Always the Last to Know(49)
New York had its hooks in me, and I believed with all my heart that I would make it.
When you’re a student in that city, all you see around you is what you could become. It is a city of wanting—wanting to live in that neighborhood, have that view, stride through that lobby every day. Wanting to show at this gallery, eat at this restaurant, be a regular at that bar. Wanting to shop at that boutique, wear those clothes, be invited to that person’s parties. Wanting to know all the city’s secrets.
I started bicycling all over the city, and the overriding emotion I felt was a combination of wonder and hunger. When I saw a woman who seemed to have it all, I wanted to be her—the confidence, the look, the way she belonged, the casual grace and comfort she exuded just walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant. Me, I’d almost killed myself gawking at a particularly beautiful building on the Upper East Side, and a cop yelled at me when I attempted to zip through the intersection on a yellow light, which apparently wasn’t done in the Big Apple. Everywhere I went, I wondered, Who are these people? How do they pull it off? How do they make it?
I wanted to weave myself into the fiber of this city. I wanted to paint it, eat it, breathe it, own it. I wanted to be right without even wondering what right was. I wanted to live in a building with character and flair. I wanted to walk into an art exhibition and have people murmur—“Oh, my God, Sadie Frost is here.” I would be that strangest anomaly—a warm, welcoming, super-successful New Yorker who knew everything and shared everything. The parties I would throw! The students I would mentor! The love and admiration of my peers and teachers! I would be celebrated, and I would give back.
Except I wasn’t, and I didn’t.
The thing about going to art school is that you’re surrounded by talent. I might’ve been the best artist in my graduating high school class, but as I hit the end of my sophomore year of college, I started to see that I was . . . average. Skilled. We’d all started off as talented kids. All of us had different strengths. But while I’d been great at the technical aspects of art, now was the time where my professors were using words like fragility, vision, articulation . . . and they weren’t using them on my pieces.
That was okay. I’d learn. I’d change. I could refine my voice and clarify my point of view. My travels had deepened and educated me—didn’t I backpack through Europe with ten bucks in my pocket? Didn’t I sleep under a tree in the Parc Municipal in Luxembourg? I bought breakfast for the old woman who begged for food outside Temple Expiatori del Sagrat Cor in Barcelona and talked to the heroin addicts of Manchester. Surely all those things made me a real artist. I would take it all and express it, beauty and darkness both, hope and despair, rage, loneliness, love . . .
“Sadie,” my professor sighed during my senior year conference, “you have to stop trying to be what you’re not.” She pointed to the angry scribbles of charcoal. “This is what you think art should be.”
I tried not to let my confusion show. Wasn’t that the point?
She tilted her head. “Do you even know what you want to say with your art?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s the melding of rage and darkness with the, um, the scope of architectural beauty and . . . uh, poverty. But hope, too. That things will change. For the better.”
She grimaced.
“How is this worse than Zach’s work?” I asked, because yes, my classmate had also done a series of black charcoal abstracts and gotten a show at Woodward Gallery in fucking SoHo.
My teacher folded her hands. “Zach’s work shows a modernist fusion and battle of urban life and nature. It’s a poem to the fragility and strength of humanity. The minimal quality of movement, the strength of message . . . if you don’t see the difference, Sadie, I’m concerned.”
I cried on the phone that night to Noah. “She’s wrong,” he said. “You’re fantastic, Sadie. You are. You just have to . . . I don’t know. Find your audience.”
“You mean, paint pictures of sunsets and sell them to the summer people?”
“Well, yeah. What’s wrong with that, Special?”
It was the wrong time to use that nickname, beloved though it had always been. I had just been told I was anything but special. “I want more, Noah! I don’t want to be stuck in that stupid town, painting stupid pictures of stupid clouds!”
He answered with silence.
Right. I’d given him that painting of clouds, and he’d just hung it in the little apartment he’d rented over the hardware store. He’d sent me a picture of it there.
“I’m sorry,” I said belatedly.
A few weeks later was the senior art show. Our school sent out invitations to art buyers and critics, gallery owners and collectors. Some students got a big break this way, and I was hopeful, anxious . . . and a little desperate.
Noah came, as well as my parents. “Your stuff is the best here,” he said, ignoring the fact that everyone seemed clustered around Zach the charcoal boy and Aneni, a woman who painted strange animals with miraculous detail.
My work wasn’t the best. I knew it, and so did everyone except Noah. Dad told me he was so proud of me and couldn’t wait to see what was next . . . which, in my funk, I interpreted as “keep trying and maybe you’ll get better someday.” My mother bought one of Zach’s paintings. “Imagine what this will be worth in ten years,” she said, and I wanted to bite her.