“He must have been incredibly lonely,” said Salo.
“Oh, he was.”
Salo got up. For the next few minutes he walked around the room, looking. The pictures were all identically framed in pale wood, with a broad empty space around each image. The largest ones, the people-buildings, were fascinating; each had a grand title and a few sentences of praise, sometimes conveyed by or interspersed with puns, about the person who’d been remade into stucco or stone. The Sayanpeau. The Kathredal. The Primal Glimpse at Forty. There was a definite edge of sexual anxiety over a few of the drawings, too, notably the female ones.
“He was watching his neighbor’s daughter playing,” said Stella. He turned to find her just behind him. “Her dress went up. She wasn’t wearing underwear. This was how he dealt with the shock.”
“Schizophrenic?” Salo heard himself ask.
“Interesting you should ask. Never diagnosed, and he held a job throughout his life. But it’s not possible to say. I did show the work to a psychiatrist I know in Berkeley. He had a field day, gave me lots of reading on psychosis and manic depression, but declined to give me a diagnosis. Which is only right. There are some very off-kilter letters, and he wrote a massive novel that made no sense, which he couldn’t get published. And there are hundreds of the smaller drawings, sketches and schematics for his imaginary city. I’d love to see all of this go to the same place, and stay together, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
He nodded. “And you work for the dealer?”
“Oh no!” Stella said. “I’m a documentary filmmaker.”
He looked at her. Her eyes were following two women as they moved swiftly past the displays. The women were dressed identically in black, with shaved heads.
The camera registered, then. She had placed it on her desk. It looked very different from the home-use versions Salo had occasionally used over the years, to videotape his children. More like the real thing.
She wanted to make a film about Rizzoli, Stella explained. That was why she’d come. To see people as they encountered the work, to find critics to interview. But the people and the critics were mainly downstairs, gaping at little girls.
“Rizzoli never left California, not once in his life. And of course he died with nothing, no heirs. All of the work was thrown away when his landlord cleaned out his apartment in San Francisco. And somebody, some total stranger, was walking past and saw all of this in a dumpster. And when he looked at it, it just blew his mind, so he took everything home with him and eventually brought it all to a dealer friend of mine in Berkeley. Sandro almost turned him away. He didn’t think there was a market for a dead guy whose entire life’s work ended up in a dumpster. But then this whole Outsider thing just kind of started to build momentum, so he had everything framed and we drove it all across the country. I filmed some interviews yesterday. The New Yorker critic was here, and a few other dealers. But like I said, it’s all about Darger at the moment.”
Salo nodded. “Your guy should have thrown in a bit of male genitalia.” It was remarkable how, without ever having seen a Darger, he felt entitled to an opinion. Well, that was the art world in essence. Outsider and Insider.
“Very sad men. Both of them. Very sad and very lonely men.”
The collar of her shirt had slipped open, he saw. There was a bright pink scar across her clavicle.
Arm, foot, concussion, suture.
Clavicle. He remembered now. She had broken her clavicle. He had broken her clavicle.
When Sandro Barth returned, the two of them left, first for a bar on Ninth Avenue and then for Red Hook, where he walked her through his collection. She was amazed by it, by what he had done. She marveled at the triptych and recognized the Diebenkorn immediately. （“California artist,” she said and shrugged.） She stood before the two Twomblys, hands on hips, silent. When he pointed to the large one and told her it was the first painting he had bought, she nodded. He didn’t have to say more than that. They stayed for a couple of hours, then he took her back to her hotel and they had another drink in the lobby bar. The place was dark. They sat apart. She had never married, she said. She had wanted to have children, but she’d spent years filming a single mother in Oakland who was struggling to raise four kids, and she didn’t think she could do that, or willfully put a child through it. The documentary, she told him, had won some awards and received some attention.