The front door of the Mad Son Electric Gallery swung back almost exactly on time, seven P.M., that evening in October, for its opening gala, and the guests outside, who numbered exactly seven, were unaware that anything much in the way of a delay had taken place. M. J. Powell, temporarily sobbing hostess, could hear, on the other side of the door, Gideon Katz, the boyfriend of Lori Fine, her dancer friend from NYU; Gideon was a mathematician, extremely talkative, and his specialty was knots, and Gerry Abram-owitz loved him, loved everything about him and his knots, how beautiful they could be in the telling, no symbolism to them at all, just knots with numbers describing them, An invariant, you know, that’s any number you can assign to a knot which doesn’t change if you twist the knot or pull on it, like if you wrap a piece of rope around a banister and don’t tie it and just pull on one end, it comes off the banister, well except that they’re not knotted around anything. They just are. So that example doesn’t count. On the other hand, if you havetwo ends in front of you, you cross one over the other, one way would be the positive way and you can assign a number of one to that, the right strand going over the left, a positive crossing, see, and the other way would be negative. So any kind of knot has an algebraic length, get it? The minimum is if you pull on it to get rid of the loops, and so forth. Had to be Gerry that Gideon was talking to. Who else could it be? Who else would tolerate a disquisition on knots? No knotted knot has a crossing number less than three, see, but, unfortunately, its also true that there’s knots that have the same invariant but aren’t the same knot, so it gets complicated. Maybe Gerry had lost his key too. He had left his key in the library up at Columbia, the library for Asian languages, where they had once gone together to kiss, because he liked it so well, its dim, neglected stacks. Books and kissing were related somehow. When she appeared in the threshold of the doorway, to the seven excited guests here for the opening gala, she could see that Gerry was not among them. What a disappointment. And she was a complicated figure to the assembled, too, and instead of attending to them immediately, she watched as, going up the block in the distance, a shade, carrying some bulky object, hastened off. If you have a loop with two crossings in it, then you can pull it and flip it and twist it with just an unknotted loop.
— Are you okay? Lori said. M. J. saw herself as she must have appeared, torn skirt and stockings, face wet, hair matted, an open gash on her thigh.
— A long story, she said. — Come on in.
Here was the part that Gerry would have loved, because it was the part he designed himself. He often made sketches of things, on scrap paper, not terribly adept sketches, but sketches anyhow. One day she’d found the plans for the gallery, scribbled in this style, on the coffee table. Just sitting there. For her. Then she began the job of realizing this interior for the Mad Son Electric Gallery, according to his vision; no whitewash since Tom Sawyer’s was applied with such method. They had taken the whole of the weekend, and while they were laboring, they were laboring together. It involved putting the old sofa, with the stuffing unstuffing, out onto the street, where it disappeared at once. Other furnishings, such as they had, were hidden under white sheets, so that the effect, in toto, was of perfect eggshell, a blank slate, incomplete potential, like in the great galleries. All these years later, fifteen years later, she remembered the sad parts of the story, but the good parts too, as one thinks of youth after it is gone, a laugh, a goof, a riot, made some bad decisions, made some worse decisions, made awful decisions, smoked a Quaalude, slept with a boy on antipsychotic medication, wrecked a car, watched thirteen dawns in thirteen towns, loved people otherwise spoken for, wrote a life story, threw it out, spent recklessly, gave a dog to the ASPCA because it barked, quit speaking to a guy and his friends, gave up dancing, above all, gave up dancing. Tried out for Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones, stayed up nights, didn’t get the job, and then the knee problems, and then social work school, after which she got married to somebody, some other guy. Oh, it wasn’t worth going into. What was attractive became repulsive, this particular habit, this particular inhibition in the beloved, you were married and your heart was in the freezer in the basement. But all that weekend they painted the interior of the gallery, she and Gerry, that was a good weekend. The disappointments from later on never interfered with the memory of washing paintbrushes and rollers with Gerry, holding his hands under the faucet. His hands: long and narrow, fingernails incredibly short, the hair on his hands strawberry blond. All this, his hands under the faucets, the big soft part at the base of his thumb. If she had these hands, fifteen years later, in her own hands, if she had back her youth, she knew she would prize these things in a way she hadn’t then.
The exhibition? The opening?
It took a few moments to sink in. They were huddled in the doorway, in the glare of interior light, her guests. Two or three of them squeezed into the doorway, like Keystone Kops hastening into a comic interior. The paint job was semigloss. The bright illumination of track lighting and the spots that Gerry had erected around the ducts on the ceiling ricocheted from these blank walls. Across the space, into corners, back into the space, the glare of it. Blank walls. Exactly blank. Completely blank. Blank without interruption. As the first two guests lurched into the space, more were just behind, crowding behind them. It wasn’t like every corner had been swept clean. M. J. could see that colony of dust bunnies, making its way, as always, from the heating register under the bay window into the center of the floor. But it was the walls that arrested everyone. Whiteness of the white walls, absolute blankness of the display, absolute poverty of ideas contained in it, M. J. could feel it even where she stood, the moment where each of the guests tried to evaluate whether or not they should consider themselves suckered by the gallery interior. By the implicit privation of the space. There was no exhibition. Or, at least: no art. The art at the Mad Son Electric Gallery was the gallery, was the fact of its presentation, was its concept, was its appearance, was its history, was its ambition. There was a discouraging silence, while each of them made his or her way past each of the dividers that separated the exhibition space, looking, making sure there wasn’t some tiny, postage-stamp-sized statement somewhere that might account for what they were not seeing.
Gideon was the first to get the drift. By exercising the powers vested in him as a doctor of philosophy in mathematics, he found that the piece of art that most fascinated him was the table on which the case of wine sat, still in its box. A pair of sawhorses with a door across the top of them, a sheet thrown over the whole thing, bottled wine on top. Meaning is usage, after all. Right? An interpretation of a gallery, not a gallery itself. You rope it off, but the ropes themselves are the artwork. Something like that. I can get behind it. Let’s drink. A good preliminary theory, anyway, unless it was the people contained in the gallery who were the show, a bunch of youngsters from the Mile Square City of Hoboken, NJ, who had come through intersecting routes, to be here, at this moment of disappointment. M. J. stood at the mirror by the front door, attempted to fix her makeup. There was Gideon and Lori, and the three locals — musicians, one of whom had once played bass for Yo La Tengo. There was her cousin Nicky Jarrett, who never said boo, his girlfriend of the week, called Annabelle. They all made themselves comfortable. The ancient crushed grape flowed from a decanter. Gideon acted as steward for the event, carrying the first and second and third bottles around, pouring out their contents, mopping up the overturned glasses.