At first, I wasn’t sure that it was really Miri and not someone playing a joke, but when she introduced herself and said she didn’t believe she’d met me before, I knew, yep, that was Miri Lippman all right. She told me that she had an open slot for her Lit-Stim series—was I interested?
If I’d gotten Miri’s call during my first years in New York, I would have celebrated all night. But I was newly disciplined, and took it all in stride. I scribbled the date on my calendar, the only item on that calendar save for Faye’s gallery show and jury duty, and then I got back to work. I finally felt like I was on my way.
HOW IAN MINOT GOT KISSED, GOT WILD, AND GOT A LIFE
When I got to the Van Meegeren Gallery for the opening night of Faye’s show, I immediately understood why she sent me home the night I’d tried to get her to linger with me at the top of the 116th Street subway steps. The reason wasn’t because she thought that I was some scummy humbert or that she was playing hard to get; it was just that the show explained what I needed to know about her a lot better than any conversation over soda pops could have. Faye must have known that after I’d seen her work, I wouldn’t see her the same way anymore.
Back at the coffee shop, Faye was always up for hearing my stories, but she never seemed to like talking to me about herself or her art—“Let’s talk about you, champ, my life’s boring as a mofo.” I had no idea she was downplaying her talent. Back then, whenever I said my writing sucked or was going poorly, I meant it.
I arrived at the gallery late. I’d been working on one of the stories I was thinking about reading at Lit-Stim and hadn’t wanted to stop in the middle, and after I got off the C train at Twenty-third, the walk to the gallery took longer than I’d expected. Heading west, I smiled, thinking of the last time I’d been in this neighborhood—for Blade Markham’s party. When I read at Lit-Stim, maybe Geoff Olden would come. “Good luck with all your future clients,” I’d say, then toss both his business cards right in the trash.
It was opening night for about a dozen gallery shows in a gutted industrial building, and the Van Meegeren was located on the third floor. The crowds milling about in hallways or sneaking unfiltered vonneguts in stairwells were dressed a little more funkily than those I used to see at book parties when I’d worked in catering. Still, the behaviors and demeanors were familiar, every conversation characterized by its participants’ desire to find better conversations elsewhere. Heads bobbed and weaved; eyes scanned rooms and halls; whenever someone new entered, people whipped around to see who it was. Like the writers at any book party, the artists were easiest to find, self-consciously dressing down—ripped kowalskis and torn Levi’s—or dressing up, in gatsbys and ascots, all ironic. The whiff of high school was inescapable.
The gallery where Faye was showing her work was a small, white, windowless box of a room with an office attached—in most of the galleries I passed, some officious panza was manning phones or handing price lists to prospective buyers, but in the Van Meegeren, nobody. The crowd was smaller than the ones in the other galleries I’d passed too; a few people would break their stride to glance at Faye’s work, but no one stopped to hang up their jacket. Faye’s snacks were grim—just a scattering of tired pastries from Morningside Coffee, and Joseph was the only one eating them; he had a turnover in his mouth as he slipped on his immense black gogol, congratulated Faye on his way out to a casting call, then glowered as he lumbered past me.
Even in the most poorly attended galleries, artists adopted façades of preoccupation, turned their backs to the entrances, focused intense concentration on even their most trivial conversations, lest anyone think they were disappointed by the meager turnout. Not Faye. She didn’t do pretense. The moment Joseph was gone, she stepped into the gallery doorway, took a big swig from a bottle of wine, then cast her eyes skyward and demanded where the hell everyone was. When she glimpsed me approaching the gallery, she smiled. I was wearing a blazer and had shaved for the event, but Faye was wearing her