Orient (63 page)

“I know you,” she said to him without smiling.

“Do you?” He was ashamed of the seven messages he had left on her phone. “I am new to New York. From Bucharest.”

She snapped her fingers. “Venice. Am I right? I’m right.” Her smile was the jagged line of a heart monitor. “And you called me two months ago.” He glanced at the scant foot traffic. The walls were so white in New York, glacier white. He had come to despise that whiteness, its replication of a brain-dead consciousness. In that moment he prayed for anything to happen: a missile strike, the thunder of drones, a rain of fire breaking from the heavens onto West Chelsea. “I’m sorry I didn’t call back. I mean, it was two years ago.” He felt the blush on his cheeks. “God, two years,” she wheezed. “A lot’s happened. I was a child then.” She couldn’t be older than twenty-five now. “But I remember you were an artist.”

He was pleased she had at least retained that detail. Before he could stop himself, he told her of his recent show at Laura Lucas, his page in
Wanted
magazine.

“Lucas is such an uptight cow, isn’t she?” Luz laughed. “I’m sorry. She’s also good at finding talent. Good eyes, bad mouth. But I wouldn’t stay with her. She has a reputation for slowly embezzling her artists’ money.” He nodded, as if he hadn’t already assessed the works in his broom closet, three flights above them, for the security deposit on a studio apartment.

“I’m doing a solo next month at Wexler Institute. Please come. No, on second thought—let me take you to lunch, to make up for my rudeness. We can check out some galleries too. Next Wednesday?” Wednesday was his day off. She scribbled something on the
Flavin press release and handed him a series of numbers that were already stored in his phone.

Every morning, before guard duty or the flagellation of the espresso machine, he worked in the broom closet. Every night, after guard duty or the hot-water flush of the espresso machine, he worked more. He took his art so seriously it frightened him. Every day he knelt at his own temple and slit his throat as an offering. He experimented in bulletproof glass, took pliers to steel sheets, deconstructed lightbulbs, and stripped wires from extension cords, trying to achieve an awkward, brutal poetry through the broken industrial equipment. Occasionally he invited friends, curators, and older artists to his closet, subjecting them to the obligatory, mutually misunderstood jargon he had learned in his months in New York. “It’s about a paradigmatic shift in value, and, um, working-class labor directed against finished production, and, err, dispersion instead of the authority of closure.” His Romanian accent gave the lecture a kind of coarse conviction. He hated, but began to agree with, the words he was speaking. For his sanity, he always said, “But you look, it is what is.” He was invited to participate in two group shows, one at a major blue-chip gallery.

Their lunch was awkward. They both kept their knuckles wrapped around their wineglasses, and Luz slapped a credit card over the bill and refused his tissue balls of ones and fives. She wore a Yankees cap through lunch, and when she removed it as they walked west on Twentieth Street toward the galleries, her hair was cut so short he could see the shine of her scalp. It made her eyes huge and her lips a center ring. She was the sexiest organism he had ever walked down a street with. They made out in an abandoned doorway, kissing hungrily after their untouched salads. As he pressed his groin against her, she said, “I have a boyfriend, Gavril. I’m sorry. I can’t go further. It wouldn’t be right, and you’d only hate me later.” “Who?” he asked, like he already knew everyone in New York. She cocked her head. “A-Dep. He’s a rapper. His real name is Marcus.
We’ve been at it five months.” Fifteen minutes later, a black limousine slid up to the curb, like in some terrible movie about class defeating love, and she climbed into a backseat he could have sworn was filled with golden retrievers. He had separation anxiety. Then he had plain anxiety. He broke many things in his broom closet.

He didn’t see her again for months. She missed the openings of his two group shows and he returned the favor by not attending her solo at Wexler (“a special private reception to honor Luz Wilson at Le Bernardin, formal attire required.”) Instead he got wasted and had sex with a few lost strays of the wealthy. He sold three sculptures, quit the internship, moved out of his shared apartment in Bed-Stuy for a studio in Greenpoint, and refused three different solicitations to join fledgling galleries on the Lower East Side. He had enough money to survive and to send one hundred dollars home each month to his family in Bucharest.

Right after that, jackpot. Samuel Veiseler, proprietor of the hallowed, billion-dollar Veiseler Projects, phoned him up on a March afternoon and asked if he could do a studio visit. Gavril expected to hate him, to spit in his face, and planned a career-killing mutinous
no
when asked for a single artwork. But still he straightened his studio and waited for the buzzer. Veiseler, who had satellite galleries cropping up faster than Starbucks across the globe (Veiseler Projects Beijing, Veiseler Projects Dubai, Veiseler Projects Aurora Borealis), appeared in his doorway in ragged chinos and a wrinkled blue oxford. He name-dropped artists that Gavril admired (Beuys, de Maria, Andre, Benglis, Turrell) and never mentioned the artists he sold on the secondary market (Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein, Koons). He dangled a plastic six-pack ring that held only two beer cans, one for each of them. “I can’t drink more than one or I find myself liking everything,” he said with his Swiss inflection. “The truth is, I like very little of what people as young as yourself are making these days.” Samuel inclined his chin—his chin actually pointed—ready to consider Gavril’s work.

Gavril had just started exploring tar and concrete, pulling it in
uneven goops across the floor, stretching its limits and textures. He started to explain it to his guest: the shifting paradigms between East and West, the failed dynamics of the Ceauşescu regime, and the haunted residue of a toppled empire undermined by the belief in a democratic utopia of pariahlike self-fulfillment. Gavril rambled on, and Samuel Veiseler sipped his beer and stared out the window at a homeless woman pushing a grocery cart. Gavril sputtered, “And, uh, just the formal elements of material, the stuff.” Samuel’s eyes redirected, snapping awake. “Yes, yes. Tell me about the material. Don’t connect it to Ceauşescu right now.” “How tar and steel and concrete bend. They’re not rigid. They are soft, pliant, yielding. A flexible form of violence.” “Yes,” Samuel purred, taking new interest in the work. “I like the formal qualities. Go with that.” So he did, and Samuel Veiseler left two hours later offering Gavril twenty-four hours to decide if he’d like to join his gallery.

He texted Luz for advice. He trusted and resented her in equal doses. “YES!” she responded immediately. “He’s the best gallerist, way better than mine. You moron, the answer happened the minute he asked you.” “I worry I sell out too early.” “Huh? Are you flirting with me? Is this because I dumped A-Dep? Stop texting me and call him before he reconsiders.” She had broken up with Marcus. “I don’t think I want this.” “You are only as serious as people take you. Otherwise every talentless drudge on earth is serious. Take it now. Look back later.” He took it. The hardest part was telling Laura Lucas that he could no longer exhibit with her in London. First she sent roses to appeal to him, followed by intoxicated voice-mail threats, and she did have a stroke three months later, just as he had predicted, and her gallery didn’t survive the impending market crash.

He and Luz had sex the night of the Whitney Biennial. He liked to think he had been chosen for the Whitney because of his talent, but mere news of his signing with Veiseler had brought a tidal wave of curiosity, an apocalyptic welfare line of collectors and editors and museum curators and rich dilettantes outside his studio door, to the point that his sudden fame must have been partly responsible for
the Whitney inclusion. He exhibited a tar smear through the third-floor gallery, a formalist’s blood vein, and he had also wanted to break through one of the white walls to expose the copper plumbing behind the institutional façade, but the curator wouldn’t let him. “Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would not have wanted that!” Luz had also been selected for the Biennial, showing five portraits of black Americans she had found working in gas stations along the New Jersey Turnpike: sad, discontent, gas-ravaged faces inside gold frames, like employee-of-the-month snapshots treated as CEO portraits. But her last painting was a secret ode to him. On the canvas, she had written with her middle finger, in black paint: “What GVW would have wanted.”

She was single, she was his, the sex was miserable, but they were artists who craved misery, and they kept having it, all night, through the week, into the next, condom by condom, and then both crept away to their studios, and neither phoned for weeks. He was busy. Interviews, studio visits, his photo in a national men’s magazine, shirt and pants Yohji Yamamoto Fall/Winter 2009, the cover of
Artforum
, solo shows planned into summer, into fall, all the way to Christmas. He hired two full-time assistants just to keep up with demand. Instead of ransacking the walls of the Whitney, he exposed the copper pipes of a penthouse on Seventy-ninth Street for sixty thousand dollars (forty thousand directly into his bank account).

He kept watch on Luz’s career, which was similarly exploding: national women’s magazines, the Rome Prize, a conversation at the Public Library with Cornel West on the subject of blues in the arts. Gavril flew to Bern, Switzerland, to disassemble cold war airplane propellers and dip them in concrete at Kunsthalle Veiseler. Luz took the train up from Rome, and they spent an afternoon on the manicured Bern streets, admiring each other’s reflections in the windows of clock shops. They had sex in his hotel suite and both of them appreciated that their initial disappointment in each other’s performance during intercourse had not abated, a missing frisson for which they tried to compensate by holding each other uncomfortably
tight in bed. “I feel like every painting I make is one step closer to my last,” she whispered against his chest. “I want to quit before I become a hack.” “I know,” he said. “I’m just doing what prehistoric cave painters were doing, holding a stick out, applying a mark on the wall. Why do those cave painters seem so earnest while what I do seems so frivolous?” “I don’t know.” She returned to her apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps; he flew to Oslo, and from there he toured white-walled rooms all over the planet.

By the time they met up in Paris, three months later, two ominous facts were weighing heavily on Gavril’s mind: his visa was about to expire, and Luz was dating a fifty-three-year-old music producer who owned a hip-hop label in Brooklyn. He fought with her in her hotel room. He told her he was in love with her, had always been in love with her, that he couldn’t keep doing all this traveling and socializing and breaking his back in his studio until five in the morning, if she weren’t waiting for him at the end of the line.

“I love you too,” she said, chain-rolling and chain-smoking her cigarettes, a one-woman factory, her mouth a purple waste-management vent. “But I don’t want to marry you. We’re too much alike.” He had always presumed that was the reason they
should
marry. “We’re undependable,” she said, “victims of our moods, too egocentric. What we need are solid, stable, generous, patient partners willing to put up with us.” They had miserable sex one last time before he took off for another Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden. She went to Miami for the Basel Art Fair. He stalked her in party pictures on fashion Web sites. They didn’t speak for four months.

When Luz reappeared in New York, she was engaged, but not to the music producer. At her side now was Nathan Crimp, the partner she’d been looking for, the one whose trust fund would provide her the stability she craved. Gavril was hurt, put all of his hurt into smashing glass and concrete bricks, and made money doing it, and he drank so much that he began to forget why he smashed glass and concrete bricks in the first place. He smashed like a smash machine. The results were still gorgeous to his eye, even if that eye
was freighted with a twitching hangover. At gallery dinners, he and Luz smiled and waved. Worst of all, Gavril liked Nathan—for his humor, mostly, which was rare in the otherwise bumptious activity of the art world. (Nathan’s show “that which does not kill you tries again later” consisted of adorable rescue dogs let loose in a gallery—visitors were allowed to pet them but had to promise not to adopt them—while video footage of a euthanasia facility played in the background.)

A crisis was beating its way toward Greenpoint. He couldn’t take another studio visit with a self-serious, middle-aged woman in all-black with a pixieish haircut, trying to talk to him about relational aesthetics as if she were testifying on human rights violations at the UN. He was lonely, and the noise of Manhattan that echoed into Brooklyn made him lonelier on a cellular level. He ate his dinners in the pizza parlor on the corner, at the hour when single lonely men ate their single slices, staring into the void of grease and pepperoni. He swallowed down rich chocolate pastries for breakfast. People who ate dessert for breakfast were either reveling in their waistlines or subconsciously contemplating suicide. If Gavril hadn’t had his two assistants he might have stopped producing work altogether. Might have sat in his studio with cement bricks tied to his feet and waited for a flood or deportation officers to carry him away.

He met Beth Shepherd at an art opening in the fall, her fine blond hair like a broom sweeping his mess into a tidy pile. He pronounced her name Beff until she patiently taught him the lisping
th
. She was the anti-Luz to all of his five senses: considerate, gentle, calm when an argument exceeded conversational registers, very much a woman out of her clothes. The sex was astounding, addictive to the point of despondency after the fact, a smell that lingered on his sheets and kept him there even after she left in the morning for her copyediting job at a science magazine. She was a painter too—that’s what she and his former obsession shared—except that Beth’s paintings were careful and affirmative. There was none of the reckless rancorous brushwork that infected Luz’s canvases.
Hate, hate, hate
, Luz’s
brush sang. He celebrated Beth’s portraits, but he couldn’t convince her that she had to betray her subjects if she wanted them to speak. “Try to hurt them or hang them by their own rope,” he advised. “That’s not what I’m after,” she said.