Aftermath of Dreaming(54)

But Tuesday, October 20, made everyone in the restaurant suddenly extremely grateful for tourists. The city had come apart overnight. In the weeks following, tips for everyone fell to the ground, service-industry jobs disappeared, or if people were able to hang on to them, their income was cut. And the high that the art market had been on came crashing down.

“But none of this is going to stop your work from selling,” Carrie reassured me in late November as my gallery show was looming. “You’re new, starting out. Your prices aren’t exorbitant. You’re exactly what they need to be investing in.”

Though I thought the whole problem with the crash was that so much money had been lost that people had nothing to put into anything, much less an unsure thing, I decided to believe she was right, and it wasn’t like Tory was canceling the show. Which was a relief for tons of reasons, one being that I had missed the deadline to apply for the School of Visual Arts to begin in the spring. Suzanne’s voice was in my head fussing at me about it as she had done on the phone the other day, but Carrie had said not to worry about it. “Your work in the show will sell,” she said. “You’ll quit your job, find a studio somewhere, and just make art all day long. Probably even be asked to teach classes at SVA eventually as a visiting artist, that sort of thing.” I hoped she was right. And Andrew would be back soon from his film, maybe even move here from L.A., or I’d fly out there to see him, drop in for lunch on my way to meet with a collector I had sold to again. What was I worried about? It was all going to be fine.



Peg helped me find something to wear to the opening. I blew a whole week’s paycheck on a black dress at Agnès b., a store I passed all the time to and from the gallery, loving everything in its windows. Peg said it was perfect, and I loved it more than anything I’d ever owned.

So I was on a high when I arrived at the gallery half an hour before the show started, wearing my new dress, about to see my art on display in a SoHo gallery in New York City just six months after I arrived, with Andrew Madden in my life. How much better could it get?

The other artists in the group show were standing around looking at one another’s work when I walked in. I had met them before in the gallery. They were all men, all older than me, and had trained formally at Yale, Rhode Island School of Design, and an art school in Barcelona. We exchanged hellos, then I joined them in looking at their work—paintings that were exuberant, aggressive, and taut—before turning toward the middle of the gallery to see how my work had been displayed. The last time I had seen all my sculptures together was the spring before when they were exhibited at a small gallery in New Orleans. I had felt such pride then, but in a way that surprised me for that word. It felt quiet and having to do with me, yet not. It was a sensation that kept me happily comfortable and able to talk to anyone about my work, more like I had discovered the pieces than made them. Like they had always been around to be found, to be reached out and grabbed, like Keith Richards once said about songs—how they’re in the air and all you have to do is grab them.

But in Sexton Space my sculptures were offered up on high white stands, not on the floor connected to the earth. And in spite of or because of the additional height, they looked diminished, as if they were floating in space. I found Peg, and tried to keep the panic from my voice as I told her that I hadn’t known they’d be displayed that way, they were meant to be on the ground. I wanted people to feel above them, not the other way around, but she assured me that Tory had decided they would have been invisible without the added height—lost in the throng, knocked over even; it was better this way. But I wasn’t so sure. Disassociated from the ground, up close to my face, the whole sense of structure I had created was gone. They might as well have been on burgundy velvet and bathed in black light, they were so far from what I’d envisioned. Then seeing my dissatisfaction, Peg said that it was too late to do anything now, the guests were starting to arrive. I tried to reassure myself that Tory, if anyone, knew how to display art, but I was angry that she had changed our plans without telling me first. It was as though the sculptures and I had lost our footing.

A huge crowd began swarming in, and in a short time the gallery was packed with collectors and critics, artists and actors, models and musicians from all over the globe. A perfectly divvied up demographic of the fabulous and known commandeered the gallery, sidewalk, and street, extending the party into the cold, deep SoHo night.

I was standing in line for the bar to get a glass of wine; the opening was in full bloom. Everyone knew so many there—there were shrieks and huddles and embraces. I tried to remember what I had thought it’d be like. Not this. I’d thought…smaller. Dispersed. People talking quietly. I’d thought…museum, I realized suddenly, not prom night, Vogue, and the Concorde rolled into one.

A six-foot-plus drag queen was in line ahead of me. When he/she had arrived, I’d thought, What an exceptionally tall woman, but so nicely dressed. I recognized the Oscar de la Renta dress from the window at Bergdorf ’s on my walks home from work, and there it was cinching a waist before cascading down in a profusion of flowered satin. “But look at the hands,” the Spanish artist had said in my ear, nodding a couple of times. “That’s how you tell.” Then he walked away to meet him/her.

Suddenly I was bumped. Pushed, really, into him/her. And as I tried to right myself, the wine that was held up high in his/her hand poured straight down the front of my dress.