Lion's Share (3 page)

“I wonder if you can manage these.” Ed ran his fingers through hair that had gone pure white nearly two decades ago, before he'd turned twenty-five.

“I'll manage,” Jana said. Then, laughing nervously, she added, “I'm used to lugging canvases around.” She had to admit that Ed's sturdy frame was better suited to carrying the portfolios. He probably wasn't more than five-foot-seven or -eight, but next to Jana he seemed gigantic. “It's only these plush offices that make me feel so small,” she told herself. The entire annual budget of The Paperworks Space probably didn't come close to the cost of the furnishings in one of APL's five conference rooms.

“I have my car around the corner. If you can wait twenty minutes until I straighten up some things in my office, I'll drive you downtown,” Ed said. Then, catching her confused reaction, he tried to explain himself: “I don't usually drive to work, but I was running late this morning, and impulsively decided I wanted the car. Who knows, maybe I even suspected a damsel in distress,” he laughed.

Jana smiled agreement. A ride downtown would give her a chance to smooth over the scene Ed witnessed. She didn't want APL to get the wrong impression about her working relationship with Natalie; an incident like this might come up once every six months, but generally they made a good team. She watched him walk down the corridor toward his office, strutting like a peacock. She didn't like being thought of as a “damsel in distress,” and that stride made her wonder if Ed had been scheming a way to be with her all along. “More than likely, he was thinking about Natalie,” she consoled herself. Choosing attractive friends, like Natalie and Marilyn, was another way in which Jana protected herself against the threat of romantic involvement.

Ed called the garage, which had his dark green Toyota waiting when they got there. Jana noticed that it was in good shape for a six- or seven-year-old car. As a kid, her father played a game with her, asking her to guess the make and year of every car they passed. In the early fifties they were easier to distinguish.

Ed opened the passenger door for her, reaching for her arm to help her into the car. She thrust the portfolios toward him, and he accepted them with one hand while placing his free arm around her. Jana froze. Here we go again, she thought; it might be a different man, but I have the same reaction. She didn't have the nerve to jerk away. As she stood there it felt as if Ed were pressing one finger, then another, then his entire hand, against her shivering flesh. At first his hand seemed to be all bony knuckles, then she stopped feeling anything, only the pressure, the presence of him next to her. Much heavier than those portfolios would have been. Dead weight.

At last he stepped aside and let her in, then walked around to the driver's side. He pushed his way onto the heavily trafficked street the way cabbies did, making the other cars stop and wait for him, while Jana stared out the window, hating this silence. At meetings there was always business to discuss, five or six people with which to make small talk during breaks. Natalie had a talent for small talk. Jana should have remembered how difficult it was for her to relate casually to men; she should have realized she'd be at a loss for words on her own like this.

The one other time she'd met Ed, at a meeting last month, he'd asked if she were an artist as well as a curator. When she'd told him yes, he'd asked whether her drawings would be included in the exhibition. “I work on paintings, large works,” she'd told him. And Ed had suggested maybe she'd
want
to do some drawings, since the exhibition was still over a year off. She countered with a brief monologue on the etiquette involved in entering one's own work in a show one was curating, but felt as if only the plush chairs were listening. Ed also mentioned wanting to see her paintings sometime. He'd probably ask her to “explain” them, she thought, turning her attention to the heavy rush hour traffic.

She leaned back and tried to relax. The bright sun, reflected off the windows of buildings, made its patterns in her hair. She'd washed it two days ago, so it was all frizzy now, blowing across her forehead, adding to her discomfort. When she'd gone away to camp as a kid, the girls in her bunk were divided into two groups. One group washed their hair on Sundays, the other group on Wednesdays. On Sunday, when Group A washed, she would always claim she'd been put in Group B. When Wednesday came around, she would insist she was in Group A and had just washed. She might have been caught, but she was in the infirmary half the Wednesdays and Sundays anyway. That doctor never seemed to mind, or even notice how dirty her hair was. He'd just lain her there on his cot, not really looking at her … Putting her attention to better use, she wondered if those awful camp memories were part of the reason she never captured her hair in self-portraits.

Ed rounded the corner onto Prince Street. Jana sat up straight, twirled two fingers through her hair to encourage its ringlet curl, and stiffly uncrossed her legs. Time to become professional again, time to give the gentleman from APL the grand tour of the gallery. Come on, she kept telling herself, put on one of those bright phony smiles you always use for corporate executives and art critics. She'd had a difficult time with that smile, at first—it seemed pretentious, so far from what made art real for her. But she knew it was important, and much as she hated to admit it, she'd become good at it. Pretend Ed's John Perreault or Peggy Guggenheim, she told herself again. Peggy Guggenheim would have been a cinch. She opened and closed the clasp on her pocketbook, suddenly envious of women who used makeup and had compacts to glance into at times like this.

Ed found a parking space and she hopped out of the car, accidentally slamming the door. She was fumbling with her keys by the time Ed had gotten the portfolios out of the back. Natalie teased her about weighing her huge pocketbook down with as many keys as a janitor—apparently it wasn't sexy for women to carry a lot of keys around.

“Welcome to The Paperworks Space, Main Gallery,” she said as she switched on the lights. In her nervousness, she'd momentarily forgotten that Ed had been here for a meeting, shortly after the exhibition was first proposed. “Welcome back, rather,” she corrected herself.

Taking one of the descriptive brochures from the window ledge, she held it in front of her face and pretended to check it over before handing it to Ed. “This contains a statement by Lou Daniels, the artist whose drawings are in this room,” she said. “You might recall discussing him at our last meeting. He's the young rebel graphic artist from San Francisco—this is his first show on the East Coast. Natalie and I are especially excited about introducing him to a wide, general audience through the Artistic Response to the Environment exhibit.”

Talking quickly, she told him about the artist on exhibition in the two smaller rooms. “If you'll excuse me for a moment, I'll go in the back and get a copy of his promo sheet and price list. There have been more people than usual through here the past few days, and the stack seems to have evaporated.” The exhibition space occupied 1,500 square feet, and Jana was grateful for every blessed inch of it. She let Ed look around alone, taking longer than necessary to gather the information she needed. By the time he'd finished looking at Lou's work, she was able to thrust the vitae on the other artist into his hands and busy herself with paperwork at her desk.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Ed survey Lou Daniels' work from room-center, then begin a closer inspection. Even from behind, she could tell his reaction was the same as that of others seeing Lou's work for the first time. Initially his drawings appear to be architectural blueprints, pencil lines on grid paper. Then it would dawn on the viewer that these blueprints weren't for buildings; they were for landscapes, with plans for trees, birds, bushes, broken fences. The one Ed was studying now included wind circling one tree and shadows running off the left side of the page.

His interest in the drawings reassured Jana that she'd been making too much of his attentiveness to her in the car. “I'll bet he's envisioning Lou's work fitting into APL's concept of the Artistic Response to the Environment exhibition,” Jana guessed. Even though she'd described the artist as a “rebel,” these drawings didn't shock or offend; there were no nuclear explosions, no radioactive waste dumps. Their original exhibition proposal had included five pages of biographical material about the artists they planned to include, carefully outlining the content of their work and conveying to APL the message that overtly provocative imagery would be carefully avoided, but Jana was delighted to see Ed further reassured by this walk-through.

He took a quick look at the smaller rooms, then eased his way over to Jana's desk. “I'm impressed,” he said.

“Well, that's good.”

“Which of these two artists do you prefer? Give me your personal opinion.”

But this wasn't a personal visit: he was a grants officer for a major corporation, and she wanted to keep a professional veneer to the conversation. “I like them both, but for different reasons.” Jana barely looked up from her papers, for a moment feeling out of place in her own gallery. She shifted her pen from one hand to the other. Ed patiently waited for her to continue. “Lou's work features a minutely detailed exploration of space. His concentration on depth and perspective makes him perfect for the Central Park boat house, where the windows will add a further dimension. I've overheard viewers comment that they want to crawl inside some of his mazes and wander around in them.” To be honest, she found his drawings cold and intellectual, but it was easier for her to talk shop than to think about being alone in the gallery with a man.

“We have some brochures around from Lou's other shows, if you want me to hunt for them,” she continued, getting to her feet as she was talking. “A review appeared in the
San Francisco Chronicle
that I found extremely perceptive.” Lou Daniels was better than most of the artists who exhibited in this gallery, artists with no sense of direction, wanting nothing more than to blend in with the crowd, paint or draw highly salable imitations of what everyone else was drawing. Well, she would have done that if she could have, especially when she'd first moved to the city, she reminded herself. She'd never studied art per se, never mastered the techniques of imitation—a blessing in disguise.

“No, no, don't bother searching for more material.” Ed was anxious not to lose her under more papers. “You've done a more than adequate job of explaining his process.” He stared for a moment at the distant back walls of the gallery.

Oh Christ, Jana thought. I shouldn't have gone on so long about Lou's work. I'll bet he's wondering if I pull away when Lou touches my arm. “Yes!” she wanted to scream, “Yes, yes, yes! I pull away from
all
men!”

Ed turned and looked out the huge front windows at the street. “As we were driving here, I was noticing how much the neighborhood has changed,” he began. “I wouldn't mind walking around and exploring a bit. Do you feel like joining me, maybe showing me your favorite places? We could stop for a drink or even dinner …”

“Thanks, but I've got things to finish up here,” Jana said, barely looking at him.

“Okay, we'll make it some other time.” This was going to be tricky, he thought. A business lunch to discuss a proposal was one thing, but driving down here he'd begun to realize that his interest in Jana Replansky might go beyond the bounds of his professional responsibilities. He didn't want Jana to think she had to socialize with him in order to guarantee funding for the proposal, but he understood she might have interpreted his invitation that way. He suddenly felt top-heavy, unsure about the best way to exit gracefully. “I'll see you soon,” he said, as he reached out to awkwardly shake her hand.

Jana shuffled through a pile of papers, letting Ed find his own way out. She found herself thinking about Ed's bald spot. She'd never noticed it before, but as he'd walked out, she'd spotted the classic half-dozen hairs combed carefully over a balding pate. Staring at one of the postcards announcing Lou Daniels' show, she picked up a pen and wrote in
bald spot.
A vast improvement. Lou's work would grow enormously if he could open up, let particulars about people enter his landscapes. He seemed right on the verge of doing that. A year from now, five years from now, there was no telling where he'd be. In one of the larger galleries, more than likely.

She dropped the postcard into the wastebasket. Thinking about Lou's work was supposed to take her mind off Ed, but no such luck. Was she going to go home and draw bald spots on grid paper? Damn Ed. Damn all the artists who seemed to be clouding her own vision.

No, the artists were no problem; damn all the
men
who seemed to be clouding her vision. Truth was, she'd been thinking about Ed since their first meeting. She remembered wanting him to like her immediately. It was almost a sexual, or at least sensual, feeling. She hadn't expected Ed's touch to remind her of her sexual bald spots. She thought she'd matured since she'd moved to the city fifteen years ago, that she'd be able to handle a relationship now, but her growth was all in her mind. Her body still remembered the way things used to be, and reacted according to conditioning. She would have frozen at the touch of any male hand.