Lacey breathed heavily into my ear in one corner of the room, while I was talking to different friends about Ginger: how at last a decent dealer had agreed to take me on. My life was going to be uphill from now on, I could see that. And the general consensus was that I was very lucky, for Ginger was going to be a hot new dealer in a matter of time, and we would make a great team.
When the room cleared out I found Sherman: he was barely able to stand on his feet. In his hand he was holding a glass of white wine that I guessed was not his first or his fifth. "How are you doing, Sherman?" I said. "Fantastic show. Are you pleased?"
He scowled at me, but I did not take it personally.
"I invited Lacey to come with us to dinner," I said. "Which I'm sure is all right."
"Why not?" he said. "Nice to see you. What's that around your waist, dead rats?" But Lacey did not answer, merely smiled mysteriously. "Go across the street for a drink," Sher- man said. "Willow and I will come by in a few more minutes, and then we'll go to dinner."
I wandered around the room for a bit more, so I could get a look at Sherman's work. Well, the room was too small for such massive pieces. They possessed a great deal of energy. Sadly, they were nothing that anyone would want to hang on the wall. It wasn't that they weren't pleasant to look at: they weren't. But it was more a question of how many people would have a fifteen-foot wall that they would want to inflict such large girders of pink and blue upon?
While I was thinking about this I bumped into Jeff Smyll, another one of my roommates from art school whom I couldn't stand. He was small and ridiculous, filling me with loathing. I was sorry to run into him; here I had fantasies of being nominated for sainthood, I considered myself a saintly kind of guy, and yet more and more I was realizing there were thousands of people I couldn't stand.
I tried to think of what it must be like for him. He had always had a thing about his height, and now for him to bump into me like this at an opening, when I was doing so well and he was still just short, must have been painful for him. He was basically a smart guy, basically talented. But the basically that I'm speaking of is basically mediocre. I had to live with him in room 132, back when I still lived in the dorm my first year. He looked like John Denver, and that made it worse. I tried to smile. "Jeff," I said. "Jeff, how are you?"
"Marley," he said. "Marley Mantello, right?" As if he didn't know. He grinned and smiled at Lacey. But sadly Lacey's name slipped momentarily from my mind, and so I didn't introduce them. Because all at once I was remembering why I couldn't stand him. This made my lack of saintliness a little easier for me to accept.
"Eaten any ham lately, Jeff?" I said.
When this guy was my roommate, he never did any work. He always seemed to get by miraculously. For his art project he spent a whole semester copying three fruit carton labels onto little graphs. This was years after Andy Warhol had already thought of the idea. Jeff spent four months on this project—he was the biggest pothead in the world, with a terrible taste in music. But I was still thinking of the ham. I asked him what he was doing.
"You know, I'm home for vacation," he said, grimacing. "I sell pizzas in L.A."
Had I no sympathy? Was I reduced to gloating over a marijuana freak who had spent art school replicating labels? But still, I remembered what he had done, and taking Lacey to one side I told her the story, before she could warm up to him too much.
This guy had bought a ham, a canned ham. He put it on the shelf in our dorm room. I said to him, "Jeff, you have a canned ham—" I was a pretty hungry guy in college. The canned ham gave me ideas.
"Yeah," he said, "I'll make it tomorrow or something."
So I went back to work, but I thought to myself, When you cook that canned ham, buddy, I'll be right here. Because I had to live with him, I might as well get to share in the good things, too.
A week later that canned ham was still there on the shelf, on the side of the room that was his. I said, "Jeff, when are you going to get to that canned ham, it's going to spoil if you leave it up there."
"Yeah, yeah," he said. "I'll get to it."
Another week went by.
"Refrigerate that ham," I said. "It's going to explode otherwise and I don't want to be here when it happens." Every day I said, "Jeff, will you do something about that ham?"
But weeks passed. One night we were both in the room—I was painting and he was duplicating fruit labels. Listening to music and working. All of a sudden there was an explosion. Splattering all over the room—on his side—was the ham. The stench was so bad it was unimaginable. Rotting ham that went off like a bomb. The ironic and funny thing was that nothing on my side of the room was touched. His ham was situated at such an angle that only his side of the room was covered with rotten particles of ham. But the air was so full of fumes I literally had to run out of there so as to save myself from vomiting.
Inside of ten minutes the entire dorm was empty. No one could stay in the building. Jeff went back into the room, his face covered with a wet towel, and threw the remains he could collect into a garbage can. They had to burn the contents of the pail. The entire dorm smelled for a week.
Lacey and I each had a quick drink in the Korean joint across the street. The specialty of the house, a ginseng cocktail, was made with shaved ginseng, so it had an extrapowerful kick. "Maybe I shouldn't drink this stuff," I told Lacey. "My stomach—very sensitive." But I left her there and went back across the street to the gallery to find out what was keeping Sherman and Willow.
Willow was a sorry elf. How she made her living I don't know. She wasn't poor, she lived in a big, whitewashed loft, with built-in couches covered with dirty white cushions vaguely reminding me of straitjackets. I used to like to go over to her place, with Sherman or alone, because she had a huge color television, the largest kind made before movie-screen size. It was the same kind I planned to buy as soon as I got rich. She was another of Borah's artists—but she couldn't possibly have survived on what she made through Borah's gallery, because Borah didn't make money for anyone except himself.
Willow's sculptures were made from Plexiglas, some kind of polyurethane substance, ethereal and resembling large turds made of spun sugar.
Well, I was very fond of Willow: I liked her. She reminded me, as I say, of a sort of fatigued-looking elf, a Peter Pan who had aged perceptibly but refused to accept it. Her pale red hair was wispy and stuck out from her head like duckling down. It may be that she resembled my sister; there was some connection there, the very vagueness of them.
Anyway, Sherman and Willow came back out to the Korean place for a drink before we went to meet Borali and his assistant in a Japanese restaurant, Willow already a little unsteady on her feet. From what I had seen she lived on a diet of champagne cocktails and diet cigarettes. She, like Sherman, could be found in the farthest recess of any seedy bar; the Three Roses on Canal Street, Stanley's down near the World Trade Center, the Gulag Archipelago ...crammed into the back of a bar, drinking alone or with friends, her ghostly white face with childish circles under the eyes and a perky snout of a nose that turned up just a trifle too much at the tip. The nose seemed to say, "I'm a jaunty, easygoing sort of person." When in reality she was superior in her attitude and at the most innocuous of comments from anyone would jump to a fight. Which amused me greatly, for when we sat down at the bar next to Lacey I started to complain about deodorant commercials. "What the hell does anybody need deodorant for?" I said. "You know, I never wear the stuff—I never smell, and I think it's all a hoax thought up by big corporations to get the American public to shell out money."