by Philip Salom
All this work and pride in feeling healthier has convinced Trevor he should make an appointment with a gallery. Bite the bullet, in the old-school saying. Be positive, as the motivators say. Visualise and it will come, they say. Request a showing of his work.
Online searching has given him a list of possible city galleries he could contact. Where does he start, though, and what kind of work do they show? His trips into town to look at works have had an indifferent effect. So many landscape spreads of glorious colour in styles he’d considered long dead. Tourist art. Galleries showing faint colour washes and even coffee-coloured surfaces, as if Melbourne’s second biggest obsession has entered the room. He watches before turning away feeling dead inside too many inert videos that exist, just, interminably.
Flinders Lane. A rising street of galleries but possibly none for him.
He checks every room of a much promoted uni postgraduate show. The first room is filled, if not dominated, by someone working with coloured string and tinsel, wasting packets of pipe cleaners without twisting or shaping anything convincing, a technique so invisible he wonders if ineptness is the theme.
A video, yes, another video, plays the changing profundity of a blob.
He smiles at the young manager without anything moving inside his or her head. The second room makes him shudder. How many cutesy girls with stunned eyes and kiddie bodies can anyone look at closely, whether or not they are hanging in a gallery said to be ‘exclusive’? They make him feel like a stressed-out voyeur of kiddie porn and zombie art, with or without the corporeal. Pale. Exsanguinated.
They are so bad, any sense of hope falls around him like doom. His shoulders and his mind tell him he is the idiot and this is the playroom of the status quo. Or has he missed something? No. Nothing as awful as this is superior to anything. If one room is technical kitsch, the other is just kitsch.
The twenty-year gap of his inactivity has been filled with this? It is a chasm of banality. Time has deserted him. Or he it.
At Flinders Street Station he dodges the homeless individuals huddled in sleeping bags and rugs, and at intervals along nearby pavements. Art along Flinders Lane, poverty along Flinders St. For the homeless the irony is that they have nothing as free in this world as time, and time offers them nothing.
Of all people to ask, he rings Lester. After all, he bought those paintings from galleries somewhere, he must know the likely places. Or will he? Trevor has noticed that when he talks about his painting, or other artists, Lester shows no interest at all. He truly is an outsider: it’s what he does that obsesses him, to hell with artists. Since he began doing it himself. And he no longer has any interest in the public existence of artworks beyond those he purchased a decade ago.
This is disconcerting.
Lester, the outsider painter who began full of fascination but without any training; and Trevor, with all his training and early success falling to impostor syndrome. What ironies. Yes, Lester knows the galleries. Or he did. They may or may not still be in business.
After a week or so of procrastination – unhappily endured, just as unhappily ended – Trevor makes an appointment at Fifty Square Gallery. For once he will not open his shop until the afternoon. His problem is fixed by making a new sign to hang in the door. BACK AT 1 PM.
On the actual day he is trying too hard. And the manager is trying to explain her problem. It isn’t working.
‘OK, yes,’ she deigns to swipe through several of the pics on his mobile, ‘yes, um’ and again ‘yes, they are quite good. Um, umm, this one is quite well done.’ Quite? Until she returns to her job title, and manages to blunt his ambition. Until he interrupts her.
‘I can’t get over the fact that you’ve hardly looked at the paintings. These phone images – how can you possibly judge them? I can easily bring some here. I can drive in, park just outside …?’
‘The question, Trevor, is not your quality or oddity as an artist. I’m sorry if I’ve been giving you the wrong impression.’
She stops, lifts her head slightly.
‘An artist of your age should have a reputation. You have no track record.’
‘What about the paintings? We’re not talking about my track record.’
‘We are.’
A pause while she lets this sink in. A pause as his body does.
‘No track record of exhibitions. At all.’
She is laying it on and he knows it.
‘Which means you have no reputation, no network, no ability to attract … anyone to your work, and that’s a risk we would have to take on. No potential buyers? Who will even bother to come here to write you up and or promote you? There are simply too many established artists around and thanks to the art schools we have postmodern and very well-read and prepared younger artists everywhere. Actually, it’s embarrassing.’
The woman’s hair is stylish and jet black, as dramatic as her answers are flat. There is no flaw in her lipstick, her couture, her elegant posture. She is money, all right, from somewhere. The gallery is high-ceilinged and as indifferent as she is.
‘But, you know, my work looks more impressive if you’re standing in front of it. It’s not miniature.’
He lifts his mobile again and is peering down and sorting through the images until he sees her raising her palm like a policeman.
‘Trevor. We wouldn’t sell a single painting. Perhaps you don’t realise, we survive on commissions from sales. We have to be able to guarantee sales.’
‘Of course I know that. But don’t you have a newsletter and a mail-out for exhibitions? Can’t you promote the exhibition in a way that attracts your regular audience? How about people who walk in off the street?’
Even before she answers he is embarrassed to have shot off so many questions.
‘People who walk in off the street don’t buy paintings, Trevor. Hardly anyone buys paintings …’
The bookseller in him is waking in alarm, plus the ironic knowledge that no eccentric locals will ever walk in here. And what a bloody pity that is. She stares at him.
‘Why are you working in two different styles? Colour and energy in one but in the other – your pieces are dark, aren’t they? The early ones, as you put it, are somewhat dismal.’
‘Dismal?’
‘Let’s stay with dark. Trevor, does nihilism work quite as well … in paint?’
Trevor was in his 20s when he used to walk in off the street at gallery openings. Quite the young nihilist. Uninvited, barefoot, alone, or with a girlfriend. He enjoyed the free booze, the food, and he studied the artworks the opening crowd had its back to. He never bought any paintings either.
Now he dresses well and is still out of place. There are dozens of private galleries and they’ll all ask him the same questions: his name, exhibition background, reputation. The space his curriculum vitae is expected to occupy is blank – the twenty or so years since art school.
‘I saw an exhibition you ran,’ he says, ‘of watercolours. Landscapes done flat and pastel and pale. They were amateurish, the artist gushed that glorious nature awakened all his senses and then the painting took over. Seriously, that naïve, and that conventional. They were dismal. Not in temperament, in quality of imagination. You exhibited them.’
She doesn’t even answer him. Instead she says:
‘Have a look at the graduate exhibition further up the street. They are the new artists and they show all the potential we want.’
Such talk is its own abstract art. He has lost, and not just this time in this place, he has lost altogether; the game is completely against him. This and not the plethora of art-school graduates is what’s embarrassing. Twenty-year-olds. Not even as old as his blank c.v.
‘What about my recent work?’ he says. ‘Colour and montage. I think they are strong enough under any circumstances. I know contemporary art. I’ve spent years in galleries, including yours. I am contemporary.’
‘The smudgy montages are’ (of course, he has annoyed her) ‘too soft in outline and image.
Too ambiguous. Really, all so blurry. It’s what my husband,’ she laughs, ‘would call unmanly.’
‘Your husband is an artist?
‘No, he’s a businessman.’
By now, having had her say, the manager is impatient:
‘Well, thank you for thinking of us, Trevor.’
This covers him with such patronising hypocrisy he feels like slapping her. A businessman. When he suggests he will put up the money, being businesslike, and however much is required, she just looks at him and says nothing. He isn’t there.
In anyone’s life there is room for more embarrassment. Trevor receives a text message inviting him to Diana’s birthday celebrations. From a friend of theirs, or is that half a friend now? Is he foolish enough to go?
He thinks he is. Gate-crasher, car-crasher, limper. The perversity of walking into your own apartment as a visitor, just a guest like all the others, ready to get drunk and say the wrong thing. Has he un-loved her enough to sustain such a visit surrounded by the friends they have in common no more, being hers now, and by others he will see for the first time and so be seen by, with their sly expressions, their impossible-to-read gestures?
As soon as he tries to make conversation he understands the old friends want to ease him into the condition of ex, some don’t even realise, and her work-friends, all very much younger, look upon him as a random old bloke. These thirtysomethings glance briefly when he says anything, even hello, smiling as he waits for a cocktail. Former friends, who have chosen Diana as the thing to do, are polite without hiding an expression they seem to have imbibed with their martinis that says, in effect, My God, what are you doing here?
Time, is it, then, to count the night a defeat and leave? He’d asked Elizabeth to come, keep him company, sort of friend not Dutch courage. It would have worked, too, except she raised her eyebrows and made a You what? kind of noise with her mouth shut.
So he’s drinking instead. Vodka, vodka everywhere.
The martinis are too good, meaning strong, like nothing wet and wan from the pop-up bar he last stopped at. Three waiters are concocting alcoholic magic from the chalkboard list of 1. to 5. and everyone seems intent of running this lap at least once. Two men dressed in black and white, and a woman dressed in red lipstick, pour and spin, shake and stir, making heads swing and lust very likely.
Therefore he is standing at his own table, bought only two years earlier, or his half of the table, drinking from his half of the cocktail glass, filled with her liquor. At least he is getting her booze for free. How strange. Estrange.
An old friend of theirs called Susan takes hold of his arm and says, ‘You are a cruel man, you know, and a cruel man always comes to a bad end. Why did you leave her? But now that you have …’
‘A bad end or abandoned,’ he says, ‘I was. But never cruel, Susan.’
‘Oh, you are. You walked out on her.’
‘What? She spent weekends at work sitting on what’s-his-name. If he’s tall, dark and handsome I have to live in the undergrowth. Though I’ve never met the man, thankfully. Is he here?’
‘Trevor. Don’t ask. You might have met him before, I don’t know. She’s had one or two, I mean. I’m as jealous as.’
She makes it alliterative and dozy, sibilant as esses and zzzz. Dzzzt.
Had Diana invited her lover to their house? Fuck, fuck, fuck. He is in freefall, though Susan is obvious and a bore and probably making this up to impress and depress him with her gossipy nous. And her fingers are gripping his arm with more than mere attention, or drunkenness. She is looking up at him with – no, it can’t be. From one room in the doghouse to the next. Alcohol has grabbed Susan and cliché has grabbed him.
‘This is half my house,’ he whispers to her, ‘but I’m glad to say we’re drinking the whole of her booze.’
They are almost overbalancing when Diana walks towards them, giving him the cat’s eyes, assuming he is being louche with her best work-friend. He mouths a Help!, a yelp. All it elicits is more intense frowning on her already disapproving face.
She moves away to the bar, ignoring him.
Later he encounters another friend in common, awkward small talk as the man makes excessive hand movements with his glass of wine. How awful. The man is as embarrassed as he bloody well should be, for saying not a word to Trevor over the last months while clearly staying in touch with Diana. Separation, divorce, what it does to your friends. Makes them choose.
The bills for his CAT scans and MRI were steep but here at the party he is being scanned free of charge. To be seen through. Flesh and bone. There is a man on the other side of the room watching him.
Diana approaches again.
‘You seem to be favouring me, darling,’ he says, getting in first. ‘Your workmates will think we are having a fling. Your boyfriend will be wondering.’
‘Trevor,’ she whispers but not at all quietly. ‘Don’t be a bitch. If you’re going to be a problem …’
‘No, no. Not a bitch, just an ex.’
Three younger women and an over-barbered, calf-trousered hipster man turn to look at Diana and smile the young and the cool. One of them has been talking about poetry, so Trevor disengages from his ex-wife and takes the casual steps needed to position himself alongside the poetry people.
‘A poem is a problem that has to be solved,’ she has just said, and the young man with hair cut asymmetrically is smiling, symmetrical in agreement. This is where thin lips are a fashion statement. His are fat.
‘Oh,’ says Trevor, ‘surely that’s too neat. As a statement it strikes me as being, well, rather glib?’
They almost manage to ignore him without looking at him, then fail out of rightful curiosity.
‘This is my apartment,’ he adds. ‘I thought I’d like to contribute. I’m Trevor. I read poetry a lot.’
‘You don’t agree with me?’ asks the young woman. ‘That a poem is a problem to be solved? It sounded really cool to me.’
‘I think it sounds American.’
‘On what basis?’ asks the young man.
‘Because it sounds like a neat thing to say in Creative Writing classes. It sounds like advice from earnest tutors to earnest students who believe either that theory and poetry are arcane problems or that popular culture and porn “empower” us. Anyway, poetry is not as rational as that. Poetry is a trip, not a problem. Poetry is a drug. All good books are drugs. Books are controlled hallucinations.’
‘Wow, what are you on? A book is just words.’
‘Ouch, words.’
‘So, what did you mean?’ She puts it to this old bloke. Let’s see if he can.
‘Reading is the hallucination, but the book is the drug. It just works differently for different people. Some get high, some take the whole dose and nothing happens.’
‘Are you a poet?’
‘No, I’m more of a shit-stirrer. You look like a poet,’ he says, turning then to smile at everyone.
‘Oh, come on,’ she laughs. ‘What does a poet look like?’
‘Good question. Did I say I was Diana’s husband? Past tense intended. This is half my apartment we’re in.’
‘Really?’ says the hipster, ‘and how do you decide which half is yours and which half is Diana’s?’
‘Whichever half I’m standing in is my half. Her half is over there. If we move towards each other then the line dividing our halves is always between us. Unless one of us stands in a corner. Like life, it keeps shifting. Talk of the devil.’
Sees Diana striding towards him from the other side of the room, or her half. She knows all too well his likely behaviour around alcohol. Like some poets, he has the unlike tendencies of being inventive and obvious. Unexpected but not original. One look at him now and she can tell he’s performing.
He knows his time is up. Wives, they can tell you’re making trouble just by looking at you – exes even more so. At least they understand each other.
Synopsis: outnumbered and possibly in the sad gawps of tease. To think a man m
ight in goodwill attend a party imagining a few months have lessened some of the difficulties his social relations have thrust upon him, only to get caught in the mise-en-scène. Jesus, even the hundreds of books on the bookshelves are his, and somehow not his, now that he doesn’t live here.
Even his books have deserted him.
‘You are going way over the line,’ she hisses.
‘No, I’m still on my side of the line. This is my half of the house until we decide otherwise. I refuse to yield.’
‘What?’
‘Tell me, how does anyone behave at a party fuelled by martinis and Polish vodka? Remember, I am Polish. Half of me.’
‘More like a drunken smart arse.’
‘Only like, the simile not the thing itself?’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come.’
‘I responded to an invitation. Diana, I have been talking about poetry. Imagine that, I’m usually prose. Am I hogging the floor?’
He should walk off. The man who was watching him still watches him. Or them.
‘And,’ she adds, ‘you haven’t wished me happy birthday.’
‘Ah, right. I get it. Happy birthday.’
Yes, she knows him well enough, his problem is with her colleagues on the other side of the room. She asks if he’s hurt his leg again, she saw him limp to the martini bar when he came in. And stayed there, by the look of him.
He is trying to find the comfort part of feeling uncomfortable. A final margarita, a dash of flamenco out on the wooden floorboards he and Diana paid so much to strip back and varnish. With the cocktail waitress in the red dress who hasn’t once smiled at him despite serving him three times. On his one good leg flamenco heel-stamping would sound like: bang, blip, bang, blip. A sloppy tango? To be honest, the young male cocktail deviser with a squeaky voice does the banter better and made Trevor a special – a Twelve Mile Limit, a drink for beyond the national laws, the one civilised encounter of his evening.
Perhaps he should dance with him.
His own speciality is Defiant Gesture but the whack has gone out of it.
It is crisp outside. The surfaces are wet, the trees still. Every few minutes he squints back along the tram tracks to find the double lights of the next tram due. Forget the party, forget the land of other people and other people’s friends. Forget the dope who punched him or pushed him, and the creep over the back fence. Remember instead the last painting with its long red spine as wide as his forearm. Remember his new day’s-end conversations with Elizabeth. He may have been knocked down but he has fallen on his feet.