the next thing is my boss, who represents Matthew’s work, tells me that he doesn’t want me working on Matthew’s show because of our personal relationship. Fine—fair enough. Philip Louis dated clients and it always fucked things up, but he ran the gallery so it was different for him. So I don’t know anything about the show and Matthew was always really secretive about his work, especially when it was going well. Superstition or whatever, and for a long time I found that really charming, so I respected it, gave him space. The night the show opens, I get to his studio, which is in this giant warehouse in Bushwick—that’s this sort of gritty neighborhood in Brooklyn, so ugly that people think it’s cool—and there’s a crowd of people there, and this energy, a tingle of something, about the way people are looking at me. And I feel like I’m being paranoid or wonder if it’s sort of, you know, nice attention. Like, oh, there’s his girlfriend, she’s so lovely, rising star, blah blah blah.” Even in this open, unfiltered mode I felt embarrassed to admit that—that I had wanted to be admired. Craved it enough that I was willing to ignore the feeling of low-grade dread tugging at me, telegraphing that I should be wary. That something was off.
“You needed to listen to your intuition.” Clara tapped her forehead to indicate her third eye. “Seriously. I don’t even believe in all of that psychobabble stuff and I’m a psychic, but I’m telling you. Trust yourself more. Anyway, keep going.”
“So the show, I find out, is comprised of two artists’ works. And the other artist is …”
Clara leaned in even closer, her knee touching mine, her hand on my wrist. “That bitch Ramona!” For a second I remembered just how young she was. How, when I was her age, my friends and I were riding our bikes to the Wawa and pooling our money to buy a milkshake to split.
I gave her the rest of the story in the most straightforward way I could muster, and it still felt muddled and strange. The first piece I saw at the show was a single canvas tacked to the wall, unframed, ragged at the edges. There was a streak of green paint at the top and several more below it, seven in total. The first six streaks were various greens: pine, emerald, bottle-green, seafoam. Someone had penciled letters next to each stripe. R, R, R, R, R, R, and M. The last streak, marked with the M, had much more yellow than the others, more of a chartreuse. In the next room, I saw a painting on the wall: a girl curled up in a wing chair, wearing a dress that was the same color as the last slash of green on the canvas. She was looking across the room at something, unaware of the viewer. It was a well-executed painting but restrained compared to Ramona’s newer work, mannered and too careful. Not good enough to be shown with Matthew’s sculptures, and not what I had expected from her at all.
In the next room: one of Matthew’s sculptures, small for him, delicate even. Oh no, I had thought. What had happened? He always called that kind of work timid. More like toymaking than art. A placard on the wall said The Flame. As far as I could tell it was abstract, made from peels of metal welded into a fan shape. I tried to read the negative space but nothing emerged for me. People around me were nodding. What? I wanted to ask. What did they see that I couldn’t? Around the corner, another small sculpture. It had the fluidity of Matthew’s larger works—it was called The Idea, and it looked to me like smoke—but again, the scale was disappointing. A photographer came around the corner and took my photo, and for a moment the brightness of his flashbulb left stars in my eyes. I saw that photo run somewhere else later, I couldn’t remember where, but my eyebrows were knit together, like a disapproving schoolmarm’s.
Temporary walls sectioned off the warehouse space. They were genius for building tension, having the viewer wind through that maze; meaning, wholeness felt just around the corner, but all I could feel was frustration. Matthew told me once that I was his muse, but I had yet to see myself in any of his pieces. I wondered what Ramona was up to, too, going behind my back