The Colorman (3 page)

They lingered in the doorway looking out at the milling crowd.

“Thanks for this,” Rain said.

“Summer show,” Gwen said, shrugging. “Why shouldn't you be one of them?”

“But it's a big deal for me,” Rain replied.

“Well, I can only do it once, so don't get too worked up about it,” Gwen said, dismissing Rain's gratitude as if it were a kitchen moth.

Important artists never showed in the summer months in New York City. Those months were often given over to a gallery's junior directors to curate as they like. For many artists these group shows were second-tier, but still added an important name to the resume.

“It's changing, Rain,” Gwen said quietly. “It's always been hard, but it's getting harder. We had an awfully brief renaissance in this country.”

“That was a renaissance? I thought it was a
will-it-go-with-my-couch
.”

Gwen laughed, “It was a
will-it-go-with-my-stock-portfolio
.”

“And you're sure the Medicis weren't thinking the same thing? Do we really care why they collected?”

“Collectors shape art,” Gwen said, shaking her head lightly. “Come on, Saatchi? And yes, when collectors' motives go off-kilter there are odd bends in the market.” She gestured out to the gallery goers. “Still, what are vacations and clothes and diamonds going to mean to generations to come?”

Rain had heard Gwen rue this same thing during all of the fifteen years she had known her. “You're right. There won't be much for the kids to fight over.”

“Rain,” Gwen turned away from the gallery and leaned back against the door jamb looking at her. “Don't do it. Get a sensible job at an ad agency, raise babies and don't torture yourself with this. I'm serious, Rain. It's all falling apart. Even Sotheby's is feeling it. It's nothing about what you deserve, or your promise. Nobody cares if you make good art. Nobody can stand still long enough to see it.”

Rain shook her head, still smiling. “Gwen, I've heard this so many times from you. Sometimes I actually think you're trying to talk me out of it.”

“I AM.”

“And other times I think you're just testing me—” Rain interrupted herself. “Hey, isn't that Esterow?”

As Gwendolyn unceremoniously left Rain's company, and Rain watched her go, she felt her fond smile fade slowly as she wandered into the crowd.

“
Rain drops keep falling on my head!
”—the ruckus erupted behind Rain and she knew exactly who it was without turning around. Quinn and Stan, trailing their impossibly stylish entourage. “
But that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turning—RED! Cryin's not for me!
” Rain turned and dipped her knees.

Stan, the singer, was, as always, sore-thumb, low-rent cool in his pork-pie hat and bowling shirt.

Quinn thrust a crazy bouquet of sticks and scraggly wild flowers at Rain.

Stan, making no effort to greet Rain, kept singing as she kissed and shook hands with their friends—an assortment of new girlfriends and boyfriends, among them three models, a writer, a cartographic conservator and a bagpiping firefighter whom they had intercepted while he was walking home from a parade.

Stan finally ended his serenade and took his turn to hug Rain, “
Nothin' worryin' me
…”

“How are you, Gee?” Quinn asked. “Good gig!” he added, taking in the scene with a nod.

“You did it,” Stan echoed.

“Stepmother…” Rain reminded them.

“No, no,” Quinn argued. “Professional hard-ass stepmother who would not risk reputation without seeing something real there.”

“Yeah,” Stan agreed. “You'd have gotten it eventually. Nepotism is underrated.”

“I'd be jobless,” Quinn shrugged.

“No apartment for me,” said Stan.

“I'm not ungrateful,” Rain said. “I just want some to sell and I want to get my own show somewhere else.”

“Not here?” Quinn asked.

“Nah, she can't.”

“Why not, where is she? Let me talk to her,” Stan cried.

Rain put a hand on Stan's shoulder. “Down boy,” she said. “She's got her stable of artists. They're all well established. Certain number of shows a year, all that, you know.”

“Ah, the gentleman arrives,” Stan said, poking out his hand. Karl Madlin took it in a firm handshake. One for Quinn, too. Karl, Rain's husband, was good looking, in a very youthful-slash-successful way. And he knew it. He clashed with Stan and Quinn in his Paul Stuart, French-cuffed, dress shirt and black Crockett & Jones monkstraps. His trousers hit at the all-too-current, high-water point.

Karl was aloof around her old friends, who seemed to stiffen up around him. Rain had never gotten used to seeing her friends act that way around Karl, and she knew they didn't like him.

“Nice to see you,” Karl said, placing a hand on the back of Rain's neck.

Stan waved toward the rest of their group. “We're going to mix,” he said.

“Can I put these somewhere?” Quinn asked, lifting his bouquet.

“Behind the desk, please,” Rain said, “and thanks for those.”

When they had left, Rain ducked out from Karl's hand. “There are some people you should be talking to,” Karl said before she could speak.

The crowd had thickened to capacity now, friends and family waiting smilingly in clusters for the artists to greet them. This swirl of sociability, chatter and strained decorum made Rain tense and unsteady. She preferred being alone, sealed in her small, messy studio, living inside the sinewy lines she painted. This clean space, the dress skimming her body and baring her arms, her hair loose and all the talking and posturing. All of it felt wrong. Too much. It felt like it could all dissolve into nonsense.

“I'd be one of those people,” a man behind her said and Rain turned at once and buried herself into a broad, fragrant, barrel chest. The scratchy blazer at her cheek, the perfectly pressed dark shirt by her eye, the tie, one she knew, and the ever-present PEN lapel pin she had always played with as a little girl.

“Alright,” he said. As Rain stayed pressed into his chest, John Morton wrapped his arms around his daughter and Rain closed her eyes. “Take me to your paintings, show me something,” he said. He understood the moment she was in and helped her cover for it.

Rain took her father's arm and led him to her canvasses.

To her, his famous face was no different than any father's—just as perfect, just as familiar, just as hers. She couldn't look at him now: he had appeared just at that moment of fear and uncertainty. It was like looking into the face of the sun—the man who had been both mother and father to her.

Her college roommate had exclaimed upon discovering she was the daughter of John Ray Morton, “Oh, my God! He's the reason I knew I could never write a novel!” Pressed to explain, her friend had simply described him as though it were that obvious: “Big white guy? Fisherman sweaters? Wild white hair? Wire-rimmed glasses? Pipe?”

But John Morton had never been intimidating or iconic to Rain. He was all present, all available, all focus, speaking with her from before the reaches of her earliest memory in fully adult conversation: open, questioning and respectful. He had always made her feel complete and secure.

That's not to say he had always been there. Rain was raised by a succession of nannies while her father worked or occasionally traveled without her. But somehow he gave her the feeling that he had been there all along when he returned or emerged from his study after long hours away from her.

With her father there for her, Rain finally understood what was good about an opening.

From across the room, Rain's works were large dark strops that looked stretched across the face of each canvas. The square construction and white of the canvas seemed like the only aspects of the artwork wrought by human hand. Instead of being tucked around the back of the work as was the convention, the canvasses just reached around to the edges, rippled, ungessoed and shredded past thick brass nails. The wood of the supports was stained and beaten to look like the surface of railroad ties. The markings on the face, however, appeared to be formed by some nesting creature—organic and random—each meandering, splitting and rejoining in its journey along the surface.

Though from afar the forms appeared to be made out of glimmering charcoal, closer inspection revealed they were built up with strands of oil paint in layers of color. What was monolithic and singular from afar became busy and suggestive up close. Rain led her father to the piece and positioned him at a close angle to it.

“It looks found,” her father commented.

“Thanks,” Rain said, adding, “I think.”

“Found in a good way, Rain, like things you'd want to gather up.”

“I think I like to make them because I want to have them around.”

“That's one approach,” John said cryptically.

“What do you mean?” Rain asked, a tiny bit defensive.

“An approach,” John said. “Your approach, Rain Morton Madlin.”

“John Ray Morton,” Rain said right back at him, “I know you.”

“Alright,” John gave in to his daughter. “Plain and simple representation-abstraction question, that's all,” he said. “I'm old school. I'm stuck with representation, but I see all the joy and meaning and discovery in that.”

Karl approached. John tended to make Karl slightly deferential, but never enough to completely relinquish his claim on Rain's attentions. “Rain, can you come talk to some people over here?”

John benignly ignored Karl. Consistently. Like he was Rain's private dalliance his good manners didn't allow him to acknowledge. It wasn't disapproval. Far from it. Just a polite, knowing, couldn't-care-less. This, of course, drove Karl crazy, but the older man's status didn't give Karl the slightest opening to express it.

John gave Rain a light double pat on the shoulder while continuing to study her work and Rain turned to Karl, as though from one world to another, and said, “Sure.”

Though clearly young, the woman was angular and looked slightly bent. Rain couldn't help but notice the dark circles under her eyes. She was dressed quite stylishly and her hair was razored and gelled, but she wore no makeup on her worn-looking face. Was it an aesthetic? A way to flaunt carelessness while projecting supremely confident attractiveness? Rain wasn't fussy about her appearance but she wore a minimal bit of makeup, which she strangely thought a favor to those who had to look at her all day. A little coverup, some lip gloss, mascara, nothing too noticeable. This woman's sunken eye sockets were like a dare.

“Rain, you know Penelope Caldwel -Worthington. And this is…”

“Peter,” Penelope said indicating the young man with her. (
Pee-tah
: she had a British accent.) Peter shook hands and shoved them back under the strap of his messenger bag.

By “you know,” Karl had meant by reputation. Penelope was an art star. An impressive persona he had enlisted to elevate Rain's opening. She had won that year's Turner Prize, which ranked her right up with the biggest celebrities, monstrous for the art world. Penelope's art—gallery performance—consisted of recitations of current pop songs in earnest, energetic, slam-poetry style in front of caged monkeys. During these appearances, while wearing nothing but Manolos, she peeled bananas and hurled them beneath her feet. She shouted the lyrics, streamed through an ear piece, atonally into a microphone at her jaw, à la Janet Jackson circa 1990. She riffed on the lyrics, now aggressive, now pleading, now robotic. She would then stomp through the bananas and repeat some of the refrains of the songs at the monkeys. She would keep this up for hours, switching lyrics, even mid-stanza, depending on what song was ranked number one on the pop charts at the time. Though Rain didn't catch her New York show, she saw it on YouTube and was perfectly unmoved by the theatrics. She did acknowledge, however, that the concept was appealing enough for those art-world arbiters only too ready to adore such pandering to human weakness.
Naked girl. Bananas? Heels? Score!
Rain thought.

Rain met Penelope congenially enough but felt both defiant and intimidated in her presence. Part of her admired Penelope's ambition. And she respected the rather long-lensed, utopian-based cultural criticism and the depth of self-assurance that Penelope's performances required. She was Karl's ideal, really, and though Rain knew that, there was a part of her that kind of relished her own NOT being Penelope. It was liberating to be faced by her ultimate rival. Rain had never been an art school “alternachick.” Proving herself an artist never seemed to require hair dye, eyeliner and safety pins. But, at the same time, she had never felt the need to lay public claim to her sexuality. Naked, this Penelope looked as though she were wearing a tight Barbie wetsuit, her figure was so elongated and plastic looking. Even her geometrical y shaped bush seemed glued on. Unreal. A little gross to Rain, though she understood it was a sort of ironic ideal.

Karl and his colleagues were talking about artists, dealers and curators. They traded players and inside knowledge like baseball fans.

Though she fully acknowledged to herself that she might have been reacting against this woman more strongly than she would have liked, Rain's attention wavered as she watched people circulating around the gallery, trying to keep herself from tallying viewers in front of her pieces against those in front of works by the other two artists. She couldn't help but feel the buzz of eyes as they brushed by her work—the little pangs as they exchanged comments she couldn't hear.

Rain didn't know the other two artists showing. They were chosen by Philip, Gwendolyn's new director. There was one other painter and a sculptor. Or rather, one wall-based artist and a dimensional artist. The sculptor's pieces were actually just vague swellings in the gallery wall, painted over with the wall paint from Gwen's back room, used to touch up between shows. The sculptor had worked for three days in the place, fitting his plaster forms to the walls, spackling them in and then using Gwen's paint to camouflage them back into the scenery.