Prelude

 

Do you know what a fermata is? It’s a notation on a piece of sheet music that allows a note to be held for longer than its ascribed length. It can be sustained—for emotion, for emphasis, even for just a charged silence—for as long as the player or conductor feels is necessary. And as long as that hold lasts, time essentially stops. The tempo of the piece doesn’t change, no other notes in the bar disappear to make room for the stretched note. Everything simply pauses, and then restarts when the next note is played. For as long as the hold is sustained, time—as measured by the metronomic sweep of the conductor’s baton—comes to a momentary halt. That’s a fermata.
   In New York City there’s such a pause between dawn and the first notes of the day. The only people on the street are supers hosing down sidewalks, delivery guys wordlessly moving paper sacks of bread or boxes of produce from truck to restaurant or grocery or bodega door, and newsstand guys cutting the strings on bundles of papers—the Times, the Post, the Daily News—and dropping them onto upturned milk crates. A black cat slips between fencepoles into nothingness. A gull arcs beneath the Manhattan Bridge gantry, rotating over the East River in wingspread silence. There is quiet and still. It’s a pause during which the city inhales its first breath of the day then holds it for as long as it can, before exhaling in a shattering explosion of cacophony and clamor. Picture the conductor’s baton motionless, frozen, waiting for the fermata to conclude and for time to…

——

   …restart, to find me sitting on the iron steps that lead up from the sidewalk of Walker Street—which runs east-west a block below Canal in the old part of Chinatown—to the broad, tall doors of the Benedict Thorne gallery, where I work. The doors are heavy, three-inch-thick old wood, each with a window inset from waist-level up to over your head. The gallery’s name is painted on the glass. 
   The gallery occupies the ground floor of number eighty-seven, a six-story building situated on the south side of the street between Lafayette Street and picturesque Cortlandt Alley. Further west, on the other side of Broadway, Walker Street is haughty Tribeca. On this side its environs have no name. It is the hinterland of Canal Street, the Tombs jail complex, and the numerous court and civic buildings—a nondescript buffer zone of gloomy structures, the place where Chinatown parks its dumpsters. 
   With few exceptions the street-level frontages of the buildings along Walker Street are empty and blank. Dusty upper-floor windows cataract grimy facades. The only movement is in the hardware store/lumberyard across the street from the gallery, where the roller shutter gate clatterclanks open at eight o’clock each morning and men emerge to load pallets of construction materials onto a constant stream of flatbed trucks. A few dim figures stand silent and still outside the spiderhole liquor store further along the block, waiting for it to open. 
   I am perched on the topmost of the three steps, executing a fermata of my own between arriving at the gallery and opening up. Benedict Thorne, the gallery’s owner and my employer, has owned this building for twenty years and says he’s seen it all. Me, I’ve been here six months and I’ve barely seen anything, so I try to take in everything.
 

 

Chapter 1

​

I had arrived in New York the previous December, a few days after Christmas, 1994 running down the clock to the new year. I landed at JFK on a flight from London, the city in which I was born and had lived all my life, to which I intended never to return. I rode the subway into the city shivering after taking a bus from the airport to somewhere called Howard Beach, where there was no beach that I could see. 
   There was a mix of passengers on the bus, young and old. Some of them were airport workers going off shift, still in uniform. All the way to the subway station I listened to them talk, real New Yorkers speaking with real New York accents and dialects and slang. The subway ride was the same. I sat in my seat and listened to everyone around me. Even the most mundane conversations seemed exotic; this was the walla of TV shows and movies I’d grown up watching. By the time I got to the city I was cold, tired and unwashed from the journey, but I was more excited than I’d ever been in my life. Every immigrant’s story, perhaps.
   Walker Street might have been as grimy as I felt that day, but it was picture-perfect—stern colonnaded facades gazing down upon a roadway not much wider than an alley, a cobblestone canyon floor running beneath tall cliffs of cast iron, brick, and brownstone. After the chatter of the subway car and the demented melee of Canal Street, the stillness of Walker Street was surreal. I felt as though I had inadvertently stumbled onto a film set. The city frequently made you feel that way. You didn’t realize that NYC was a movie star until you encountered it in person for the first time and noticed how familiar you were with so many of its small details and idiosyncrasies, its tics and tells. You’d seen them a million times on screens but never in person like this. When you were actually there it was real, so real it was hard to believe it wasn’t fake.

——

   When I met Thorne in London two years ago, during my second year at art school, he’d described this neighborhood, which might as well have been on another planet to me. He told me it had once been a district of workshops and factories, humming with industry, but that the businesses had moved away to more industrial locales—Bushwick, Gowanus, Long Island City (the names of these prosaic places sounding mysterious and magical to me)—leaving the buildings that had housed them mostly empty. By the 1970s, he explained, the quarter was abandoned, dark, and dangerous. No one wanted to be there except for artists, and they gravitated to it because space was cheap. Lofts were walkup and coldwater, but you could pay the rent with what you made from life modeling or waiting tables or whatever for a day or two and spend the rest of your week working on your art. It sounded like heaven. 
   If you had the resources, you could even buy an entire building. Landlords were eager to offload their properties during the bad time and Thorne had bought number eighty-seven in 1974. He never revealed what he had paid, but hinted numerous times that it had been a financial coup. Thorne was as mercantile as any of the factory owners that had occupied the premises before him, and conducted his business much the same way.
   The gallery was at street level and he lived on the second and third floors. The remaining floors were empty and used for storage or, like several of their neighbors, for nothing at all. He had put me up during my first few weeks in the city, and in the evenings he would have one or two acquaintances from the old days drop by his loft for dinner and drinks. Conversations at these gatherings would often turn to life as it had been when they were all pioneers, and I lived the 1970s vicariously through their reminiscences. 
                                                              ——
   My tutor at the Slade, the art school at which I studied in London, was Jasper Barrie, the modernist painter. Thorne knew him from Barrie’s time in New York in the 1970s, when they were both hovering on the periphery of the Soho art scene, before Barrie’s rise to prominence. During my second year, Thorne had come to London to scout talent for his gallery and called on his old friend, now a grandee. Barrie mentioned him to me. Thorne, he said, had a keen eye for talented young artists, and his gallery, though small, was closely watched. He represented a few established artists—the painter Jonas Sykes, now middle-aged but a perennial figurehead of the avant-garde, was one—but his specialty, said Barrie, was unearthing young standouts and launching them on their careers. That got my attention, made me sit up and take notice. 
   I was invited to join them for drinks. Well, to be truthful, I made Barrie invite me. I reminded him (not that I needed to; he knew) of my fealty to the New York modernists—Jules Olitski, LeWitt, and the rest of the gang—and to places like 112 Greene Street, where the conceptual art that most captivated me reigned. Tina Girouard and Alan Saret had created installations there. Gordon Matta-Clark had removed parts of the building itself in his investigations of penetration and absence. 
   Most significantly, my personal art hero, Joseph Kosuth, had created his own conceptual space in New York, where he had shown his own work, work I had studied, absorbed, obsessed over, imitated and emulated. He was my holiest of holies, and as an acolyte will, I aspired to make a pilgrimage to his temple.
   So New York already had a strong gravitational hold over me, and Barrie knew it. Thorne, who if you were an aspiring artist like myself, seeking to change the world in order to change your place in it, held the keys to the city and my future in it, at least that’s the way it appeared to me at the time. I had known, even when my art studies consisted only of looking at books I couldn’t afford in expensive art bookstores, that it was the place I wanted to be, the place I could find myself, as an artist first, and maybe as a person too. Thorne, I instinctively knew, was a portal, one that would only be open for a short time and which I must absolutely pass through if this future I had chosen for myself stood any chance of being realized. It was important to act.
   Barrie liked me, thought I was the best of his current student crop. I’m not boasting by saying that, nor am I fabulating. He had told me as much, with no ambiguity. I was a kind of protegé to him, and he understood my desire to live and work in New York. He had done the same when he was my age. It was where his career had begun, and he had known many of the artists whose names were the stuff of legend to me personally, so I think he understood my urgency when I pleaded to be invited to meet Thorne. He acquiesced, and one evening a few weeks later the three of us met in a pub near the British Museum. They both got quite drunk, which worked out pretty well for me. 
   They reminisced about their time in NYC, and I gathered my tutor had been given a year-long residency at an upstate artist’s retreat which he hardly spent any time at. 
   “What were you supposed to be doing up there anyway?” Thorne asked him at a certain point during the evening.
   “Can’t remember. Whatever it was, I didn’t do it. Never there, was I? Always down on Broome Street at your loft, getting drunk or worse.” 
   Barrie let out a fusillade of laughter. He had a deep baritone and he was loud. His accent was mid-Atlantic and Brahmin, like a banker in the boardroom of an august financial institution, but some of the students said that he was faking it, that he was just a regular, standard-issue Brit, and that the accent was a put-on. It sounded real to me, but I was always lousy at detecting imposters.
   Thorne name-dropped a lot, partly to impress me, but primarily to establish his bona fides with anyone nearby who happened to be listening. The place was popular with art students, and since the emergence of the Young British Artists, dealers like Thorne had started showing up, on the prowl for the next next big thing. 
   As I’ve mentioned, I was Barrie’s favorite, and this evening he promoted me as his discovery. I expect he felt that there was something to be gained by presenting me to his old friend in the manner he did, and Thorne ended up getting what he wanted too. Barrie wanted to show me off, and Thorne was eager to believe. Everyone wanted their own YBA at that moment, Thorne very much included, and Barrie laid it on thick. I was flattered by his praise, but I had a hard time believing in the idea that I was anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t have the innate, unshakable confidence some of the other students had so much of, in fact I was withdrawn and moody. Something tragic—tragic and very unexpected—had happened very recently, and I was not on good form. At first Thorne didn’t seem convinced, but as he got drunker he became more attentive, especially when Barrie explained the nature of my paintings. 
   “What is it you said?” Barrie said, turning to me. “Something about meaning in art coming from context and concepts rather than physical representation? That thing about exploring deliberate fictions to depict underlying truths—still don’t totally really understand that part, but I have to admit it’s intriguing. Don’t roll your eyes, Thorne, this is serious stuff. There’s going to be a wave after all this shock and sensationalism business. Our friend here is reading Wittgenstein and telling me that language constructs reality and meaning as much as it represents them, and that art is a language, a convoluted language of mistruths and unstated yearnings, and that at its core it's a collection of encoded narratives we tell about ourselves, and that it’s for us to determine where they sit on the spectrum of reliability.”
   He turned back to face Thorne, who sat silent. To be honest, after that introduction I would have too.
   “Now I know you don’t think painters have any role to play in this current whatever-it-is phase of contemporary art. This in-your-face symbolism. But our young friend here is past that. This isn’t just crude paraphrasing for impact; this is art that questions identity, perception, the nature of truth and of deceit. It's the next step, Thorne, the next great leap forward.” 
   Thorne, who I came to learn had no poker face at all, managed to look both disbelieving and hungry at the same time. He turned to me and raised an eyebrow. 
   “Barrie’s famous hard sell. Art’s high priests and temples have fallen before it, so why should I be immune? But you’re sitting here silent as a clam. Come, don’t be coquettish. Seduce me with your own words.”
   I didn't reply immediately. Barrie's speech had thrown me off, and I was still trying to determine if he was being sincere or if he was simply showing off for Thorne. Fighting my tipsiness, I gathered myself. “Seduce me,” Thorne had said, and I had an inkling that he hadn’t been speaking altogether metaphorically.
   “I always have a hard time describing it. It’s basically portraiture, people I know, or people I meet, or sometimes people at the Slade. I get them in my studio and I try my hardest to strip them bare.”
I was being deliberately suggestive, trailing my petticoats, and Thorne took the bait. A sleek eagerness slid across his face, and he locked eyes with me. I went on.
“I put up posters that say Seeking Desire & Duplicity. Underneath is my phone number. Nothing more—very mysterious. There’s an answering machine—I never answer the phone—and I leave a message asking them to tell me their darkest secrets and the things they most want and leave their phone number if they want to take part in an art project. I don’t say what it is, what form it’s gonna take, so it’s a test of their willingness. You’d be surprised how many students want to confess their fantasies and crimes to another person. Well, maybe you wouldn’t.”
Barrie snickered, but Thorne hushed him. 
   “Anyway I pick the ones I like, the ones that I think have potential to make good paintings, and I contact them and explain the work I do and ask them to participate as sitters. But they’re much more than sitters. Before I start painting I do these interviews of my subjects, quite long interviews. I ask them to tell me stories of things they've done in their lives that they’re ashamed of, things they regret, their sins, and why they did them. Like confessions, rationalizations of their misdeeds. I also tell them they don’t have to be truthful. They can tell me complete fantasies if they want. So then I paint them, usually quite formal, from chest and shoulders up like court portraiture, in oils, fine brushwork and all. But I incorporate elements from all the stories they’ve told me, and try to depict which ones are true and which are lies. Like I show my subjects as everything they actually are and everything they fantasize about being, and everything they’ve done or are willing to do to become it. They’re layered, but more like multiple exposures in a photograph. Each layer is sharp, but you can still see the ones below and the ones above. The actual order of layers is based on what I believe to be the surface lies that reveal the deep-down truths. I call them Works of Fictions—fictions plural.”
   Thorne was all ears now. Barrie was beaming. “Be intriguing,” he had said to me before our rendezvous with Thorne. “Tantalize. I know you can when you want to badly enough.” 
   Much later I told Tamago (you’ll meet her shortly) about that night, and that I’d been the star student, the one my tutor expected the most from. “He probably just wanted to fuck you,” she said. 
   She was shy of the mark, but not by much. When our evening drew to a close, Barrie poured himself into a taxi, and I offered to walk Thorne back to his hotel in Russell Square. Along the way my drunkenness abated, and I delivered my proposal to him. As an artist seeking mentorship and, yes, a degree of patronage in the city of my artist’s dreams, he would have my undivided loyalty were he to facilitate my move, and as my career progressed he would surely have his reward in terms of sales and prestige. How brazen I was in those days!

   At the hotel he invited me in and we lingered a while in his room while I continued my pitch, and as I was leaving Thorne wrote his home phone number on the back of a business card and gave it to me, saying I’d be welcome to stay with him if I ever made it to NYC. He probably regretted it once he sobered up but, to his credit, he stuck to his word when I arrived a year and a half later. He put me up for a couple of weeks in a guest bedroom next to his own, and if he could hear that I was sleepless late at night from jetlag he would come in and keep me company. 

——

   So I had a somewhat soft landing in the city, a roof over my head and access to a prestigious gallerist. Thorne had given me more than I warranted, certainly, my charms notwithstanding.
   What was not forthcoming anytime soon, I learned, was a show at the gallery. To be fair, I had shown up virtually unannounced, absolutely unknown, and Thorne’s generosity only stretched so far. His offer to me to come to New York, made drunkenly in a London hotel room eighteen months ago, had included the vague promise of a show, but of all people I was well aware that bait proffered in this deliberately fuzzy manner carried with it no contract or obligation. It was a sketched outline of what might one day be, a confection rather than a commitment. 
   In any case Thorne’s dance card was already full. There was a major show of new works by Jonas Sykes that was to open within the next few weeks, and after that, Thorne said, he hoped to show an up-and-coming hotshot sculptor he was pursuing. If he was successful, he said, it would be a coup; she already had a significant following and the opening would be a spectacle. Naturally I was envious. Despite being finally here in the city, this crucible of art that had captured my imagination for so long, despite my connection to Thorne and all he represented, I remained very firmly on the periphery. But even if I was still an outsider, for the time being simply observing the play, at least here at the gallery I had courtside seats, was close enough to the action to see the sweat spray and hear the players curse at one another. So when Thorne offered me a job of sorts—as a general “gallery assistant,” whatever that meant—I took it like a shot.
   In any case, I had started thinking about making an entirely new series of paintings. What was floating around my mind was to cement my move to New York by pivoting away from what I had made in London, and committing to the making of an entirely new and different body of work. I had already decided that this existence, this life in this city, represented a rebirth for me, and I must therefore cast off everything from the old one, the one in London. Which meant I had to discard the old paintings—those Works of Fictions—along with everything else I no longer needed. I carried a lot of baggage for such a young person, and as I began to see myself anew in this place, I determined to jettison it all, to become reborn, unsullied by my past. 
   But back to the paintings: I had already begun to have a vague inkling that there was something more to the methodology I had used thus far—the multi-layered investigation/analysis of my subjects that I had explained to Thorne at that pub near the British Museum—that I hadn’t fully explored, I sensed that it still possessed a latent power that was yet to be unlocked. What it was to be exactly still lay beyond my grasp, somewhere ahead, but I knew with great certainty that I needed to stop working as I had. There would be no more Desire/Duplicity posters.
   I told Thorne, and he looked vaguely relieved. That took any lingering sense of obligation off him. I never did get a show at Benedict Thorne, but in the end it didn’t matter. 

——

   The gallery job was supposed to be a temporary, occasional thing, but Thorne was a hedger of bets, and decided that even if he didn’t plan to be my gallerist, he wanted to keep me within reach. At first I did all the menial tasks he had set aside, like repainting the entire gallery space over the course of one weekend, in preparation for the Sykes show. That was a performance piece of its own. I spent far more time meticulously taping floors and windowframes and light fittings than actually applying paint. 
   The same could be said for my own work. Every piece requires intense thought and contemplation before I even so much as make a sketch. In that sense my process is significantly more mental than it is practical. Every step, every action, is mapped out in my head after a great deal of consideration and revision. It’s laborious, but I have always been this way. Even as a child I’d periodically rearrange my shelf of books based on a new taxonomy I’d been worrying at for weeks, mentally trying out different permutations until I found the one that I deemed acceptable. After that, actually making the changes was easy, until a new taxonomy suggested itself to me, and the whole process would start again. 
   I’ve continued to do things exactly the same way ever since. When Barrie first encountered my strange way of working at the Slade he was bemused. It seemed to him that I wasn’t actually doing any work at all. My first canvas remained blank for days, and he remonstrated with me, asking me, in essence, what the hell I thought I was doing, taking up valuable space and not producing the work he’d demanded of us first-year students. But then in an almost trance-like state of pure focus I completed the first painting—no pausing, no stepping back to regard my work, no turning it this way and that in the light—in something like eighteen hours of uninterrupted work in my studio-cubby. I had already figured out all the permutations, possibilities, methods, mediums and so on, and it was simply a case of executing. I had the technical ability—I could paint, no question about that. Barrie said he supposed it was similar to how a master chess player works, calculating all the angles and implications before moving the piece. I’m lousy at chess though, I told him, which for some reason he found hilarious. 

——

   So at first I was a factotum at the gallery, but Thorne soon discovered—on the occasions he ran out for lunch or on errands, leaving me alone—that he enjoyed being untethered, so I quickly became the de facto front desk person at the Benedict Thorne gallery, working Monday to Saturday from ten am to six pm. I had postponed my debut as an artist, at least for now,but I had my first real job in New York City.
   The convenience of our arrangement notwithstanding, Thorne wasn’t going to keep me in his guestroom forever, so he sent me to see a landlord he knew, who showed me a fifth-floor railroad apartment in a cream-colored tenement building on the corner of Eldridge and Grand, about a half-mile from the gallery. The apartment had two and a half rooms—a tiny black and white-tiled bathroom with a slit of a window and a rope-wrapped floor-to-ceiling hot water pipe, a narrow pass-through kitchen and a large living room/bedroom. There was a beat-up table and chair in one corner that would be perfect for my paints and brushes and whatnot. The bare floors were scuffed and battered so paint splatters wouldn’t hurt. It had two windows overlooking Grand Street and two more on the Eldridge side. It faced south and east, so it had great light. The radiators hissed and the rent was low. It was perfect. 
   I bought plates, glasses, knives and forks—two of each; I hoped for company—from the 99¢ store across the street, and a little transistor radio too, to celebrate. I stacked the plates and glasses in the cupboard next to the sink. I spent some time arranging and rearranging them until I was satisfied with the composition, the balance of forms—even the smallest quantity of things had to have a harmony and agreement—then turned to the larger task of organizing my work space, where taxonomies of an entirely different order lay before me. That took several hours, but once I was done I was happy. My workspace was as it should be, and I was ready.
   So there I was in the winter of 1994/1995, manning the gallery by day and painting into the small hours when I returned to my apartment. I was twenty-two, an unknown quantity with an uncertain future, but I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted off me. Time had restarted after the conductor’s pause.

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