“How do you know?” I asked, suspicious. I still didn’t see a signature and I hated to be shown up about a painting.
“Mexico City. The Tamayo has Ianelli by the meter.”
“I’ve never been,” I said. “You mean—Rufino Tamayo.”
“The one and only.”
“Seems out of place. I didn’t think they owned any works by men.”
“It belongs to Max. Isn’t it good? I think it’s so good,” he said, meaning it—then changed the subject. “Your painting looks nice.”
I nodded, then turned very deliberately back to the painting in front of us. “Helen Frankenthaler was his student, you know—Tamayo, I mean.” I was determined to regain my ground on my only subject of expertise. “She said in an interview that she made very good Tamayos. I once made very good Frankenthalers,” I admitted. “But I would give my right arm to make a good version of this.”
“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said, abruptly changing the subject again.
“I assumed Susan had.”
“Tomato Tomato, at the Menil last year, right?” he said, referring to one of my biggest paintings, displayed in an exhibition at a privately owned museum in Houston.
I nodded.
“I’m madly in love with that painting,” he said.
I didn’t believe him. “Tomato Tomato has that effect on people,” I deadpanned, swallowing the rest of my drink.
“So that’s how you pronounce it,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “I’m sorry for being so rude. Susan said ‘my friend.’ I thought you were some…dilettante. That’s why I gave you the barn. I thought you would leave. She—Susan is old. She doesn’t always communicate well.”
“Do you haze everybody that way?”
“It’s worked in the past,” he admitted. “There’s a socialite in Dallas with your rose-gold hair. She paints dogs. I honestly—I honestly thought you were her when you drove up.”
“Because socialites drive dented twenty-year-old pickup trucks with counterfeit tabs.”
“It could have been an affectation.”
“It’s not.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been the first time.”
“My friend Cady paints dogs.” I was putting him through the wringer here.
“I’m sure your friend Cady paints the best dogs.”
“She does, actually.”
“Wait.” He paused. “Did you say your truck has counterfeit tabs?”
“Did I?” I shook my head cluelessly. “Who can remember.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He said it twice, leaning into me. His eyes were dark green, the rind of a cucumber. “I was late to the airport when I showed you in. I was distracted.”
“Why do you do it?” I asked, to regain control of the conversation. “Your work, I mean.” Savage’s recent medium was the talk of the town: real human organs purchased on the black market. He dried them out to leather in the sun, coated them in bronze, and mounted them like trophies. Slobodan Milošević’s Liver sold at auction the year before for over a million dollars.
“Everybody’s trafficking in something,” he quipped.
“Hah.” I waited for a better answer.
“My gallery says the work is a commentary on commodities.”
“What do you think?”
“Why does anybody do anything?” he replied. “What else am I going to do?”
I stifled a laugh. I was softening but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. He didn’t know that I felt sorry for him; I wasn’t going to absolve him of his bad manners after a few jokes, even if I wanted to. “So. Where’s everybody else?”
“Over there. Jack, Marlin, and Jes are all here,” he said, gesturing to a cluster nearby—Jack Wells, in an equally threadbare tuxedo, stood chatting idly with Marlin Mayfield, who wore an ocher-tinted cocoon; Jes Winsome, a navy shroud. The three of them were an impenetrable bubble that the party seemed to bob and weave around, a drop of olive oil in a glass of milk. “We were in the city, but we’re back for June.”
“I should say hi to Max,” I said suddenly, the bottle of wine sweating in my hand.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
“That’s okay,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll catch you later.”
“Truly, I’m sorry,” he said. “We do have a space for you. I’ll give you the keys tomorrow. Tonight when we get back, if you want. It’s huge, and it’s watertight.”
My mouth made a suspicious line. “Why?” I asked.
“We’re not using it.” He shrugged. “Everybody needs a solid sometimes, right?”
“Thank you,” I said.
Marlin caught my eye from where she stood with Jes and Jack, and she waved, then pointed at Tyler and made the okay symbol with her fingers, raising her eyebrows as if asking a question: Did he tell you about the space?
I gave her a thumbs-up and sighed. “All right,” I told him as Max caught my eye and waved. “I should say hi.”
“I’ll go with you,” he repeated.
The stairs, a hard torrent of cement bars spiraling to the ground floor, were difficult to descend in Cady’s wooden heels and I went slowly, clutching the bumpy tube of the brass banister. Tyler stayed a step or two behind. At the bottom, Max was waiting for me with her arms held open. I could count the ribs beneath her skin.
“Hello, sweet friend,” she said to me, hugging me close. “Hello, Ty,” she said to him.
“Hiya, Maxy.” He kissed her on the cheek.
“You bought my painting,” I said. “It looks nice.”
“Good surprise or bad surprise?” Max bit her lip in childish anticipation.
“Good.” I tried to smile. Whatever Max and Charlie had paid for it would never see the inside of my bank account.
She swiveled to Tyler. “Did I hear that you sold Idi Amin’s lungs last week?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Let me know when you have another dictator,” she said as she made eye contact with someone more important than either of us. She kissed us each on the cheek. “Try the ketamine,” she said, pointing to a bowl. “Find me later. Let’s talk, okay?”
I never got a chance to hand her the bottle. Flustered, I turned to walk upstairs, back to the food, but Tyler stopped me.
First he took the bottle and handed it to a server. “Put this in the cellar,” he said. “It’s through there.” He pointed to the kitchen, then turned back to me. “You’re sweet,” he said. “Nobody else bothered.”
“I noticed,” I said, trying to swallow my pride. I hadn’t realized that Max threw the kind of parties you didn’t bring gifts to. I turned around in a circle, trying to find a way out.
“Don’t split. You heard our hostess,” he chided. “Try the ketamine!”
I smiled—barely.
“It’s like a vitamin,” he said, “except it’s, you know, an animal tranquilizer.”
That I laughed at. Still—I held out, trying not to let him see the warmth I felt. “You’re going to let me borrow a studio?” I asked insistently. “Tomorrow? Because if not—I shouldn’t even be here. I should be packing.”
“Scout’s honor.” He held up three fingers.
“That’s Girl Scout’s honor.”
“Isn’t that better?”
He had me. I laughed and dipped my finger in the glowing green bowl he held out, a vintage jadeite saltcellar, piled high with flat, crystalline flakes that melted on my tongue and tasted like hair spray. I dipped again as we started chatting—and again—and again—until the world was a glassed-in ripple, warm as the tropics.
I plucked a section of vine from the wall. It vibrated with life. Tyler helped me circle the blossoming green rope of it into the cloud of my hair like a crown, and then we wandered into the backyard, an acre of clean-cut grass surrounded by stone walls overflowing with lilac and honeysuckle bushes. There was a huge bonfire in the center and the lawn was dotted with lounge furni
ture, most of it aggressive and modern looking, save for a huge vinyl blob covered in pillows. I took off my shoes to let the cold, soft grass grow between my toes, and it did, in long, silky tufts. Northern grass. Like everything up here, it was better, because it got to die and come back fresh. Everything in Florida is made out of knives, because there are no seasons and nothing and nobody ever leaves.
The garden wall was a pile of fieldstone, like an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture; it probably was one, I realized. When Tyler climbed on it I clapped my hand over my mouth in shock.
“Don’t worry. It won’t break.”
I refused to follow, and, drawn instead to the vinyl blob and its nubby wool pillows, I sprawled across one end. The pianos played Haydn, and the notes scattered over us in bursts, like handfuls of birdseed falling on cobblestones.
I curled my mouth into a circle and took clean, cold breaths while the gentle hum of the party waved around me like a nest of seaweed. I remember feeling the way the embroidery of my dress scratched against the tops of my thighs, and the way the vinyl stuck to my skin, the woolly fur of the pillows in my arms. I was so grateful to be surrounded by people—by their noises and their sneezes and their footsteps in their jeweled slippers—that it almost didn’t matter that it all belonged to Max.
* * *
Though it felt like days, I lingered on the blob for no more than fifteen minutes until Tyler lay down on the other end, our heads nearly touching, like a capital A. I became very aware of him, of the shape of him, though I didn’t dare look in his eyes.
It was becoming clearer to me, on a personal level, why Tyler had done so well. Aside from being handsome, he was physically very charismatic; his jokes were delivered in the key of bittersweet; he said sincere things about what he liked and didn’t like. He looked you straight in the eyes when he spoke to you and he didn’t seem insecure. He was the kind of person you wanted to be around. And his artwork did something to the bottom of your stomach to make you simultaneously uncomfortable and afraid and curious, and that—I liked that. I think everybody did.
At some point a group of people nearby, three men and two women, started speaking loudly. I didn’t know them, but they shimmered with the unmistakable patina of privilege. It emanated from them in waves. I rolled in their direction, away from Tyler, and made myself small against the blob, stacking pillows over myself, and poked my head out one end to eavesdrop.
“The gallery is so controlling about the estate,” one of the men was saying, rolling his eyes. “I mean—she’s one of his artists. That’s his damn job. We need this work for the show. It cannot happen without it.” The ketamine had dissolved, for the moment, all of the possessive anger I’d felt earlier. In its place stood naked, unbridled curiosity. I stopped breathing and listened.
“She was the rebel of our time,” one of the women said, in a Southern lady’s accent, all pearls and politeness. “So important. Such a powerful influence.”
“I’ll work on him,” another of the women said. “We’re having lunch next week. Ugh, Brits. You can punch them in the face and they say thank you. It’s impossible to get straight talk out of them.”
“Well—she left it all to them,” one of the men said, nodding his head backward to the lake and Pine City. “They could’ve made millions since she died. Charlie’s not the problem. He won’t say it but—it’s them. They are the problem.”
Then—abruptly—I felt Tyler roll from the blob. The group hushed each other and fell silent. I twisted my head inside the pillow burrito and watched him, shoulders high and hands in his pockets, sit grumpily on an Adirondack chair in front of the fire.
“Oh my,” pouted the Southern one, in faux-embarrassment. “Have we been…indiscreet?”
“Don’t worry about it,” another said reassuringly, though even I could tell he didn’t mean it. “Let’s get a drink.”
After they retreated, I tunneled out of the pillows and headed over to Tyler, sitting in the grass at his side, digging in the dirt with my carefully polished fingernails. He didn’t say anything and I wanted desperately to know how he felt.
“Are you okay?” I asked, wanting to put my hand over his mouth, feel his breath.
It took him an eternity to reply. “Are you one of them?”
“One of who?”
“The Carey Logan fans,” he said flatly, rolling his eyes. He was angry—and tense, visibly tense; it was fluttering from him in little ragged pulses.
“I don’t have to be,” I said carefully. I was going to follow it up with something about how I thought Yes, Carey was interesting, I mean, the work was technically very finished, and I’d been to several of her shows, and as another young woman artist who was compulsively prolific, she meant a lot to me, but in the ketamine reverb I forgot to speak.
Relief flooded across his face. The pulsing stopped. He said, “Thank God.”
“I liked some of the work, but not all of it,” I said, which was true. “Sorry. I mean. The sculptures are extraordinary. The performance work was less compelling. I don’t mean to be negative.”
“No,” he said. “I agree with you.”
“So you can be agreeable!” Charlie said, appearing in front of us in an absolutely spotless shawl-collar tuxedo, the bow tie and top buttons of his shirt undone. His polished shoes were smeared with wet grass. Without thinking, I leaned down to his feet, plucked a blade of grass, and put it on my tongue; it was slippery and cold.
“Hello,” he said to me, his voice warm. “I saw your hair from across the yard. I was so sorry to hear about your apartment.”
I put up a hand, and he pulled me upright. I blew the blade of grass at him and he stepped out of its way. Before he could kiss me hello, Tyler stood, and they were shaking hands.
“Nice to see you,” Charlie said, his voice shallow. It was obvious that he didn’t mean it.
“You too,” Tyler replied blankly.
I shifted my weight from foot to foot impatiently. “Can I have a drink?”
“I’ll get it,” they both said at once.
“Allow me. I’m on duty,” Charlie insisted. He managed to flag down a girl with a tray. I picked out a brown one in a round, silver-tipped glass.
“What are you doing with yourself?” I asked him, once we all had a drink in our hands.
“Managing an installation in an elevated park, rather like the High Line, in Macau. The artist is mainland Chinese—she’s from a place that actually translates to ‘Button City.’ Lu Liu is her name.”
“Oh.” That wasn’t what I meant. I meant more, What do you feel? In your life?
“You don’t like it.”
“You’re decorating a floating casino?” I said, trying to keep up. “Why? Don’t you have enough money?”
“We’re devoting ourselves to public space. It’s a first step.”
“Macau is the least public space I can think of,” I said slowly, trying to solve the puzzle.
“Nothing can ever be public,” Tyler interjected. “Nothing belongs to everyone.”
“If that’s true, then it doesn’t matter what anyone does ever,” I snapped. Tyler smiled.
“It’s a barter,” Charlie explained. “If we finish this project in Macau, the Chinese government will allow us to build a four-kilometer walkway in Beijing, covered in two levels of air-filtering plant life. We predict that air quality within the Beijing Line will be improved by over fifty percent. It could see ninety thousand people a day—three times what they’re hoping for with the High Line.”
“You got me there,” I told him. “Hooray for Beijing.”
“Every woman in the world has an opinion on how I’m supposed to run my business.” He laughed—but mildly. “Come on. I think we’re doing quite well.”
“You represent women. You shouldn’t route the trafficking of our identity politics through some gaudy money dump that only exists as decoration for the world’s richest people,” I insisted.
“I heard Milot picked you up,” Charlie replied.
Whoops. I’d gone too far. “Congratulations. Do you want her to give your paintings away?” His tone was light; he was only teasing. No criticism from me could make Charles Eliot feel even the slightest bit of insecurity.
“Jacqueline says that women painters are the bargain of the century,” I said. “Maybe she is giving them away.”
“That’s why Hen and I do what we do,” he said, tucking a daisy in my hair. “Nothing’s a bargain at Eliot&Sprain. We didn’t even know you were on the market. You didn’t give us a chance,” he said, pretending to be hurt.
I rolled my eyes. “Maybe I’ll be successful enough for Eliot&Sprain when I’m dead,” I said, “and that’s a big maybe.”
Charlie smiled good-naturedly. “I’ll have to console myself with the idea that you’re too good a friend to do business with. Anyway—how’s it going? I assume you’re over there painting? I hope you didn’t lose any of Jacqueline’s beautiful paintings in the fire,” he said. “She’s been talking about them for two years.”
“One. But I’m remaking it. The show is the eighth of September.”
He looked at his watch, then back at my painting inside. “Jesus. Are you going to be on time?”
“Barely,” I said, feeling shame pump into my cheeks—it wasn’t one painting, it was all seven, and no, I was probably not going to finish them, I was probably going to be even worse off in three months. I pushed it down and tried to change the subject. “After that…I don’t know. I’m looking forward to being between things. All those new ideas that I can’t even think about, you know? I can fool around for a while.”
“I like the betweens,” Charlie said. “I haven’t had one in years.”
“Can’t stand ’em,” Tyler said. “I’m never not working.”
A girl in a tuxedo leotard appeared and whispered something in Charlie’s ear. He nodded.
“Me neither, I suppose.” Charlie sighed, sticking out his hand again. “Pleasure to see you, Tyler.” He leaned down and kissed me goodbye, the smooth surface of his clean-shaven cheek brushing hotly against mine. “Come over for supper. We miss you.”
“I will,” I promised.
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