By Nightfall: Art History

Monday, a little before ten. Uta is at the gallery already—you can't get there earlier than she does. "Morning, Peter," she calls from the back, in her exaggerated German accent. Mawning Pedder. She's been in the States more than fifteen years now, but her accent has gotten heavier. Uta is a member of what seems to be a growing body of defiantly unassimilated expatriates. She on one hand disdains her country of origin (Darling, the word "lugubrious" comes to mind) but on the other seems to grow more German (more not-American) with every passing year.

Peter walks through the gallery proper—goodbye, Vincents. The crew is on its way to pack them up. Even after fifteen years, show after show after show, there's a small sense of disappointment, a hint of actual defeat, when it's time to bring it all down. It's not about sales (though the Vincents did not, in fact, move the way he'd hoped they might). It's some idea (other dealers will confess to it, too, some of them, after a few drinks) that with this show or that you might have moved something a fraction of a centimeter forward. Aesthetics? Art history? Ugh. But still. What about. . . the unending effort to find a balance between sentiment and irony, between beauty and rigor, and in so doing open a crack in the substance of the world through which mortal truth might shine?

Right. They're objects, hanging on a wall. They're for sale. They are also quite beautiful, in their way—canvases and sculptures wrapped in brown paper and bound with string and then coated in paraffin, vague reference to the shrouded Christ, made by a kind and rather feckless young man named Bock Vincent, three years out of Bard, who lives with his much older girlfriend in Rhinebeck and who is able, in a somewhat limited way, to talk about wrappings and bindings and their relationship to holiness; about how the art we anticipate is always superior to the art we can create. He insists there are images and objects under the wrap¬pings, earnest attempts, though he won't show or describe them, and the paper has been too thoroughly waxed to permit any kind of unveiling.

Anyhow, they're coming down today. By Thursday, all new work.

Uta emerges from her office, coffee mug in hand. Hennaed nest of hair, heavy-framed Alain Mikli glasses. There had been an air of charged possibility between them for a while, a couple of years ago, when Rebecca was in the throes of her crush on the photographer from L.A. It was the time, if ever there were such a time, for Peter to have a little something going on—Rebecca seemed to want him to. Uta was clearly willing, and it seemed that she'd prefer it as a fling (terrible word), a final tipping-over after all the working together, traveling together, living Mondays through Saturdays in that semi-erotic almost-but-not-quite realm of physical proximity. She'd have been sexy and tough and affectionate, no question; she'd have been offended by the suggestion that she might expect more (Zo, you tink vimmen only fock you to zee vat dey can get for it?). And yet. Maybe Peter felt he could see it all too clearly: the wised-up, Weimar cynicism, a sweet and weary cynicism, but still; the cigarettes and coffee and banter; the whole bitterly humorous nihilistic German-ness of it. Because Uta is German, utterly German, which of course is probably why she left there, and insists that she'll never go back.

Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

from By Nightfall
published by Farrar,Straus and Giroux in September 2010