Dead Sleep

When the cab pulls up to Wingate’s Fifteenth Street gallery in the failing light of dusk, I find a simple three- story brownstone like a thousand others in the city, with a bar on one side and a video rental store on the other. The tony atmosphere of the Chelsea art district stays in another part of Chelsea, I guess.

After paying the cabbie to wait, I get out and study the doorway from the curb. There’s a buzzer by the front door, which looks normal enough but probably hides all sorts of security devices. I slip on sunglasses as I approach, in case there’s a videocam.

There is. I push the buzzer and wait.

“Who are you?” asks the stateless voice I recognize from my earlier call.

“Jordan Glass.”

“Just a moment.”

The buzzer burps, the lock disengages, and I pull the door open. The ground floor of the gallery is half- illuminated by fluorescent light from the second floor, spilling down an iron staircase. With my sunglasses, it’s hard to see, but the decor seems spare for a trendy New York art gallery. The floor is bleached hardwood, the walls white. The paintings look modern for the most part, or what my idea of modern is, anyway. A lot of stark color arranged in asymmetrical patterns, but it means little to me. I’ve been called an artist – often during attacks by purist photo-journalists – but that doesn’t qualify me as a judge of art. I’m not even sure I know it when I see it.

“Do you like that Lucian Freud?” asks the voice I heard on the speaker outside.

There’s a man standing on the landing, where the iron staircase turns back on itself. Fixed squarely in a shaft of light, he looks as though he simply materialized there. He is wiry and balding, but he compensates for the baldness with a shadow of trimmed black stubble. In his black jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket, he looks like the midlevel mafia thugs I saw in Moscow a few years back: slightly underfed but fiercely predatory, particularly around the eyes and mouth.

“Not really,” I confess, with a quick look at the painting hanging nearest me. “Should I?”

“Should doesn’t come into it. Though it would have a better chance of impressing you if you took off those sunglasses.”

“I wouldn’t like it any better. I’m not here to see this.”

“What are you here to see?”

“You, if you’re Christopher Wingate.”

He beckons me forward with his hand, then turns and starts back up the stairs. I follow.

“You always wear sunglasses in the evening?” he asks over his shoulder.

“Something wrong with that?”

“It’s just so Julia Roberts.”

“That’ll be the one thing we have in common, then.”

Wingate chuckles. He’s barefoot, and his pale dirty heels seem to float up the steps. He passes the second floor, which houses sculpture, and continues up to the third. This is clearly where he lives. It has a Danish feel, all spare lines and Scandinavian wood, and it smells of fresh coffee. Standing in the middle of the room is a large, unsealed wooden crate with packing material spilling out of its open end. There’s a claw hammer lying atop the crate, a scattering of nails around it. Wingate brushes a proprietary hand against the wood as he passes the crate, which comes to his shoulder.

“What’s in the box?”

“A painting. Please, sit down.”

I gesture at the crate. “You work up here? This looks like your apartment.”

“It’s a special painting. It may be the last time I see it in person. I want to enjoy it while I can. Would you like an espresso? Cappuccino? I was about to have one.”

“Cappuccino.”

“Good.” He walks to a blue enameled machine on a counter behind him and starts to fill a small mug. While his back is to me, I move to the open crate. There’s a heavy gold frame inside. Peeking between the box and the frame, I can’t see much, but it’s enough: the upper torso and head of a nude woman, her eyes open and fixed in a strangely peaceful stare. Wingate is dispensing the cup as I back away.

“So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” he asks the wall.

“I’ve heard good things about you. They say you’re a very selective seller.”

“I don’t sell to fools.” He sprays out some steamed milk with a flourish. “Unless they know they’re fools. That’s different. If someone comes to me and says, ‘My friend, I know nothing about art, but I wish to begin collecting. Would you advise me?’ This person I will help.” Another hissing jet of steamed milk. “But these pretentious WASP millionaires make me puke. They took art criticism at Yale, or their wife majored in Renaissance masters at Vassar. They know so much, what do they need me for? For cachet, yes? So fuck them. My cachet is not for sale.”

“Not to them, anyway.”

He turns with a grin and offers me a steaming cup. “I love your accent. You’re from South Carolina?”

“Not even close,” I reply, stepping forward to take the mug.

“But the South. Where?”

“The Magnolia State.”

He looks perplexed. “Louisiana?”

“That’s the Sportsman’s Paradise. I’m from the home of William Faulkner and Elvis Presley.”

“Georgia?”

I’m definitely in New York. “Mississippi, Mr. Wingate.”

“Learn something every day, right? Call me Christopher, okay?”

“Okay.” After Ron Epstein’s characterization of Wingate, I half expected the man to make some crack about Mississippi being the home of the lynching. “Call me Jordan.”

“I’m a huge fan of your work,” he says with apparent sincerity. “You have a pitiless eye.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“Of course. You don’t shy away from horror. Or absurdity. But there’s compassion there, too. That’s why people connect with your work. I think there would be quite a demand, if you were inclined to market it as fine art. Not much photography really qualifies, but yours… no doubt about it.”

“You’re not living up to your advance billing. I heard you were a son of a bitch.”

He grins again and sips his cappuccino. The pure blackness of his eyes is startling. “I am, to most people. But with artists I like, I’m a shameless flatterer.”

I want to ask him about the painting in the crate, but something tells me to wait. “It’s been said that a photograph can be journalism or art, but not both.”

“Such crap. The gifted always break the rules. Look at Martin Parr’s book. He turned photojournalism upside down with The Last Resort. Look at Nachtwey’s stuff. That’s art, no question. You’re every bit as good. Better in some ways.”

Now I know he’s bullshitting me. James Nachtwey is the preeminent war photographer at Magnum; he’s won the Capa five times. “Such as?”

“Commercial ways.” A glint of mischief in the black eyes. “You’re a star, Jordan.”

“Am I?”

“People look at your photos – stark, terrible, unflinching – and they think, ‘A woman was standing here looking at this, recording it. With a woman’s sensitivity. A woman has stood this, so I must stand this.’ It floors them. And it changes their perspective. That’s what art does.”

I’ve heard all this before, and while largely true, it bugs me. It smacks of Not bad, for a girl.

“And then there’s you,” Wingate goes on. “Look at you. Hardly any makeup, and still beautiful at – what? – forty?”

“Forty.”

“You’re marketable. If you’ll suffer through a few interviews and an opening, I can make you a star. An icon for women.”

“You said I’m already a star.”