The juice of New York was something he could understand. American rage, freedom from European classicism and the deathly Common Market. Still, he had problems with his stomach. It was fifteen or sixteen years since he had moved to New York. Now his artists were famous for painting cartoon char- acters, primitive computerlike drawings, rip-offs of Navaho and African art. He was riding the crest of the future, it was better that he hadn't stuck with painting. He had been involved with a revolutionary group, in the 1960s: one of the members had gone up to the offices of a famous art publication and chopped off his finger on the desk of the senior editor. This was a statement. He and two others had bombed the information desk at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a small bomb; none of them expected that a few paintings would receive smoke damage, shrapnel. Only a Miro was beyond restoration. A year's suspended sentence: ten years later, people still tried to fight with him in bars. But his old self no longer seemed to have any relationship to his present one.
He had told George Lodge he would go up to his Forty-second Street studio to look at his new paintings that afternoon; by now it was too late to go to the gallery first. He took a cab uptown. The streets, even this early in the summer, were unbelievably filthy; the pavement seemed to be oozing its own sediment, the reek of grilling meat, hot dogs, shashlik, burnt and greasy, was like the smell of some garbage incinerator. He had to fight his way around the hustlers, past the electronic junk stores, to get into George's building. The elevator stank of roach spray and mothballs.
The radio was turned up so loud he had to bang on the door over and over before George heard him and let him in. "George, George," Victor said, "how can you listen to that junk?" He walked into the room. To work in such squalor. The reek of acetone, a tipsy brain-crumbling shrillness, almost knocked him off his feet. Spray paint, fixative, polyurethane. No molecules resembling oxygen were left anywhere, the air conditioner was apparently out of order and the windows sealed shut. The O and CO2 forced out by the tougher, man-made particles, which lacerated the lungs as they floated here and there. George stood sulkily by the door, his long galoot face surly and elegant, as Victor pulled stuff from the racks. Scrawled on various half-finished canvases:
USED AFTER A NON-FINITE OR VERBLESS CLAUSE AT THE BEGINNING OF A SENTENCE: TO GET THERE ON TIME, SHE LEFT HALF AN HOUR EARLY.
USED BEFORE AND AFTER A NON-DEFINING RELATIVE CLAUSE OR A PHRASE IN APPOSITION, WHICH GIVES MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE NOUN IT FOLLOWS: THE PENNINE HILLS WHICH HAVE BEEN A FAVORITE WITH HIKERS FOR MANY YEARS ARE SITUATED BETWEEN LANCASHIRE AND YORKSHIRE.
QUEEN ELIZABETH TWO, A VERY POPULAR MONARCH, CELEBRATED HER SILVER JUBILEE IN 1977.
George smoked a cigarette while he looked. "Someday you're going to have an explosion in here," Victor said. The grim pseudo-African faces, topped with penile projections, reared from their gloomy canvases. "Now, you should go and look at the work of Léger, George," he said. "Take a look at this painting. The composition is all wrong. On the bottom, over here, should be a thick triangle. And all of these shapes, they should have a heavy shadow to the right. You have something here, but it's not there yet. How can you work when your studio looks like a bomb hit it?"
"Victor, did you get my letter?" George's arms were too long, like a gibbon, shooting from imaginary tree to tree.
"What letter? Why don't you get a chair, someplace I can sit?" He went and looked out the window. It was bleak here on Forty-second Street, no sign of vegetable life to prove that the season was spring. Across the way was a peep show, two nude women in neon; one, with the tube burnt out in her leg, flickered on and off. "Give me some paper." George didn't move. Victor peeled a piece of newsprint paper off the floor and took a gold pen from his lapel pocket. "I'm excited about what you're doing, George, but I'd like to see you working from extensive drawings, it would give me the feeling that you've spent time working these things out. See, this is what Oldenburg did. He started with small sketches, let's say for his giant cigarette. He made sketches, these today are worth a hundred thousand. Then he went out and found cigarettes, hundreds of butts. He studied these. Then he had a craftsman, a master craftsman, make a small cigarette butt from metal. Then he had medium-sized ones made from clay."
"Victor, didn't you read that letter I sent you?"
"Wait, just let me finish. Then you'll talk. This is important, George. This could change your whole way of working. How Oldenburg worked, when he was finally ready, he built his giant cigarette butt in soft sculpture. Whether you like his work or not—"
"Hike Oldenburg."
"You have to agree that the man was a genius. So you have the whole gamut, do you see what I'm getting at, here, George? You have the whole gamut, from sketches to paintings to the final soft sculpture; it's not as if he just got an idea and slapped it onto canvas. When you're working, you should do drawings first, then you should make the painting in squares. Each individual square, a segment of the painting, should be as complete and fully realized as the whole work. Go and look at Léger, George. He knew about composition. That's who you could be like, if you spent a little more time on these things." In his excitement the thick, oily feeling rose up in his chest, as if the stomach contents were backing up the esophagus like a kitchen sink. He fumbled for a Turns.
"Victor, can I say something now?"
"What? George, I came all the way up here this afternoon, just to take a look at your work, and I can see you're already on the defensive."
"Victor, I'm trying to tell you: I sent you a letter listing twenty points that would have to change for me to stay with the gallery, and I don't think you even read the letter."
"No, I haven't read any letter! George, I just got back from Chicago, I had to spend all week getting ready for the Madrid art fair, I'm leaving for Madrid tomorrow—what's your problem?"
"I don't know if we should talk about it until you've read my letter. Basically, it's about your attitude. I've seriously been considering leaving the gallery for a long time now, Victor. I don't see how I can stay unless you have a change of attitude."
"Attitude! What attitude! George, why don't you come to me if you have problems? You go around complaining to your friends, this doesn't make me look good."