Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(42)
At last I arrived at an idea for the studio show: a life-size video projection of a poker game. It was part of a series of “happenings” that I filmed from the ceilings of rooms and then projected, often back into the very spaces where the events had been recorded.
Having spent the afternoon at the studio setting up for the shoot, I pulled a rectangular table into the center of the room, climbed on top, and attached my video camera to the ceiling. Then I spent an hour adjusting the angle of the camera, observing the image of the tabletop on a monitor, lining the edges up with the frame.
With the show only a few days away, an oppressive mood had settled over the studio. Dispirited, Mike and Ole tinkered for hours with a broken video projector. Tanja came over from across the hall to use our bathroom, but didn’t stop to talk. Gary sat at his desk, ignoring everyone.
My poker-playing friends were due at any moment, but then the phone rang and I went over to answer.
It was my brother Bobby. “So, dad eloped with that . . . thing.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh at this, or cry. I leaned into the wide windowsill, observing the desolation of the street outside, dead grass studding the empty lot beyond like patches of mold on old bread. Tiny flecks of rain blew sideways through the air.
“Where?” I said.
“At Gruhn’s—that redneck guitar store in Nashville.”
I knew it well, the store. My father spent tens of thousands there each year buying vintage Martin guitars and selling others back for pennies on the dollar. “I thought he was going to invite us to a wedding or something.”
“Well, he was with Elisa and Ginger Boatwright and they all got drunk and threw an impromptu wedding. No prenup. Nothing. Bingo, right? Mom is f*cking pissed.”
Ginger was a buxom and soulful bluegrass singer, a friend whose career my father had probably subsidized. She herself had wanted to marry him at one point, but he must have been holding out for a young thing like Elisa.
Hanging up the phone, I felt as if a truckload of wet concrete had just been dumped on top of me. I wondered how I’d make it through the shoot.
I walked back to the set and adjusted some floodlights around the poker table. Neither Mike nor Gary looked up from his work. Ole watched me silently for a moment, then returned to the broken projector. The old radiators began to kick out some heat, and the room grew warm with the comforting smell of scorched dust.
On the day of the studio show, I stood at the center of the exhibition room, observing my piece for the first time; just a color projection of poker chips and cards, with hands manipulating them on a tabletop. No sound.
With its banal subject matter and lack of implicit critique, the piece came across as . . . nothing more than itself. Rather than enlarging the experience, the all-seeing eye of the camera had reduced it, and I was relieved no one mentioned it to me either during or after the private view, which attracted over a hundred friends and art-world types.
In the disappointment of the show, I couldn’t help but feel the tide had permanently turned for me in London. If the proverbial club sandwich had ever been there, it certainly wasn’t anymore; and I no longer felt deserving of success, anyway.
My flat was a warm, safe cave in which to hibernate through another London winter, and I stayed home for days, subsisting, like my mother, on cream of tomato soup from cans, and sleeping too much. The answering machine picked up my messages with the volume turned all the way down. My clothes sat in piles on the floor.
It seemed I was losing everything all at once: my father, my family, what I’d hoped to be my career. So many blows in so short a time. And that legacy of failure I thought I’d left behind in the States? It had not only caught up—it had overtaken me. I wasn’t the favored one anymore, not anywhere, and it felt like a kind of death, as shameful as it seemed to even think this way.
One day, when the phone rang, I decided to answer it.
“Frances,” said my father. “Will you be coming home for Christmas?”
“I don’t know, Dad.” Sudden tears burned my cheeks raw. “I’m just . . . you know, really, really busy here.”
“What’s wrong?” he said.
Nothing, I told him, and we talked instead about the weather and the beer business, avoiding entirely the matter of his marriage. Elisa, I figured, would be right there in the room beside him, downing a beer, or firing up a smoke. I had to choose my topics carefully. Now I would be the one hovering in the shadows, afraid to speak. The absurdity of the thought made me smile for the first time in days.
I was stretched out on John Hilliard’s sofa in furry leopard pants. John, who lately had taken on something of a fatherly role, sat in the chair to my left, talking over my future with me, red wine and crackers laid out on the table between us. All around us, printed on enormous canvases, were John’s famous photographs, resting against the tables and walls. I adored my friend’s house, formerly the vicarage of an Anglican church, with its Gothic arches and minimalist decor.
“London can really work for you, if you give it some time.” He sipped his glass of cabernet. “Make three more of the inkjet prints, why don’t you, and invite the galleries over to your studio.”
As part of my final exhibition at Chelsea, I’d made a nine-by-nine-foot color print—a partial aerial shot of an unidentifiable town in the North of England—enlarged and sumptuously printed on vinyl, then mounted on stretcher bars in the manner of a painting, much like John’s work. He had assisted me in stretching the “canvas,” an all-day undertaking, and the print had been the focus of much attention during the exhibit. Now it was rolled up in a closet at my studio, collecting dust.