Art Groupie

‘Here’s what’s fun,’ claimed the host. She throws back the last of her champagne and tosses the flute off the balcony. It falls for so long you think it must have hit the bottom, but was so far down as to be inaudible, until a gentle tinkle echoes up from the centre of the giant atrium.

‘See, here, I’m on top of the block, on top of the city. On top of the world, friends!’

You think – being on top is only in relation to what’s down, and what’s down: hell, of course, but really molten spheres within spheres, or perhaps if you go right through, just an awful sick nothing.

Another guest hurls her flute down with an obliging whoop. Somehow, it feels fine – if the balcony was over the street no way would I be throwing things off. My cousin’s friend was actually that person killed by a penny tossed from the viewing platform on the Empire State Building. But this building is like a giant bin, trash can, she’d say, really, not that I’d point out the comparison to Selina, of course. Problem now, is I’m without a drink, so off I go in search. With floor to ceiling windows all the way around the circle, inward and outward-facing, I can see the servers with their trays and the three bars. I head for a bar: champagne makes my tongue furry.

The glasses are too small and the drinks too big. She walks up and says, ‘So, what do you think of this place?’ I think, then decide to say: ‘It’s emptier than the promises made at events like this.’ She looks at me with wet eyes. She touches her necklace. Thus she makes it clear she is a benefactor, rather than reporter or another hanger-on, as I am.

I take my hand from my necklace and go to the balcony on the outside of the vast cylinder. This one overlooks the plaza below, where trees are lit from beneath and people shuffle carefully around the fountain. No-one looks up, but I look down. I notice with terror a gap in the frameless glass balustrade, large enough for my foot to pass through easily, and enough for a small infant to tumble wildly, randomly through, just another accident on the unsteady feet of babes. From their mouths, truths, from their gait, disaster. Experimentally, I slip my foot through and let the heel drop, pointing my toes skyward to preserve the shoe. My neighbour at the rail takes note and smiles to himself, perhaps at my childish testing through action rather than thought – the mark of an uncivilised mind, still immature, I think, but her slender calves and thick dark hair make me pay her mind, so we get talking. She tells me:

‘I’m just another rich man’s wife. I wouldn’t pay much attention to me.’

I ask: ‘Why come then?’

‘I’m trying to cultivate a passion for art.’

‘If it’s so much effort, why not get a passion for something else?’

‘Oh, I’ve tried. There were sports – badminton, golf. I played piano, but it didn’t stick. Even cross-stich – couldn’t get a passion for it. So I’ve come to this. Art’s good.’

Spoken like an authentic dilettante, I think.

It is an opening, the artist: Samuel Noteworthy. Canvases, hung from meat hooks, fixedly crumpled with a paraffin wax soak, showed collages of hentai and scripture folded into the giant sheets. Noteworthy peacocked his way around the party, using phrases like: ‘unbroken consciousness mapping’ and ‘simplistic complexity’. These I fed to him as his agent: a vital strategy is confusing buyers or maybe-buyers into respect for the works’ depth. I offer to introduce her to him – see if her passion is alerted.

(I don’t tell this man I know him well.)

It does not go well.

He says: ‘We are but the nodes of a linking web of human relationships.’

She addresses my agent, sarcastically: ‘Does he always talk like this.’ I know, I hope, it is an act, a fiction.

I am stymied always at reactions like this, and want to say the truth, that I am blundering about, fascinated by imagery ancient and modern, amazed at the parallels between treatment of women in pornography and holy books, where they are demonic temptresses whose power must be vanquished by violent retaliation or the consequence is a hot-faced masculine vulnerability. But even that is post-hoc, like all art commentary. I made it up, I thought it was good, then came the reasons.

In another world, this is what I say when people ask. I say, too, quality can’t be easily described, but you know it when you see it.

He says – ‘Oh, he’s unknowable really. A savant, in lots of ways.’

She sneers – pretend incomprehension as a defence masking real incomprehension. She looks like a shout, she whirls on her toe and hooks Noteworthy’s arm to lead him to his own work that he might explain it – so I one-upped his pretension and in doing so shone on light on him: a paragon of an art dealer.

I leave them to it, and see the hostess speaking to the assembled reporters and their photographers.

Leverson is talking about the cultural meaning an innocence threshold. He gets prolix on the tension between the doctrine of original sin and the location of a loss of innocence so widely sought in an artistic moment in the Booker, the Oscar, the Turner.

He says: ‘Is a child blessed with an innate innocence? Or are they fallen creatures like the roiling sinful rest of us? If it be the former, when does this innocence fall from their eyes? And is it with an act, in which they must be the actor, or must it be lost as they bear witness to the hopeless depravity of us all?’

This through the PA. My voice is sounding good, almost theological. People are reverent.

At this point we saw a child, with bare feet and a white, loose-fitting tunic, like they’d walked out of a vision of a bland middle-class future. The child holds hands with a woman in a necklace and thick dark hair and they walk together towards the balcony that faced inwards, so that everyone in the penthouse hoop can watch them.

Noteworthy comes forth and takes the child’s hand softly.

His hand sweats into mine, clasping around it, making me feel small. He pulls me slightly, right to the edge of the balcony. The great big hole is black and deep. Mum had said art was her new hobby, and she needed me to help out a really famous artist. I do as she says. I don’t know if she even really knew him, but he was holding my hand.

But then he drops it, and steps behind me.

We see Noteworthy lift the child at the waist and hoist him over the balustrade, over the deepening fissure of concrete and glass, through the barrier of innocence and out the sinful side.