The Rest of Us: A Novel (24 page)

“Says who? What about the entrepreneurial model?”

“People joined together are more effective than one person out there like a renegade, proving herself. There’s strength in numbers.”

“You should get a new book of slogans,” she said. “Those ’70s groups were rife with petty infighting, unhappiness, and dissent. Plus it sounds like your little party at MoMA is meant to be entertaining—there will be appetizers, I’m sure. I’ve been to events like those. It’s not exactly the same thing as storming Washington.”

“I don’t know what it’s going to be about, but I always believed in women’s rights,” I said stubbornly. I thought back to when we were in college and used to play our Ani DiFranco tapes, and tossed around the word “cunt” pretty freely, although always in reference to our own bodies, never as an insult.

She shifted in her seat, and I could tell she was going to start lecturing me. “You should have used the suffragettes as a model if you were going to try and win me to your side. It took those women sixty years of nagging, making those little pins, and marching around to get anything done. That’s tenacity. Susan B. Anthony was already dead by the time they passed the damn amendment. Which is why all organizations need fresh blood like yours to keep the dream rolling.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you so desperate for my approval, anyway? I feel like I’m getting a hard sell.”

“What? I’m just defending my opinion, and I—”

She waved this away as if it were made of gnats. “Does your old man know you’re going to be hanging out with his ex-wife?”

“Yes. He told me it would be good for my career.”

“If it were me, I wouldn’t like it.” She frowned, sipped her tea.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t go now? This isn’t about Laura, or even Rhinehart! It’s a chance for me to talk to gallery owners about my work. You don’t know how hard it is to get those introductions in New York. I can’t just pass it up because of some marital issue that has nothing to do with me. If I don’t take these opportunities I’ll still be doing portraits with Marty when I’m in my fifties!”

“All right, all right,” Hallie said. “No need to get your panties in a twist. You must be feeling guilty—you look ready to cry.” She signaled for the bill. “So go then. A real feminist doesn’t need anyone’s approval.”

T
he event was held in one of the big blank vertiginous rooms of the museum. I disliked Taniguchi’s redesign, the catwalks with their glass sides, the floor slipping dangerously away from your feet. It was a building that seemed to be trying to show you up.

I was smiling at everyone. I smiled at the woman who checked me in and gave me a program; I smiled at the caterers that came around with flutes of champagne. When I first arrived in New York, I’d been a server for events like these, and I remembered how invisible I’d felt, and what was worse, how invisible the people I served were. I would lie in bed after, smelling of cooked eggs and grease, trying to conjure up a single face in that mass of people. I couldn’t. The entire operation, humans serving other humans as if they were a different species, seemed both ridiculous and sad.

Laura found me hesitating on the fringe of the crowd and brought me over to the people she was talking with, a shrill-looking woman with large Chanel eyeglasses, and a washed-out redhead, whose plainness, I suspected, belied a great deal of money. Both women were in cocktail dresses. I had been anticipating more artists, young artists like me. This event seemed more akin to a dinner party at the Kennedys’ in which all the men had been removed.

Laura’s introduction of me seemed over the top, but the other women received it calmly, as if they were accustomed to being introduced to accomplished people, artistic and otherwise. When it came time for me to substantiate her claims, I was struck with shyness.
“Who are your influences?” One woman asked, and I couldn’t think of anyone, except, bizarrely, Michelangelo, perhaps because I’d seen a photograph of
David
on the way in. In answering the question “What is your work about?” I felt as if I were describing an imaginary friend whose entire existence depended on my belief. One of the women said abruptly, “Excuse me?” either because I was speaking too low or just incomprehensibly, backtracking when I sensed resistance or when I felt myself drifting. When talking to women, I had been used to a certain conversational pattern, supportive, encouraging, and based on a desire to find parallel circumstances in which to commiserate or offer advice. There was none of that here. My dangling sentences, the “you know” gambits and other vocal gestures for help seemed weak and self-condemning. My lack of confidence a symptom of the societal problem we were here to eradicate.

The radical feminist group the Guerrilla Girls was giving a talk, and Laura and I filed up to the front row of the auditorium, to the reserved seats. As the group came on stage, wearing the signature gorilla masks, Laura whispered that she’d reveal their top secret identities to me later. “You’ll never guess.” There was a lot of cheering and even some catcalls, but the Girls sat down rather sedately, like guests on
Oprah.
They had a PowerPoint presentation that detailed their aim to increase the visibility of women in the arts, their formation in 1985 after they had attended an international survey at MoMA in which only 13 of 169 artists were women, their decision to remain anonymous and to take code names of dead female artists and writers, and their interventions, posters, and billboards calling attention to the underrepresentation of women in the art world. The longer I sat there I didn’t see the masks anymore, I saw the women underneath, whose activist work I respected, depended on, actually, to help me expand my career, but whose individual personalities I wasn’t crazy about. It was the self-aggrandizing tone of some of the women that bothered me. They seemed aggressively anonymous, their disembodied voices detailing in a very pointed way how they
had shamed museum administrations, which had subsequently issued them invitations to come and speak. Applause followed.

Older women, in expensive shawls and dress pants, stood and asked questions that sounded more like statements, referencing their substantial gifts to the museum and the process by which someone can ensure money was properly earmarked for art by women. How different these women were from the female interns scurrying around in their black tights and headsets, making sure the mikes were okay, and everyone had a program and a seat they were comfortable with. Behaving like serfs.

I was deeply conflicted. Did it matter, really, if I didn’t like them? What right did I have to criticize, anyway? Compared to these women I had done very little to help the feminist art movement, beyond being a woman and trying to express my own vision, however naively. And I
had
been naive, I could see that now, to have equated feminism with freedom, nudity, unbridled conversations, lack of judgment, and hand-sewn clothes. The social mores platform I had been supporting it on wholeheartedly, the illusion that feminists believed I was okay as long as I was being true to myself, that they would want the best for me—I didn’t feel that here. I didn’t get the sense that these women particularly cared about my success. In fact, I felt more liable to be discussed in dismissive or less generous terms in this upper-class crowd than I would have in a mixed bag of men and women from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

I was aware of what was possibly my first genuine activist impulse. I had the immediate, pressing desire to work towards creating a different model, a supportive community for women like me. For the college girls in the back of the auditorium who wanted to be here but were either too shy to ask questions or weren’t called on.

Laura was breathing comfortably beside me, emitting a faint scent of perfume, an odor so delicate and unusual, I couldn’t relate it to anything in the natural world. The Guerrilla Girls and then the entire audience gave her a round of applause for organizing the event, while she sat there with a patient smile, as if she would have preferred not
to be singled out. I applauded, too, enthusiastically, while studying her profile, trying to imagine her as a teenager with tight jeans and sneakers, jumping turnstiles, smoking stolen cigarettes, feeling she had no future.

In the crowded reception hall, I took a glass of wine offered to me by a blond server, wondering if she would remember me later. People were gathering around us. Standing with Laura, I was with a celebrity. She was telling a lively story of bringing in a relatively unknown artist to speak at a feminist colloquium, even more conservative than this one.

“It was a very serious affair. Black-tie. We had some big-name artists and philanthropists there to discuss the future of feminism. Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, Gloria Steinem were all on stage. And this young woman, who certain collectors—and I will not tell you who—
assured
me was the next great thing, and who was
so
enthusiastic about being included, she comes up to the podium to give her presentation. She’s dressed in jeans, which is odd, but not that odd, Leibovitz never dresses up either, but this woman is also carrying a plastic bag. In it, we discovered, was a change of clothes! She proceeds to take off her jeans—on stage—pulls on a little frilled skirt, changes from boots to heels, and gets out these two sock puppets.”

“Sock puppets!” a woman said.

“She’s not a performance artist, either, she’s a painter. And this is the best part, the puppets, one was an elephant, I remember, start having a conversation about how they were bought by rich children, how poorly they were treated, then tossed away. It was a subversive rendition of
The Velveteen Rabbit
for art benefactors. She didn’t use names, but she made strong allusions to some of the people in the crowd.” Laura started laughing, so that she could barely get the words out. “You should have seen me. I was sitting there with my mouth open! Then she just walked off the stage and out of the building. She left the puppets next to the mike. No one wanted to remove them so they stayed there throughout the discussion, looking at us.”

I laughed, too, but uncomfortably, as if Laura had been reading my mind in the auditorium and had decided to prove it to me. I was
also digging around for the point of the story. Did she expect more obedience from the artists she had helped? Or was this tale being used to shame the other benefactors listening?

A woman with frizzy red hair, red lipstick, and a big smile had joined us, and Laura introduced me “as a great fit for T-Projects. Tunis, tell me you have some room for her. You love launching careers, and you’re so damn
good
at it.” I was a sucker for anyone looking out for me, and was feeling quite chummy with Laura now. Tunis owned a gallery on West 19th Street in Chelsea that handled a lot of young artists, and she had a special interest in photography. She also seemed like a genuinely kind and down-to-earth person, and for the first time that evening, I was enjoying discussing my work. “Laura has a great eye,” Tunis said, handing me her card. “Why don’t you bring by your portfolio, and we’ll take a look.”

The crowd was thinning out and by then I was less inclined to look on it ungenerously. I’d gotten further in the past half-hour than I had with all my years of intermittent self-marketing. I tried to convey my appreciation to Laura, who deflected it with a wave of her hand. “That’s the purpose of networking. What did you think of tonight?”

I started stumbling around since, honestly, I would have given the event a mixed review—even with my last-minute success, I was still stubbornly clinging to my original assessments. She cut off the pleasantries. “The events downtown are much different. A lot more fun, younger artists and curators. The whole thing has grown so big, I’m happy to just be a figurehead now, thank God. I started this group, you know.”

I didn’t.

“After Charley and I divorced, I felt like I would go crazy if I didn’t put my energy somewhere.” Her face was flushed. “When we first began, it was really lowbrow—paper cups, sitting on the floor. I was living in the city full-time again and was excited to know more people. These women did all sorts of things besides make art. Some were cleaning houses or working in restaurants, and we’d brainstorm group shows. Even though I owned a gallery, I was no more important than anyone else. I was just one vote in a collective decision-making process.”

“That sounds so great,” I said.

“It was for me. It reminded me of who I was before, that seventeen-year-old with big plans.” She spoke with real feeling, and I was fascinated.

I had forgotten about Rhinehart entirely, so when Laura mentioned him, I froze, becoming as wary as a rabbit sensing something moving in the grass. She kept chattering away, as if too drunk to notice. It didn’t fool me. I’d watched her sizing up her audience when she was telling that puppet story, and she was probably doing the same now. I was careful to keep my face expressionless, a polite listener.

Evidently, Rhinehart wasn’t much of a feminist, according to her.

“Not that he would ever come out and say it, but he wasn’t too keen on these meetings. Maybe it’s because he tends to see differences between individuals more than between genders. He’s certainly not as sexist as Charley, who was one of those old school, whiskey glass in one hand, pinch your ass with the other types. I found it endearing back then, if you can believe it.” We drifted off into Charley, who’d remarried soon after the divorce. He’d died from a heart attack several years ago. I kept guard, as I expected we would come back around to Rhinehart, and we did. “It’s so hard to retain a social relationship with a man you were once married to. You want to and you don’t because it seems such a farce. All the old grudges resurface, but I do miss talking about this stuff sometimes. He loved to discuss these people, the little intrigues of the art world.”

Part of me was curious as to whom Rhinehart knew in the room, but I was leery of traveling any further down the path of this conversation. I didn’t like being privy to her thoughts about him—it made me feel guilty.