The Wangs vs. the World Read online

  Saina knew exactly the kind of article that he was planning to write. It would contain a shocked series of references to her barely controversial past, an ironic look at her current state of singular domesticity, a supposedly neutral summary of the protests, a sidebar on what Grayson was doing now, with maybe a tiny inset of his chaotic canvas of her in chola mufti, rendered in splashy, ’80s-style primary colors.

  But Saina was still too raw to put herself back into the public eye like that, naked, without a new body of work to back her up. The whole time she had been up here, she hadn’t made a thing. Somehow, in all the attendant commotion and loss, the thing itself, the eternal, singular piece of art, had gotten away from her. What she didn’t want to say to herself was this: Saina couldn’t create art without spectacle, and spectacle, by its very nature, had to be witnessed. Not for the first time she wished that she had never sold her Manhattan apartment, never fled to Helios.

  “You know, I could always do a write-around.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s when you don’t interview the person. I mean, I could describe this, where you are, what we talked about, even if you don’t participate in the story.”

  Was Billy threatening her?

  “Speaking of, how did you find out where I was?”

  He ignored the question and pressed on. “I could do it, but I don’t want to. I want you to be on board. Saina, this is a cover for New York mag—it’s huge! Look, I could set up a sort of summit, you could meet with some of the protesters, and people are going to look at you differently now, with everything going on with your family and stuff.”

  “Billy, you’re freaking me out. How did you know about that?”

  “I ran into your ex. He was wasted.”

  Saina felt a flash of cold. Even if Grayson didn’t care about her heart, she thought he’d at least want to protect her privacy. Or, failing that, her physical safety.

  “And he just told you? What, did he program the directions into your phone and give you a ride to the train station, too?”

  “Hey.” Billy sprang up and gripped her arms, a liquid look of concern in his eyes. Fake, Saina reminded herself. It was probably fake. Billy was like those serpent-tongued eunuchs who slunk around royal courts, trading on scraps of gossip. “I just want to help you. I know I’m a reporter, not a critic, but I am really just a fan. I mean it. I think you’re going to be up there with, like, Marina Abramović someday. Those protesters are crazy.”

  “You’d think I was creating false images of Mohammed and putting him in a flowery headscarf, ” she said, glad even for this scrap of sympathy.

  “That’s what America likes to do to its successes, right? Eat them up and spit them out?”

  Saina laughed. “Exactly. I’m definitely in the being spit out phase.”

  “But it means that you’re someone to be taken seriously. Why else would they want to give you a cover?”

  “Because my life is an art world soap opera.” They stared at each other for a moment. “Did you . . . did you pay him or something?”

  “Would that have worked?”

  “Well, apparently he was willing to sell me out for nothing, so cash could only have sped up the process.”

  “Does he need it?”

  Saina stopped herself. Of course. Billy was just trying to get his story. In a way, she didn’t even fault him—she was a commodity in his eyes, their connection a stock that had yielded excellent dividends in the past and now promised to pay off even more if he could persuade it to split.

  “Billy, I’m tired. And you have to catch the seven-thirty train. I’ll call a cab. There are only two in town, so it’ll probably take a while for one of them to get here.”

  “Hey, no, no, no. I thought we were having a good talk, right?”

  She wanted to wound him. Who was he to insinuate himself into her life, to ambush her here where she should be safe, to suggest that he’d had anything to do with the life that she’d made?

  “I never thought you’d end up just being a paparazzo, Billy.”

  She said it with as much nonchalance as she could muster. It worked. She could tell. He froze and raised one eyebrow as high as it would go. He was a lot bigger than she was, Saina realized. He was skinny, and he always slouched, but he was at least six feet tall with broad shoulders and big, veined hands. His face was thicker now—too much happy-hour beer and midnight melted cheese. He didn’t feel like a boy anymore. Saina wondered if she should be scared. Would Billy hurt her?

  “Did your former fiancé tell you that he’s getting married?”

  No. Billy wouldn’t hurt her. He’d destroy her.

  Or try to. Once she’d gritted out her bravest smile and boldest lie, assuring him that she knew everything, once he’d left, disappointed, and she’d locked the door and prepared to crumble, to let herself just wash away, Saina found, instead, that she felt blank. A lightness. A widening space inside that was neither positive nor negative. She remembered the weeks after Grayson had first left her, when she sat straight up in bed every morning at four, heart racing, knowing only that something bad, bad, unutterably bad had happened. This already felt different.

  Her only thought was embarrassing. It was this: But . . . Sabrina’s not an artist!

  Because how could Grayson have loved her, Saina, for all the reasons he said he did if he could just turn around and love Sabrina instead? She pictured him calling his new wife’s jewelry art and felt sick at the lie of it all.

  Wife.

  Saina focused back on that space. Dark, quiet, internal. It expanded and buoyed her heart up so that it could not sink again, like it had done once before. She made herself remember, instead, a road trip they took to a friend’s wedding, not far from where she was now. The radio played a cheerful little tune and then the host announced that futures were looking good. Grayson cocked his head and looked at her, cute, saying, “Futures? I thought there was only one.” So she’d explained it to him again, trying to remember the way her father had untangled the world of options and futures and puts and shares for her, and for the third time, he’d nodded and said that he understood. Finally, though, she realized that he just liked to hear himself voice confusion, liked to think of himself as an artist who couldn’t be expected to understand base financial matters. Her suspicion was confirmed when she heard him again at the wedding itself, saying to a group of friends who were talking about an upcoming IPO, “How can people buy something that doesn’t exist?” and shaking his head sagely at the wonder of it all.

  Your clubscapes don’t really exist, she had wanted to say. They’re a bunch of things that are supposed to make a statement about another thing. Your collectors are buying a series of symbols because critics have conferred meaning upon them. It’s the same damn thing as buying a piece of paper that the banks say represent a group of homeowners’ individual promises to pay back their mortgages. Wasn’t that abstraction the beautiful thing about what they did? Wasn’t that what made it different from painting a house or welding a car? Different from staging a kid’s birthday party or serving a meal in a restaurant? From making a fucking ring?

  The things we agree to call art are the shamanic totems of our time. We value them beyond all reason because we can’t really understand them. They can mean everything or nothing, depending on what the people who look at them decide. Everything or nothing. Saina knew it was nothing, and yet she kept on doing it. Grayson thought it was everything, and somehow that made him . . . what? Better? More successful? Worse? Stupider? More self-delusional?

  In a way, finance was even better than art. It was nothing but an expression of potential, of power, of our present moment in time, and existed only because a group of people collectively agreed that it should exist. Out of nothing but a shared conviction was born a system that could run the world. It was beautiful and terrible. Saina thought that she and her father would probably see eye to eye on this, if they were ever able to have a conversation like it without arguing.r />
  Saina had decided that she was going to be an artist when she was in junior high. It was because of a story that Morley Safer did. In Saina’s mind, he was a sort of cross between Peter Falk’s Columbo and Walter Cronkite, and the story had a hint of murder mystery to it. She even remembered the title: “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” Portentous, like it should be followed by an ominous chord progression. Safer had focused his skeptical eye on Jeff Koons. The trio of floating basketballs, the vacuum cleaner, they had all felt like revelations to her. I can make anything art, she’d thought then, not realizing that Safer was producing a takedown of the contemporary art world.

  Fifteen years later, she’d still felt the same way. Until now.

  A week ago, lost in a Grayson Google loop, Saina found a brief mention in Art in America saying that his last piece had sold for half a million dollars—it was an entire order of magnitude greater than any of his past sales. He’s doing better without me, she’d thought. In a sort of daze, Saina had rewatched the old 60 Minutes piece, which looked hopelessly outdated—the early ’90s might as well have been the ’70s—and tried to comfort herself with an interviewee’s observation about collectors: “The act of spending that money on an object makes them feel like they are collaborating on the creation of the art history of their time.” That was why. Grayson gave good artist. He was tortured and handsome and unpredictable, willing to hold forth for hours on the nature of beauty and creation.

  Koons, it turned out, had been a commodities trader before he became an artist. It all seemed so appropriate somehow. Maybe all modern art was the strike of beauty against wealth, the artists mocking the collectors for their vain attempt to purchase the inimitable spirit of the artist. But what if you were cursed with both?

  Saina wondered why she’d ever stopped watching 60 Minutes. Would her life make more sense now if she’d continued to see the world through Morley Safer’s eyes, if every week still ended and began again with that ticking stopwatch?

  All I wanted, Saina thought, was to make someone feel something. Money can’t do that. Just looking at a dollar bill did nothing to the emotions—you have to make money or lose money for it to make you feel anything. You can earn it, win it, lose it, save it, spend it, find it, but you can’t sell it because you never really own it. On the other hand, you didn’t have to possess a song or a sculpture for it to make you feel something—you only had to experience it. So why did collectors want to collect? What feeling were they pursuing? Or was a portfolio just a portfolio no matter whether the investments it held were financial or artistic?

  Other artists cared about their place in the canon, about color and brushwork, about pushing forward the lines of inquiry that obsessed and impressed their peers. Sometimes Saina pretended to care about all of those things, too, but really all she wanted to do, all she’d ever wanted to do, was to look very closely at the world in a way that resonated. And her show, her last, best show, had done that. She was sure of it. Saina kept the catalog from Look/Look on her desk, a punishment and a reminder, and too often she found herself rereading parts of the introduction that her gallerist had written.

  In 2007, while war raged on in Iraq, Wang began to notice something about the photos of civilians and refugees published in mainstream newspapers. They were often composed so that the frame centered on a single, striking young woman. While researching this observation, Wang remembered a photo of the war in Bosnia that she first encountered as a child living in Los Angeles. “I’d been flipping through my mother’s back issues of Vogue,” she recalls, “and then I opened up the L.A. Times and was instantly struck by a beautiful girl in a really chic headscarf. It wasn’t until a moment later that I realized that she was on the back of a truck with a dozen other refugees.” Wang tracked down that older photo, and then spent months poring over published images of America’s wars, going back to Vietnam.

  Then, in a daring move, she selected the loveliest of the women—women who might have already perished in the conflicts they were used to illustrate—and, with the aid of Photoshop, excised them from their place in history, transported them to a moody warehouse, and looked at them again through the Vaseline blur of desire. There, the women became all beauty, taking on new roles as the models they might have been, had they the fortune of being born in another place and time.

  —New York City, February 2008

  What was so bad about that? Her gallerist had issued an apology on her behalf of the “I’m sorry if anyone was offended” sort, but she still couldn’t understand how her show had become the flash point of so much anger. Lately, the only professional interest she’d received was from people who had heard of her fall: A gallerist in Germany who wanted to curate a show of modern-day failures, a filmmaker whose documentary on anti-Semitic fashion designer Jean Lugano’s bid to remake his career had just premiered to some success. The only offer that wasn’t outright insulting came from Xio, the persistent curator of the new Beijing Biennial, who wanted to include Chinese artists living abroad. She’d had a conversation or two with him and been dismayed to learn that gossip of her disgrace had spread all the way to China, though it didn’t seem to change his enthusiasm for her work.

  In the end, though, none of it appealed to her. It would never work to try to make something mannered and safe. Pandering to your detractors was even worse than pandering to your collectors.

  Saina closed her eyes. It was too much. For the first time in her life, she felt old, tired, like the effort that it took to fight for recognition was no longer worthwhile. It was true what they said—leaving New York made you soft.

  二十

  Phoenix, AZ

  605 Miles

  THERE WAS NOTHING grosser than a naked mattress, the quilted, satin surface of it all pilled and stained from more generations of Arizona State students than Andrew wanted to think about. He rubbed the palm of his hand against the rough little bumps raised all over the flowered beige surface and shivered. It tickled like riding a bike over a bumpy gravel road, but something about the sensation turned his body’s attention inward and he felt himself press up against the ridge of his pants. Damn skinny jeans. Andrew pulled down his zipper and wriggled them halfway down his legs as he looked around the room for a forgotten bottle of lotion, anything viscous, anything, but it had all been packed or given away.

  He hated spit. The smell of his own saliva was never a turn-on. Why couldn’t he smell it when he was making out with someone?

  He could feel himself getting hard and straining at the cotton confines of his briefs and put aside the unwanted urge to pee. Andrew reached a hand into his backpack. Laptop, cell phone, beanie, a few wrinkled envelopes, and the crumpled bag from yesterday’s egg sandwich.

  Oh. That could work.

  He thought of Emma, gorgeous Emma, who wanted nothing more than for him to let her have sex with him, Emma squirting ketchup on his dick like a hot dog and swallowing it down. He held that image in his mind as he rooted in the bag with one hand and tugged his briefs down with the other, closing his eyes and flicking over again to Emma, now jumping up on the volleyball court and arching her body back, back, back, one arm up, throat exposed, breasts pushed high, then pounding the ball across the net in an explosion of sweat and heat. With his teeth, he tore open a ketchup packet and emptied it into his palm, flicking again to Emma on her knees in front of him, reaching out for him as he reached down with his ketchup palm, sliding his hand around and up. He was lying down now and Emma was gone, replaced by a girl he saw once, Rollerblading across the Venice boardwalk, her dress billowing up with a gust of wind so that he caught just a glimpse of her naked bottom and the neat little strip of hair between her legs. He pushed himself into his hand, and for just a second, a half second, Professor Kalchefsky crept in, making him wonder whether copula and copulate had the same root, but Andrew banished him and brought in his most timeworn and reliable image, a flash of Cinemax he somehow saw as a kid, a few stolen minutes of a man and a woman spread out on the hood of a car,
hips thrusting, boobs jiggling, the man angry with a bush of a mustache, the woman pleading for more, pleading for him to stop when, like a flicker on the screen, he saw his doorknob turn.

  “Stop!” He choked on the word, tried shouting it again. “STOP!”

  “Andrew?”

  It was his dad. No, no, no, no, no. His heart stuttered and his lungs froze.

  “Andrew?”

  And his sister. And probably Barbra, too. Andrew stood up and staggered towards the door, throwing his weight against it.

  “Just hold on,” he said. “Give me a minute.” He could hear them on the other side of the door, his dad asking what he’d said, Grace shushing him, Barbra saying nothing. He looked down. His right hand was a ketchupy mess. He closed his eyes, thinking of vomit, shit, his dead mother, until he hung limp, dark smears of condiment caught in the wrinkles of his shrunken penis. Still pressing his back to the door, Andrew pulled up his underwear and pants. Zip. Button. Oh god.

  He wiped his hand on his jeans and opened the door, pretending to swallow.

  “I was just . . . eating. But, I . . . I had to get dressed.”

  “Why you don’t want us to see you eating? You were eating naked? You have girlfriend hiding in closet?” His father sounded hopeful.

  Andrew half turned towards his closet, wishing that Emma really was in there, disheveled, beautiful. That would have been way less embarrassing. He’d always wanted the kind of father who would shoot hoops with him, but his dad was way more likely to introduce him to a couple of models than to buy him a baseball glove or attend a soccer match. He hated the wink that his father would give him whenever a woman’s name popped up on his cell phone. Once, late at night, he’d even seen his father waiting at a valet stand in downtown L.A., his arm around a surprisingly beautiful redhead who looked not much older than Saina. It was gross to think of the women who made themselves available, grosser to think of Barbra caring about sex at all, and grossest to know that if his dad cheated on Barbra, then it meant that he had probably done the same to Andrew’s beautiful mother. Maybe that was why Andrew was holding out for true love. Who knew rebellion would be so boring?