The Road Narrows As You Go (21 page)

Take this before it murders me, thank you, she said and waved the joint at Jonjay. Coughing brought out the hircine qualities in her. Justine quenched her throat with a fluteful of bubbly, and, blinking through bloodshots, remarked with her usual contempt that it was wonderful to see Mark hadn't been sucked into the vortex of cliché lowbrow cartoony
oompa loompa
; that lack of maturity might impress Haight-Ashbury, but it doesn't play in her gallery. My god is it this pot that reeks of superstrong B.O.?

That's Hick Elmdales's. Give her a pen, said Jonjay. Watch what she can do.

Wendy slipped the Rapidograph from her bra and gave it to Justine. She started to draw, her hand moved with dynamism beyond her ken, haunted, the hand moved of its own free will. The result—Bugs Bunny paddling a canoe through a marsh.

Zoink, said Mark.

I drew that? she said and took a deep breath.

Wendy leaned sideways in her Mies van der Rohe leather clam chair and watched Jonjay tour the room, pulling artworks off the shelves lining the walls, silently appraising his peers. If you showed comics, you'd probably sell a lot. There's so many fans in town.

My field is contemporary art, Justine sniffed. Autonomous radical
ideas pushing the envelope, etcetera. The artists I represent make demands. Conceptual. Found objects. Minimal. Postmodern. Don't you, Jonjay?

Watch me run backwards at top speed through the shopping mall, was his answer.

I love how much you hate comics, Justine, said Wendy and poured herself another glass of champagne and opened a coffee-table book about soft sculpture from the seventies. I know exactly what you mean. Mostly comics are such dumb shit. But what about
Doonesbury
?

I don't
hate
comics, but I don't see what they have to do with my gallery. Mark lit the second joint. No, oh god no—, Justine waved him away, —I can't have more. I'm high as American Airlines already. Why do I smoke the stuff? I get so freaked out I think the world is caving in on itself and my next step is through an invisible curtain into a new reality.

Fear is the price of an active imagination, Wendy said. That's what my mom used to tell her actors.

Justine finished the last of the first joint in a single haul, gave the roach to Mark to keep.

Take a good look at Mark's drawings, he's a natural—and you can't say they're commercialistic or cartoonism. He's his own movement's ism.

Justine squinted down at the paper. These
are
quite provocative. Okay, one more toke. She took the second joint. Your mark-making is rigorous, agile, and uncompromising. Tell me, besides this crazy weed giving me vertigo, what is your creative process?

Mark gripped his champagne glass like a microphone at a spelling bee and said: I made these while reading
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
.

Julian Jaynes. Interesting. That book has been on my reading list forever. Groundbreaking study, I read the reviews. Justine passed the joint eventually. Oh fuck now I'm really high. Nothing in her posture or voice gave away she was.

My other inspiration is
glass
, Mark said. It was on Wendy's advice that he had practised some lines in advance. If he spoke from his heart it would invariably come out as Saturday morning Scooby-Doo blabber.

Glass is very in, reminds people of Duchamp, said Justine. Dan Graham is working in glass. I'm impressed. I make a point not to represent lovely pictures or pretty things. I represent
ideas
. Your pictures
are
lovely ideas, she said. However I prefer not to represent two artists working in the same medium, and Jonjay already subverts traditional drawings on paper, so. But perhaps there's a space. I would like to think of you for my winter group show. I'll nick some strong pieces from your portfolio if you don't mind so I can treat a few blue chippers to a sneak peek in the meantime.

Shazam, said Mark and drank deeply from his glass flute.

What do you call this series?

Wiggles, said Mark through pursed lips.

Hmm, we might want to think of another title. Or not. What are some of your other influences, in visual art?

Kirby krackles, Kirby squiggles. Biz Aziz.

Hmm. Justine nodded as though she understood when it was plain to all of us she didn't. Where are you from, here in the Bay?

Ba-deep-ba-deep, said Mark. Sweesh! Shimmysham! Slamjam! Boobie doobie blammo!

Wendy flagged the gallerist's attention. Please, won't you pass that joint, please. Jonjay, hey, Jonjay, Wendy snapped her fingers, … didn't you have something you wanted to ask Justine?

I did? Oh yeah of course, duh. Hey, Justine, that reminds me, I heard through the ole gravepine you sold some of my drawings.

Yes, oh god, she slapped her palm to her forehead. I forgot to tell you, that's right, yes, to the collection of Hexen Diamond Mistral, a Wall Street
banking institution
that's been operating for over a
hundred
years. Good news.

Listen, if it's cool I could use my cut, said Jonjay. I'm kinda strapped.

Of course now that you're home we can settle up. Justine said her accountant was in next Friday and she would have him write a cheque for the full amount. Like all the galleries with any reputation, Justine Witlaw split sales with her artists fifty-fifty. Four large-scale drawings meant she owed Jonjay to the tune of sixteen hundred dollars.

I could use it in my pocket right now, he said and lifted a silkscreened blue square out of a flat file.

Careful with that. She jumped for her starry gold-lamé purse—it looked like a motorcycle helmet. What can I give you? Here's
fifty
. I'll peel it off what I owe. In fact, just take it.

Jonjay pocketed the fifty. You're a peach with no pit, Justine.

When I was out for dinner with Frank from that bank Hexen, said Wendy as she pushed a flute of champagne to her nose, he told me he was at that show with the blue squares.

O'Connell, said Justine. You
know
Frank Fleecen?

Yes sort of … Just signed a contract with him for my strip. What do you think of him anyway, is Frank on the level?

Justine said she wouldn't know. He bought Jonjay's pieces over the
phone
. She never spoke more than a few words to him in the times he followed his wife to the gallery for openings and then Justine was always too busy with regular clients to single him out. She presumed his wife was in charge of the art collection.

The wife. Wendy slid down a bit in her chair and lowered the lids of her eyes as she fixed her stare on Justine. What's the wife like?

An intellectual, I guess. Of the two, she seemed to make the decisions in the gallery. One afternoon she came here on her own after O'Connell's opening and I gave her the tour. Struck me as smart and down-to-earth, dressed in a sandy-blue pantsuit or something I took to mean she was ready to do business. Told me she wrote and had published a short story. Wives are often the ones who study art and decide the direction of the husband's
collection, for these overworked, overpaid, guilt-ridden millionaires who want to appreciate culture but don't have the time to do the legwork. So the wife appreciates for them both. She was polite and curious the whole of my tour and I thought I had made a sale and then she said,
Why does art make me feel so stupid?
I offered to take her to the back room, and she looked through the files. All she was interested in seeing when we got here was Jonjay's pictures.

Ladies love cool Jonjay, said Jonjay, looking up from some pictures in a flat file.

That reminds me, said Wendy, swinging her Gremlin's keys around her finger. I gotta go. Need to get back to No Manors and help Rachael and Twyla put my package together for UPS by five, and there's still entire panels that need inking. Guys? Ready to go?

Justine tiptoed back to her chair, fell into a catlike position with legs crossed at the knee, wagged her ballet flat at the end of her toe, and said, Well, don't collect your money, drink my champagne, and take off, that's rude. I mean, really, stick around. Blow off UPS. Do you at least have ideas for your show, Jonjay?

Oh sure. Watercolours and drawings of bristlecone pines from the White Mountains. Dried skull mushrooms from Japan. Documentation of an event. Traces of a geological formation. That's what I have so far. And a bottle of what I call Ruthvah, Jonjay said, grinning idiotically.

Justine swooned with a contemporary art fever when he said Ruthvah was the name for a
scent
.

The watercolours and drawings of the bristlecone pines were done. The dried skull mushrooms from Fear Mountain were glazed for preservation. These and the beautiful pictures from his time lost in the White Mountains were more than enough. Why clutter the space? What he had was beautiful on its own. But Jonjay was impartial to beauty, he wanted more material, he wanted clutter.

Justine Witlaw wanted a show
this year
but he told her he wasn't ready.

In fact she had him down for a solo in September. Postpone, he said. And she said, You've got more than enough for two shows. Compared to Abrams. And she's had three shows in three years. Look, we're even, aren't we? I paid you back.

Yeah, thanks, said Jonjay. But it's still my decision when I'm ready to have a show.

Wendy shook her keys again and pointed to her wrist as if there was a timepiece there and said, UPS waits for no woman.

But as if conversation was a cliff and she was clinging to it for dear life, Justine began to digress into a portrait of her gallery. Listening to Justine talk about herself, we saw this skittish, frail woman in a designer wardrobe who was either very dismissive or making big demands of people, and you thought better of getting too close. We knew from gossip back at the manor that in the early seventies, when she started out, Justine Witlaw's wealthy father bought half the work in almost every show, so she would have the red dots needed to attract interest. The strategy might have taken seven or eight years but it worked eventually, for now Witlaw dealt exclusively with a blue-chip clientele, most of them based on the West Coast, collectors who—in her words—lived in three homes, owned two yachts, and piloted a floatplane to an island getaway. A few of her artists were in the permanent collections of minor American and European museums—but at her own admission there were years she sold everything she exhibited and years she sold nothing, the white walls were cursed, the concrete floor was hexed. Some months she sold nothing but made more money than sellout shows, by doing backroom deals on the secondary market, matching buyers for sellers, acting as an intermediary who was quieter than an auction. Not selling
her
roster of artists. She told us that she sold little Picassos her clients owned and needed urgently to sell, Renoirs and Thiebauds that surfaced after deaths, divorces, job changes, and sordid so ons. A frequent problem for shifty art collectors was the unstable value, because according to Justine unless you had exactly the right buyer, most of what you bought
was impossible to resell, worthless in the short term. Justine Witlaw had an exceptional eye for hot new art, but most collectors knew her better for her intrepid nose. Matchmaking in the secondary market was an art of its own. She could see how to shape an artist's trajectory; whether she was capable of making that happen was unclear. Her Rolodex was filled by her ability to find a buyer for a little Teraoka watercolour, or one of Nengudi's squiddy pantyhose-filled-with-sand sculptures, sometimes in under twenty-four hours. Snap her fingers it was done, she claimed. Justine was a lot of times a safer bet for a collector living on Russian Hill than an auction house based out East. Sotheby's rebuffed a local collector of Tanaami and Yokoo who hoped to sell for at least a third more than paid. Justine put the owner on hold, sold the prints to a collector on the other line for double. For these services her cut was fourteen percent.

This was a city in thrall to rock memorabilia they thought was fine art, Robert Crumb, Cal Schenkel, and Keiichi Tanaami were taken very seriously. Former park-dwelling hippie turned Silicon Valley nerd turned drug kingpin turned defence lawyer. Money to burn on their nostalgia for the time they used to waste. You could sell a silkscreen of a Tadanori Yokoo for the same price as a Clyfford Still canvas out West; in California a Chris Burden went for as much as a signed Doors concert poster silkscreen; Justine sold an autographed painted cell of the Evil Queen from the Disney film
Snow White
faster than an exquisite piece of Marcel Duchamp paraphernalia—eventually to the same buyer, an Oscar-nominated character actor.

That a curator from the Guggenheim had even visited a commercial gallery in San Francisco was enough to perk up heads in the culture circles, gossip rippled out as far as the comic shops in Berkeley. Justine was
certain
the turning point would be a major solo show with Jonjay, in the way that only his mercurial standoffishness could crack the East Coast, his work, his style was bound to attract the kind of media attention her gallery deserved, notices from critics and calls from curators, museums,
other galleries in SoHo, and magazine editors. Considering it's been a decade in the business,
he
would establish Justine Witlaw's gallery as the real centre of contemporary American art, since no one represented the true avant-garde of the eighties better than Jonjay. If Jonjay would only agree to a show. He had more than enough work.

He said, Naw, don't have enough stuff. All I got so far is decoration for the main event. I need to create a certain mood of, I don't know, ambivalence.

You mean imbalance? said Justine.

No, I mean ambiva
lance
. I'll come next Friday and pick up the rest, okay? Ready to burn rubber, Wendy?

As he drove us home, Wendy asked him why he didn't take Justine up on the solo show, and all he said was, Not until I get my money.

What about Mark, should he give Justine some of his pictures?