— I can’t get this guy and his friends off my step, I dropped my case of sodas, M. J. called to Anthony Somebody, on the far side of Madison. — I have a party starting in an hour.
— That’s nothing, Anthony said. — Couple of dogs, right? Pretty girl like you. Could be worse. Could be rats.
Anthony stepped off the curb. As though stepping across the Hudson River itself, separating this Jersey side from that NYC side, but at the moment of this historic voyage from the curb there was, unfortunately, a convergence of bad luck. A pair of young guys in sweatshirts driving what was probably a stolen Camaro slowed, and the driver of this vehicle waved at Anthony Somebody, and Anthony waved back, and one of the dogs bolted between parked cars on M. J.’ side, and everything was possible in this moment, the movements of the dramatis personae, dancers upon a proscenium, all converged, another bottle of soda popped, the Camaro swerved, struck the crosstown bus, and Mrs. John J. Vincenzo of Adams Street was thrown clear, from her perch on the steps of the crosstown bus, over her walker, and onto the pavement, onto accumulations of automobile glass, and there was a muffled cry from her, and a screech of tires, and the Camaro from the ’84 model year rumpled like an expensive suit after an evening of embraces, and Anthony Somebody, attempting to wade into the street, attempting to contribute in a civic way to a dangerous congregation of hounds, fell to the curb, grasping for his leg, so that M. J. could see the comb-over on the summit of his head. At first, she thought Anthony’s injury was a bluff, a way to deny aid in the midst of civic upheaval. But Anthony had lurched forward between Hyundai and Ford Escort, Goddamn it! collapsing onto the ground, immediately hiking up blue flannels to reveal navy blue socks of the sort that you might get at one of these haberdashers on Union Square where a guy on a stepladder served as discount law enforcement. Anthony began to rub his ankle, blaspheming softly.
M. J. slipped across the great divide of Madison, behind a police car drawing near. — You okay?
Anthony apparently knew from the block these kids who were driving the Camaro that had smacked the crosstown bus that had disgorged Mrs. Vincenzo, the bus which had formerly housed a dozen private school kids from the Catholic school uptown, Joey, is that your brothers car, does he know you took his car out like this, you’re out joyridingyou smack up your own brothers car? It was a customized car, too, and Joey was the younger brother of the guy at the corner grocery near her, the younger brother of the guy who owned the grocery who no longer much spoke to M. J., because, she suspected, she kept using the store address for parcel deliveries from the catalogues. One day when she strode in for a can of lentil soup, the guy and his wife were calling out to her from behind a wall of corrugated-cardboard shipping containers, from J. Crew and Tweeds, Miss Powell, could you please take some of these boxes over to your place, because were having trouble moving around in here, in the store. Blouses and sweaters and linen jackets and black leotards and jeans and swimsuits and hats. The younger brother, who had been loitering in an aisle near the canned goods, had volunteered to help carry her boxes. Joey. And Joey and his pal Mike were now out of the car (near a prone Mrs. Vincenzo) inspecting the front end, repeating their own decorous obscenities, pacing nervously.
Gerry got the idea for the gallery in a certain bar on Second Avenue. In Manhattan. They used to go there after thesis recitals at Tisch. One girls performance involved a relation to dirty laundry; she had brought out a laundry bag and put on a tape of a song featuring miserably chortling synthesizers, and, amid kinesthetic combinations that resembled the process of giving birth, she scattered laundry across the stage, halter tops, underwear, tights. No dry-clean-only items. It was after this piece that Gerry got the idea. Probably soon after. He had moved in, she had just invited him to move in, and he remarked that the gallery scene in the East Village had been indispensable, and with so many musicians living in Hoboken now, so many artists, there was a real scene, there was Maxwell’s and there were all these bands, and things were really happening, it was the right time for a gallery, in Hoboken, a gallery, a samizdat kind of thing, that would reflect the local artists, like there were definitely some great artists out there, and there was all the loft space, and they could sort of serve as a hub, a nexus, for all of these artists, and maybe there would be a Hoboken style, like there was southwestern style. M. J. had taken some art history courses in school; she’d taken this one course where, on the final exam, she’d compared Piet Mondrian’s reduction of the vocabulary of classical painting to the way a student on a final exam attempts to reduce the movement and vocabulary of the semester’s work down to a single essay question, and she had received an A for the paper and therefore for the term. She then elected to reuse this idea, a semester later, for the mid-term on the Abstract Expressionists and Their Era, this time receiving a C minus. Where the hell was Gerry, while policemen hovered over Mrs. Vincenzo like the mob in deposition paintings; while Joey and Mike argued with the driver of the crosstown bus; while the children who’d been on the bus were spilling out onto the street, Five dollars on the black lab! That’s not a lab! Gerry didn’t know too many artists. He’d dated a woman from Barnard who painted portraits of her wealthy family in the style of court paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and he’d approached her for the Mad Son Electric Opening Gala. M. J.’s cousin Nicky Jarrett, who’d gone to Cooper Union and who specialized in sculptures featuring balloons with smiley faces on them — shunts and fuses and tubes housing balloons which then inflated and uninflated, circularly — had also refused. The artists she’d known years before were not artists anymore. They were graphics designers. What was art, but something that you could get into a bank lobby, or something that a large law firm or junk-bond brokerage boutique acquired through a committee on decorations to sell later at a profit; or, as Nijinsky said, Ifelt disgust and therefore could not finish the ballet. The Mad Son Electric Gallery had made more progress with the Hoboken Reporter, in terms of media penetration, than it had made with the artists who might show upon its walls. Gerry had begun to call frantically around town asking if anyone knew any artists at all who worked in Hoboken, any artists who worked in the loft spaces over in the midtown section of Hoboken near the projects, and sometimes, at dusk, he wandered the streets, gazing in windows.