“It’s really a masterful one of Zhu’s,” the gallery assistant said. She was straining, Catherine knew, to read the laminated name tag hiding itself between Catherine’s jacket lapels; though it was the second afternoon of the fair and the grabbing and slavering of the big collectors was therefore over with, still Catherine — well-dressed, passably well-groomed — could be somebody it was important to greet — as the girl, finally making out the dangling name and affiliation, realized that Catherine indeed was.
“Oh my goodness, you’re Catherine from Frieze?” she said, and her smile took on its full Manhattan wattage — although they were not in Manhattan, actually; they were on a small island to the east of Manhattan, Randall’s Island, which, because it had space for the giant marquee, had been chosen as a site for the first New York edition of the Frieze fair. “It’s so good to meet you! I really want to come to your criticism panel later! I’m Ashley — I work with—”
“Nice to meet you too,” Catherine said, extending a hand. “We’re all so glad the gallery could be part of our first New York fair.”
This was disingenuous, and both women knew it; even the uncovering of a forgery operation in Nate Lewis’s back rooms would scarcely have been enough to block his gallery’s participation in the fair. As soon as it had been decided that there would be a Frieze fair here, it was assumed that Lewis would not only take part but would be assigned one of the most prominent booths; today, Catherine had spotted the Wang as soon as she had walked through the huge tent’s glass doors. The other pieces in the booth were also by big-name Lewis artists: the Lucas Borga dot drawings, the long, low marble Falken, the Michael Woyzcuk metal frames with the stones suspended in them like mutated bell tongues. There was a piece from the Wittenborn archive, and a very delicate, actually quite beautiful little Clara Long, and in the middle of the space, on a pedestal, a yellow Meccano structure which revealed itself, as Catherine came closer to it, to be a miniature camera tripod; a small Diana camera had been painted exactly the same yellow — the case, the lens, everything — and was perched atop it.
“That’s a Noh Ritter,” Ashley said, following behind. “She just joined us in March, as you might have heard.”
“Mmm,” Catherine said.
“We’re all very excited about her new show. If you’re still in town, the opening is—”
“Oh, no, unfortunately I’m really just here to do the panel, and then I have to get back to London. The July issue is about to go to print.”
“Oh, that’s such a pity. Nate will be so sorry to have missed you, too. He was here earlier, but he’s in LA now until Tuesday.”
“What a pity.” Catherine nodded.
“And you actually know Nate a little, right? From Ireland?”
“Well, not really. I mean, we met, but that was a long time ago. A very long time ago, really. I’m surprised he remembers.”
“Oh, he remembers everything,” Ashley said with a theatrical little lift of her eyebrows.
“Yes, I’m sure,” said Catherine, trying, with her laugh, to achieve the same tone.
“Of course, you’re Irish,” Ashley said, tilting her head now. “But to be honest your accent sounds English to me.”
“Well. I’ve been living in London since I was twenty. That does things to your accent.”
“Oh — there! I can hear it!” Ashley trilled, pleased as a child who has just heard the first cuckoo. “Yeah! Does things,” she said, in the ridiculous Hollywood brogue always used at such moments. But it could be worse. Ashley could be interrogating her further about her connection to Nate, and putting two and two together, with the glue of the Irish accent, and coming up with—
“Wait, so do you know James Flynn?” Ashley said then, more quietly, leaning in as though the matter was a confidential one, as though the knowledge of James and Nate’s now long-ended relationship was not as public, at least within the art scene, as these things could be. The rising young star just arrived in the city and the dapper young gallerist just opening his own space; the sell-out show and the affair that was an open secret; the older lover, wronged and betrayed and with his career on the skids and, a year and a half into the whole business, found dead in his loft on West 26th Street. Ed Dunne had in fact suffered a massive heart attack, as became clear with the coroner’s report a couple of weeks later, but this was 2005, when Gawker and the other media gossip sites were climbing towards their gleeful zenith, and the circumstances of Dunne’s death were the tinder for several posts about James and Nate and the tragedy to which their glamorous liaison had led. In London, Catherine, then still freelancing, had called into the Internet café on the corner almost hourly for updates; she had pored over the photographs of James and Nate at openings, of Nate and Dunne in their loft, of the glass-and-steel exterior of the new Lewis gallery, of James’s works on display there, that portrait series for which he had got so much attention — the high-school footballers, the bodega men, the hipster boys with their tattoos and their mullets, their four-hundred-dollar skinny jeans. James looked almost like one of those boys himself now, which Catherine found, out of all of it, almost the hardest thing to believe; there was a photograph of him standing outside the main entrance of Lewis at an opening, smoking, a bottle of Presidente in his hand, and his lip was curled like someone she had never known, and his clothes were shabby and expensive, and his eyes were sharp with cynicism and dark with something deeper.
He and Nate had lasted another couple of months after Dunne’s death, and then there had been the break-up, and the swoop of Jonathan Greene to snatch James away from the Lewis Gallery; by then, Catherine was an assistant editor at Frieze, and could track the story from the comfort of her cubicle and her high-speed broadband, and still call it work.
At Jonathan Greene in early 2007, there had been the collaboration with Ryan McGinley; in 2008 the HO-HO-HOPE! show, which had got the Artforum cover, and soon afterwards, the Infinity Award. On each of these occasions, Catherine was tempted to send a congratulatory note to James; she knew the magazine stationery would get any correspondence marked Personal past the gallery’s gatekeepers and on to his apartment in (she knew this from a Vogue profile) Bushwick. But she never knew what to say, or rather, how to go about saying it. She tried; she wrote the sentences; always, she ended up crossing the office to the industrial-sized shredder, and watching to make sure that they had turned into off-white ribbons. When, in June 2010, the civil union announcement appeared in “Vows,” with its language of almost comic combinations and formalities—James Flynn, 32, the son of Peggy Flynn and Michael T. Flynn of Leitrim, Ireland, will commit Sunday to Christian Brandt, 33, a son of Denise C. Brown and Dr. Arthur D. Brandt of Stamford, Connecticut—Catherine had actually gone to Paperchase and bought a card with two little, blue-tuxedoed grooms—I don’t think Armani does a navy-blue tuxedo, she had written inside it, across from her fondest wishes for many, many years of happiness and love, and that card was still in her desk on Montclare Street, just waiting for the office franking machine — just the office franking machine, that was all.