Unbind (58 page)

I covered my mouth with a hand. “What have I created?”

“Seeing is believing,” he told me, and he shot off the couch to grab more coffee. When he returned he gestured, “In the studio… I’ll show you.”

We walked there—me in my lounge pants and shirt, him in his boxers and tank, as the Americans say.

We got to his workspace and found it a total and utter mess. I’d always told him if he wanted me to go in there, it’d have to be clean and tidy otherwise I’d go spare. That day however, I didn’t feel irked—I wanted to see what the heck had put some fire in his eye. I stood nervously to one side, trying not to stand on sheets of thumbnails spread out, cameras dotted around, various proofs spread across the floor. Before I could determine what it was he’d shot, he downloaded the final arrangement and plugged it into the projector screen, gesturing we sit down on the chaise longue just nearby.

“Just… watch,” he said, without giving me any pre-warning about what was going on here.

As soon as the first image came up on the screen, my nose flared and my eyes peeled wide open. I covered my mouth with my hands but I couldn’t stop what was flying off my tongue…

“Sensational… controversial… painful… haunting… terrifying… frightening…”

A FEW WEEKS later, we made it to preview night. Amazingly, yes. We’d endured a trying few weeks while negotiating the swarm of vipers endeavouring to bring down the show before it had even begun. You see Cai had never actively promoted himself before and with this sudden buzz surrounding his work, people were quick to dismiss him as a lame horse backed by a generous sponsor. They didn’t know he was nothing of the mouth, and everything of the trousers.

Jennifer categorically (over email) told us she was having nothing to do with the show, which was fine by us actually. Cai didn’t want to let his affiliation with her overshadow the event nor draw the wrong attention to what was meant to be a coming-of-age exhibit showcasing his real talent.

However, we did need someone well-known to validate his work. We just didn’t know who, especially as we were trying to keep his photographs under wraps until curtain.

I even took some leave from work I was owed so I could sit down every night with Cai and Corinne, planning the ins and outs of the event, from who we should invite to how we might redecorate the gallery—and a whole lot of other points of consideration.

For starters, Cai had a framer he knew and trusted so that was a done deal. Nobody was getting a look-in before preview night. He chose simple—lightweight glass and white metal frames. It was going to be such a dour show, I couldn’t wait! Cai beneath the layers wasn’t pretty or sorted, he carried a powerful anguish he didn’t ever express vocally. I’d always seen him for who he really was but never thought he was strange, because he was so much like me you see. I thought the general public would quake in their boots when he showed them what he had.

I’d quaked, yeah, even me—when he first showed me what had inspired him to do this sequence of shots he had put together. It was bound to provoke reaction.

With the show taking place on a Thursday night, as an antidote to the stress all this had caused us, we booked tickets to Vegas for the weekend, flying out early Friday morning. He’d been trying to rope me into going for yonks and I knew it’d be good to get away and escape any furore or backlash… or whatever. We’d already discussed a possible flop and Cai reassured me that it didn’t matter because we’d given it our best shot. If nothing else he felt sure that his new work was a definite improvement on what went before. The one piece of information we did release about the photographs was that the collection was titled,
Sub Rosa
.

As I dressed for the show at the apartment, Carl texted:
She’ll show. Watch her. She won’t be able to stand the anticipation
.

Yes, along with a lot of other New York stalwarts on the artistic scene, we’d still sent her an official invite.

I replied with a smirk on my lips:
Pardon me, are you saying she’s your plus one? ;-) x

CARL:
Okay, I am not that lame
…
okay yes, maybe I am! But no, she’d rather turn up dead than with me. Ha! I just know the temptation is too great
…

ME:
You could spend your life being a sucker to temptation
…
I think you’re right though
…
if only I didn’t know what she was going to make of his prints
…
eeek
!

THE gallery was dark and all the pieces still curtained off. Corinne, Cai, his junior assistants Raj and Wayne, plus me—we stood in the backroom having a bit of a powwow.

“This is going to be so fucking amazing,” Corinne exclaimed, dressed in New York’s finest thrift store Oscar de la Renta. Cai wore a Dior suit with an open-neck shirt. He looked too good to be true! His boys wore smart jeans and sleeveless shirts with black tie—our waiters for the evening, handing out canapés and champagne.

With my new hair, I found I could get away with a lot of different outfits because the do made anything look good. I found the dress I was wearing at the back of the
Frame
closet and the head dresser told me I had to take it because it had to be photographed at Cai’s event.

So I was wearing the nearest thing to a real kimono, but sleeveless, decorated with huge, exotic birds. Knee-length, I paired it with some simple black pumps. The pièce de résistance was the plunging, structured collar that stretched like huge petals from the top of my breasts, carrying on seemingly endlessly, though hugging the sides of my throat like a choker. I knew Cai loved it; he could hardly tear his eyes away. He asserted, “You’re leaving that on.” It was extraordinary and even better—it was by an unknown designer.

As we waited for the strike of seven, the cool outside was awash with flashbulbs and limos, queues and two doormen put on hand. I had a sneaking suspicion that Carl might have spread a rumour about Jennifer attending—and that the material was controversial.

Cai didn’t look nervous or if he was, he didn’t show it. At precisely seven o’clock, Corinne asked, “We unveil now?”

We nodded,
yes.

She and the two boys went to pull down the drapes covering the pictures while I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed his mouth gently.

“Ready?” I asked, grinning.

“I think so, I don’t know!” He chuckled, slightly nervy, but still damn gorgeous. He shook his head from side to side. “I must be in a dream.”

“It
is
amazing you’ve got this far, baby. It’s an achievement most can only even dream of. You’ll always be my superstar.”

From the gallery, Corinne called, “Ready!”

I reached for the light switches and we counted together, “Three, two, one…”

Time for action.

Corinne sat at the cashier desk while Cai and I drank some champagne as we waited for the room to fill with our invite-only guests. When everyone was in and the doors shut, Corinne stood and called for quiet, introducing the artist Kincaid Matthews, the star of the show. She gave a brief biography of his life but left out anything pertaining to the collection put together for this special launch. That was Cai’s job.

I searched the crowd and found most silent, unsure what to think of what they had seen so far. Most notably absent was Jennifer.

“Over to you, Cai,” Corinne said, handing him the stage.

I didn’t know about Cai, but my heart was in my throat and my pulse raged. It dawned how important this was.

“Ladies and gentleman, I want to thank you for sacrificing your evening to come to this preview. I really appreciate it even though I know there are plenty of other places you guys could be tonight.

“I want to make this worth your while and the only way to do that is to tell you the story behind all these pictures. One day a few weeks ago, I just had this mad urge to drive up to my family home up in Connecticut. Let me tell you, it wasn’t a good place to grow up and we’ll get to that. This crazy urge I guess… sprung from a desire to face something that frightens me.

“In the comics, you know, the superheroes always try to face those things they’re frightened of, don’t they? There is always an antithesis or a factor that establishes equilibrium. Someone recently inspired me to face all the things that scare me and I took myself up to that house with one aim…

“It’s not something my aunt and me talk about… and not many of you will remember, either… but my mother Claudia Matthews, the artist, was a very ill woman. They said she suffered from schizophrenia but they struggled to diagnose her. I knew she’d been hospitalised quite young but I don’t think she ever healed, she just learned to medicate. My mother was an extraordinary artist, a very talented seamstress like my aunt, and a gifted person overall. It was mental illness that crippled her abilities. She was either numbed by drugs or trying to kill herself and one day, she followed through on that. But you know… she never frightened me. I loved my mother wholeheartedly and never once did she hurt me. I knew she was very sick but I knew she loved me because she often demonstrated that during rare, lucid moments. So what I suppose I am trying to say is that it isn’t always other people we are afraid of, but the capabilities of ourselves.

“In the images are some of the parts of that house that terrify me now but never did when I was a child. A number of editing techniques highlight just how I see those rooms now, through an adult’s eyes. You’re looking at memories I can’t even explain. All I know is that as an adult with more understanding of the world than I did then, that place scares me. It would be hard to explain in words my personal association and this is basically the only way I knew how.

“Once again ladies and gentleman, I want to thank you for coming to view my work and I’ll be around for your questions. Thank you.”

The audience applauded him rather conservatively and the room fell to a quick hush when Jennifer appeared from nowhere, pushing to the front. She stared at Cai for a few moments with a look of pure terror before she turned on her heel and left.

I watched from the sidelines while Cai talked quietly with journalists and other photographers, explaining his methods.

It was a very civilised affair apart from the way Jennifer had looked at Cai and then left without a word, like he’d defiled something that was sacrosanct.

His collection was basically a number of pictures detailing a young boy’s hiding places. Under the lid of a window seat, a cubbyhole in the dining room (I felt like that place was hollowed out somewhere), beneath a table, behind a corner, or a hedge, under a bed. The furniture seemed large in all the shots so that the mind immediately pictured the person taking the pictures to be very small. All those hiding places, hey? It was obvious he’d seen things that the adults in that house never imagined he might be privy to.

All the shots were veined by a kind of red pigment his mind had conjured. Red being the colour of death, passion, rage, heart, blood? Who knew? He saw red when he went back, that was all we knew. The photos were all burnt-edged as if tea-stained or made to look vintage, or grunge.

There wasn’t one image of a rose, nor a flower. If anything, everything in his pictures looked dead or decaying. Maybe the memory of that place was slowly dying for him, but would never be quite eradicated.

The first bidder took the lot—the Met bought the collection for a discounted bulk price Corinne and Cai negotiated with the curator. It was so apt; these weren’t pictures for a home, or a workplace, but works of art. Even if the subjects weren’t special, Cai’s use of photographic techniques was extraordinarily haunting.

I watched Cai’s contemporaries wandering round, their arms folded and their chins raised because they knew deep down, they couldn’t match his pain. Cai had released himself from the desire to conform or do what he thought was expected of him.

Nobody could match the tortured artist born with pure, raw talent—even if they had a true story that you struggled to believe was real. Then again, what seems real to one person, is not necessarily real to another.