Her full, meaty lips turned down in a pout. Her blue eyes, smeared with dusky liner, voluptuously fringed, stared at him with childish rage. "Come on, Victor, just try it." She thrust the pad at him. He scribbled hands at the one and three. "Victor! Wait until I'm thinking of the time on the watch! Try and picture the hands in your mind." She ripped the used page from the pad. "Okay, I'm picturing the time on the watch," she said. "Now do you see it in your head?"
"Okay, okay," he said. He drew on the clock, fifteen to seven.
"Let's see," she said. "Look, Victor, look at the watch!" Her wristwatch was set at five thirty-five. "See, it's close," she said. "Only an hour and ten minutes off. Isn't that amazing?"
"It's nowhere near," he said.
"No, it is near," she said. "I mean, you could have written two o'clock, or anything. But you were close." Her tongue, a little blistered flap. Parrots had tongues of the same stumpy variety, pointed, beefy. Her obsession with ESP was perpetual. "What flavor am I thinking of?" "Vanilla." "Close—tomato!" And if he had been able to guess, what would have been the use of ESP of this nature? Often, when she claimed to be cleaning the house, he would come upon her fondling a spoon, attempting—by using psychic energy—to bend it with mind power alone. She insisted this could be done. Yet even if possible, he said, he didn't need or want their spoons bent. "Oh, Victor," she said. "Don't be an old poop." He had ended up with a woman, pretty as a fawn, who used such expressions. "Twat." "On the rag." Words still had the power to offend, coming from a woman. Not by meaning so much as sound.
Years ago, in his artist days, he had written a book. B.B., Before Bomb. The book was called Mgungu, it had little text. His wild English friends, decked in sixties' sequins and satins, arrived in Manhattan and posed for a series of pictures: staggering out of a studio-set jungle, indulging in birdlike mating rituals. The book was a spoof. Once he had been an outsider, a marginal figure, capable of making fun. Now he saw things were too serious for that. The world was on the edge of collapse, like a balloon with a pinprick. Yet on this edge it was possible for exciting changes to occur. The artists he had found were like angry babies, furious, spoiled, needing constant attention. Without his nurturing they would hit their heads against the wall, red and squawling, until they beat themselves into exhaustion and died, or gave up. Only through him could they remain in their childlike state of innocence, carefully tended, receiving enough money and attention to enable them to produce.
His brother was sitting on the sofa in his office. Above his head a painting by Stash Stosz: red speckled chickens, pink Bullwinkle moose heads, a man stuck in a gorilla suit, minus the head, arms flailing at the zipper. $5,000. Less discount, $3,800. Fifty percent went to the gallery: not even enough to keep him open for a week. Leo looked uncomfortable. Wearing a cheap pinstriped suit, his face washed-out, as if he had spent too many years under fluorescent lights. Though he was younger than Victor, he looked older—married for twelve years, two children—his wife was a Yemenite Jew, who never came with Leo when Victor insisted he attend the dinners for the artists following various openings. With Leo's sad little twitches—a squint of the eyes, a nervous cough—Victor could not help but feel sorry for him. He had insisted Leo move from New Jersey with his family to Queens, leave his job. Now Leo would manage the gallery business, organize computer records. This would be a change for the better for Leo, though he claimed not to have been unhappy in his dreary life in New Jersey. Somewhere along the line he had died, figuratively speaking. Victor remembered how sparky Leo had been at eleven, playing both teams of an imaginary cricket game in the backyard, a green chiffon scarf around his neck, keeping careful score in a notebook. A tiny, angelic child with pale curls. At some point that imaginative cherub had been swallowed up by a middle-aged English accountant. Now Leo was talking about the house he had finally rented in Bayside. "So I told Orna to call the landlord again. This is the fifth time in a week, Victor. The upstairs toilet is still leaking, and the water is dripping into the ceiling and all the plaster in the living room is bulging, about to burst. Finally the landlord said if we wanted anything done, we'd have to pay for it ourselves."
"What are you renting for? Why don't you just buy the place?"
"I don't have the money to buy a house, Victor. I can't even afford to rent."
"Listen, I wanted you to come in last week. I'm going to Madrid tomorrow night, you're going to have to be here while I'm gone. I've set up an office for you in the basement. The contractor said he'd put in new lighting by the end of the week. All those things we went over, Leo—I'd like you to be able to have files set up on every artist, which paintings of theirs we're holding, where the paintings have been sold to, how much money should be coming in for payments and by whom."
"We went over all this, Victor. I don't know why you wanted me to come in this afternoon. Nothing's unpacked at home, I left Orna with—"
"Because, Leo, this is very important that I feel you understand what's going on here. I want to feel you'll be able to handle any problem that comes up while I'm gone. Don't rush in here like that, acting like I'm imposing on your time or that there's something more important you could be doing. I'm expecting to feel that you're just as conscientious and concerned about everything that takes place here as I am."
"You sound like you need a vacation."
"Yes, I need a vacation. I would love to be able to take a vacation. But when things are happening with the gallery like this, with my artists, it's necessary that I—or someone equally involved—be here every single minute as the problems arise." He could feel himself becoming worked up; why was it that he felt as if he were under water? He had to shout to make himself heard, and even then all he was greeted with were blank expressions.
Meanwhile Sasha was buzzing on the intercom; the collector Larry Nims had arrived and was looking around at the show. Leo stood up to go. "Leo, Leo, don't go. I want you to stay and meet Larry, you're a part of this now."
He led the pudgy Larry Nims down to the storage racks in the basement. It was late, maybe close to five. The gallery was empty. He was not unaware of his snobbery. This snobbishness was of an elaborate, complex, obscure order. The rules, which entailed ratings by family history, personal accomplishments, physical attractiveness, dress and personal hygiene, also wealth, were so complicated that often even he grew confused, rushing to greet a woman in a pricey mink coat while ignoring an internationally acclaimed artist who had entered the gallery at the same time. Larry Nims had no one else vying for Victor's attention. He came in from Colorado once or twice a year, to buy in the $3,500 range. He considered himself a big collector; there were as yet no paintings of Day-Glo colors or Quick Draw MacGraw up in the ski lodges of Aspen.
"Even in China, on the collective farms," Victor said, "ideology is no longer as important as making money." He was pulling out a series of lithographs, $1,500 each, that Carl Ballow had made the year before. So far mostly unsold. "They have a saying, 'The rice field is soaked with the sweat of the peasants, the food on your plate is all hardship, every grain of it.' That's the quality I'd like my artists' work to have: I want them to rely on their shoulders, their muscles, the strength of their bodies."
Larry Nims giggled nervously. There was the feeling that everyone—Sistina included—was his enemy. They were laughing at him behind his back. Also they had an intimacy with each other that he was not privy to. He could not help but be critical of others, this was something they must have sensed in him. Especially when he saw so clearly what was wrong with each of them. Yet underneath this, perhaps they could not tell, was a feeling of love.