The Latecomer, page 3
Back at Cornell in the fall, he unenrolled from his fraternity, not because the men were in any way insensitive but because he found that he couldn’t stand to enter those rooms and not see Danny Abraham, a person he’d considered almost unbearably kind. Someone told him the girl who’d been Daniel’s date that terrible day had left Cornell. Salo could not remember her at all. He could not even picture her face; he was not sure he had even turned his head when the two of them, Daniel and the girl, climbed into the back seat of the Jeep, or if he’d ever been told her name. He didn’t ask where she’d gone; he felt only relief that he would not have to meet her in some classroom or cafeteria. For the rest of his time in college he wanted to not make any friends and not make any waves; he wanted only to complete his degree without fucking up another thing. He knew enough not to shift his major from economics to anything else, let alone art. Art was an established tradition within the Oppenheimer family, and that was enough to justify an early-morning survey course, and one on the Modernists, and one on Pollock and his circle. Art was also an acknowledged part of the apparatus of wealth, indeed, a not unuseful vector for acquiring wealth. (Selda and our grandfather, Hermann, were not sentimental and they were not stupid: the seventeen Old Master paintings that remained in the Fifth Avenue apartment after Boy with a Spoon and the others departed had been earmarked by Sotheby’s as having the greatest value and/or potential appreciation.) Salo did not need to have any of this explained to him. If he wanted to own and live in the world of paintings once the business of the workday was done, that was his right, indeed our family tradition! But he would continue to study economics and after graduation he would, without complaint, step into the place prepared for him by his father and the fathers before them—the Broad Street offices of Wurttemberg Holdings—there to serve the business of being an Oppenheimer for the rest of his professional life.
When he turned twenty-one, two months before leaving college, he was given access to his trust, and within days he had enlisted the help of the Marlborough gallery to make the purchase from Galleria Sperone in Turin (for an amount that would forever strike him as absurd). Four months later the crate arrived, and when the movers pried it open and went away, he nearly ran after them, terrified to be left in charge of this object and stunned that they—that anyone—actually trusted him to be its caretaker. Even in such an uninspired setting, it had lost not the tiniest fragment of its power.
The setting in question was the perfectly ordinary apartment Salo had rented, in a white brick building on Third Avenue, just your basic young professional one-bedroom with Sheetrock walls, a Jennifer Convertibles sofa he’d bought right off the floor of the shop, a glass and chrome coffee table, and a couple of chairs from Habitat. Now it was all that plus an iconic artwork by an American master that would one day be worth seventy million dollars. Our father had first attempted to hang the Twombly from a lonely nail he’d inexpertly hammered in (off-center and too low), but the weight of the picture promptly tore the nail and a chunk of Sheetrock out of the wall and the picture fell forward, with Salo barely managing to catch it before it hit the coffee table. (One of us, on learning this detail, would not soon recover from it.) After that, the picture remained on the floor, leaning against the wall and just covering the missing chunk. Salo, quite obviously, had no particular interest in beautiful spaces, let alone furnishings, not even furnishings that might conceivably be more comfortable than the ones he had, and he barely used the kitchen. Every corner in his neighborhood had a Korean grocer, and every Korean grocer had a salad bar, so after work he went there and spooned some hot dish into his plastic tray, then he went back to the apartment and sat on his convertible sofa and ate off his lap with a plastic fork, barely taking his eyes off the painting. That’s how he spent his first year at Wurttemberg.
The following summer, when our parents met (re-met) at that wedding on the Vineyard, he saw, before anything else, that Johanna Hirsch was a person in Mandy Bernstein’s mold. Not quite as attractive, maybe, and not quite as smart, but strangely just as loving toward him, as if he were some great prize to be won. He’d been holding on to the rail as the rehearsal dinner wound down, possibly a little drunk and wondering what it would be like to live here, on the island, when suddenly this person was standing next to him and calling him back to those first appalling days: the somber shaking of hands, the enfolding by strangers who vibrated as they held you, the smells of grief. But she knew what he’d done, and she was here anyway. Something inside him slipped into place: not love, not a sudden recognition of his own terrible loneliness, not even desire. Only he thought, looking at her, noting the obvious nervousness as she spoke and understanding that she wanted, for some unfathomable reason, his good opinion: Why not? Here was a pretty, amiable girl who seemed to have decided, apparently on the spot, that the redress of his great personal tragedy—for the record, not his own cosmic view of the matter—ought to be her purpose in life, or at least its priority.
That fall, Johanna returned to Skidmore for her sophomore year and Salo continued to work downtown alongside his father. He didn’t dislike what he was doing and he wasn’t bad at it. He could sense in the other employees, many of whom had been with Wurttemberg for decades, a collective relief that he appeared to be dutiful in his attitude toward the company, competent as he familiarized himself with a century and a half of holdings, and even creative as he began to put together deals of his own. On the weekends our mother came down on the train and stayed with him, something she was less than forthcoming about with her own parents. Salo hadn’t slept with anyone since the Dutch art student he’d been with that day in Germany, when he first saw the Twombly. He’d known it was absurd to be a young man, in the 1970s (when even women were shrugging off old ideas about promiscuity), and living like an ascetic in some religious order, but he’d felt incapable of crossing that abyss. Johanna took charge of the whole thing, somehow, meaning that he was not required to do anything but be accommodating. And once they were having sex (in other words, almost immediately) he was relieved to discover that his body remembered how to do this strange, animal thing, and also how to like it. It comforted him to sleep all night and wake up next to Johanna. He had never actually done that, not even with Mandy Bernstein.
Mainly they kept to themselves, going to museums or movies, sometimes meeting Johanna’s older sister Debbie and Debbie’s boyfriend (later fiancé, later husband) Bruce Krieger at Maxwell’s Plum or P. J. Clarke’s. Debbie was a dynamo in shoulder pads who power-walked to work in running shoes, listening to music on a Walkman. She and Bruce had embarked upon big careers and were obviously on their way to being very well-off. (Salo could see that his family’s archaic little firm, deliberately shrouded from the public gaze, was somehow suspect to them.) A few times Johanna’s brother Bobby came in with whoever thought of herself as his girlfriend that week, and the four of them went out somewhere and struggled to find things to talk about. Bobby was already buying and selling strip malls and commercial spaces, sometimes—through a series of probably illegal holding companies—to himself. He spoke proudly of having been thrown out of boarding school for selling weed to his schoolmates (he had only been caught, he informed them, because he’d cut some preppy’s purchase with pencil shavings), but by some suspicious alchemy he already lived in a huge New Jersey house, full of glittery things that attested to his success. Bobby did tend to thump our father on the back whenever they said hello or good-bye, but it was really to his credit that, despite being “in the same racket,” he never once asked Salo for anything, or tried to sell him so much as a garden shed.
Gradually, weekend by weekend, little by little, Johanna moved in with Salo, bringing bits and pieces from her dismal little Skidmore room and nothing at all from her childhood home but a wedding photograph of her grandparents, Rose and Lou. Gradually, her weekends on Third Avenue extended on either end—Friday to Sunday, Thursday to Monday—until she was only going back to Saratoga for unmissable classes or exams. (She also ended up switching her major to child psychology, which in time would afford her not the slightest insight into any of her children, at least not when it mattered.) About the painting that dominated her boyfriend’s living room she said nothing at first because—incredibly—it didn’t make much of an impression on her, but as she watched the way he looked at it and began to understand the real estate it occupied in his head, she did make a sincere effort. Our mother obviously recognized that it wasn’t some roughshod picture he’d picked up from one of those street markets in Soho, or a piece of student work he’d bought off an art major at Cornell. A complicated purchase had been involved, and real money spent, and the thing had actually been shipped from Europe. But that only deepened her lack of understanding.
No one had ever taught him how to look at art. Not his parents—if, indeed, they knew themselves—and not the early-morning survey course at Cornell, which in any case ended with Nude Descending the Stair. But this—the 1970s—was a time when the wish of an ordinary person to buy a picture matched up easily with the wish of a gallery or auction house to sell a picture, and nobody cared to complicate that transaction. The advent of art advisors was still a decade off (not that that mattered to our father, who would later take special pleasure in sending them packing), and the only collectors attracting much attention were the people buying Pollock and his circle, which meant that Salo could wander into Christie’s or Sotheby’s, get himself a paddle, and walk out with one of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings, or a slab painting by Hans Hoffman, both things he actually did before the 1970s ended. It was at an absurdly low-key auction that he first encountered Franz Kline and Agnes Martin, and in Andrew Crispo’s gallery, while Crispo himself was in the back lavishing attention on a Swiss collector, Salo wrote a check for a large work by Ed Ruscha. He brought the picture home to Third Avenue, tied to the roof rack of an accommodating cab.
“So, what do we know about this artist?” our mother asked him one day as they sat on the couch. The painting was in the place a television would be in anyone else’s apartment.
He gave her the basics, and our mother listened, but it was a struggle for her to sustain an interest in someone who scribbled in crayon on a background of what was apparently house paint, not even proper oil paint. And actually, Salo himself wasn’t all that interested in the life or opinions of that painter, just as he would not, in the future, be very interested in the biography of any artist he collected. He knew their stories, in general, and he knew their stated concerns, but he didn’t let anything interfere with how a work of art made him feel. Never once, in all the years of his collecting life, did he set out to acquire a work by so-and-so because he felt his collection ought to include a so-and-so, or because someone had told him so-and-so’s work would one day be worth a fortune. He wasn’t concerned with acquiring a fortune. He already had a fortune.
Usually, no one even spoke to our father when he went to Castelli’s or Pace or even Marlborough on Fifty-Seventh (where he’d once sought help acquiring the Twombly), or when he wandered through the showrooms at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in his weekend wardrobe of chinos and old sweaters, head down, hands stuffed in his pockets. It helped that the artists he found himself drawn to were not well-known, not highly valued, and not considered at all likely to become either of those things. And while he never set out to reject the fashions of the art world or the “guidance” of its critics, he saw no reason to pay attention to them, either.
At first, no individual work provoked in him the magnitude of feeling he had experienced in Krefeld, but he discovered, as he looked, that he was beginning to understand the ideas refracting among these paintings. Then, nearly a year after the Twombly, he found himself returning more than once to look at another square painting, a vertically divided field of gray and different gray, so deceptively simple and endlessly complex, by another painter no one had ever heard of. That became his second purchase, and he put it in the bedroom of the rental, above a brown laminated bureau he had bought on the furniture floor at Bloomingdale’s. He could tell that this one didn’t just baffle Johanna; this one she actively disliked. But she didn’t say a word. His third purchase, when it was delivered, proved too large to get through the door of the apartment, and the super had to be bribed to remove the doorframe. Once inside, only the wall the Twombly was leaning against would be big enough, so the Twombly went to the bedroom. The exposure of that damaged Sheetrock necessitated another bribe for the super, and a delay for the wall to be patched, and—for the first time—a visit from a professional art installer. Not one of the people involved in this process—auction delivery men, superintendent, professional hangers—looked at these three pictures with anything but open disdain.
“What do you think of this one?” he asked our mother.
She was sitting on the Jennifer convertible, looking at the new painting with a certain dismay. It was large, a mustard color with a thin vertical greenish stripe on the left edge and a crosshatch of lines at the top. It clashed horribly with the sofa, which was a light blue flower print, and with the shag rug, which was also blue, but a different blue.
“What is it supposed to be?” she asked.
“His home. He lives in Los Angeles.”
“And those are … streets?”
So that—the sharing of it, with her, the woman he already assumed he was going to marry—was obviously not going to happen. But then again, our father wasn’t sure he wanted to share it. It relieved him not to share it.
One thing Salo really did like about Johanna was the fact that she didn’t care much about the acquisition in general. Our mother had never been a shopper and she didn’t start then; she wore jeans and Fair Isle sweaters, tall brown Frye boots on her feet, and for dressy occasions there were a couple of wrap dresses that made her already small waist nearly disappear. She had no wish to experience the downtown clubs, CBGB, already legendary for its iconoclastic bands (and filth), or later the game-changing Palladium and Studio 54. She seemed happy at home with a book or watching one of the new cable channels, Cinemax or Home Box Office, or going out with her Skidmore friends who were beginning to drift south to Manhattan. She gamely went along when there was a museum he wanted to visit, but he waited until she was back in Saratoga to do what he had begun to think of as his real investigations. She did not seem to have a comparable interest, let alone passion; or rather, he understood that the chief interest of her life was himself: his comfort, his entertainment, his absolution. Salo had not asked for this, but suddenly he had it, and he could not seem to make himself feel anything about it. Sometimes he wondered who he might have become if his Jeep hadn’t hit that rock and sent the four of them tumbling through space, but he could never quite see this theoretical version of himself. That person was as much a stranger to himself as the actual person, the tumbling person, he knew himself to be.
Sometimes, our mother made him think of Mandy Bernstein: her relentless focus on him, the force of her unqualified love. He understood that she thought of him as a good man, a man beaten down by the undeserved tragedy in his personal rearview mirror, but always on the edge of some beautiful redemption. Our father couldn’t bring himself to disappoint her, to tell her how wrong she was. He would not destroy another nice young woman who was so ill-advisedly determined to love him, and it was that, more than anything else, more than love for her or optimism about a life with her, that made him propose one night at Maxwell’s Plum under one of the ersatz Tiffany lamps, with a ring that had once belonged to his father’s mother. It was too big for Johanna—the size, not the stone—but she was happy with it. Wildly happy. She would also have been happy with a small wedding, just their families and the few friends they’d each kept from college, but they ended up with a big ceremony at the Harmonie Club, and plenty of Wurttemberg clients in attendance. His parents paid for everything.
By then, of course, our mother had a firmer grasp of what she was dealing with in regard to the Oppenheimers, their considerable wealth in particular. She had met his parents, the all but silent Hermann and the terrifying Selda (her expression so frozen Johanna truly did not know whether she was being singled out for special disapprobation or was merely a tiny part of a disapproved-of world), but mainly in restaurants, which delayed her complete awareness. Objectively she recognized that the Oppenheimers were people of means, far more so than her own family, but she had grown up in proximity to only one version of American wealth—the one represented by the students of the Lawrenceville school—and Salo’s parents were obviously not that. Also, Salo himself was indifferent to any display of wealth, unlike other boys she’d known (and dated) who had far less money but who seemed to require the most expensive version of anything in order to feel good about themselves. Our father, when they met, lived mainly in those elderly chinos and sweaters, sometimes over a T-shirt from his old school, Collegiate. He didn’t make any great change in his wardrobe even after he’d begun to work at Wurttemberg, and it was only when his own father spoke to him that he suited up to the appropriate degree. (Johanna helped him pick out a briefcase so he’d stop transporting his papers in a Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s.) She was not yet enough of a New Yorker to recognize the significance of some of Salo’s touchstones: Collegiate, the weekend house on the shore in Rye, the summer camp long associated with Jewish families of a certain financial stratum, and above all the Oppenheimer apartment on Fifth Avenue, in a 1915 limestone co-op that had once been resolutely off-limits to Jewish people, no matter how much money they had. This mansion in the sky took up fully half (the better half) of a high floor, so its long line of rooms all overlooked the great carpet of trees in the center of Manhattan. There, the sofas were certainly not from Jennifer Convertibles and the chairs were certainly not from Habitat, and the paintings on the beautiful walls, which were certainly not Sheetrock, had little bronze nameplates and discreet lights overhead.
