The Genius

KELLERMAN

Trouble Sunstroke

Beyond Our Control

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS Publishers Since 1838 Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright Š 2008 by Jesse Kellerman

All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kellerman, Jesse.

The genius Jesse Kellerman.p>

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4362-1338-X

1. Art galleries, commercial—Fiction. 2. Drawing—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title. PS3561.E38648G46 2008 2008005810

813’.54—dc22

BOOK DESIGN BY MEIGHAN CAVANAUGH

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To Gavri

True art is always found where we least expect it, where nobody is thinking about it or saying its name.

Art hates to be recognized and greeted by name.

It flees instantly.

—Jean Dubuffet

… a mirror of smoke, cracked and dim in which to judge himself …

— The Book of Odd Thoughts 13:15

5

n the beginning, I behaved badly. I’m not going to lie to you, so allow me to get that on the table right away: while I would like to believe that I redeemed myself later, there’s no question that—in the beginning at least—I lacked a certain purity of purpose. That’s putting it mildly. If we’re being honest, let’s be honest: I was motivated by greed and, more important, by narcissism: a sense of entitlement that runs deep in my genes and that I can’t seem to shake, no matter how ugly it makes me feel, some of the time. Part of the job description, I suppose, and part of the reason I’ve moved on. Know thyself.p>

Christ. I promised myself that I’d make an effort to avoid sounding like a pretentious prick. I ought to be more hardboiled; I’d like to be. I don’t think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes. (My heroine’s a brunette, and not the especially sultry kind; her hair isn’t jet-black and dripping; it’s medium chestnut and, more often than not, pragmatically tied back, workmanlike ponytails or flyaway buns or stashed behind her ears.) I can’t do it, so why bother trying?

We each get one story to tell, and we have to tell it the way that comes naturally. I don’t carry a gun; I don’t get into car chases or fistfights. All I can do is write down the truth, and truthfully, I might be kind of a pretentious prick. That’s all right. I can live with that.

As Sam is fond of saying It is what it is.

Generally, I don’t agree. A more appropriate rule of thumb—for my life, my line of work, and this story—might be It is what it is, except when it isn’t, which is most of the time. I still don’t know the whole truth, and I doubt I ever will.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

All I mean is that, having lived a long time in a world of illusions, a costume-party world, wink-wink and knowingness and quote marks around everything everybody says, it’s a relief to speak honestly. If my honesty doesn’t sound like Philip Marlowe’s, so be it. It is what it is. This might be a detective novel, but I’m no detective. My name is Ethan Muller. I am thirty-three years old, and I used to be in art.

OF COURSE, I LIVE IN NEW YORK. My gallery was in Chelsea, on Twenty-fifth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, one gallery of many in a building whose identity, like that of the city around it, has been in flux more or less since birth. A row of stables; a garage for hansom cabs; then a corset factory, whose downfall coincided with the rise of the brassiere. The building lived on, though, subdivided, reunited, resubdivided, condemned, uncondemned, and—finally—rezoned as residential lofts for young artists, some of whom had taken to wearing corsets as a protofemi-nist throwback. But before the first struggling MFA filmmaker could sign her lease and get her boxes out of storage, the entire art world decided to drag its sagging ass uptown, creating a neighborhood mini-boom.

This took place in the early 1990s. Keith Haring was dead; the East Village was dead; SoHo was dead; everyone had AIDS or AIDS ribbons. Everyone needed a change. Chelsea fit. The DIA Foundation had been there since the late 80s, and people hoped that the move would redeem art from the rabid commercialization that had metastasized the downtown scene.

The developers, nosing out an ideal opportunity for rabid commercialization, took their newly prime piece of real estate and had it rezoned yet again, and in May of ‘95, 567 West Twenty-fifth reopened for business, accepting into its white-walled bosom a few dozen smallish galleries and several large ones, including the airy, double-high, fourth-floor space that would eventually become mine.

I used to wonder what the corset-maker or the stablehands would make of what transacts on their former plot. Where horseshit used to turn the air sulfurous and rank, millions and millions and millions of dollars now change hands. So goes the Big City.

Because of the number of tenants engaged in the same activity—i.e., the sale of contemporary art—and because of the nature of that activity—i.e., frantic, jealous, shot through with schadenfreude—567 frequently feels like a beehive, but a hip and ironic one. Artists, gallerists, assistants, collectors, consultants, and assorted flunkies buzz up and down its smooth concrete halls, nectar-heavy with gossip. It’s a schmoozer’s paradise. There are openings to attend, a sale to scoff at, a resale that makes the first sale look like a bargain—plus all of New York’s standard social touchstones: adulteries, divorces, and lawsuits. Marilyn refers to the building as the High School, for her a term of endearment. Marilyn was homecoming queen, after all.

There’s no lobby, as such. Three concrete steps lead to a steel gate, opened by a numerical keypad, which has about as much thief-stopping power as a twist tie, or perhaps a banana peel on the floor. Everyone relevant knows the code. On the off chance that you’d recently arrived from Mars or Kansas and, never having seen an art gallery before, that you took the first taxi you could find to 567, you would have little trouble gaining admittance. You could wait for an intern to come toddling in, balancing four cups of coffee, all prepared with extreme precision, one for herself and three for her employer. Or you could wait for an artist to show up lugging a hangover and the new canvases he promised eighteen months ago. Or for a gallerist himself, someone like me, getting out of a cab on a cold and windless January Monday, phone pinned between head and shoulder, negotiating with a private party in London, fingers going numb as I count off the fare, filled with a sourceless and dreadful certainty that today was going to be one hell of a day.