Lion's Share (18 page)

“I think it's time to call your doctor,” Ed said between mouthfuls of paella, casually, as you would remind someone it was time to go to bed or time to turn on the seven o'clock news. “My guess is you'll be large enough for her to examine you now.”

Jana detected a tinge of pleasure in his voice—the consequences might be disastrous, but he had gotten through; he had done what the doctor ordered. “I know,” she said. She should have called Dr. Barbash a month ago, right after she'd lost her virginity. Only, what if she was still too small to be examined? She put down her fork. Sauce trickled down the sides of her mouth. She wiped it with her napkin, pressing the cloth hard against her face.

Ed resumed eating, chewing every mouthful ten times, the way his macrobiotic friends recommended. He suspected Jana was sitting there comparing her self to Kathe. He wanted to tell her how different she was, how Kathe would have made his life miserable for months afterward if she felt he hadn't taken enough precautions. But such a comment would only be playing up to Jana's neuroses, so he let it drop.

Once again Jana didn't sleep well. Her head was foggy the next morning, but she wasn't due at work until noon. She puttered around the apartment as long as she could, almost as if she had a premonition of trouble at the gallery. And sure enough, the first words out of Natalie's mouth were, “The slides of Matt Fillmore's work came this morning. I think you'd better have a look.”

Jana flipped through the slides quickly, holding them up to the light and glancing at the titles. The piece entitled
Power and Light
was pretty hard to miss. She slid it into the projector and shone it on the office wall. In the foreground was a teepee bursting into flames, drawn with bold, vibrant red and brown strokes; inside the teepee an Indian family, bound and gagged, was depicted in a pen and ink drawing, while the background charcoal hinted at other Indians running in panic.

It took Jana a few minutes to remember: ten years ago the federal government had taken over land which belonged to the Seneca Nation. After leaving it vacant for seven years, they granted APL permission to use the land for a new generating plant. Work wasn't slated to begin on that plant for another two years yet; only the politically well informed would recall the small news items that appeared three years ago. Certainly no one on their board had remembered. Leave it to Matt Fillmore.

Deciding the front room could stay vacant for a few minutes, Natalie joined her in the office. “It's one of his strongest drawings,” Jana said.

“I have a feeling that fact is going to be lost on APL.”

“At least it's not a dead coyote.”

Natalie laughed, remembering. When the Central Park Zoo first closed for renovation last year, an environmental art exhibit was held there. No one from the Parks Department bothered to look over the works before the show opened: one artist had nailed a dead coyote on a cross, next to a sign that read “He died for your sins.” It caused a furor at the time. Mothers came with their children, since the exhibit was at the zoo, then ended up dragging them away from the horrific image of the crucified coyote. Even
Newsweek
covered the story. “It's a wonder Central Park's willing to risk another exhibition,” she commented.

“They probably said it could never happen again,” Jana said with a bitter laugh.

“It's our job to see that it doesn't.”

“I feel more like a dictator than a curator.” The more she looked at Matt's drawing, the more she found herself identifying with the Indians' point of view. It had the effect of drawing viewers in, making them more than innocent bystanders. Turning away from it, she asked if Natalie had talked to Bill Fitch yet.

“No. I wanted you to see it first.” And now that Jana had seen the drawing, they had run out of excuses. Natalie went back to the front room and picked up the phone.

“There's one thing I'm
not
about to do, and that's try to explain the corporate view of life to the same liberals who made it possible for women like me to have legal abortions,” Jana thought as she put the slide back in its case. She wondered what position their board president would take on the abortion issue. How could you typecast a man who'd been married for fifteen years, had three children, a wife who stayed home all day, and a three-bedroom condo on Central Park West, yet let his hair grow well below the collar of his Italian suits, which he wore with style? Bill was as much of a puzzle to her as Frank Markowitz was. But he
was
the person who'd recommended Matt Fillmore in the first place.

“Reprieve!” Natalie exclaimed, coming into the back again. “Bill's out of town until Monday.” While they both understood this would ultimately be a matter for the entire board's consideration, there seemed no question that they had to speak to their president first. “You can keep it under wraps, can't you, Jana? I mean, you're not going to let anything slip to Ed, are you?”

“Listen, it's easier for me that way, too,” Jana said, flicking off the slide projector. She and Ed had enough to think about as it was.

FIRST THINGS FIRST: she wasn't pregnant. But the blood hadn't been from her period, either. Quite possibly, Jana was still bleeding a bit from having recently lost her virginity. Dr. Barbash suspected that as her lover reached into new areas, he might be causing slight abrasions. It was probably nothing to worry about, but she examined Jana with an electron microscope just to be sure. The magnification such an instrument provided would also give more insight into that “blockage.”

“No sex for seventy-two hours,” Dr. Barbash cautioned when Jana was dressed and sitting in her office. “I took a biopsy. You have an open wound there. It's very important that you give it time to heal.”

Jana welcomed such an ordinance. Lately it was painful every time Ed touched her. Last night she'd tried but failed to repress her scream. “I had the wrong angle,” Ed mumbled apologetically. He shifted his position but still seemed to be pushing against a bone.

She took his hand and guided it toward a pimple. “I'm a little sore there, see?”

“But look at how wet you are,” Ed said, settling back on his own pillow. Wet, but passive. Sometimes he wished he didn't have to be the initiator all the time, but he supposed he couldn't ask for everything. He'd been with women before who had tried all kinds of kinky sex, and frankly, he found Jana's innocence more enjoyable than all of them put together.

Jana had never bothered to explain she was wet because of the mucous secretion around the suspicious blockage—Dr. Barbash remarked on her first examination that she was wetter than normal there. Jana had known for weeks it had nothing to do with how sexually excited she was. She resented the fact that he turned over and went to sleep easily, while she lay awake. She resented how much he enjoyed being with her, while she, she … Damn it, say the words:
she froze when he touched her.
“I'm not frigid, I'm frightened,” she'd reminded herself as she sat in Dr. Barbash's office this morning.

“The blockage is caused by fibroid tumors,” Dr. Barbash said, drawing Jana's attention back to the situation at hand. “I also found three or four minuscule warts, but I don't think they're anything to worry about. That's why I took a biopsy.” She tapped the bottle in front of her. “I'll run this through the laboratory. Give me a call on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

Jana wasn't feeling as shaky as she'd anticipated—Dr. Barbash had sprayed her with novocaine, the examination hadn't even been painful. She supposed she might as well go into the gallery for a few hours. She was halfway to the subway when she had a better idea. Stopping at a pay phone, she gave Natalie a call. “Look, if there's nothing urgent you need me for this afternoon, I might be better off going over to the library and seeing what information I can dig up on problems between artists and corporate sponsors. The more facts we have at our disposal when we talk to Bill, the easier it's going to be. And we need facts and figures, not hearsay.”

Natalie agreed it sounded like a good idea, and Jana hailed a cab and went over to the main library at 42nd Street. Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural was the most obvious example, so she started gathering information on that. “Think what a Rivera mural would be worth these days,” she thought as she flipped through Rivera's biography. The hard copy confirmed her suspicions: Rockefeller knew Rivera was a communist; he knew the mural Henry Ford commissioned in Detroit had created a public scandal and was saved only through Edsel's intervention. Even when Rockefeller paid Rivera in full and prevented him from finishing the predominantly red mural with its distinct face of Lenin among the group of technicians in control of the universe, there was the promise that the work itself would be preserved. And what happened? Six months later construction crews entered the building at midnight and destroyed it. For years the wall remained blank, since no other artist was willing to paint over the wall that should have been Rivera's. Jana xeroxed the chapter talking about this mural, as well as information about Rivera's Detroit commission and his mural at the San Francisco Stock Exchange.

A passage in Rivera's biography led her to research José Clemente Orozco's work, which she found in a book on the Mexican Muralists. As if to make amends for the destruction of Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural, Nelson Rockefeller was instrumental in saving the mural criticizing higher education that Orozco did at Dartmouth. “Orozco saw it as his moral commitment to criticize his patrons,” the description read. “Painting a mural for the Supreme Court in Mexico, he attacked the concept of justice. He always presented both sides of the issues, making people stop and sort things out for themselves.” Jana highlighted this passage on her xerox, adding a note that Matt Fillmore was doing the same thing in his
Power and Light
drawing: making people stop and think. Fillmore wasn't trying to pull a fast one, either; he wasn't insisting upon working behind a curtain, as Rivera did in Detroit. No matter what the outcome, there would be no surprises in the forthcoming exhibition.

She had to look harder to find more recent examples of the corporate world interfering with art, but she eventually found them. In 1970, the University of Massachusetts took down Chuck Close's show because it included nudes; Close might have lost the case, but he fought hard, taking it as far as the Supreme Court. Jana chided herself for not having recalled that incident—no self-respecting artist had agreed to exhibit at U. Mass. since then. Searching further, she unearthed a brief newspaper article from the late sixties, relating that the Chicago and Vicinity Show had given a prize to a work which the officials at the museum of the Art Institute considered too obscene to exhibit. That story made her recall there being other incidents involving the Art Institute, and she prowled through various indices until she found references to the story of another artist whose construction depicted a couple having intercourse under the United States flag. Told he had to alter the piece if he wanted to be included in the show, he transformed the flag into a red and white striped blanket. The book where she found that story didn't bother to mention the artist's name. Perfect, Jana thought: the artists who sold out were the same ones whose names had long since been forgotten. This was exactly the sort of ammunition she wanted to feed their board.

She was on a roll now. Every reference she found pointed her toward the next, and before she knew it she'd xeroxed a dozen articles referring to ten different incidents. It was after seven o'clock before she realized what time it was. Meanwhile, Ed had come home early, concerned for her. She walked into the apartment to find that he'd become worried when he was unable to reach her at home and at the gallery. He'd changed into a sport shirt, opened a bottle of wine to let it breathe, and sat tensely waiting. He hugged her in silence, then, warned not to touch her in the one spot he could always be counted on to reach for first, he placed a gentle arm on her shoulder. His fingers lost their familiar playfulness. His concern for her made his palm sweaty as he approached her with an innocence that recalled their first nights together. Jana told herself he was looking out for her, trying to comfort her. But she needed love, not comfort.