It’s cold enough that he turns up his collar before the door has slammed behind him. The cab he’s requested idles near the curb, chuffing exhaust in idyllic puffs that make him think of Christmas. A girl with a cigarette seems to be watching him from under the streetlight on the corner, her eyes following him without interest. A hot young thing from a different world than his. There’s the future and there’s the past, he thinks. He wants to arrive at some insight about the two, but after a minute the best he can come up with is Fuck ’em both. He gets in the cab, and they creep out onto the avenue, and maybe he’s being an old man about it, but the cars out on the road seem reckless tonight, some of their drivers drunk, some only tired, all of them collisions just waiting to happen. He gives the driver cross streets, and the man nods without saying anything. Dov hears a chattering, and for a moment thinks the man has a little radio in his ear before he recognizes it as a Bluetooth headset. Whoever is on the other end must be saying something funny, because the cab driver gives off a long, slow chuckle, so low and so dark it’s like he’s laughing in a different language.
EVERY FACE IN THE CROWD
Deckinger had a painting by Evan Durant in his foyer, one of the larger canvases, maybe four feet by six feet. How much it had cost him I didn’t know, but I knew other Durants, smaller Durants, had sold for more than thirty thousand. None of my friends could boast a foyer, let alone thirty large to decorate it. Rounding the corner into his living room I was confronted with a kind of optical mystery: the condo, which from its little brick façade should have been cozy if not cramped, was as spacious as the house I grew up in. That’s the type of magic money can make. A part of me hated coming to Beacon Hill, because I started to see price tags on everything: on the Durant, on Deckinger’s artisan dinner table and matching leather couches and the beveled lowball glass out of which he drank an amber liquid I didn’t want to know the price of. He had poured a glass for me as well. It tasted like a winter cake with candied fruit.
“I don’t know my spirits very well.”
“Cognac,” he said. “Paul Giraud.”
He surprised me by having the tact not to talk up the drink or say how much he’d paid for the Durant. I’d brought a portfolio for him to look at, and I set it on the table. He flipped through it quickly, then said he’d thought I would bring some of the actual pieces.
“Pumpkins?” I said. “You wanted me to haul pumpkins here on the T?”
“How do you deliver the finished product?”
“That’s just one at a time.”
“Well, that’s thinking a bit small, isn’t it?”
He wanted to play with me, to pique my artistic humors.
“You looked me up, Mr. Deckinger. Saw one of my carvings in your neighborhood, right? Consider that a sample.”
“Victor Newburn, and I really had to wring it out of him.”
Newburn was Chair of Humanities at Harvard, and lived the next street over. He had commissioned me for a jack-o’-lantern mock-up of the famous statue of the Laocoön priest and his sons being strangled by Poseidon’s serpents, one of the more interesting assignments I’d taken. I’d ended up needing two pumpkins to encompass the horizontal spread of the tableau.
“I’m offering you a fairly big job. Ten pumpkins, five across, two high. A real panorama of Boston: the skyline, Back Bay, the Hancock, the Pru, the Charles with maybe a sailboat or two. But a knockout job.”
“You realize Halloween is this Saturday?”
“Let’s be honest. I really want to kick Newburn’s ass.”
“You want to kick his ass… with art?”
“Art’s got to have some utility, right?”
“You know I charge five hundred for a pumpkin? Ten pumpkins is five thousand dollars.”
“Do I get some kind of bulk discount?”
I looked around at the rich accoutrements of his condominium and took another sip of his cognac. “No. Do you know anyone else who does this?”
He smiled. It was the answer he’d been looking for. I told him I’d draw up a contract, but that I’d need enough up front to cover the cost of the pumpkins themselves. He fished his wallet from his back pocket and handed me twenty-five hundred in cash. “Half now, half on delivery.” He noted that I’d seemed interested in the painting in his foyer and encouraged me to admire it for as long as I liked on my way out.
Like every Durant since 1996, it was a painting of a crowd, this one a Tokyo crosswalk at the end of the workday, thousands of identical black suits approaching each other and passing like the densest school of fish. It was painted from the perspective a few feet above, as if someone had stood on a ladder to view the scene, and the style was almost photorealistic—in fact, it appeared photorealistic from more than five feet away, and all the Durants we’d seen in class had seemed that way on the projection screen.
A fellow student had derided Durant as Where’s Waldo? for grown-ups, and the rest of the class, myself included, had lazily agreed. Professor Wei said we’d have to stand in front of one to understand, and he was right. From afar it looked simply like a picture of a crowd taken without any regard to composition, the entire canvas filled with people. “There’s no central focus, no subject,” I’d said in class. But in the foyer, as I stepped closer, I saw that each face was a focal point, that everyone in that crowd, maybe two hundred people within the frame, had a unique expression. I first looked at a young man glowing with ambition. He’d done something praiseworthy in his office that day. Another owed money to a friend, and another was drunk already, leaving work. I went from face to face, gleaning their stories. Preoccupation, delight, every state of humanity perfectly rendered. Each visage could have been a painting in its own right. As Professor Wei had said, “Every face is in the crowd, but no face is the crowd.” No wonder a new canvas only hit the market every few years.
I walked through Beacon Hill back toward the T station, sure I was going to be robbed. I squeezed the lump of cash to make certain it didn’t slip out of my pocket somehow, fearful that if I took my hand out the wad of bills would come out with it and fall directly into a storm drain. Such are the puckish proportions a critical mass of hard money can take on to one underfamiliar with it.
Beacon Hill was beautiful, and it made me angry. It was postcard Boston, with rows of red-brick condominiums with quaint porches, strung in places with ivy, narrow cobbled streets, and little walkable alleys. I’d seen a news item the year before about a parking spot in Beacon Hill selling for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. John Kerry had a house there, and Uma Thurman. Daniel Webster and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had lived there. The people making art in this city did not: they lived in Jamaica Plain, Chinatown, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Somerville. Their apartments weren’t made of brick, and there was no hint of ivy. It wasn’t fair that everyone in the most beautiful part of the city was a moneymaker, that one had to buy his way in. The rest of my walk to the station, I thought of how different a world it would be if that Durant lived instead with whoever loved it the most.
I began as an undergraduate at Boston University in 1996, and moved into a three-bedroom apartment in Allston with four other guys. Coming from a suburb of a suburb of Champaign, Illinois, I thought Allston was the heart of the city. With Korean restaurants and record shops and Blanchards liquor (even though I was too young to shop there), how could it not be? And since my friends had gone to UIUC, if not community college, if not no college at all, I saw myself as a grand adventurer, as a very rare individual. My four roommates and I were the type to migrate from the country to the city.