh down. The last known photo of him was from the seventies, and somehow I’d expected to see the same open, life-full face, only older. But age isn’t just time passing. It’s time breaking you—your will, your heart, your beliefs. Richter’s breaks were written in the deep wrinkles in his skin, in his tired posture, in his large, sagging hands.

  The DeGraw case was famous, and not just for the money at stake. Many saw it as a turning point—the first time Richter worked for the wrong side. The side with money and Washington connections. The case that made Richter realize he could use his skills for something more useful than the truth. Depending on how you defined useful.

  There was a rumor that Richter had once been a Silettian. I didn’t know if I believed it or not.

  The seabird kept diving in, trying to grab his fish. Maybe there was no fish.

  From a brutally plain sideboard Richter took out a bottle of scotch and poured us each a glass. He sat down next to me. We both watched the ocean and drank. I wondered what he was punishing himself for—living alone, in this brutal house, drinking the ugliest drink in the world. It tasted horrible but it didn’t feel half-bad; he poured another for us both and I knew I’d pay for it as I tried to navigate the cliff-side curves back to Hollywood.

  “Constance spoke very highly of you,” he finally said.

  “Thank you,” I said. I didn’t say she was the only one who ever had.

  “So one of my men worked on this case,” he said. His lackeys had told him what I wanted. “Tell me about it in a few words.”

  I thought for a second and then I said: “Someone died.”

  Richter waited for me to continue and when I didn’t he laughed. When he laughed his face lit up and he looked like a different man.

  “You think someone killed him,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know enough to know yet.”

  “So you think my man was wrong?”

  “I don’t think anything,” I said. “We were hired to look into it. So we’re looking into it. If you could ask your guy to talk to me,
that would be helpful. That’s all I was hoping for.”

  I said it as if it were not a big deal, but it was one of the biggest deals in the world. The Richter Agency did not cooperate with anyone, ever. Even the CIA had to kiss ass to get anywhere and even that didn’t always get them far.

  I didn’t have much faith in whatever little peon they’d put on the case. I didn’t have much faith in any PIs other than myself. What Richter was good at, and what I wanted, was information: police reports, social security numbers, surveillance footage. None of that would solve the case—if it could have, Richter’s man would have solved it. But it could save me weeks of excruciating legwork and boredom, and things would be revealed I’d maybe never even think to look for.

  He didn’t say anything for another long minute. For the first time I noticed that what I thought were natural fluctuations in the wood surface of the table was, in fact, a very faint and fine etching across the whole table: a sundial; an evil eye; writing in Enochian and Hebrew; numbers like 444 and 888 and sigils I didn’t understand.

  “OK,” he finally said. He made a little nod of his head. “Go to the office tomorrow. Not here. The office in Beverly Hills. They’ll be expecting you. I’ll tell them to give you full access.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Full access at Richter was unheard of.

  I didn’t know exactly what had happened between Constance and Richter. I didn’t even know how they knew each other, or when they had met.

  But once Constance called the agency and got Richter on the phone within four minutes. She asked him questions and he answered. This was regarding the famous Clue of the Golden Butterfly—the clue no one but Constance recognized, the case no one but Constance could crack. And I knew that a set of first-class tickets to and from Los Angeles—tickets she didn’t use—showed up on her doorstep a few days later.

  Richter’s last known public appearance was just about the time of the unused tickets.

  Richter poured us each another scotch and we turned around and looked at the gray ocean. I tried to think of something to say, something clever but also deep, something that could maybe pierce his armor, something that could weave a cord between us, no matter how thin.

  But I didn’t think of the thing to say, the thing that might cure what ailed us, the thing that might bind us together—might bind me to anything—and instead I finished my scotch silently.

  When I turned around, Richter was gone, and I was alone.

  * * *

  “Meeting Merritt was pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  The woman telling me this was Tiffany Stockton, thirtyish. We sat in a sidewalk café on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. Tiffany was one of the art students Merritt had convinced to drop out of school when he taught for one semester at USC.

  “There were four of us who dropped out,” Tiffany said. “Me, Gail McCort, Alex Rahm, and Clay Jackson. People made it seem like Merritt ruined our lives. That’s why he was fired. I mean, one of many reasons why he was fired. But people made it like we were these immature children led astray by this equally immature man. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or something.”

  I hadn’t read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but I got her drift.

  “So what was it,” I asked, “if it wasn’t that?”

  Tiffany sighed. She looked like the exact opposite of everything every mother who named her daughter Tiffany hoped for. Tiffany’s hair was dyed black and cut into a severe Louise Brooks bob. She wore a black garment that was kind of like a dress but shapeless and wide, and ended at an odd point above her knees. She didn’t smile often and everything she said had a kind of seriousness to it that you might have been able to laugh at except most of what she said seemed to be true.

  “He talked about . . . about the system of school, about the systems of society and culture, and how art had the opportunity to disrupt those systems. But if you let those systems eat you, you lose that potential. You cannot bite a hand while you are eating out of it. You cannot disrupt a system while you contribute to it. You have to pick one.”

  “So what was the hand he wanted you to bite?” I asked.

  We both sipped hot, fancy, coffee drinks in big white cups. It had been cloudy and cool when we ordered our drinks and then the clouds had spun away and the sun had come out and now we were sitting in the hot sun with hot drinks and too many clothes. Which, in the scheme of things, was not so bad.

  I took off my jacket and hung it on the chair behind me. The sun on my arms made me hotter.

  “Merritt wanted us to aim higher than creating a valuable commodity,” Tiffany said. “Which was pretty much the only art education I’d ever had. I was always very talented. I know you’re not supposed to say that out loud, but it’s true. It’s an ability. Like some people can run or play soccer. I could paint, draw, whatever. And from a very young age, I was basically taught, by well-meaning people, that my worth as a person came from the praise I got for my art. And that, eventually, my art would be worth whatever dollar amount someone wanted to put on it. But, I mean, if you create art, that’s a piece of your soul. So to everyone else in my life, everyone before Merritt, the only question was: exactly how much can you sell your soul for?

  “So to give you an example of how that worked out for me, my sophomore year, the semester before I met Merritt, I had a real fuck-up in my sculpture class. I overreached on this welding project and I really screwed it up and I actually had to take an incomplete in the class. And the teacher, who was a dick, and I think hated women, was, like, judging me. Like, instead of helping me fulfill my creative vision, he judged me, found me lacking, and refused to help me after that. So at the end of the semester, I was . . .

  “Look, all my life I’d been judged by this one thing, right? So when I failed at that one thing, having no idea that that’s what real artists do, having no idea that was part of the process, that failing was sometimes necessary, I, well, I hated myself so much that I got so wasted, over the course of three days, that at the end of the three days—well, I OD’d and ended up in a hospital on suicide watch.”

  She looked down a little. I didn’t tell her I’d been there. I didn’t tell her I was still there. I didn’t tell her: I hate myself that much every day. I didn’t tell her: the only thing that saved me is gone and never coming back. I didn’t tell her: I will be there again, and I will be there so often I will come to believe it’s my natural habitat.

  “So how was Merritt different?” I asked.

  Tiffany let out a rare smile. “Well. The first thing Merritt said to me—said to me, personally, not the class—”

  Tiffany stopped and looked up and I realized she had tears in her eyes. I could tell she didn’t want to cry in front of me and it was a minute before she could go on.

  “He came over—you all kind of work in a circle in class, it’s like the movies—he came over and he said, ‘This is really good, and you’re obviously very talented. But now, I want you to make the worst painting you can. I want you to just completely fuck this up. Just loosen up your horizons of what you ought to be doing.’ And I did—”

  Now Tiffany started to cry outright. Her nose turned red and her eyes and forehead scrunched up.

  “And that was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. I spent all semester on it. Making the worst painting I possibly could. Just totally fucking up everything I’d worked for all my life. Just diving into it. Just really coming to terms with how much I hated myself and my own art. How disgusting I really thought I was.”

  “So what happened?” I asked. “Was it the best panting you ever made?”

  “No,” Tiffany said. She finished crying and even smiled a little. “It was horrible! Like seriously the worst of the worst of art school—which is really saying something. But when I was done, I was still me. I was still Tiffany Stockton. After that, I knew I could fail and live. And I knew I could take risks, like I had with the welding, and that sometimes those risks wouldn’t work, but I would be a better a
rtist, and a better person, because of it. And the next painting I did after that, that was really good. Like, way better than anything I’d done before. And I knew that who I was was not entirely dependent on my results. I am who I am because of who I am, not because of the commodities I generate or even the, you know, the sacred objects that I generate. I am not my results. I am my process.”

  I let that sink in for a long minute and realized that I agreed with her.

  “You left school after that?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Tiffany said. “Between the welding bullshit and Merritt—it all became very clear. Also, I know this won’t seem relevant, but bear with me: after I left, I started going to temple. I’m Jewish. And I began to really understand, the way Merritt wanted me to understand, that making art is not like making another commodity. It’s not a popularity contest. When you’re making art, real art—sorry for being pretentious, I know I keep apologizing, sorry—you are not participating in capitalism. You’re participating in mysticism.

  “Merritt didn’t just tell us to go out and, you know, get high or run away from home or whatever. He told us, this school is teaching you to sell art to upper-class America. I—Merritt—I am here to teach you how to communicate with your soul. He told us that we should hold the highest standard possible for ourselves, no matter what the people around us wanted. That we should be like those hot dog commercials—he loved those commercials! You know. We don’t answer to the supermarket. We don’t answer to money or grades. We answer to a higher authority.”

  I asked her how Merritt’s advice had worked out since she left school. She said it had worked out pretty well.

  “My life isn’t perfect,” Tiffany said. “It’s hard. It’s really hard. Especially once you decide not to make money your priority. That does not make it easier.” She laughed. “But it’s good. And the best way it’s good is that my art, the thing I do every day, is not my enemy. It’s my best friend.”