The Genius (18 page)

“To be frank,” he said, “I would have gone as high as four-fifty.” He touched the desk again, causing the panels to slowly rotate back to their original positions.

Except for one—the future resting place of
The Burial of Count Orgaz
, which got stuck after about a quarter turn. Hollister banged at it, found it intractable, and, reddening, touched the desk to summon Matthew. The butler appeared post-haste and, seeing the catastrophe, hurried from the room, cell phone in hand. As Hollister and I stepped from the office and made our way back toward the elevator, I heard a California accent rising to the top of its lungs.

HOLLISTER’S PRIVATE MUSEUM stood at the highest point on his estate. A glass dome, dimpled and latticed with iron pipes, the structure resembled nothing so much as a gigantic, half-buried golf ball. I could only imagine the cost involved: the foundation work alone probably ran toward eight figures, once you took into account that the top of the hill had to be chopped off. Add to that an architect so prominent that Hollister declined to name him (“It was a favor. He doesn’t want it getting around that he does residential work”) and bulletproof glass for the entire exterior and you began to approach a new universe of money.

The armored car was parked by the loading dock, the jumpsuited men waiting for us. Like the butler, they addressed Hollister by his first name.

A retinal scan later, we stepped inside the dome, and I looked up at a series of concentric balconies culminating in an enormous Calder mobile seven stories overheard. Whoever the architect was, he had ripped off the New York Guggenheim to the extent that I wondered if that had been Hollister’s express wish. He wanted copies of the world’s most desirable paintings; why not replicate the most famous buildings, too? The glass I saw as a nod to I. M. Pei, and I felt certain that if I looked hard enough I would find other references as well.

A tweedy, greenish man in a well-cut suit met us in the lobby. Hollister introduced him as Brian Offenbach, the museum’s manager, who I gathered was basically a glorified picture hanger. In the cadences of a well-rehearsed speech, Offenbach explained the logic behind the museum’s layout; the work was displayed not chronologically or thematically but tonally, with the darkest pieces on the ground floor, and every successive floor getting lighter. Light and dark could mean the color of the piece, but more often it meant the emotional response the piece provoked, or the sense of weightiness it gave. Hence the Calder, despite its immensity—five tons of painted steel—occupied the apex, for the feelings of flight it evoked. Hollister had designed the scheme himself, and was proud of it; as one went higher, one transcended the physical realm and found oneself elevated to an understanding of blah blah blah blah blah.

I distrust binary systems—light and dark, good and evil, male and female—and the arrangement seemed to me self-defeating: an attempt to whittle down art’s ragged irrationality that ultimately created not order but muddle.

“It’s wonderful,” I said.

They had already begun bringing the new art up to the third floor, and when we stepped out of the elevator we confronted a tornado of packing material and exploded crates. Hollister had to keep raising his voice above the whine of drills.

“I’ve been wondering if the Cracke PIECE BELONGS HERE WITH THE REST OF THE, of the collection. I mean, it’s so disturb DISTURBING, AND I WONDER IF I’D BE BETTER OFF PUTTING IT in a separate wing. For outsider art. I could tack on another few rooms. NEAR THE BACK. THAT WOULD HAVE SYMBOLIC RESONANCE, WOULDN’T IT, PUTTING the outsider art segregated in its own sphere. WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

I nodded.

“On second thought. The THE WHOLE POINT OF COLLECTING OUTSIDER ART AS I UNDERSTAND IT—MARILYN HAS BEEN GIVING ME SOME GREAT, great books to read. Have you read”—and he named a bunch of obscure monographs. The only name I recognized was Roger Cardinal, the British critic who gave Dubuffet’s term Art Brut its English equivalent.

“The whole point is to REASSESS THE TRADITIONAL STANDARDS OF WESTERN CULTURE, AND to bring to light the talent of people untempered by SOCIETY. RIGHT?”

The Cracke drawing had special value to Hollister, as the first piece he had purchased of his own volition rather than Marilyn’s; he took a personal stake in its location. Offenbach offered suggestions, each one dismissed: “It’ll get lost.” “It’ll stand out.” “Too sterile.” “Not well framed.” It was as though this one piece had revealed all of the scheme’s flaws.

As a last resort we moved back to the lobby, It was my idea to have the workers hold the canvas up immediately to the left of the entrance. That would make the Cherubs the first thing you encountered.

“Perfect,” said Hollister.

Perfect meant another thirty minutes of discussion about height and centering and lighting. It couldn’t be too perfectly square; that wasn’t in keeping with the piece’s Otherness. But if you cheated to the left, you had an unpleasant gap; to the right and the edge of the drawing began to jut around the corner…

When they were done we all stood back to admire our handiwork.

“What is that?” Offenbach asked. He approached the canvas. “It’s like a star.”

“I believe it is a star,” I said.

“Hm,” he said. “Is that a reference?”

“What do you think?”

“I think,” Offenbach began, and then said, “I think it looks marvelous. And that’s what’s important.”

THE RISE OF THE ART FAIR over the last three decades has drastically changed the contemporary market. A lot of business now takes place over a few frenetic weeks: the Armory Show in New York, the sprawling campuses of Tefaf Maastricht and Art Basel. I made a third of my sales at fairs; less trafficked galleries can do as much as fifty or sixty percent of their yearly totals.

For collectors, fairs provide motivation. If you had to traipse to every last gallery in Chelsea, who could blame you for tiring out and giving up within an hour or two? But when every dealer has his best twenty pieces out, hundreds of them lined up under one neat, climate-controlled tent—and when you can stop at the espresso counter for muffins or duck confit—then you really have no excuse not to get out and see the damned art.

The Miami fair to which I boarded a plane that Tuesday afternoon was an offshoot of a European fair, and over the last few years, as prices went through the roof, it had undergone an incredible transformation, from a regional outpost to a circus entirely its own: red carpets and stretch Hummers; blinged-out hip-hop moguls in floor-length ermine; crusty Brits and unctuous Swedes and Japanese in Day-Glo eyeglasses; fashionistas, heiresses, events and parties and after-parties, hobnobbing and flashbulbing and the electric crackle of a lot of people about to have sex. Hair got dressed.

And then there was the art. So much of it, and so much of it bad. There was a Persian rug woven with images from Abu Ghraib. There were some photos of cups and saucers being shattered by bullets. There were sober paintings of Britney Spears and, courtesy of Damien Hirst, panels of laminated houseflies. In the center of the main tent was an installation by rory z called
Jizz? or Salon Secrets Volumizing Conditioner with Hibiscus Extracts
?, whose title pretty much says it all: a row of hinge-top cases, the lids of which showed a color photo of an object—a pencil, say, or a Tickle Me Elmo—spotted with nacreous liquid from either a bottle of the aforementioned product or rory z’s own reproductive glands. Viewers could study the photo and muster a best guess before opening the case to discover the truth inscribed on a little gold placard.

Another piece I took the time to look at was a video installation by Sergio Antonelli, who had filmed himself walking into a midtown Starbucks, ordering a triple-shot espresso, drinking it, getting back in line, ordering another, drinking it, getting back in line, and so forth. (He never seemed to have to pee, although I suppose that could have been edited out.) Eventually, he consumed enough caffeine that he had—or appeared to have—a myocardial infarction. It’s hard to overstate the comedy of him thrashing through the mid-morning crowd. One man actually stepped over him en route to the cream-and-sugar station. The final shot showed Antonelli in the emergency room, being revived by a doctor wearing a green apron. The piece was called
Deathbucks
.

But most of the time I wasn’t looking at art. For someone like me, part of the fun was that I got to catch up with colleagues I hadn’t seen since the last fair. Marilyn had been cranking the rumor mill, and our booth received a steady stream of gawkers who put their noses right up to the drawings, asking was it
true
, had he
really
. Word of the Hollister sale had gotten around— no doubt I had Marilyn to thank for that as well—and by week’s end I sold everything. Ruby began referring to our booth as the Cracke House and to us as the Cracke Whores. Guilty or not, Victor was a gold mine.

Nat calculated that were I to turn the whole collection around at the prices I’d been getting, I’d net close to $300 million. That would never happen, of course; I could ask as much as I did because most of the drawing still sat unassembled, in boxes. Since closing the show, I had moved the remaining material to a secure warehouse in the east twenties, and made plans to start assembling some new canvases—just a few, enough to moisten the market without flooding it.

Cracke’s success rubbed off on the rest of my artists, too. I sold some Ardath Kaplans, some Alyson Alvarezes, the remaining Jocko Steinberger; I had a request for first pick of the new Oshimas when they came in. I even got rid of an old piece by Kristjana, one that I’d begun to think of as a white elephant. I tried to let her know the good news, but she wouldn’t take my call.

I ARRIVED BACK IN NEW YORK exhausted and in desperate need of dry cleaning. I left the gallery closed for a day and lay around my apartment, letting my head clear. Then I called McGrath to see if anything had come up since our last meeting.

He didn’t answer, not then nor on the subsequent two days. By the time somebody picked up, on Wednesday afternoon, I’d begun to worry.

The voice that answered was a woman’s, unfamiliar.

“Who’s calling.”

“Ethan Muller.”

A hand muffled the receiver. I heard talking. The woman came back on. “Hold on.” A moment later another female voice came on, cracked and dry to the point that at first I didn’t recognize it as Samantha’s.

“He’s dead,” she said.

I told her I’d get in a taxi.

“Wait. Wait. Don’t come, please. The house—everything is crazy right now.” Someone said her name in the background. “One second,” she said. Then she said, “The funeral’s on Friday. I can’t talk right now, I’m sorry.”

“What happened?” I asked, but she had hung up.

In retrospect, I’m glad she didn’t hear my question, which I asked reflexively and which needed no answer. I didn’t need her to tell me what happened; I knew what had happened. I had been watching it happen for the last month and a half.

Since she hadn’t told me where the service would take place, I spent the rest of my day making awkward cold calls, inquiring after the McGrath funeral party. I found the right place, a church in Maspeth, and hired a car for Friday.

I’d always heard about police funerals being large, ceremonious affairs, but perhaps that’s true only when an officer goes down in the line of duty. At McGrath’s service there were a fair number of blue uniforms, but nobody that stood out as top brass, and definitely no representative from the mayor’s office.

Mass began. Prayers were offered, hymns sung. Not knowing what to do—the Mullers are not a pious bunch—I stood at the rear of the sanctuary with my hands knotted behind my back, trying to see all the way to the front, where Samantha rested her head on the shoulder of a woman I assumed was her mother.

The Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God

McGrath’s brother delivered a eulogy, as did Samantha’s older sister, whose name I could not remember. Had McGrath told it to me? I didn’t know. Our time together had been spent under strangely intimate circumstances, but almost everything about him remained a mystery to me. I told myself I had an idea of who he was—a wry sense of humor, a lust for justice—but how much could I possibly know? I looked out at the sea of heads, trying to put names on people: his old partner? The famous Richard Soto? I did spot Annie Lundley, and, glad to find a familiar face, I almost waved.

“I doubt that anybody here can think of him as anything other than a police officer. And that’s what he was, that’s what he always was, and he was great at what he did. I remember when I was a little girl, and he would take me out for a drive. He’d switch on the sirens, just for a couple of seconds, and people would look at us as we passed. And I remembering thinking, That’s my dad. They’re looking at my dad.’ I was so proud of him. Daddy, I’m so proud of you. We all are, and we know how much you put into your life, how much you cared about the people you helped. You never stopped being the man I was proud of.”

The Eucharist; the wine, the wafer.

Into your hands, Father of mercies, we commend our brother Leland Thomas McGrath.

Six brawny men shouldering the casket.

The processional was brief, five blocks. I walked along alone, keeping pace with the somber train of SUVs and Town Cars. The day was brisk, the light harsh, as though the sun had turned on its own headlamps in sympathy.

During the burial I kept my eye on Samantha. She stood apart, no longer leaning on her mother, who instead took the arm of a man with a walrus-like moustache. He wore a light blue blazer that stuck out against the predominant black, and I got very clear dislike vibes from Samantha regarding him. Her sister didn’t seem to bear him as much animosity, and at one point clasped his hand.

In my mind, I tested out several explanations, rejecting all but the most obvious: the man was the wife’s second husband. Evidently, the collapse of McGrath’s marriage had fallen harder on Samantha than on her sister. Maybe the sister had been out of the house already, leaving Samantha to watch her parents’ relationship in its dying throes.