Authors: Christopher Bollen
She thought she heard the front door open downstairs, but Gail’s shoes were still crunching on the gravel. She dropped a shirt in the suitcase. The beam on the second floor squeaked. “Hello?” she called. “Gavril? Mom?” The legs of the easel skidded in the nursery. Beth walked into the hallway. “Mom?” Her foot hit the same squeak in the hall, and when she crossed into the nursery, she was blinded by the glare of the clock’s tin face. The painting of Mills had fallen on the floor, and as she moved to pick it up, she caught something out of the corner of her eye, a blurred shape springing toward her. Beth lunged toward the hallway, her hands grabbing the doorframe. An arm swept across her chest, yanking her back into the nursery. She clung to the doorway, her fingers slipping on the wood, until her heart took over, rising up her throat, and she managed to say, “
No, stop, please
” before a voice whispered into her ear, “I’m sorry,” and the effort of her heart was released as a knife cut across her throat.
H
e first saw her on a
vaporetto
in Venice. He was standing on the cobblestones in front of the Accademia as a boat crammed with tourists lurched toward the dock. The afternoon sun was streaming off the water, lightening the hair of passengers until they looked like candles on a wobbly cake. All except for one: a young black woman with iron-straight hair, wearing a black fitted suit. It was the year of the black fitted suit,
le smoking
, but he didn’t know that. He had hardly been out of Bucharest before, and at the age of twenty-six, this trip seven hundred miles from home counted as acute international travel. He lost sight of her among the tourists fighting for a foothold on the waterbus, but her face remained with him; she reminded him of the sour, stone-faced Madonnas in the Titians and Tintorettos. He reminded himself of Leonardo’s
Vitruvian Man
, a stockier and hairier rendition, but his legs and arms stretching into wide circles.
He saw her again two nights later, leaving a party on a former army-barrack island. The black suit had become her uniform, and her hair was tied back in a bun. Mousse sparkled like snow at her temples. She was worm-limb drunk on the free wine that glowed amid the candles at the bar. That was when he first heard her voice, American, screaming like plucked piano wire as she climbed into a water taxi. Before that, she could have been from anywhere. It was unlikely he’d ever see her again. The art world had brought so many
beautiful women to Venice that week, exotic birds collecting on the bridges and squares, stirred easily when he ran across them.
He was in Venice to work at the Biennale, assisting an artist whom no one in his home country respected but who had been chosen to represent Romania with a suite of portraits of Communist leaders made from candy-bar wrappers. The Romanian Pavilion was not so much a pavilion as a two-floor brick hut that shared a wall with a youth hostel run by wrathful hippies. Worse, it was located in Giudecca, a forty-minute boat ride from the art world epicenter. Few bothered to visit. Gavril stacked the brochures on the welcome desk and waited. “After decades of a conciliatory transition toward an ‘enlightened’ western democracy, the neoliberal paradigm has sprouted an agitated counter-paradigm in Eastern European art that questions the very legitimacy of the project of modernity . . .” He refused to read on, embarrassed by the language of art. When tourists stepped in the doorway to ask where they could catch a boat to the glassblowers in Murano, he deflected his eyes.
On the last day of the show, fifteen minutes before he locked the door, a woman in a black suit entered and took a brochure. “I’ve seen you before,” she said as she squinted at him. She introduced herself as Luz Wilson and fanned herself with the press release. He asked in his best English, “Why have you come?”
“Oh, I never go to the big countries. A bunch of token names who show their better, less pretentious stuff in the galleries in Chelsea.” Realizing she was speaking to a humble desk-sitter representing Eastern Europe, she clarified. “New York. That’s where I live.”
He should have guessed. Her perfume smelled expensive, like New York. She paced languidly through the exhibit, returned to the desk after four minutes, and shrugged. “We have better artists,” he swore. “But this is for rich collectors and reporters with no knowledge of the history of my country.” She asked if he was an artist. “Yes,” he said, but because of the garish litter portraits he didn’t mention his own work, the pile of smashed beer-bottle glass he was sweeping into lines and stars.
“I paint,” she volunteered. “I was in a few group shows in the spring. Fuck if I know if I’ll be painting the next time you see me. The whole thing’s got little to do with talent. Sometimes, when collectors want to buy a work, I think they just want to take a picture of me looking desperate to show to their friends. Do you ever come to New York?”
“Sometimes,” he lied. “I want to. Soon.”
She wrote her number down on the press release. “If you ever get there, call me. I’ll show you around.” And then Luz Wilson walked out into Giudecca and presumably onto a plane.
He returned to Bucharest, where the cobblestones lacked the golden thread of Italian light. He worked days doing construction on a new block of condominiums. The materials were cheap and black market shoddy and he mixed concrete with sawdust. At night he returned to his tiny apartment off fountain-laced Alexandru Ioan Cuza Park to work on his art in his bedroom. He covered his mattress with a tarp and often fell asleep on the plastic the same way his mother sat for hours on her plastic-wrapped sofa, never once stripping it off for company. He continued his bottle-glass experiments and created abstract sculptures out of metal sheets he stole from the construction site. He showed his glass-bottle lines in small illegal galleries that never sold anything and closed permanently when the electricity was shut off.
That first taste of the art world in Venice had disgusted him. It made him feel complicit in a carnival of fast, expensive merchandise purchased by men who parked their yachts off San Marco like great white whales of pleasure and crude. But he kept the image of the black American girl in his heart the way a drunk keeps a picture of a lost woman in his coat pocket. He thought of her when he fucked his girlfriend on his tarp-covered bed, or when she whined about her job selling ornate wooden clocks at the train station. He dreamed of the black-suited American visiting his first show in New York. It was time for Gavril to up the ante.
One rainy day in April, he hid a crowbar in his jacket and went to
Ceauşescu’s House, or the Palace of Parliament as it was known to the rest of the world. When one of the magenta-blazered guards fell asleep on his stool, his mouth a cave of metal deposits and echoes, Gavril popped ten tiles from the mosaic marble floor and loaded them in his pockets. Three weeks later, before a young, inebriated crowd in an abandoned shipment station on the east side of the city, he held his first serious show, smashing the tiles with a sledgehammer and leaving the pulverized marble to collect like stardust on the cement floor.
A reporter from the
Bucharest Herald
wrote an article on the performance, attacking him with typically misplaced nationalist outrage at his vandalism of the palace. The story ran on the back page of the Tuesday paper. Gavril waited to be arrested, waited for the security brigade to break through his walls, behind which he had always imagined them lurking. He was stunned when they failed to appear. Perhaps the surest sign of change in his country was its careless tolerance of petty crimes. Instead of an arrest, he was rewarded with a call from a gallerist in London whose Romanian husband had shown her the article over breakfast. “I love it, I bloody love it,” Laura Lucas yelled into the phone, her English so crisp she sounded as if she were having a series of small strokes. “I have a tiny upstairs space for emerging talent. I want you to do the same thing here. We’ll call it ‘Unquiet on the Eastern Front.’”
London was colder than Bucharest, the faces on the street angrier with less cause. But the interiors were warmer, and the gallerist, a stringy woman high on forty years of an undiagnosed eating disorder, introduced him to artists so celebrated even he recognized their names. He was given a drab, elevator-size room in an East End hotel, but the bed was soft and the room was warm, and from there he wandered around the rolling parks and side streets, fully international, starving but too poor to buy himself lunch. He waited to eat at Laura Lucas’s never-ending strategic dinners, her thin arm on the back of his chair, introducing him as her latest “find.” When a culture magazine asked to take his picture, he refused. He had
witnessed artists in Venice posing for fashion photographers, sucking in their cheeks, channeling their favorite film star, smiling like some misbehaving monkey about to be given an orange, and he swore he’d never play that pathetic game.
Laura Lucas went ballistic. “What you need is exposure!” she screamed. “Exposure is what’s going to keep that work from being forgotten in a week.” She said the word
exposure
as if it were a virus that would kill him if he didn’t contract it. “Do you want to go back to Bucharest and stir cement for the rest of your life? Will you
please
just trust me? I had to call in a favor for that profile.” He finally had his picture taken in a headache-lit studio in Islington, where a tipsy woman with silver-plated eyelids handed him a sport coat that happened to be hanging on a clothing rack. Later, reading the magazine caption, he discovered the black sport coat was Givenchy, Spring/Summer 2006. A journalist conducted an interview by phone,
uh-huh
ing through his explanation of Ceauşescu’s slave nation and his fascist desire to build a palatial, first-world empire on the backs of its citizens, and Gavril’s own attempts at finding meaning in the fractured remains of that regime. Under his picture—with his birthmark Photoshopped out—ran the title “Dracula Rising,” and, in smaller type, “Hot, up-and-coming Romanian artist bites the hand that beat him.” The article told a story that must have been spoon-fed by Laura herself: “In an art market whizzing with million-dollar surfaces, one rogue artist is literally smashing his way into the gallery scene. Gavril Catargi claims he is ‘making gestures of reparation,’ but his seriously destructive tendencies are catching all who sift through his rubble. . . .” He was disgusted, enraged, and correctly quoted. Yet he hoped the magazine would find its way into the hands of Luz Wilson in America. The smashed tiles sold for eight thousand pounds to a collector in Geneva. Laura Lucas gave him four thousand, more than he had ever made in his life.
In Bucharest, there were no further shows, no offers of photographs. Most of his friends drifted away from him after hearing of his success in London, as if he had indeed come down with a case
of exposure. He couldn’t go back to construction. His girlfriend moved to Constanta to work as a nanny for a family of Moldovans. Gavril applied for a paid artist internship at a small contemporary art center located in Chelsea, New York, where Luz Wilson was from, where the less-pretentious big-name stuff was shown, where his career might flourish from the attention of intelligent, black-suited New Yorkers. He received his acceptance by e-mail and waited four months for his student visa to be processed.
Everything in Bucharest was slow—the weather, the bureaucracy, the face of any passerby above the age of fifteen. His mother was furious about his departure. She had suffered for years so that her children could have a better future in Romania, not someplace where things were already better. He brought his four thousand pounds to the bank, where they converted it through the Romanian leu into U.S. dollars, $2,178 to be exact. From there, he went alone to Henri Coandã International Airport and shut the eyelid of the window before takeoff. He didn’t call Luz Wilson until he landed.
He punched her number in while he was waiting for his luggage on the Newark carousel. He loved the carousel, the iron plates rotating on a conveyor belt while travelers stared longingly at the gleaming emptiness. Everything in New York could be art. “Yo, this is Luz,”
beep
. He left a rambling economy-class, two-connecting-flights, trans-Atlantic, jet-lagged, just-drilled-by-a-homicidal-customs-official message.
Manhattan glittered iridescently, told him dreams of fortune through its arrow-sharp streets as he passed into and then out of the island, to an apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. The New York Craigslist section, where he’d found the apartment, was like his childhood idea of New York, a place where all was available: sex, psychics, used stereo equipment, tickets to Carnegie Hall. Unwilling to admit that he knew not a soul in the city, he told his grad-student roommate that he had a girlfriend named Luz Wilson, although his accent was so thick the guy sharing his bedroom hardly understood
his declarations of love. He called her again, two days later, and left another message.
The artist internship at the Chelsea museum was a model of indentured servitude. The museum assigned him a broom closet on the top floor to use as his studio, and in return required him to work part-time for $7.99 an hour as a gallery guard and as a barista at its rooftop café. Gavril learned how to make all the drinks he’d never sampled in Venice: latte, espresso, macchiato, decaf iced ristretto with a dollop of whipped cream. Luz never called him back.
He made friends in the internship program, fellow artist aspirants more accustomed to the beat of Manhattan, none of whom had had their picture taken in a glossy magazine. He hated their artwork—ripped covers of Danielle Steel novels with microchips pasted over the heroines’ mouths; canvases dipped in latex—but he trusted his own talent and knew by the rules of art world Darwinism that many would end up making their careers standing as still as possible among white gallery walls or preparing caffeinated drinks. The museum cleverly offered apprenticeships in more practical vocations. He accompanied these friends to the Chelsea galleries, white boxes that confirmed Luz Wilson as a liar as well as an unreliable friend. The art was goose-liver pâté, rippling with currencies, the prices of semen-spotted paintings written in bold on the checklists. His new friends were mesmerized, because their own art was reproducible, generic, disposable, and so, in most ways, were they. They were desperate to prostrate themselves in front of anything that was awarded wall space. They had no real politics, although they wore pins to prove they had voted in recent elections. They also wore stickers suggesting they’d sold their blood.
One afternoon, while he was on guarding duty on the third floor of the Dan Flavin exhibition, he finally saw her. Her black suit had given way to a neon orange sweatshirt and tight acid-wash jeans, and her straight hair had fossilized into dreadlocks, which dangled across her shoulders like decaying wind chimes. She eyed him as
she stood amid Flavin’s fluorescent tubes, and did so again before disappearing into an exhibition room. He was ashamed to be standing there so dumbly, so pointlessly, in such easy reach. At least at the Romanian Pavilion in Venice he had been afforded a desk and chair. She circled back and stared at him, unblinking, moving a gold pendant across a chain on her neck.