It wasn’t long before Chapman felt like part of the landscape. We all wanted to visit Ling, but we were sick of sickness, sick of death. The East Village was a minefield of disasters that year, and when we trekked up to Chelsea it was more for Chapman’s vivacity than for Ling’s pallor and fatigue. We were tired, after all — some of us were dying ourselves — and Chapman had the energy to crack a joke. Unlike Ling, he could jump up to grab a book from the shelf, could explain with great vigor why you needed to take a second look at Käthe Kollwitz.
Ling had a solo show planned for the following spring at the Whitney, with the unspoken but universal understanding that it would be his last. The apartment was filled with the finished pieces, lumpy twisted things lacquered green and yellow, plus a series of quasi-phallic clay reliefs waiting for their final glaze. Missing were the monolithic forms on which Francisco Ling had made his name, abandoned along with his studio, with his ability to walk down the block. For a while he’d been using a shopping cart, leaning on the handle and wheeling it around the work. In the cart were trays with sponges, putty knives, spray bottles, towels, chisels, clamps. But now even that was too difficult, and a rolling stool became his seat. His tools lay on the floor in a dish rack. When I went there in October, Ling was on the couch with a cup of tea. The television blared campaign news, and he asked me to turn it off.
He said, “You remember Kip.” I hadn’t known this was what he called Chapman — at the party, it had still been Christophe — but I nodded. Chapman’s beard had a way of making his eyes the only thing on his face. Just hair and then eyes, spectacular in the way they refracted light. “He never hit you, did he? Kip, did you ever hit him?”
“I didn’t have that honor,” I said.
“Well, he should have.” It was a compliment.
At this point, Chapman brought me a glass of water and their whole bowl of Halloween candy (“I don’t think we’ll get any kids,” he said, “so eat it all”) and told me he’d found a fifty-dollar bill in a library book that morning. Just when they needed grocery money.
“Everything happens to Kip,” Ling said. “He’s a magnet for fortune.”
I wondered if Ling was including himself in that magnetic field — and if so, whether he considered himself good or bad fortune for Chapman. Famous, but sick. Handsome once, but no longer. Living at the Chelsea, but dying there, too. Adored, but needy.
Artforum, in writing about the buildup to the Whitney show, called Chapman “Mr. Ling’s amanuensis.” A careful, glossy word — as if he were taking dictation for Ling’s memoirs, rather than giving him sponge baths. It was a term I’d learned only recently, one that now, when I hear it, brings back New York 1988 in full Technicolor. We were in a terrible state that year, all of us. The big art money was gone with the ’87 crash. We were pinning our hopes, for Christ’s sake, on Michael Dukakis. And yet there was urgency to everything. Each visit was maybe your last, each voice something to be memorized. It was worth ordering another glass of champagne. When I hear “amanuensis,” I see Chapman’s face, his young face, and I see Ling’s hands, cragged and ruined, and I feel like jumping out of my chair to do things, to see people, before it’s too late.
That day, I showed both of them the Polaroids of my new acrylics. Ling shook his head and told me I should go back to oils, that the oils loved me better. I’d have ignored him, but it turned out to be the last thing he ever said to me, and how can you ignore the last thing a great man says to you?
It’s chilling, how you can spend years with someone and be left with only the smallest pile of scraps. That sentence was one of my scraps. And so eventually I went back to the oils, which did, indeed, love me better.
Here’s what happened: In April, on the night of the Whitney opening, Chapman left Ling at home and headed over early. Ling trusted him to check the lighting, the positioning, to make sure the curator hadn’t messed things up overnight. Ling was supposed to take a cab uptown at eight. He was still strong enough to walk out of the building, but he was going to call Juney if he felt too weak. Chapman had helped him dress, had combed what remained of his hair.
It didn’t feel odd to arrive before Ling, to be greeted by Chapman, his beard soft against your cheek, a drink somehow already in your hand, as the sea of patrons and artists swallowed you up. The work was extraordinary — what had looked small and half-finished in the apartment suddenly luminous and monumental, each piece a triumph of fluidity — and we were awed, each practicing, privately, what we’d say to Ling, testing the words on each other first. “It’s gentle,” I remember saying. “It’s like a détente, a melting.” But the crowd never parted for Ling, the room never hushed. Instead Chapman breast-stroked his way through, sweaty and flushed, and grabbed Juney’s arm. “You’re sure he never called you?”
A few of us stayed behind and tried Ling’s number, again and again, from the pay phones by the entrance, and a few close friends even remained in the gallery, circulating and keeping things upbeat, but at least ten of us sardined into cabs and rode back down to Twenty-third Street, slapping our faces to sober up and wondering if we remembered our CPR, wondering if we’d have the courage to put our mouths to Ling’s.
My cab was the second to arrive at the Chelsea, and when we got up the stairs and through the door and to the living room, Chapman was on the phone with the police — not the paramedics — and we joined in ransacking what was, aside from the absence of Ling, a normal apartment. Wherever he’d gone, he’d taken his essentials: wallet, satchel, toothbrush. His painkillers, but not his AZT. Not the cat, who walked in circles, mewling. What he left behind was a page of shakily written instructions for Chapman: pieces willed to friends, unfinished works to be destroyed. At the bottom, he wrote — at a different slant, an afterthought—“I grant Christophe J. Chapman legal rights to my artistic and physical estate. Please consider this legally valid.”
It was a warm night, and everything was wet when we set out to blanket the city. I wound up with Juney, who braided and unbraided her hair as we walked. She had me carry her shoes. She was never one to be afraid of broken glass. Juney taught me the prayer her Catholic grandmother had used when she couldn’t find her passport or purse: Good Saint Anthony come around, something’s lost and can’t be found! We chanted it over and over, searching the sidewalks and stoops all the way to Gramercy Park and then beyond. I’ve been using it the rest of my life, and it hasn’t brought me much luck ever, except the few times I’ve found my car keys when I certainly would have come across them anyway. I looked Saint Anthony up years later, expecting him to have found a child in the woods or food in a famine — but all he ever found was his lost psalm book. If that’s enough to make you a saint — the reappearance of your book — what, then, were we, wandering in packs and alone, posting signs outside the hospitals and around NYU, not sleeping for three days? Saintly, maybe, if you’re generous, but not saints. Sainthood requires divine intervention, or at least the type of luck that passes for it. But we called the Chelsea every two hours till our quarters were gone, and Ling never came home. We kept our eyes open around the city for months, and no one ever saw him.