Picture This

Inside it was a magnificent labyrinth of white columns, rusting steel pipes, corridors that, Escher-like, seemed to stretch either way like mirages. Graffiti and local street art was paint-sprayed at random on the concrete like ancient hieroglyphs, evidence of other illicit visitors. Rusty railway tracks for abandoned carts of wheat ran between the repeating pillars, with mysterious large metal trays, their purpose long forgotten, sitting like ritual baths, squat and defiant. It was function that had become art in an arbitrary ruin that no real installation artist could possibly mimic. Susie was enraptured, and when she spoke she found that she was whispering, almost as if they had landed in a place of worship. She pulled out her camera from inside her jacket and took a series of shots, framing the columns, tracks and industrial pipes like abstract sculpture. After she’d finished she turned back to Felix.

‘How did you find it?’

‘When I first arrived in New York, I was a total greenhorn. I lived in Brooklyn and I used to see this building on the horizon like some strange giant. I was intrigued; it seemed isolated, like I was. Then, when I had my first break, when I persuaded Robin Stanwick to leave Gavin Brown and let me represent him… ’

‘… Stanwick was huge at the time… ’

‘… actually he was cooling off, it was me that launched his collage era, that’s when he really made it.’

‘That was you?’ Susie couldn’t keep the awe out of her voice.

‘My first real artist. Anyhow, at the time, when he finally rang me with his decision, secretly I was shit-scared. I came here, broke in and watched the dawn from the roof. And it was on that sunrise that I made a pledge to myself. At the time it felt like the building itself was praying with me, championing me. I’ve been coming back ever since.’

He finished gazing out towards one of the broken windows framing the skyline of the city on the other side of the river. Cars streaming over the bridge, an abstract of flat red, brown, cream planes, verticals and horizontals. Again, she thought of Hopper, how these were the exteriors of his urban interiors and why Felix might be attracted to them. Looking at his profile, lit by the golden afternoon light streaming in, she thought he was godlike, a Hermes in an underworld of grand decay, and she knew his beauty was drawing her toward him, like an insidious perfume. She struggled, fighting the desire to touch him, to kiss him.

‘Can we go up there?’ she asked brusquely, determined to break free.

‘To the roof? Sure.’ And as he turned away to lead her up the rusty steel steps he felt that tension between them tear away a little with their physical separation.

*

It was about four by the time they clambered out, their boots rattling on the flat metal surface, the roof itself a lunar scape peppered with the stub ends of rusting chimneys and funnels that seemed to have pushed through the roof like alien fungi. The distant horizon, jagged with the thrust and plunge of the skyscrapers, steeples, towers, seemed to go on and on as if the city itself would continue over the curve of the Earth. It was the domain of pigeons, and the ghosts of the adventurous, who again had left their mark – the lurid pink of a heart painted on the rusting pot of a funnel, white angel wings and a gang emblem sprayed onto the flat beige of the roof itself.

‘Oh Felix, it’s amazing.’ The wind caught her words and twisted them against his tongue. He was happy. Simply content to have her standing beside him and to have astonished her; it was an emotion, he realised, that saved a little piece of his soul. Not wanting to break the magic of the moment, he took her hand and led her closer to the edge.

Five feet away from the soaring drop they both halted.

‘How many people do you think have fallen?’ she asked.

‘Thousands and none. I have a theory that the wind is made of ghosts, whirling around in some Goya-like fury, angry at the absurdities we waste our lives on, yet unable to tell us any better.’

‘You’re a surprising man.’

‘And you a surprising woman.’

Later when he dropped her off at her building he kissed her, careful to keep to the protocol of the peck on each cheek, but then deliberately drew his lips slightly toward her mouth, already hard beneath his jeans.

Chapter Six

She could still feel it on her skin the next morning, gazing down at her sketches, struggling to stay focused. The rattle of footsteps, then the creak of the studio door, broke her reverie.

‘God, you’ve begun without us. What time did you finally get to sleep?’ Alfie and Muriel stood framed in the doorway.

‘About four – I had trouble sleeping.’ Susie led them into the vast studio, sunlight streaming down from skylights illuminating two massive worktables in the centre of the space. There was a podium at one end, surrounded by photographic lamps and light reflectors, while at the other side of the space a green room was set up with a long leather couch, a coffee maker, video projector and huge flat-screen television. ‘What do you think of our new workspace? Not too shabby, eh?’

Alfie whistled in admiration. ‘So Mr Baum delivered the goods. I did have my doubts.’

‘He’s even brought in the sewing machine I stipulated – very impressive. And I thought he was all bells and whistles.’ Muriel had gravitated straight to the sewing area situated under the window.

Alfie was already at the worktable, staring down at the reproduction of an 18th-century Chinese erotic painting Susie had placed there.

The print featured a near-naked plump woman with bound feet lying back in what looked like a specially constructed chair, her ankles held up high by a man in a loose robe as he penetrated her, his penis and her vulva the focal point of the painting. Three fully clothed female servants – two young, one older – stood watching with curiously blank and innocent expressions; each held a painted fan and appeared to be fanning the amorous couple – obviously the lord and lady of a grand household. All five characters had ornate hairstyles bound high atop their heads, in traditional Qing styles. The background was a plain pale gold, which served to highlight the dark carved wooden throne the woman was lying on, as well as the ornate dresses of the onlookers and the erotic action itself.

‘Interesting. There’s a real innocence about it, despite the sex,’ Muriel interjected.

‘That’s why I chose it, because of the playful expressions. Isn’t it wonderful? It’s totally free from the Judeo-Christian notion of carnal sin – it was a Taoist principle that every man should know how to make love properly, that this was a necessary way of balancing spirit and body.’

‘Sounds eminently civilised,’ Muriel sniffed.