Burnaway

[cont.]
None of the glossy walls had any art on them. That probably would have warmed the space right up. Having carpets which weren’t the exact same grey as the cement floor would have helped as well. Nothing, though, was allowed to mar the planes and right angles of the architecture. Even the furnishings, clustered at one end by the French doors, simply reinforced the rigid geometry. The black furniture – by Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Josef Hoffman, a who’s who in modernist design – looked as elegant and unaccommodating as the space itself.
Add a few kiosks, she told herself, and this would be about as comfy as trying to live in New York’s Grand Central Station without any of the little stars overhead.
Rina greeted them half way through the great hall, glancing ever so briefly at their shoes and attire. Odessa’s dress received a quick look of almost disguised pity. Rina, clothed in a dark gold sheath designed to prove definitively that she had no extra ounces anywhere on her body, looked stunning as usual. The dozens of swirling shades of blonde, the long unwrinkled neck, her flawless cream colored skin, immune to the impact of sunlight. She was like a carved caryatid, all facial movement frozen in an expressionless, graceful gaze. Odessa had to give her husband a slight nudge to break the spell. She didn’t want him to drool in public.
Rina immediately introduced them to a couple who had hired Roger to reconfigure their home in the Cayman Islands. The wife was an artist who just adored Odessa’s gallery, although Odessa couldn’t for the life of her recall ever seeing her there. “You should do a studio visit with her,” Rina told Dennis, as if he were the one responsible for the gallery. As the woman began describing her process of collage, Rina left to rejoin her husband who was chatting with the celebrities by the kidney shaped pool built way in the back of the house. That space was the one featured in all the architectural magazines, a bubble wrapped in a web of steel and glass like a gigantic gift bow with a clear view of the mountains, all the suspended glass punctuated by the aqua glow of the pool. Aerial photos of it were stunning.
As the woman prattled on about her work, Odessa thought it was such a shame that so many affluent women thought of themselves as artists. They never collected work if they painted on their own, except maybe the work of their other rich friends. And she’d never met one who could really paint. Some did nice en plein air pieces but nothing fresh. Nothing as good as what they were imitating. But she’d be a good sport: she pulled up her calendar so they could agree upon a firm date for a studio visit. Maybe she would be surprised. It’s possible the work was good. Besides, an hour or so of awkward art talk really wasn’t a bad exchange for an invitation to see this place firsthand. The bragging rights would serve her well and maybe Rina’s friend would be the exception and buy some art for inspiration. No, it wasn’t a bad exchange at all.
That accomplished, Odessa glanced around to find anyone who looked vaguely familiar, gamely assumed her meet and greet face and started to work the room. Her spangled dress always drew a comment, allowing her to talk about the artist who designed it, creating a nice segue into mentioning her gallery. She and Dennis chatted with several couples before he found someone who played golf. She left him expounding about wedges and which courses had the worst sand traps. Like most of the guests on this side of the house, she stuck around the furniture, all located by the French doors looking outside onto the tubular fountain in a little courtyard.
She couldn’t help but notice that the water spewing from the fountain was an artificially bright blue, bice blue. The most salient detail of the scene, though, was not the blue itself but the fact that the waiters were nearly naked and spray painted that same blue. Rina definitely deserved her reputation for extravagant, themed parties. As Odessa accepted a bright blue cocktail, she tried not to gawk at the bare young man with a braid, or was it a tail, down his back. Oh, the flawless beauty of the young, she sighed, admiring the luscious curve of his back.
She turned to another woman her age also staring at the well formed buttocks scurrying by. “Taking a drink from him seems almost lewd, doesn’t it?” The woman huffed at the comment.
Despite her perfectly manicured looks, despite the splendid younger man accompanying her, the woman wasn’t in anything close to party mode. Most of the other guests on this side of the great hall were equally subdued – like they were milling around after a particularly boring lecture. But they were probably like Odessa, a bit cowed by the mass of concrete hovering above them. She could appreciate the magic of a seemingly suspended cement ceiling and still feel like she was just a bug waiting for it all to crash down and squash her flat. Watching cluster after cluster migrate toward the glowing aqua light and the sliver of moon visible outside above the mountains, she decided to move toward the light herself. No one over here had any interest in art any way. Maybe some of the guests out by the pool would. That’s where everyone was congregating. That was the place to be.
Not everyone was as bothered by the architecture. Dennis continued to talk about golf with a growing group of men who seemed impervious to the space. Bless his heart, he could live in a damp cave and be perfectly happy. There’s a lot to be said for a man who’s easy to please.
On the way toward the pool, she passed the famous dining room and stopped in her tracks. Heavens alive, what a sight. In the midst of all of the perfect right angles was a great huge leaning wall, Roger’s signature element. None of pictures she’d seen of it did it justice. Just beautiful and menacing and unnatural.
A young artist she knew was also staring at the wall. Dressed in a tux a half size too small, Tommy leaned against a table that was larger than her entire living room, scarfing down shrimp hors d’oeuvres with great dexterity. “Oh no,” he mumbled when she tapped his shoulder. “Caught in the act of being a complete piglet. But look at these. Three of them together aren’t even a mouthful.” He was slurring his words a bit. The cocktails were very large and the appetizers were very small.
“Don’t let me stop you. Eat. So how are you doing, Tommy?”
“You know, working away. I had a studio visit with a museum director this afternoon. Life is so damned strange, you know? He just laid into me for not thinking about the future because of the semen I mix into some of my paints. Take a look at this wall. What kind of future does this wall have in LA? It’s taunting an earthquake to come and finish its fall. And this,” he gestured with a sculpted carrot strip in his hand, “is substantially more expensive than any painting I’ll ever do. A good shake and the whole fucking house will go tumbling down the hillside. And really, what’s archival about multimillion dollar museums built a stone’s throw from an active tar pit or right by the ocean or right in the middle of fault lines and flood zones? And they complain about artists not working with permanent materials? No one thinks outside their own tiny bubble.” He sighed. “You know, after another Scotch, none of it will matter. Tell me,” he said as he gobbled more tiny sandwiches, “could you eat comfortably with that slab hovering over you like that? It’s a brutal thing to do to a dining room.”