Aftermath of Dreaming(39)

“Oh! Do you like it?”

“Are you f*cking kidding me? I’ve eaten half a loaf already—what’s in this thing?”

The name of every ingredient flew out of my head. “Uh. Wheat.” I might as well have said “cow” for the butter and milk. “I mean, flour and—”

He rescued me from the list. “This is amazing.”

“Was it still warm?”

“No.” He sounded like a child who found out his Christmas train didn’t choo-choo. “Can it be? I want it warm next time.”

God, he was cute.

Then he told me about the art gallery. About the lunch he’d had that day with Tory Sexton, the British owner and namesake of the space, while I was delivering his bread. I knew about her SoHo gallery—everyone did. It was one of the top three downtown, farther outside the mainstream than the other two, but widely respected and reviewed. I had been there in June.

I had moved to Manhattan to apply to the School of Visual Arts by December and start my undergraduate degree there in the spring, but a couple of weeks after I arrived in New York, knowing no one in the art world, I decided what the hell, I’d go around and show the dealers my work just to see what they thought. I knew it would take years to get a show, probably at least until I graduated, but Daddy had always said, “God helps those who help themselves,” and maybe some job would turn up or something, you never know, so I took a week-old copy of Ruth’s New York magazine, pulled out the art section, and compiled a list of every gallery in town.

And off I’d go. Working around my restaurant schedule, every minute I could, I’d focus on one neighborhood at a time, walk into a gallery, and ask if the owner had a moment to view my work.

It was weeks of uninterested response. Many were arch and filled with disdain. A few were polite, outlining their gallery’s procedures or simply stating they were, in no way, an open door. The rest fell somewhere unpleasantly in between. After the first few days, I didn’t want to keep going. Each entrance was hard, every exit excruciating, but I consoled myself that I wouldn’t have to lie in bed every night thinking I was in New York but not doing anything toward my dream while I waited to get into school.

The last group of galleries I hit was in SoHo, where, in reverse tack, I decided to start at the low end and work my way up. With only two galleries left to call on, I finally had a unique experience at Sexton Space. The assistant, a woman named Peg, explained that Tory would never grant me a meeting, but took the time herself to see my work. I showed her everything: color slides of my paintings, a small notebook of sketches, slides of my sculptures. As she studied each one, I imagined she was from upstate or Connecticut, close enough to Manhattan that her urban integration wasn’t jarring or hard.

Handing all of it back, Peg told me that as my work developed, and if I got into some group shows, this might be a gallery I should come back to. She liked the construction of my work and thought I had a strong, unique vision that was clearly developing. “This is an extremely tough field, but don’t give up.”

And here was Andrew, a couple of months later, explaining Tory to me, the work that she liked and how what he saw in mine was simpatico with her eye. He’d known her from London back in the seventies when he was shooting a movie there. I couldn’t help but think how funny it was that the one person on my self-ascribed door-to-door gallery tour who had shown real interest was Tory’s assistant. Maybe this was meant to be in some big cosmic way.

“Call Tory tomorrow; she’s expecting you.”

“Thanks, Andrew. That was really wonderful of you.”

“I just passed your work on; you’re gonna do the rest, you big f*cking art star.”



Peg wasn’t in sight when I walked into Sexton Space that Thursday afternoon. I was told by an exquisite pale man, whom I didn’t remember from my summer visit, to wait; Ms. Sexton was on the phone. I studied the work on display in the prohibitively silent gallery. The air was filled with an admonishment not to speak, as if in the face of such nonnarrative images, words became obsolete.

After thirty minutes of looking about, I began to feel lulled by the intensity of the paintings—rage was a prominent emotional theme—and the quiet of the room. Adrenaline had pooled in me with no place to go, so I jumped when a hand touched my back.

Exquisite pale man told me to go in, as he pointed me toward Tory Sexton’s sanctum. I suddenly wished I had something to hold on to—some object to derive strength from.

When I walked in, Tory Sexton was sitting inside a gigantic, ornately carved Chinese canopy bed, but with furniture in it instead of a mattress. It was a red-lacquered room within the real room that I had to walk up two steps then down one to get into. Low-slung leather stools were placed in front of a burnished wood table that Tory sat behind on a French rococo chair whose legs had been lopped off, guillotined victims of her revolutionary design. My slides were laid out in front of her like tiny children walking a tightrope in a row.

Tory’s crimson lips were practically a separate entity. They floated above her black-suit-clad frame, pronouncing sounds, enunciating edits, and charting new courses with the air they exhaled. The conversation she was having at me was so previously unencountered in my life that my mind practically had to translate her words into ones I could believe. My sculptures were to be in her group show of new artists in December. I should talk with Peg to arrange the shipping of them here, the gallery would cover that, of course, and tell her now about where I was from that I was making such work at eighteen.