Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “But you and Jesús were both right.”

  “Which has nothing to do with whether you’re right.”

  “It has to do with your being against anything I want that isn’t part of your plan for me. Like your father was with you.”

  Alex had never said anything like that to his father before, and his father’s eyes went wide and his head jerked back a fraction of an inch. For a couple of long seconds, Alex thought he’d blown it. His blood was up and he didn’t care.

  His father must have seen that. He looked away and thought for a while and then he said, “I’ll agree to the two years for this new Bachelor’s degree, if you’ll continue to manage the house. After that we’ll have to see where we are.”

  “Thank you, Papa.”

  “My father used to say, ‘The entire world has lost its mind.’ That was nothing compared to now.”

  “No,” Alex said. “For the first time in history, the world is trying to get sane.”

  *

  Madelyn knew that there were creatures called “morning people.” Clearly they existed and were able to function with the disorder; all the same, she had never understood them.

  Benjamin Kindred was one. When she got to the gallery that November Saturday at nine am, Kindred had already run four miles, showered, and had a big breakfast while he read the Chronicle. Madelyn herself had stumbled out of bed only an hour before, thrown a cup of instant coffee down her throat, and eaten a cold croissant as she drove up from Palo Alto, the top up on her mg because of a light drizzle and a temperature in the fifties.

  Kindred wanted to see her in his office—immediately, of course. Repeated hints that she preferred some quiet time when she first got in had been as incomprehensible to him as jogging before dawn in the rain was to her.

  “I’ve put off talking to you about this until I was more certain about what’s going to happen,” he said.

  “Ben, it’s nine in the morning and I haven’t had any real coffee yet. Please come out and tell me if this is going to be bad news.”

  “That depends on you.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “You know that business has been good. As it happens, it’s been good enough that I’ve been weighing my options for a second location. I think I’ve found it.”

  Refusing to encourage his tendencies toward drama, Madelyn held herself very still.

  “This is a pretty exciting time,” he said. “The picture dealers on Fifty-Seventh Street have had a stranglehold on the New York gallery scene for decades, and that’s breaking wide open. You’ve heard of SoHo?”

  Madelyn realized she’d stopped breathing. She forced herself to inhale and scrubbed any trace of enthusiasm from her voice. “I’ve read about it in Artforum.”

  “They finally changed the zoning laws in January, so the artists can legally live and work in the lofts there. The scene is going crazy. Giant canvasses, huge sculptures. Happenings. Film and dance. They’re redefining art.”

  Madelyn, who was reasonably satisfied with the old definition, nodded along.

  “A couple of galleries have already opened there and—”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Am I willing to move to New York and manage the new gallery? Yes. I assume I’d finish up the PhD at nyu, since it’s around the corner.”

  “Actually I was hoping to manage the New York location myself and leave you in charge here.”

  “Oh.” She knew she was losing the battle to keep her emotions from showing.

  Kindred gave her a few seconds to suffer for her presumption, then said, “Unfortunately, my roots here are too deep and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be practical for me to move. So yes, that’s the offer. Relocate to one of the most dangerous cities in America, which Mayor Lindsay has spent into insurmountable debt, take on the responsibility of a storefront in an area recently known as ‘Hell’s Hundred Acres,’ and somehow continue your education at the same time.”

  Broadway, Madelyn thought. Brentano’s and the Drama Book Store. Greenwich Village and Washington Square. Columbia University and moma and the Guggenheim and the Met. “When do I start?”

  “Madelyn, are you absolutely sure about this? You should take a few days to think about it, maybe talk to your parents…”

  “My father trained me my entire life for this.”

  “Work on the space is absolutely, positively supposed to be finished in March. I’m hoping they’ll be done by June, which is when I want to open. At the end of your spring semester, in other words. We should fly up and take a look before then, try and find you a place to live. My realtor can help.”

  “Thank you,” Madelyn said.

  “We’ll see if you still say that a year from now.”

  She was unable to concentrate for the rest of the day. She called Gordo’s now ex-girlfriend Irene, with whom she kept in sporadic touch, and made a date for dinner.

  Irene, unsurprisingly, knew quite a bit about SoHo. “Christ, I am so jealous,” she said. They were splitting a plate of Ethiopian lentils, green beans, and cabbage. “It’s the fucking Revolution up there. Guys like George Maciunas and Fluxus, they’re tearing the whole thing down to the sidewalks. Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  “That’s what Kindred asked me. Why would I not be?”

  “Well, aside from your being comparatively conservative politically and artistically, there’s the whole issue of how a gallery is going to make money off this scene. I mean, most of the hard-core guys are anti-capitalist and anti-art. They’re out to fuck over people like you. They’re doing all this shit that can’t be commodified, like performance art and film. How does John Q. Collector take that home and hang it over his sofa?”

  “I guess if I figure that out I’ll be rich. Then I can see how firm these guys’ anti-capitalist convictions are, once there’s real money on the table.”

  “Or,” Irene said, “just maybe, they’ll win you over and you’ll put that amazing intellect in the service of truth, justice, and anarchy. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  1973

  Dave found out about it when a manila envelope showed up at his office in late February, bearing the return address of a friend who worked at Billboard. Inside were page proofs of an interview with Sallie Rachel about her upcoming album, Sallie Rachel Krupheimer, which she’d recorded in LA with Bones Howe “captaining the console.”

  Asked about her name change, she said, “It’s all about being honest, being who I really am. From day one the music business crams you into their one-size-fits-all boxes. Giving you a new name, picking your backing musicians, crafting your ‘image.’ I’ve finally fought my way to a place where I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s the seventies now, people want to get real, and that’s what this album is. Real.”

  Dave crumpled the pages into a ball and threw them across the office. He went out into the hall and had a long drink at the water fountain and then bent forward and played the cold water over his face, imagining the heat of his anger vaporizing the water into clouds that floated above his steaming head.

  It wouldn’t have hurt so much if he hadn’t been in love with her so very long.

  He was doing so well otherwise. Two gold records in the last two years, a nice house in Ingleside Terraces, and maybe the start of a relationship with a marine biologist at the Exploratorium. He was getting offered more interesting projects than he could take on, and Judy, the biologist, had him walking every day and losing some weight. Until five minutes ago he’d felt better than he had in a long time.

  He returned to his office and flattened out the interview, needing to know if she’d insulted him by name. He didn’t have to read far. The interviewer said, “Dave Fisher is one of the better respected producers in the business. What does Bones Howe give you that Fisher can’t?”

  “The sense that I’m the one in control,” Sallie had answered. She rattled off a list of first-call LA session men: Jim Gordon on drums, Lee Sklar on bass,
Leon Russel on piano, James Burton on guitar. “It felt like a real band when I was in the studio with them.”

  The songs included a couple of remakes of previous album cuts alongside new versions of songs she’d written for the Meteors, the Fifth Dimension, and Johnny Rivers. She’d done a couple of cover tunes and only two new originals. “It’s a new beginning and a coming to grips with my past,” she said. The photo showed she’d cut her hair, turning it into a wild mass of curls. Dave conceded the distant possibility that, despite its studied artlessness, her hair might have looked that way on its own and not been the result of hard work by an LA stylist.

  He locked the article in his desk, telling himself he would not think about it again. He had a date with Judy and hoped that she might be ready to spend the night.

  He kept refilling his wine glass at dinner. He was not a drinker, rarely had more than a single beer or glass of wine. Judy sensed immediately that something was wrong, but it took his third glass of wine before he would tell her the outlines of the story.

  “‘It felt like a real band,’” he mocked, after finishing the bottle. “That’s like picking up an aging hooker and telling yourself it’s love.”

  Judy had tried sympathy and making excuses for Sallie and she had clearly tired of the subject. “Dave, you need to let this go.”

  “Besides which,” Dave said, “I let her record with her actual real band that she was touring with and they were lousy and the record bombed.”

  “Dave…”

  “Which she pressured me into because she was screwing the drummer.”

  “Can we change the subject? There’s some interesting stuff happening with plankton in the Baltic Sea. They just found eight species there that they’ve never seen before…”

  Dave managed to get the bill paid. Judy insisted on driving his car back to his place. He showed her around and she was suitably impressed. She declined a drink and at first Dave did too. They sat on the couch and Judy said, “Are you working tomorrow?”

  “No, I’m in between. I’m supposed to do something with Quicksilver in a couple of weeks. Unless Sallie has completely sunk my career.”

  Her disappointment hovered over the ensuing silence. He got up and poured himself a shot of vodka and drank it down. “She said I changed her name,” Dave said, still facing the bar. “It’s true. Do you know what she was calling herself when I discovered her? Sue Storm. After some comic book character. How’s that for being who she really is?”

  He turned around and saw that Judy was no longer on the couch. He heard her in the kitchen, reciting his address. She was hanging up the wall phone as he walked in.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

  She braced herself against the kitchen island, holding on with both hands. “I like you, Dave, but you’ve got some serious unfinished business here. Six months or a year from now, if you get past it, give me a call, maybe we can try again. But I’m not going to fight over you with somebody who’s not even here.”

  She pushed past him, headed for the front door. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “There’s a cab on the way. He should be here in ten minutes.”

  “I can take you—”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, and let herself out.

  Dave made it to the bar and poured himself another shot. He didn’t remember drinking it, or anything else until he woke up at four am, sprawled on the couch with a caustic taste in his throat and his head thudding.

  “‘In control?’” he said to the empty house. “When were you ever not in control?”

  *

  Cabs cruised through SoHo now, at least during daylight hours and in the four square blocks that the galleries had civilized, from West Broadway east to Greene, and from Houston south to Prince. In her first two months, when she was still struggling not to pronounce the street name like the name of the Texas city, Madelyn frequently had to walk across Houston to the nyu campus to even see a cab, and most evenings she kept walking until she got to her ritzy and secure studio apartment on University Place, north of Washington Square.

  The changes that she’d witnessed in the last year had mostly been for the good, though she missed the smell of arroz con pollo that used to leak through the wall that Kindred Gallery East had shared with a now-defunct Puerto Rican restaurant. The last of the sweatshops and textile merchants were clearing out; the city had finally granted a historic designation to the local cast-iron buildings with the arched, gray-painted facades that gave the neighborhood its character.

  It was 6:19 on a Saturday evening in late September, she had just locked the doors of the gallery, and the first drops of rain had started to fall out of a gray sky. At that moment a cab stopped in front of her and she chose not to argue with fate, laying hold of the door handle before the previous fare, a guy in a white corduroy car coat, could close it.

  The rain was pummeling the cab by the time it pulled up across the street from her building; she was soaked before she got to the front door. Water cascaded off the overhang all around her in a liquid curtain. She unlocked the heavy glass door and made sure the lock clicked solidly behind her. She tracked water across the black marble lobby, rode the brushed chrome elevator to the 11th floor, let herself into her apartment, and shed her wet clothes by the door.

  As always, a hidden tension relaxed once she was in her space, the sanctuary that enabled her to endure the lonely and intimidating megalopolis. The single room was too small to permit any disorder, so everything was precisely placed, from the thrift-store single bed and sofa to the rugs and potted plants to the posters on the walls by her beloved Pre-Raphaelites: Byrne-Jones’s King Cophetua, Rossetti’s Beatrix, Waterhouse’s Mermaid.

  She took a quick shower and dressed in black jeans, black turtleneck, and African print jacket. Alex called as she was putting on her mascara. Her destination that night was an opening at Paula Cooper’s newly relocated gallery on Wooster, and Alex was eager to go. He’d only been in the city three weeks and was still finding his way around. He’d had a rupture with his father and was trying to get by on financial aid and student loans from nyu film school, plus a part-time photo-processing job at a Duane Reed pharmacy. He’d rented a tenement apartment a few crucial blocks east of SoHo on the Lower East Side, a tough Jewish and Puerto Rican immigrant neighborhood with the Spanglish nickname Loisaida. Madelyn worried about him; for his part, Alex seemed liberated. “I’m a poor Mexican kid in the barrio, living in a crappy apartment and wearing ropa usada. Why would anybody want to fuck with me?”

  They’d gone out every two or three days since he’d arrived, and Madelyn remained unsure of his intentions. Thus far everything had been comfortably platonic, and he’d insisted on separate checks and paying for his own movie tickets. Madelyn was unsure how she would react if he came on to her. He’d gotten more physically attractive as he’d grown up and filled out, but the flashes of cynicism she’d seen in him over the years had left her wary. Their tangled relationships to Cole and Denise also gave the idea a whiff of the incestuous.

  For the moment she was happy to have the company, not to mention the ferocious critical sensibility he brought to watching films. Over a glass of wine afterward he would point out the myriad ways that the cinemaphotography, the music, the verbal clichés, the very essence of the typical Hollywood movie was designed to deaden the mind and dictate the reactions of the emotions. She’d asked him why he kept watching them, and he said, “You learn more from what you hate than from what you love.”

  As always, Alex wanted to eat at food, Gordon Matta-Clark’s conceptual art restaurant, and Madelyn demurred. The dinner menu was unpredictable, with a risk of something presentationally brilliant but inedible, and ever since the New York magazine review, crowds had been a problem. She was tired of Fanelli’s, the only other restaurant in the neighborhood, and she convinced him to go to Little Italy, where they could be sure of a good, cheap meal.

  They got to the Coop
er gallery well after nine. Despite Madelyn’s having been on the scene for over a year, she couldn’t help the charge she got the minute she passed through the door, knowing she was at the absolute forefront of visual arts for the entire planet. The inside was cavernous, managing to look battered and sleek at the same time, from the exposed joists overhead to the original distressed wooden floor that had been refinished and buffed to a high gloss, to the islands of light where massive, mysterious objects disrupted the flow of a jittery and hyper-verbal crowd.

  Paula herself was hovering near the door and hurried over to press her cheek to Madelyn’s and say, “Madelyn, I’m so glad you could come. You look fantastic.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it,” Madelyn said, not letting herself reject the compliment—audibly, anyway. Paula was 35, tall and stunning in the classic New York tradition, full lips and enormous dark eyes, long dark hair held loosely in a silver barrette. She had a wide-collared white shirt, a black blazer, and a cigarette in her left hand. Madelyn knew the welcome was sincere. Paula, like most of the artists and gallery owners in SoHo, seemed immune to envy or competition, as if they were all part of a crusade against the business-as-usual of art. Half of the artists were making works that couldn’t be sold, either because they were too gigantic or too ephemeral, like Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, executed on the actual walls of the gallery and then painted over when the show closed. Madelyn had to admire the suicidal purity of the ideology.

  “This is an old friend, Alex Montoya,” Madelyn said. “He’s in film school at nyu.”

  Paula took his hand, sized him up quickly, and said, “If you do something interesting, I want to see it.”

  “Absolutely,” Alex said.

  They moved into the smoke-filled exhibit space. As many as a hundred people ebbed and flowed through the room, dealers and collectors and critics in coats and ties or black dresses, artists and hangers-on in jeans and T-shirts and sweat shirts. The exhibit was Donald Judd’s latest collection of rectangular boxes, or “specific objects” as he preferred to call them. His “vertical progressions” consisted of identical cuboids, made of steel and plexiglass, mounted one above the other directly on the gallery wall. The main floor held a scattering of more massive pieces, including a large plywood cube, open on one side, with a panel tilted diagonally inside it from the top almost to the floor.