Bright, Precious Days (15 page)

There probably weren't more than a hundred people, but the place was packed to capacity, half seated in the chairs that had been set out and the rest standing, crowding the floor as the stragglers from outside struggled to get in. Astrid Kladstrup, overdressed for the occasion in a tiny black cocktail dress, waved to him from the back. He couldn't believe it had been a year since he'd taken the keeper of Jeff's Web site to lunch, or that he'd managed to resist her.

It was as good a crowd as Russell had ever seen here, and the atmosphere was charged with anticipation. The audience seemed convinced that they were in on something special, pleased with themselves for being here and anxious to have their expectations fulfilled. Russell wished he could tell Jack that the crowd was with him—that they wanted him to be someone they could say later they'd seen at the very beginning, that they'd follow him almost anywhere tonight as long as it was novel—but Jack was enduring the pleasantries of the owner and the staff. He looked as if he'd just crawled out of bed after sleeping off a terrible bender—his hair an unruly mess, his face drawn and gaunt.

He was fucking perfect.

When he started to read, the crowd collectively leaned forward; Jack was mumbling, and speaking so fast that it was difficult at first to make out the words, even for Russell, but a helpful staffer adjusted the mike and a hush fell as he started again. He was still mumbling, and occasionally slurring, but it was just possible to make out most of what he was saying.

He read “Family First,” a story about a young woman from a small Tennessee town who is sexually abused by her father and runs away to Memphis, where she eventually ends up working for an escort service. Years later she gets an outcall for a trick at a motel and arrives, only to find her father waiting there, and she shoots him with the pearl-handled revolver she stole from his truck the night she ran away. We have already learned that this is a girl who knows how to hit what she shoots at, and though she wants to kill him, and we want her to, she shoots him through the thigh and walks away, leaving the pistol behind on the bedside table.

The climactic action all happened in less than a page—what had once been three pages describing her thoughts and feelings, until Russell had cut and pared much of it away, saving the essentials and exposing, as he saw it, the hard, adamantine core. It was all there, but Jack had told too much in his original draft, hadn't trusted his material, when, in fact, he'd already set it all up and provided everything the reader needed to know. And Russell, as he saw it, had shown him what was already there, and how to overcome his fear of not making his case explicit, and had cited the eternal cliché that less is more. He didn't want credit, but he knew he was right, and he was grateful that this incredible material had come to him so that he could help to make it what it wanted to be. Even the draft he'd first read, cluttered with exposition, had had that vertiginous liftoff that he always wished for at the end of a story, the simultaneous feeling of rising out of the mundane comprehension of our mortal experience and the sensation as we rise of looking down into the abyss, an intimation of redemption—or damnation—that was all the more powerful for being left almost unspoken, and now the audience felt it, too; the combination of the story itself and how clearly the crowd was validating his assessment of its worth made Russell's eyes well with tears, as did, perhaps, the knowledge of how hard-earned Jack's hard-boiled wisdom truly was: the absent father and abusive stepfather, juvenile detention, the fast-food jobs and bar fights. It was all there in the stories. It was all
his.

The applause was prolonged and clamorous, and many who were sitting rose to their feet. Russell knew it was a great story—no one could have convinced him otherwise—but it was exhilarating to hear Jack read it and to see the response, almost unmediated by preconceptions. He was actually a powerful performer, his obvious reluctance lending weight to the reading. The audience knew they'd heard something special. The
Times
had prepared them to be impressed, but it hadn't necessarily prepared them to be physically moved.

As for Jack, he looked stunned, as if he didn't know what to make of all this. He nodded and blinked, waved once and then retreated to the signing table, where his new fans pressed in on him.

Russell chatted with the staff and examined the shelves while Jack signed books, finally extracting him after more than an hour. The young drug courier, Cara, followed him out to the street. Astrid Kladstrup, who'd been smoking on the sidewalk, sidled over to join their group. “That was amazing,” she said to Jack, who merely grunted as a taxi pulled to a stop beside them. Clearly a city girl, Cara opened the cab door and thrust Jack into the backseat, sliding in beside him and pulling the door closed. But the maneuver failed to discourage Astrid, who slipped around the back to the opposite door of the cab and inserted herself on the other side of Jack, forcing Russell to claim the front seat.

He gave directions to the Fatted Calf while Cara explained to Jack that he really should have had his party at KGB in the East Village, before launching into a speech about her other favorite bars and clubs, babbling melodiously, filibustering her rival. She was still talking when they arrived at the restaurant. This battle for Jack's attention, and the youth of the crowd upstairs, made Russell feel suddenly old and weary. He stayed just long enough to introduce Jack to some of the other writers on hand, then struggled down the stairs against the incoming tide of bodies, leaving Jonathan to keep an eye on the star of the evening.

The publicist showed up at the office just before noon the next day and stepped into Russell's office to give his report. “You missed the whole second wave, which was pretty fucking crazy. Nancy Tanner got hammered and danced on the bar, and these two girls got in a catfight over Jack, and then sometime around one-thirty he disappeared with Dan Auerbach.”

“Who's that?”

“Guitarist for the Black Keys. Anyway, I got a message from him at four-thirty this morning. Hard to understand, between the accent and the slurring and the music in the background, but I think he was looking for cash.”

“Definitely time to send him home to Tennessee.”

“Well, you might want to rethink that. The 92nd Street Y just had a last-minute cancellation and they wonder if he wants to share the bill with Richard Conklin on Monday night. Actually, it was Conklin himself who requested him.”

“Jesus,” Russell said. For all his belief in Jack, he was kind of amazed at the rapidity of his rise, and slightly worried about how the young author would handle it. He had a lot of issues to begin with, and Russell wasn't sure that his previous life on the ragged edge of American civilization had prepared him for the ordeal of literary celebrity. “Tell them if we can find him by Monday and he wants to do it, they can have him.”

“
WOW, I FEEL LIKE I JUST CLIMBED OUT
of the Wayback Machine, this is, like, so eighties. Isn't that David Byrne over there? It's like any minute now we're going to see Keith Haring and Basquiat slouching around.”

“I know, it's like my nose is twitching. I suddenly feel this overwhelming urge to tease up my hair and do some blow.”

“It's not like cocaine ever went away.”

“It did for some of us, honey.”

“Is the man of the hour finally clean?”

“What, Tony? That's the whole point of this show. It ought to be subtitled
My Thirteenth Trip to Rehab Finally Did the Trick.
”

“Actually, I was shocked to hear he was still alive.”

“The way I heard it, Arkadian saw him staggering around the Lower East Side in rags one night, took him home and paid for a stint at Hazelden.”

“That's the nicest thing I've ever heard about Gary.”

“Not really. He's making fifty percent on every canvas Tony sells from here on out; plus, he bought masses of the old paintings for next to nothing while Tony was detoxing. And those are the ones everyone suddenly wants. Basically, it was totally in character for Gary.”

“Oh, look, isn't that Dash Snow? He's so hot.”

“So hairy, you mean.”

“Speaking of the recrudescence of drugs.”

“The what of drugs?”

“It just means drugs are back.”

“I keep telling you, they never went away. Every twenty-two-year-old in this city has a dealer on speed dial.”

The one with the too-blond hair and the Pee-Wee Herman shrunken suit, sensing that she was eavesdropping, turned and glared. “Can I
help
you?” he said.

“I don't think so,” Corrine said, retreating into the crowd and trying to find Russell, who was supposed to meet her here.

The artist was hidden inside a distant scrum of bodies, a nimbus of LED light and clamoring, interrogative voices.

Eventually she spotted Washington, who was chatting up a pretty Asian girl in a neon green mod dress with intricate tattoos mimicking sleeves. He appeared momentarily discomfited when he saw Corrine, but quickly recovered his composure, kissing her cheek.

“This is my friend Corrine Calloway,” he said, clearly at a loss for the girl's name.

“I'm Jenna,” she said.

“I was just giving Jenna a little art historical context. Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Futura 2000.”

“That's very kind of you,” Corrine said. “You have the real pedagogic instinct.”

“I just love the eighties,” Jenna said. “You guys are so lucky you were around then.”

“Yes, they were…memorable,” Corrine said. “Except that, they say, if you can remember them, then you probably weren't there.”

Momentarily puzzled, Jenna forged on. “I mean, the whole club scene, Area and Danceteria, and the graffiti thing. That must've been so cool.”

Corrine hadn't been to the clubs in question and hadn't been all that fond of the graffiti thing at the time. She remembered when every urban surface was covered with strange names and slogans, and how it had reflected the dread and menace that was the psychic weather of the city back then, the visual equivalent of boom boxes and car alarms, the backdrop for muggings and murders. Subway cars entirely obscured beneath the colorful malignancy, which in her mind seemed to have something to do with their thoroughly erratic schedules and tendency to break down mid-tunnel. And even the color was quickly swallowed up by the pervasive pre–catalytic converter filth in the air, an encompassing sootiness that turned chartreuse to mustard, pink to burgundy, white to gray. In time, this girl's tattoos would suffer the same fate.

“Remember those paintings on the sidewalk that were like crime scene outlines of bodies,” Corrine said. “Like the ones police draw at murder scenes? And everybody assumed they were real, because it just seemed like,
of course.
There was so much fucking crime.”

“Richard Hambleton,” Washington said somewhat smugly.

She suddenly realized they'd had this same exchange just recently. “Yeah, well,” she said, “I'll take your word for it. He knew what he was doing. That guy had the zeitgeist down cold. I remember coming across those and thinking, Yeah, this is how we live and die in New York.
That
was the eighties,” she said, turning to the young woman in green. “Looking over your shoulder all the time, convinced that you'd get mugged or killed. Having your purse or gold necklace snatched on Fifth Avenue. Waking up in the middle of the night with some junkie trying to pry apart the bars on your bedroom window. Watching people you knew die of AIDS. But
otherwise
—fun.”

“That was very eloquent,” Washington said after Jenna fled.

“Just trying to provide some sociological context to go with your art history,” she said. She wondered what Luke would have made of her commentary and wished he could have heard it.

“You lived on the Upper East Side, for Christ's sake.”

“I got around,” she said.

“Yeah,
right.
Between Park and Madison. Who did you know who died of AIDS?”

“Are you seriously asking me that?”

“Oh, shit, sorry,” he said.

The subject of Jeff having been raised, if only obliquely, she said, “It might interest you to know that I once rescued Tony Duplex from a drug den on Avenue B.”

“You're red-lining credulity here, honey. If you'd said a
poker game
on
Avenue A,
I might have almost believed you.”

“It's true. Jeff called me one night. They were being held hostage by a drug dealer who they owed a lot of money. I had to deliver cash.”

He looked at her as one might at a small child who persists in fibbing.

She shrugged, hoping to convey indifference to his opinion, although, in fact, she did want him to know she wasn't as straight and as predictable as he imagined. She could be bad—she
was
bad, and sometimes she felt like such a fucking impostor. She didn't want to be the perennial good girl, the doting mother and faithful wife. Washington would understand. She almost wanted to tell him about Luke, that she wasn't just some prude in a plaid skirt and penny loafers. She, too, had her secret desires and sins. Who better to confide a crime to than a serial criminal? But of course she couldn't.

“Where's Veronica?” she asked, seeing her husband slaloming awkwardly toward them through the crowd.

“At the office, I expect. And here's your husband. The phrase ‘bull in a china shop' yet again comes to mind,” Washington said as they watched Russell apologize to an art lover in a fedora whom he'd elbowed sideways.

“I prefer to think of him as puppyish,” she said.

“It's getting a little late in the day for that fucking analogy,” Washington said before gripping Russell's hand. “Don't see you at many art openings, Crash.”

“A lot of Tony's art has captions,” Corrine said. “Russell prefers his art with text.” Actually, she knew, it was Duplex's connection with Jeff that had sparked Russell's interest. When he died, they were supposedly working on a project together.

Washington led them all into the second, slightly less crowded room of the gallery, where the older paintings—the ones that they'd seen and taken for granted in their youth—were hanging. The earliest had been rescued, or stolen, from the street—from lampposts and windows and the boarded walls of construction sites. Colorful figurative cartoons complete with captions.

“I used to see these fucking things plastered all over the subway stations,” Russell said wistfully.

Corrine didn't herself remember any such thing, but she recognized some of the images, including the iconic EAT THE RICH painting, which featured a skeleton attacking a top-hatted pig in a tuxedo with a giant knife and fork. And three versions of the ENJOY COKE series, showing a young man with a Colt .45 jammed in his nostril. Duplex's iconography and his technique had become more subtle and refined as the eighties progressed and his work moved indoors to the walls of galleries and collectors' lofts without necessarily losing its exuberance. The captions became more enigmatic, at least for a while, the brushwork more nuanced, the palette more complex. And suddenly she came across a canvas depicting a man and a woman separated by the words YOU WERE RIGHT. SORRY. It was similar to the canvas Jeff had given her long ago, which was presumably still in the closet at her mother's house, and which, it seemed, might actually be worth something.

Standing in front of the painting, she registered a disturbance in the buzz of voices in the next gallery, a spike in volume and intensity, and turned to look just as a man with a bandanna covering his face like an outlaw in an old Western movie charged into the room and looked around before running toward them, holding some kind of cylinder in front of him, taking aim at the first ENJOY COKE painting, which suddenly exploded with a new color scheme—and seemed to bleed as he sprayed an unreadable cursive symbol on the painting. She realized that the cylinder was a can of spray paint and that the man was marking the canvas, appropriating it for himself, that the lightninglike mark was his signature, his tag, if not his name.

He dodged around Corrine when a beefy blazered man lunged for him, using Russell as a human shield, shoving him at the security guard and breaking for the exit. A second guard suddenly appeared in his path and wrestled him down below her sight line.

“Well, that seals it,” Washington said. “Tony Duplex is back, baby.”

“Was that part of the show?” asked a young woman behind them.

“It is now,” Wash said as the two security guards hustled the spray painter into the main room.

“You don't think it was planned?” Corrine said.

“Well, far be it from me to be cynical, but whether it was or whether it wasn't, I'd guess that Arkadian's not at all unhappy about it.”

“How much are Tony's paintings going for, anyway?”

“After this, probably twice what they were going for yesterday.”

It soon became apparent that they'd shared front-row seats at the event of the season. Somehow Russell ended up getting interviewed by
Entertainment Tonight.
Facts and rumors were being traded like especially tasty canapés. The party had acquired a new energy, at once both festive and valedictory, but except for the artist himself, who appeared genuinely upset about the defacement of his painting, the former note seemed dominant, the crowd reacting in a manner that might have reminded an outside observer of hometown fans who'd just witnessed a great sporting victory, although a different observer might have guessed that the giddiness of those in the gallery resembled the relief of witnesses who had been passed over by a catastrophe, a tornado, say, that had wiped out several buildings without casualties, and the party certainly would have lasted well into the night if the Pinot Grigio and Prosecco hadn't run out after an hour. Eventually it flickered out, only to flare up again at Bottino, the art-world cantina on Tenth Avenue, and later just a few blocks away at Bungalow 8. Russell and Corrine returned home to the kids, but he got a call from Washington a few hours later, summoning him to the after-party, which he pretended to be reluctant to attend, before eventually deciding that his friend probably needed the company, then returning finally at two-thirty, smelling of booze and cigarettes, just like in the good old days.