Read Online Envy by Kathryn Harrison - Free Book Online Page B

An editor at
Art News,
she knew a number of gallery representatives, and in a gesture akin to throwing salt over her shoulder, she took the box of prints into her clean hands. Will could assure his father, she told him, that she would be responsible for their handling.
    To Will’s astonishment, within a few months, his father’s work was picked up by a small gallery on Greene Street, his photographs mounted, framed, and hung on a freshly painted wall, celebrated with an opening announced on creamy, deckle-edged invitations and catered by attractive, hip young men and women who carried trays crowded with glasses of champagne, caviar rolled into tiny blini, and slices of honeydew wrapped in prosciutto sliced so thin it was almost invisible.
    Henry Moreland was an instant and happy success, his work favorably mentioned in
Art News
and
Photography,
his show recommended by
Time Out,
embraced not just because he was old but because he was a retired animal doctor. Having been a humble sort of savior, a man who’d never cultivated connections in the sniping New York art world, never sucked up to anyone or done anything to invite spite, Will’s father was forgiven his talent. Gracious at the opening, he introduced Will’s mother—wearing a new dress and salon-styled hair—to people she would never see again, among them the woman with whom he’d embark on an affair. Will and Carole had watched all this from where they stood, on the party’s periphery, grateful to have Samantha between them, the necessity of answering her questions, of collecting her half-eaten hors d’oeuvres and finding her a cup of water that didn’t sparkle, of wiping up her spills and asking her again to please not point, not even at people whose clothes were designed to awe and confound.
    The crowd of flushed celebrants; the trays of filled champagne flutes; the indecipherable praise; the little cards that read “Price available upon request”: none of this was what Will’s father had imagined for his old age. But, on the other hand, as his modest smile implied, it wasn’t unwelcome.
    â€œDad?” Will says now, as they stop for a red light, “when you’re working, taking a picture or printing it, do you ever feel something’s being revealed to you? That your consciousness is heightened— augmented, maybe—by a force outside of your own intellect? That you understand something you hadn’t before?”
    His father looks at him. “I don’t know. I can’t tell what you’re talking about. Do you mean something to do with God?”
    â€œIt wouldn’t have to be. It could, but it wouldn’t have to.”
    They walk in silence for a block, then cross Forty-seventh Street. Ahead are the bright lights of Times Square, mesmerizing, each neon shape bleeding into the fog and creating its own aura of color. So many more giant screens than there were even a few years ago, it seems to Will. On the side of one building a series of portraits appear, each for a second or two. He watches to see what the monumental faces are selling. Insurance of some kind, life insurance, or health. Or maybe it’s financial planning, mutual funds. Beyond them, he can just make out the shadowy outline of 1 Times Square, the building on top of which the glittering New Year’s Eve ball slides down a flagpole, its audience, five hundred thousand strong, counting down the seconds to their lists of resolutions, or at least to clean slates. Will has never understood why a giant disco ball is the country’s chosen symbol of time moving forward, and shouldn’t the big orb go up rather than down? So un-American to descend. America was all about upswings and bootstraps and mind-over-matter, a confidence so profound—or was it blind?—it ensured the country would always be out of step with the rest of the world.
    â€œAre you talking about inspiration?” his father asks.