Lion's Share (2 page)

This work speaks for more than the city, she reminded herself. Especially on a morning such as this, when she'd been harshly awakened by Nat's super-sweet voice, the painting seemed a memorial to her own earlier innocence. Her first apartment here had been on the corner of Mulberry and Grand streets, a four-room railroad flat she'd gotten for $150 a month. Jana recalled lugging canvases up the five flight walk-up, convinced that it was a temporary inconvenience—within two years she'd be making enough money off her art to hire an assistant to stretch canvases for her. Those were also the days when she assumed losing one's virginity was a magical rite that would take care of itself as soon as she was away from her parents' critical eyes. Talk about innocence …

The radio was blasting a commercial for Ronald Reagan—
Morning in America!
Snorting in disgust, Jana snapped the thing off. Deciding the painting before her was too drab, she mixed blue paint for the flowers in the woman's dress and emerged with an ungodly color. Her head was too foggy to concentrate. “Maybe it's wrong to pay too much attention to the past,” she admonished herself.

But focusing on the present is even worse, she thought, glancing at her latest self-portrait propped against the far wall. While she had no intentions of becoming a modern-day Rembrandt, she was aware that she had to get closer to herself in order to sharpen her depiction of others. For the past three months she had, as an exercise, painted one self-portrait a week.

Did all short people really have no neck? No, of course she had a neck. She might be just under five feet tall, but she had a delicate bone structure, so the rest of her body was, as Marilyn would describe it, “cut to size.” She didn't have that misshapen appearance she'd noticed in other short people. In this side view of her head and shoulders, she'd purposely depicted herself with her head down; on a painting two weeks ago, she'd let the neck show, and her mole turned into a dark blotch that jumped out at the viewer. I can never seem to get my hair color right, either, Jana realized. It might be a dull, indistinct brown, but the center of the curls always caught the light.

Trying to forget the face, she let her eyes move down the canvas. The upper half of her arms looked not only heavy, but flat, wide, more like her mother's than her own. On some supposed portrayals of herself, she'd ended up cluttering those arms with the liver spots she recalled on her mother's arms, a throwback to the time her mother had scarlet fever. On other portraits, she depicted huge sores from her own infected mosquito bites. Maybe it needs these awful blue flowers, Jana laughed, glancing back at
Mulberry Street.
No, she might not have perfect taste, but her clothes weren't
that
bad. Besides, those flowers were large, and the picture would appear top-heavy if she didn't show the whole upper half of her body.

All her self-portraits either stopped above the chest or began below it. Her frustrations concerning her breasts dated back to fifth grade, when she still wore an undershirt while the girls who'd grown breasts were being teased mercilessly by all the boys in the neighborhood, so she'd never gotten used to the idea of wearing this C cup. She refused to wear scarves or jewelry for similar reasons—they called attention to the top half of the body. “You just don't want to see yourself as interesting,” Natalie said when Jana talked about these portraits. Maybe she was right. Even when painting someone she thought of as odd-looking, the finished work ended up gripping the viewer more than these self-portraits.

Telling herself she didn't have time to get caught up in self-analysis today, Jana grabbed the rolled-up Lincoln Center plans from her drafting table and laid them on the floor, put a stuffed animal on either end to keep them from rolling up again, and brooded. Were there any other hidden areas she'd overlooked? She knelt, examining that one narrow area, running charcoal over it to deepen the shading. What if APL insists they use every inch of available space? She'll argue that if they have to use that giraffe corner, at least put a painting there, something more colorful than the drawings selected for other places. Since it will be too late to find anything suitable from other artists, she'll have no choice but to hang
Mulberry Street.

She picked up a sheet of plexiglass and quickly painted a thick black checkerboard pattern across it, then propped it in front of the painting to see the shading's effect—appalling. The figure appeared to be behind bars, trapped in the subway at Lincoln Center, not leaning out a tenement window. No matter where her paintngs were hung, the light seemed wrong.

Jana gave up, washed off the plexiglass, took a shower. She stuffed herself into gray slacks—a little too tight in the waist, but they were 100% wool and looked respectable. Then the black Danskin with the crew neck—out of fashion, she knew, but turtlenecks made her too hot. She put on the black satin jacket with the wine embroidery … no, too dressy. The black and green Chinese jacket? The sleeves were a little frayed. She settled on the gray tapestry jacket with the black fringe down the front, a dim reminder of how wrong that painting had looked. I look almost like the shadow of that murdered woman, Jana thought. I might not be able to paint self-portraits, but do I have to become my own haunting figures?

It was nearly twelve already. For someone who insisted she didn't give much thought to her appearance, she'd certainly wasted enough time dressing. She grabbed the floor plans, raced down the stairs, entered the subway just as a train was pulling in, and got to the gallery at five past one.

At five minutes past two, Jana Replansky and Natalie Connors were seated at the large oak conference table, making small talk with Frank Markowitz and his assistant, Marsha Tapscott. Ed Gabrielli, community coordinator in Associated Power and Light's Public Affairs division, stepped into the room.

“Sorry I'm late; I had some letters I wanted to look over and get out in this afternoon's mail,” he explained, sliding into the nearest thickly cushioned chair. Promptness wasn't the only difference between Ed and his boss, Jana noted. Frank had a perfectly puffed handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket, its blue silk matching the jacket's lining perfectly. Ed had a pack of cigarettes casually jutting from that same pocket. Frank wore perfectly polished shoes; Ed wore Rockport Dressports—that's why his footsteps were so noticeably muffled by the room's charcoal carpet.

“Last week Ed audited a play we're sponsoring—he got to the theater in time for the final act,” Frank said with an ironic smile. Ed winced at Frank's pathetic attempt at corporate humor, but he didn't sulk about it—he recognized the quip as Frank's device for getting the meeting under way. Papers were shuffled, chairs were pulled under the table. Jana clutched the floor plans, then glanced at Natalie, both wondering what surprises might await them, despite their thorough preparation for this meeting.

“Natalie,” Frank began, “when you and Bill Fitch first ran this proposal by me last November, my response was enthusiastic. But the more I thought about it, the more concerned I was over the appropriateness of the sites you'd suggested and the security of the artwork. I must say, you've definitely allayed my concerns.” As if to reiterate his statement, Frank let his hand rest on the presentation Natalie had sent him last month, with its detailed floor plans and accounts of other public exhibits and their security methods. As Frank looked over his notes, Ed shot a reassuring glance toward Natalie and Jana.

“After Ed, Marsha, and I considered the proposal and your budget in detail, however, we found ourselves facing other concerns. You list eighteen artists to be included in the exhibition, yet none of them have significant name recognition. We'd like to suggest that you include at least one well-known artist at each site.”

“Well, The Paperworks Space mission statement declares that our purpose is to exhibit works on paper by artists who use paper as their major medium,” Jana began. “The Artistic Response to the Environment exhibition might draw a wider audience by including well-known artists, but we want to be careful not to override our primary goal. If more established artists were included, we'd have to be extremely cautious in selecting them.”

“When we present this proposal to our board, we could ask board members to suggest names and assist in any initial introductions,” Frank offered.

“Instead of one well-known artist at each site, perhaps we could see our way clear to including two or three such artists,” Natalie began, in a conciliatory tone. “Major artists might be appropriate at the more prominent locations, such as the World Trade Center or the Lincoln Center arcade. With careful artistic review, and with input from The Paperworks Space board, we should be able to select prominent artists whose work is appropriate.”

Jana sucked in her breath. Well-known artists had enormous reservations about showing alongside those less established. Natalie's suggestion that the invitations come through The Paperworks Space board of directors might work, but someone on their board would have to be owed a lot of favors, and be willing to call them all in. Not to mention the favors they would, in turn, owe members of their board.

Frank jotted a few notes on his copy of the proposal. “When do you think you might be able to get back to us with artists whose names have the prestige we're looking for?” he asked.

Natalie glanced briefly at Jana shifting in her chair, then winged it. “We can assemble our list of names, contact the artists to determine their willingness to participate, and have biographical sketches in your hands in three weeks.”

“If you can keep to that time schedule, we should have no problem getting the information to our board prior to their April meeting. Now, with regard to your budget,” Frank continued, “you have allocated less than $5,000 for the opening reception. Assuming we fund the exhibition, we envision this as a far more elaborate affair.” He suggested moving the ribbon-cutting ceremony to the World Trade Center and making it an evening cocktail party rather than a lunch-hour reception. “Then, why not follow up with a gala dinner dance at Windows on the World?”

Natalie, rapidly adding mental figures, felt her head begin to swim. The dinner dance Frank was proposing could easily cost more than they'd budgeted for the entire exhibition and would triple their administrative headaches. “We've budgeted for one additional temporary staff person to handle the extra work load, and several of our board members have promised to donate time to help with arrangements, but …”

“Why not consider dropping the gala from your budget and let our promotion department handle the affair?” Frank might have intended his smile to be reassuring, but Jana read it as patronizing, like his comment that APL could provide introductions to well-known artists. Obviously, he'd already discussed the prospect of taking over promo for the gala with Ed and Marsha; it seemed a fait accompli.

The next two hours seemed to fly, and before Natalie and Jana realized it the meeting was adjourned. Although Jana had been taken aback by the request for name artists and totally surprised at the proposal to turn the entire gala over to APL's promotion department, everything had gone well. A few other issues came up, but it seemed as if APL's foundation staff were behind the proposal. Of course the foundation staff didn't have the final power, but the board of directors usually went along with their recommendations.

Jana gave a small sigh and started packing up. Natalie shuffled the floor plan for the Staten Island ferry terminal from hand to hand, rolled it tightly, then passed it to Jana to put away. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I have an appointment at the hairdresser at four-thirty,” she announced.

“What?”

“I don't have time to get back to the gallery first. You can carry these downtown, can't you, Jana? My hairdresser's only a few blocks from here. It doesn't make any sense to go all the way downtown and then be late.”

“Why didn't you tell me before?” Jana stopped packing and glared at Nat. Not only had they brought the floor plans, but they'd brought two portfolios of representative drawings on the off chance Frank would ask to see them.

“I didn't expect the meeting to last this late. I'm sorry.”

Jana threw up her hands. “At least help me get a cab.”

“Of course, of course. I won't abandon you.” Jana heard steps behind her, then looked up to realize Ed had returned. In the few minutes since he'd left the room, he'd unbuttoned his jacket, making him appear less official. Jana found the sight of his slight potbelly more intimidating than the careful corporate demeanor.

“Let me give you a hand,” he said, carefully rolling one of the plans before she could quite recover from her surprise.

“Oh great.” Natalie's voice assumed that super-sweet tone again. “You can get her a cab, can't you? I'm late for another meeting. Jana, I'll see you tomorrow morning.” And she was gone.