Galleries, HIV Tests, and Tiramisu
David and the Lion’s Den, chapter 5
“Excuse me, David. Did you hear me?”
“Huh?” I glanced up from my canvas. Somebody had been repeating my name but I was too “in the zone” to hear. “Oh, Richard, sorry,” I mumbled as I rolled my shoulder around to relieve a cramp I’d been too zoned out to notice.
“That’s all right,” laughed my upstairs neighbor. “You got a minute? I want you to meet somebody.”
This is the price I pay for being too poor to have a studio, I grumbled to myself. I tried to force a genuine smile, oblivious to the oxymoron. “No problem. I guess I need a short break anyway.”
I never took breaks.
My neighbor introduced me to this short, chubby, pock-faced guy dressed all in black. “David, this is Renaud. I’ve been telling him about the portrait you did of Hilda — and how you won’t sell it to me.”
My guard went up. Jetted up. I didn’t want Richard’s charity, and I didn’t understand how he could possibly want to spend money on that dark monstrosity. I turned and extended my hand out of politeness.
Renaud grabbed and pumped twice, quickly, then pointed at my canvas. “Do you mind?” I sighed and stepped aside.
“You see what I mean,” murmured Richard as they both eyed my latest piece. He’d been a man in his 50s, balding. You could tell he used to be fat by all the loose skin hanging off his jaw.
I’d really liked the guy. He’d been cheerful, funny, and bizarrely full of life. I’d spent four or five days painting him, not thinking he was all that sick. Sure, he’d lost all that weight, and thrush had swollen his throat shut and made talking painful, but he wasn’t even stuck in bed. Most of the time he didn’t need an IV.
He’d died just the same — suddenly — and I was trying to finish up, to capture that look in his eye when he talked about his granddaughter. I almost had it.
Renaud stared silently for a few moments. I was about to ask them to let me get back to work when he finally spoke. “Richard, he tell me you have more of these, hein?”
“Uh … sure. I mean, not here, though.” I pointed around the garden as if to explain we were in a public space.
“But, of course. May I ask you if you have taken them to any galleries?”
“Yeah. I mean, of course you may ask. But why? What do you wanna know for?”
“Ah, so you have!”
“No, I mean I haven’t even thought about it. I’m busy working. Why?”
“David,” Richard broke in. “Renaud runs “De la Fréta Fine Arts,” on Spring Street. I ran into him at a, um … party last weekend. I talked up your work a little.”
“Seriously?” I was annoyed and embarrassed, but I didn’t want to let it show. Richard was a nice old guy and he took good care of Hilda. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but the idea of a serious collector looking at my paintings was ridiculous. I felt myself start to blush.
Renaud didn’t seem to notice. “Young man,” he asked, nose in the air, sniffing, “have you heard of Lucien Freud?”
OK, so I may have graduated from a state college in Kansas, and I may have been pretty wet behind the ears, but I had a serious degree in fine art and the guy’s question pissed me off. His thick French accent was annoying me too. I was pretty sure he was exaggerating it.
“Of course I have,” I huffed. “Critics dismiss him as a traditionalist and for being overly representational. The art world spends a lot of time insulting him. I happen to think he’s brilliant. They think he’s not a conceptualist. Like that’s supposed to be a crime? I think they’re wrong about that, anyway, but even if they weren’t, his work still stands out. It’s incredible.”
Renaud’s face twisted into wry amusement. I imagined painting the cross-eyed squint that contorted his bushy eyebrows.
“I apologize,” he offered after a single beat. “It was not my intention to sound patronizing. I am one of Mr. Freud’s admirers. And, if I may be permitted to say it,” — he pointed at my canvas — “this portrait, he remind me in some small way of Lucien’s oeuvre.”
“Oh… uh, well…” I’ll say this much about Renaud. He was always a master of seduction, of disarming an artist with flattery.
He touched his fingertips together and smiled. “So. I’m putting together a little show for the fall. I’m interested in emerging trends in identity politics, among other concepts. Keith Haring has already committed some small pieces. If you have any more canvasses like these, I would very much wish to see them.”
I blinked.
“No promises,” Renaud continued. “Space is very limited, and I’m already considering any number of emerging young painters.”
“Ready to order, sir?” I asked, whipping a tiny notepad out of a white apron pocket. Jill never got orders mixed up in her head, but I had to use a careful system.
I treated the page like a map of the table, abbreviating orders in the proper positions. I’d scratch first names down too if I could get them. Howie taught me that one. Anything to increase tips.
“Raph, more water for table six, please?” I called out as I swerved around Jill on my way to the kitchen. When I hustled back into the dining room loaded down with tiramisu and espressos, I spotted Howie — purple tie glowing neon against a starched white shirt, leading the way down the spiral staircase with Hilda in tow. He was grinning ear to ear, and I gathered it was because of Hilda’s escort, Mistress Carla in full regalia.
She waved as I delivered dessert to a table of drunken accountants, pointing her whip at me and whispering in Howie’s direction.
“C’mere, David,” he mouthed, motioning to me as I set my rowdy number crunchers up with caffeine and sugar. “I know this isn’t your table,” he shrugged, “but the lady asked for you specifically.”
I caught a few dagger glares from Claudia as I took Hilda’s veal picatta order. Carla opted for carpaccio and a salad. The kitchen closed in 15 minutes, so I’d swooped in on what would probably have been my coworkers’s last tip. Customer is always right. What can you do?
Howie, Jill, and I had coffee with Hilda and Carla after the dining room emptied out, “had coffee” being a euphemism for “collapsed at their table.” It’d been a hectic Thursday. Jill and I counted out our tips while Howie balanced the night’s take.
“Sure, I’m nervous,” I answered Hilda. “I don’t know what’s taking so long. They said two weeks, but it’s been almost three already.” I turned to Howie. “You didn’t get yours back either yet, huh?”
“They get backed up,” he shrugged, riffling through a stack of credit card imprints.
“There’s also this,” Carla added. “You know they do a simpler test first. It gives false positives sometimes. Somebody told me if the first test comes back positive, they send another sample out for a more expensive confirmation. Takes longer.”
That hit me like a bomb.
“You’re kidding. Really?” I picked up my espresso and studied the cream-colored froth that skimmed the surface. I’d never seriously thought about getting sick. AIDS was for other people, older people. I thought about AIDS in terms of losing people I cared about or people I’d never have a chance to care about.
Get sick and die before I turned 40? Or even 35? Me?
My stomach jumped like I’d drunk too much of the bitter brew in my tiny cup, only I hadn’t taken a single sip yet.
Carla’s husky voice interrupted my thoughts. “Hey! Take it easy, Cookie. I shouldn’t have said anything. The lab gets backed up all the time. I’ve been through the same thing, and I’m fine.”
Howie looked up from his receipts. “Hey, y’all see Mike da Fish roll in here after lunch? She smelled like a cross between a cat house and a sewer, girls. And those black eyes? Mary Louise! Lemme tell ya how he got himself into it THIS time.”
Leave it to Howie to try to deflect tension with a Mafia Fish Guy story. He seemed really happy that Carla had come in, though, so I tried to push my worries to the background.
Jill was as bored with Mike stories as me so she stopped him. “Isn’t the boat cruise almost here?” She turned to Hilda. “How’s it coming? The boys selling enough tickets?”
“Ach, ja! Is goot, the sales. Damn goot.” She patted Howie’s arm. “This boy is our champion, you know.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not fair,” I griped. “He sells them all night when he’s tending bar! I don’t have time. Too busy schlepping pasta and spilling coffee.”
“Schlep, is it?” teased Jill, “Nice one, Kansas boy! Since when do you speak Yiddish?”
“You sell plenty,” Hilda reassured me. “Don’t you worry none. Joe? He sells only five so far — even with his sheyn eydish!”
“So, we’re gonna make money?” I asked.
“We gonna net 55, maybe 60k easy,” she nodded.
My jaw dropped.
“Everything except the boat is donated, she explained. “And Joe’s uncle owns Circle Line. So we get a discount even on that. Local bars and restaurants, they do all the food and drink gratis. The DJ? Mr. Famous Radio Star, he also is volunteer. We even get limos free for the night for VIPs — so long as we pay the drivers.”
If only the cops and the newspapers had figured that out right away. Oh, sure, it all came out in the long run. In tiny paragraphs on page 18. Or 36. Buried behind the classifieds or in a Saturday edition nobody reads.
You can’t really compare the disclaimers to the screaming headlines.
Painting Ghoul Lives High, Parties Hard
Dracula Dines with the Rich and Famous as Models Die
It’s hard to counter headlines like that. But I’m getting way ahead of myself. I’m not nearly up to the part about the cops and the New York Post yet. Bear with me. There’s a lot more to my story than most people imagine. Even you guys who read the “balanced reporting” in the Times only think you know the whole truth.
You just read Chapter 5 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Richard, and Howie are walking a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen. Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.
