With or Without You (15 page)

“Oxana.” Erik beams, his hand sliding around to the small of my back. “This is Evan.”

Everything about her seems formidable. I can picture her reducing artists to tears with just the slightest arch
of her pointed eyebrows. Still, as she regards me, she is warm, and her Russian accent is the shit.

She offers her hand, which I shake (after discreetly drying off my clammy palm). “Evan, it’s a pleasure.” She turns back to Erik. “Shall we?”

Erik pushes the cart toward the waiting elevator. I find myself unable to move. Oxana weaves her arm into mine and we follow Erik.

“Erik tells me you’re a fan of Keith Haring,” she says, pausing to poke the 2 button in the elevator. The doors chime, close in obedience, and we’re off.

I nod. I realize that I haven’t actually used, you know, words for a long time now. I don’t imagine that changing soon.

“When we are through”—everything about her voice is like Willy Wonka’s chocolate river—“you must go to the third floor. I have a small exhibition, on loan from his estate. It doesn’t open to the public until Monday, but I know the curator.”

I laugh, a little too loudly, but I welcome the knowledge that, yes, I can still make sound. The doors open on the second floor. We go down a long hallway, and at the very end is an office door bearing Oxana’s name. Her office is huge and white. The walls are surprisingly stark, with only a few paintings. Six marble pedestals sit in a row down the middle of the room, right in front of her desk,
which is near a giant window with a view of downtown. Erik begins setting up my paintings, laying the broadside of each frame on a separate pedestal. The phone on her desk rings and Oxana answers it. I close in on Erik.

“What. The. Hell?”

“Ah,” Erik mutters, turning a painting of our favorite bench overlooking Lake Monona so that it faces Oxana’s desk. “Evan go talkies again?”

“Erik, I’m totally serious. Stop this. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t make me go through this.” In eighteen years, my voice has never sounded this desperate. I’ve never been this desperate.

“You are a very talented artist. Oxana has an eye for talent. I’ve been promising to introduce you and now I’m following through with that promise. What’s the big deal?”

I sense Oxana is wrapping up the phone call so I pull him in close and hiss, “Oxana does not have an eye for talent. She has two eyes for art. She has many, many eyes. She is a big eyeball monster when it comes to art. She can spot an amateur at ten paces. I’m not ready for this.”

He stares at me and says firmly, “Evan, you need to trust me.” There’s something in how he says this. His emphasis, ever so slight, on “need” and “trust.” Embedded meaning: It won’t be long before he asks to meet Davis. And my folks.

I hear a click as Oxana hangs up the phone. Erik tips his head toward the door. “I’ve got a couple quick errands to run. I’ll leave you two to talk. Be back soon.”

ARTIST’S HEAD SPONTANEOUSLY
COMBUSTS, KILLING FOUR

Madison, Wis.—The Fedorov Art Gallery, located in the warehouse district, burned to the ground yesterday. Investigators have determined the blaze was caused when the head of artist Evan Weiss, 18, exploded at the prospect of having his work inspected by Art Goddess Oxana Fedorov.

Before I can say a word, Erik’s gone. I’m alone. With the eyeball monster.

I glare at the door and, behind me, I can hear the clicking of Oxana’s heels as she makes her way to the first pedestal. I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, like yoga. Deep in through the nose, then out. I try to clear my mind but that’s hard when my boyfriend has just abandoned me.
He means well … He means well …
I repeat the mantra, wanting to trust Erik but needing to run away.

Oxana walks a full circle around each painting, the cherry-framed glasses now poised at the tip of her nose. I’m not sure what’s expected of me. I feel I should explain each work. Or maybe tell her what they’re called. Or maybe just stand aloof like a tortured artist who doesn’t give a damn what anybody thinks. I settle for giving her space, slouching awkwardly near the giant window and dividing my gaze between Milwaukee and her casual stroll around my paintings.

Twenty minutes pass. That averages out to three minutes per painting. I wonder how much this woman makes in three minutes. I wonder how much other artists would pay to have her spend three minutes on just one of their works, to say nothing of the twenty she’s granting me.

With a flick of her finger, the glasses now dangle by their silver chain and she wraps her emaciated arms in another self hug.

“You’re very good.”

Ice blue floods my vision. I can breathe again.

“Thank you,” I say almost silently.

Oxana turns her back to regard a small square window on which I’ve painted a replica of Cézanne’s
The Abduction
. A graduation gift for Erik, who mentioned he admired the work when we saw it at a touring Cézanne exhibit. I faked sick for a week, missing school just so I could have it ready in time for his graduation.

“Your attention to detail is astonishing,” Oxana whispers, wiggling her finger at the painting as though trying to recreate the brush strokes herself. “You’re dangerous. You could be a master forger.”

I don’t know what to do with this, other than file “swindler” away as a fallback career.

My mouth is dry but I manage a small smile and say, “I like to use my powers for good.”

She leans in to examine a picture of State Street at night, done in the style of Georgia O’Keefe. O’Keefe was one of the easiest to grasp. Abstraction adores me. Oxana continues to stare and, again, I’m not sure what to say.

“Will you be showing my work?”

I’ll always maintain that the biggest problem with becoming an adult is our firm adherence to the concept of “no takebacks.” There’s no way I can withdraw the question, a bastard child of stupidity and eagerness. She turns and her face says it all. If I were anyone else—not Erik’s boyfriend, not some dumb kid just out of high school—she would have laughed at me. Instead, she chooses compassion with a small smile.

“You’re very talented, Mr. Weiss. I see a lot of very talented people here. I work with very, very few. What you’ve done is certainly good. But, ultimately, it’s little more than mimicry.”

My fingertips go cold and the edges of my vision go blurry. I shoot a glance at the frame of a nearby picture. She sees this and reads my mind.

“Yes, your medium is unique. Interesting. But I’m sure you know there’s more to art than the medium you choose.”

She stands behind me, places her thin fingers on my shoulders, and turns me to face my version of
The Abduction
. “Every detail,” she breathes into my ear, “exact and
perfect. Too exact. Too perfect. If people believe Cézanne did this, where does that put you? You become a nonentity. It’s not your work. Where are you, Mr. Weiss? Where are
you
?”

I open my mouth to protest. Am I allowed to protest genius? Yes, I copied Cézanne, but what about the others? The subjects were of my choosing, from my perspective. And if I used someone else’s methods to convey that, doesn’t that also reflect on the artist? How am I missing from my own work? I don’t say any of this. I’m humiliated.

She guides me to my picture of a pawnshop on State Street, reminiscent of Picasso’s
The Old Guitarist
, featuring a guitar bathed in the pale blue light of a display window, sans guitarist. “Were you sad when you painted this?” she asks.

I hesitate. “No. It was a great day.”

“I suspected as much,” she admits. She reaches out, her fingers gliding just above the thin lines in the painting, careful not to touch. “Do you know about Picasso’s blue period? He painted while in a state of depression. He chose varying shades of blues and blue-greens to show his feelings. You chose these colors because they resembled Picasso’s. Inform your pieces with your life, your thoughts, your perceptions. Just as Picasso and Degas and all who came before. Let your colors be
your
emotions and combine them with
your
technique to give us
your
message.”

These are all things I thought I knew. I was wrong. I think of Mr. Benton, calling my colors my vocabulary. Here I’ve been using the right language but the wrong words. I stare at this piece that I created, labored over, and suddenly I don’t recognize it anymore. I see it as she sees it: lifeless, wan. “I only study artists’ techniques. I don’t know anything about Picasso’s life.”

A chill of shame runs across my shoulders as I hear her
tsk
. “To appreciate a work of art does not require intimate knowledge of an artist’s background. Anyone can survey and react to art. But to create, it is often wise to understand where an artist has come from. What inspired them? What in their life prompted them to speak out through their art? Everyone is influenced somehow.”

She opens a desk drawer and removes a weathered book. The dust jacket is missing but as she pages through it, I catch the title on the spine:
Keith Haring—Journals
. She licks her fingertips, flips through the pages, then passes the book to me, pointing out an underlined passage on the jaundiced page:

Matisse had a pure vision and painted beautiful pictures. Nobody ever has or ever
will paint like him again. His was an individual statement. No artists are parts of a movement. Unless they are followers. And then they are unnecessary and doing unnecessary art.

Even Haring thinks I’m crap. A follower. Unnecessary.

“Think about what I said, Mr. Weiss.” She fixes me with a look that’s two parts empathy, one part pity. “You’ve done your homework. Your technique is impeccable. Now it’s time to figure out what you have to contribute.”

She gives my shoulder a short squeeze, then hands me a thin ivory card from a sleek silver box on the desktop. Her name, the gallery, and her private phone number are embossed in lusterless copper.

“Erik says you’re thinking about art school. I know the deans of many fine institutions. San Francisco, New York, London, Florence … Most will have closed their fall admissions by now, but if you find a school where you’d like to study and need a reference, give them my number.” A tiny smile crosses her pert lips. “You’re almost there, you know. Almost.”

I go to hand the book back but she shakes her head. “Let it be your first lesson on the life of an artist. Get it back to me when you’re done.”

I slip the card into my shirt pocket and guess that I
must look undead because she broadens her smile, hoping to resurrect me. “I’ll be very interested to see where you are in a few years. I suspect I’ll see great things from you. Maybe then we can talk about a showing.”

She glances at the tiny clock dangling from a chain at her waist, excuses herself, and leaves the room. Numb, I begin to pack my work back into Erik’s makeshift traveling cases.

All this time, I thought I was good. I thought I was a painter. Turns out I’m just a huge copycat.

I load the last window onto the cart and as I’m about to leave, I notice a silk screen on the wall opposite Oxana’s desk. It’s an original Keith Haring, one I’ve only seen in books. It’s square with a black background. In the middle of it all is a huge pink triangle. Superimposed over all this is a jigsaw of many silver human figures with the thick, rounded outlines that made Haring famous.

The figures are shown only from the waist up, each overlapping another, alternating positions—some have round hands covering their mouths, others cover their ears, the rest, the eyes. See/Speak/Hear no evil. Very few of Haring’s works have titles but I know this one:
Silence = Death.

I’m drawn in, marveling at the simplicity. Here it is, cartoonlike and yet brilliant. Haring carved a name for himself. It didn’t look like anything anyone else had done.
I’m sure he didn’t waste his high school years replicating Cézanne and Van Gogh and da Vinci. He had vision. He is there, in the painting, staring back at me. When I look at my work, I’m not staring back.

I don’t know how long I stand, gaping at the silk screen, before I realize Oxana is standing shoulder to shoulder with me.

“It was one of Haring’s many responses to the AIDS crisis of the Eighties.” Her whisper echoes the reverence I feel. “Part of the exhibit. I’m putting it in the gallery on Monday. I just wanted it in here for a few days so I can pretend it’s mine.”

“My next painting was going to be … you know …” I feel sick so I don’t finish this sentence. Right now, I never want to paint again.

Oxana’s tiny fingers grip my shoulder. “So do it. Paint your own Haring. Do your own
Radiant Baby
. Get it out of your system. Let it stand as a testament that it’s time to move on and find out what Evan Weiss has to say. You’ve spent too long delivering someone else’s message.”

She escorts me and the dolly to the third floor where Erik is waiting. He smiles at me but I make a point of looking away. The gallery is a massive white box, almost the size of a football field. And it’s just the three of us.

“Here’s the Haring exhibit.” She beams proudly.

Along the left wall, flat-screen TVs run a loop of
Haring’s video art. Most are videos of him painting or doing performance art. The right wall sports an assortment of silk-screen paintings.

“Take your time; look around,” Oxana says. “I have another appointment so you’ll excuse me.”

Erik and Oxana exchange hugs; I shake her hand and thank her for her time. A moment later, Erik and I are alone. He slips his hand into mine and we walk the gallery.

“So, how did it go?” From the DictionErik: cracked, high-pitched voice—
Evan, you’re upset; I can tell. That makes me nervous.

I stare into the first flat-screen—a video of Haring drawing a design on the floor until he’s literally painted himself into a corner. The irony is not lost on me.