Natasha, my boss at Ducat, was in her early thirties. She hired me on the spot when I came in for an interview the summer I finished school. I was twenty-two. I barely remember our conversation, but I know I wore a cream silk blouse, tight black jeans, flats—in case I was taller than Natasha, which I was by half an inch—and a huge green glass necklace that thudded against my chest so hard it actually gave me bruises when I ran down the subway stairs. I knew not to wear a dress or look too prim or feminine. That would only elicit patronizing contempt. Natasha wore the same kind of outfit every day—a YSL blazer and tight leather pants, no makeup. She was the kind of mysteriously ethnic woman who would blend in easily in almost any country. She could have been from Istanbul or Paris or Morocco or Moscow or New York or San Juan or even Phnom Penh in a certain light, depending on how she wore her hair. She spoke four languages fluently and had once been married to an Italian aristocrat, a baron or a count, or so I’d heard.
The art at Ducat was supposed to be subversive, irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap, “punk, but with money,” nothing to inspire more than a trip around the corner to buy an unflattering outfit from Comme des Gar?ons. Natasha had cast me as the jaded underling, and for the most part, the little effort I put into the job was enough. I was fashion candy. Hip decor. I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery, a pouty knockout wearing indecipherably cool avant-garde outfits. I was told to play dumb if anyone asked a question. Evade, evade. Never hand over a price list. Natasha paid me just $22,000 a year. Without my inheritance, I would have been forced to find a job that paid more money. And I would probably have had to live in Brooklyn, with roommates. I was lucky to have my dead parents’ money, I knew, but that was also depressing.
Natasha’s star artist was Ping Xi, a pubescent-looking twenty-three-year-old from Diamond Bar, California. She thought he was a good investment because he was Asian American and had been kicked out of CalArts for firing a gun in his studio. He would add a certain cachet. “I want the gallery to get more cerebral,” she explained. “The market is moving away from emotion. Now it’s all about process and ideas and branding. Masculinity is hot right now.” Ping Xi’s work first appeared at Ducat as part of a group show called “Body of Substance,” and it consisted of splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate. He claimed that he’d stuck a tiny pellet of powdered colored pigment into the tip of his penis and masturbated onto huge canvases. He titled the abstract paintings as though each had some deep, dark political meaning. Blood-Dimmed Tide, and Wintertime in Ho Chi Minh City and Sunset over Sniper Alley. Decapitated Palestinian Child. Bombs Away, Nairobi. It was all nonsense, but people loved it.
Natasha was particularly proud of the “Body of Substance” show because all the artists were under twenty-five, and she’d discovered them herself. She felt this would prove her gift for spotting genius. The only piece I liked in the show was by Aiyla Marwazi, a nineteen-year-old who went to Pratt. It was a huge white carpet from Crate & Barrel stained with bloody footprints and a wide bloody streak. It was supposed to look as though a bleeding body had been dragged across it. Natasha told me that the blood on the carpet was human, but she didn’t put that in the press release. “You can order anything online from China, apparently. Teeth. Bones. Body parts.” The bloody rug was priced at $75,000.
Annie Pinker’s Cling Film series consisted of clumps of small objects wrapped in Saran Wrap. There was one of tiny marzipan fruits and rabbit-foot key chains, one of dried flowers and condoms. Rolled-up used thong panty liners and rubber bullets. A Big Mac and fries and cheap plastic rosaries. The artist’s baby teeth, or so she claimed, and Christmas-colored M&M’s. Cheap transgressions going for $25,000 a pop. And then there were the large-scale photographs of mannequins draped in flesh-colored fabric, by Max Welch. He was a total moron. I suspected that he and Natasha were fucking. On a low pedestal in the corner, a small sculpture by the Brahams Brothers—a pair of toy monkeys made using human pubic hair. Each monkey had a little erection poking out of its fur. The penises were made of white titanium and had cameras in them positioned to take crotch shots of the viewer. The images were downloaded to a Web site. A specific password to log in to see the crotch shots cost a hundred dollars. The monkeys themselves cost a quarter million for the pair.
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AT WORK, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks. “Napping” is such a childish word, but that was what I was doing. The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared. There was no response necessary. No inane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. A vent in the closet released a steady flow of fresh air that picked up the scent of laundry from the hotel next door. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.