OPENING NIGHT

by Karen Lillis

Some might know that along with writing about art, I (Emma) write fiction and self-published a book. Though the world of literary publishing seemed ultimately uninteresting to me, I still write novels and short stories. When Karen approached me about publishing fiction in Petrichor, I was thrilled at it. Many of our readers will recognize the experience of working in a gallery at the whims of the patrons and the neuroses of the gallerists. I thought Karen captured working as a young person in the art world excellently here and I hope you enjoy the story as much as I did. – ER

A note from Karen: “In the early 1990s, I had the pleasure of working at a small, ambitious photography gallery which featured the work of both emerging and established African American artists and documentarians. The Crawford and Sloan Gallery in New York’s SoHo was short-lived, but significant for (among other achievements) centering around The Black Photographers’ Annual (1972-1980). The Annual was an influential publication that was dense with talent from New York and Chicago—but had fallen out of print and into obscurity by the time the gallery opened in 1992. This story is set during a fictional gallery opening inspired by that place and those artists.”

Henryk arrived on Mercer Street at least an hour after it got too crowded for me to keep peering down the block at his absence. I felt a sudden hand on the small of my back just before I heard him exhale my name, Eleeza. He asked me for a cup of wine in a low voice, like it was a secret between us. I tipped a narrow bottle until a flimsy plastic cup was two thirds full. Then Henryk took his drink and headed to the farthest corner of the show.

Everything was like a secret between us. I still wondered why Henryk saved up all his affection for behind closed doors, under the covers, in the darkest hours when even Manhattan was asleep. In the beginning, his Eastern accent had seemed like a come-on, an invitation. I was aware of his lips as he spoke to me, his mouth involved in the effort of forming words in my direction. Lately his accent sounded brusque, like he was pushing me off him or closing a door. “Eleeza, don’t.” “Eleeza, proszę–” 

I poured some wine for an older couple, and the wife forced a polite smile. As they slipped away into the crowd to inspect the photographs, Renee told me about them, richies from Sullivan Street. “They’re more conservative with what they buy these days, but of course we keep them on the mailing list.”

I stole a glance in Henryk’s direction as Renee kept talking—I had some notion that I could corral him with my eyes. The gallery was so tiny, it was hard to imagine that I could lose Henryk in the same shoebox that contained me five days a week. But of course the crowd made it an entirely different room.

He was still standing in the far corner. I could see that he was savoring an early self-portrait, a shot of the artist in a hotel room in France, her young and luminous face jumping out from the outmoded floral wallpaper. He took in the image like he consumed his alcohol, spending long minutes in quiet appreciation. The photographer Sonya Johnson was a beauty from any angle, and the wife of a notorious musician. Two days ago, I was the one enjoying her black and whites up close while I walked around the gallery in fixer-stained jeans, helping Dennis and Renee assemble modular picture-frames and measure spaces between nail holes. That day, I marveled at Sonya’s electric contrasts and indelible faces. A mother and child in African dress on a medieval European street. A trio of jazz musicians rehearsing in a sun-drenched city park. A profile view of Grace Jones adjusting her costume backstage. A uniformed waiter clearing a two-top at Windows on the World. Tonight, my black dress was good for hiding splashes of pinot noir, and there was a room alive with people from Sonya’s places: Chicago, Johannesburg, 125th Street; Paris, Memphis, Senegal, Detroit.

Chiaroscuro Gallery: On good days, I was sure that I had a glamor job. I was the girl in the window on Mercer Street, the conspicuous young woman in cat glasses who sat behind the glass doors at the glass desk under the halogen lights, on display like the photographs. The delivery boys Hey Chica-ed as they walked their hand trucks down the block and the bartenders nodded as they headed to the night shift. The dog walkers smiled and the bike messengers glanced and the tourists wandered in and whispered. The trash collector who was also an art collector offered to fetch me cups of Cuban coffee. As Suzanne would say, I had it made in the shade. 

”Gal Friday,” the Village Voice classified had said. Which sometimes seemed more like announcing a caste of person than describing a job. A welder or a gaffer or a teacher might show up to work knowing what skills were needed or what tasks the hours would entail. But so many of my jobs as a young woman could be boiled down to the dubious skill of anticipating the needs of everyone around me. Salon receptionist, restaurant hostess, bus boy, mother’s helper: It was starting to be a pattern I hadn’t yet noticed. Me, I was busy looking for truth and beauty in the souls of other people.  Point the lens and click the shutter.

I wanted those jobs when I took them. Babysitting got me into neighbors’ houses, where I could spy on how they really lived. Hostessing at the Denny’s on the edge of town let me talk to strangers who were just passing through. Answering phones at the beauty salon let me see how women became women, and what it looked like when they were on their way there. I thought I knew what a good photographer needed–empathy, curiosity, a backstage pass to the inside scoop.

Just then, Sonya Johnson herself pulled me aside to ask if her husband had phoned.

“He was going to meet me downtown HOURS ago.”

I could smell her perfume heavy in my nostrils and feel the softness of her fake, plush leopard-skin coat. But I couldn’t help her.

“I’m so sorry…”

Her anxious face filled my view. I wanted badly to be of assistance.

“You’ll come and find me–?”

I felt nothing if not useless. The star of the night needed something from me, and I didn’t have it to give.

In the next moment she saw an old friend over my shoulder and ran laughing-screaming into her arms: An experimental filmmaker who lived on Broadway nearby and frequented the gallery. They almost knocked the drink out of Dennis’ hand hugging in their animated fashion. I squared the stack of napkins on the desk and cleared the dirty cups.

Point, click. Henryk was standing so I could see only a small corner of the picture in front of him. A fraction of the expression on a boy’s mouth and the knotted tie of a school uniform. Henryk never wore ties unless he was working at that kind of restaurant, which he sometimes was. Tonight he stood wrapped in his brown leather jacket, which was thinner than American ones. I enjoyed his silhouette as he shifted his weight from one leg to another in his faded jeans. A chic young woman making her way through the show bumped into him. Henryk smiled at her a little, but not enough to reveal his teeth, which were dark gray from a childhood without fluoride.

I poured a cup of wine for Renee’s favorite waiter from Grand Street, and another for his date in pleather jeans. “Cheers,” the waiter lifted his cup to me, which I took to mean he remembered my face–or maybe my glasses, or at least my existence as Renee’s right hand.

Point, click. Henryk had moved on to another photograph, an image of an old woman and her suitcase in the New Orleans train station. I loved the unexpected softness around the edges of things in so many of Sonya’s pictures. She had a sharp eye for street scenes but she worked a style that made them something else if you stopped to notice. This one used a short depth of field to focus on the deep folds in the woman’s dress, and the lines on her aged face, while blurring the details we could fill in on our own: the worn wooden bench, the station full of passengers. A longer glance drew the eye to a creased envelope the woman gripped in her lap.

This was a humble subject, but I exalted Henryk’s relationship to art as I watched him. The silent way he stayed with a picture for a long time made me give him depth. I fetishized what I couldn’t touch: Henryk’s patience with art became part of his sophistication in my mind. All the world’s culture he had seen and hadn’t yet shared with me. The Roman roads and the revolutionary angst and the dense villages and the crowded cafes. Henryk’s gaze became Warsaw itself, a capital that blurred into every Eastern European city I could and couldn’t name.

What I missed when I was inventing gravity for his silence was the part where Henryk had left Poland for almost the same reasons that I’d left the American corn fields. I failed to see what Henryk sometimes alluded to: That Warsaw growing up was a small room with four gray walls. One, The Catholic Church, two, the Soviet pricks, three, the Polish bureaucrats, four, his parents squeezed breathless in the smallness of it all, too. Henryk was looking into those photographs for the same thing I was staring into him for: some kind of magical New York salvation. A deliverance granted by a city so tall, so multi-lingual, so glamorous, so endless, so optimistic, so dominating that it could wipe the past clean of its narrowness and sorrows. Some kind of art world super-power to transport us from what we thought we were trapped in.

While I was watching Henryk, someone came up next to him to ponder the same image, one of the moneybags I hadn’t heard about from Renee. She wasn’t nearly as old as the woman in the photo but she was old enough to know a few things about baby-faced young men who came alone to art openings. Soon they weren’t really facing the photo anymore at all.

“Eliza, can you go over to Fanelli and pick up another couple bottles of red?”

Dennis pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket and I remembered that the gallery still owed me some of last week’s pay. “Frank’ll have three for you behind the bar. Give him a twenty.”

“Dennis, no—Aaron says he’ll go. I need Eliza here.” Renee squeezed through several art-lovers to intervene.

“Okay—and, should we have him get some flowers for Sonya, too—?”

An older man was handing me his long wool coat and fedora, and Renee motioned with her eyes to the ceiling. I climbed the ladder to the loft-office and tossed the coat to my right, and placed the man’s hat on Renee’s desk. From my vantage point near the top rung of the ladder, I cast a quick eye down at the gallery, looking for Henryk in the last place I’d seen him. But every time I looked for him again, the scene had, like a jump cut in a movie, changed.

The room was buzzing with artists greeting one another, a reunion of Sonya’s friends and mentors. I remember thinking that night that Sonya had everything I wanted as a grown up artist, which was more than I had really imagined. I loved that she had managed to devote most of her days to the Art Life. I considered her “famous” because she had a solo show in a downtown New York art gallery, though I learned later that those things come and go. But her entourage showed me something I hadn’t really seen in full bloom until then. A set of friends whose personal affection and artistic admiration were utterly mingled. A group of comrades who kept in contact for decades and had each other to call on in creativity or emergency, in celebration or consolation.

From my ladder, Henryk was no longer in view, but I could see Sonya standing with another one of her intimates, talking cheek to cheek. Sonya looked worried again, and I wondered if they were talking about the husband. A husband was a curious thing to me at that age. By curious, I mean that I was curious why women thought they needed one. It’s the end of the Twentieth Century! It seemed like such an outdated habit. And yet Sonya and George were a good-looking pair of book-ends in her photographs. They seemed like they had belonged to one another for a long time, and I could see the admiration in her shots of George and his infamous trumpet. Her friend clasped her hands around Sonya’s, and I wondered what the fear was: accident, incident, fighting, cheating? Sonya had one of those faces with a surprising range: When she was smiling, you could see all the radiance of her youth, and in moments when she was anxious, she wore all her years on her face.

I climbed backwards down the ladder and kept pouring wine for more artists and gallery regulars. There was the angry young man who came to the gallery and took notes every Thursday afternoon, but never acknowledged me. There was the up and coming indie screen star whose kindness was as memorable as her breakout face. There was the chatty public school teacher who was a devoted collector of works by Romare Bearden and Roy DeCarava. There was the Village Voice photo critic I didn’t know by sight but Renee filled me in on later (“Remember the white guy with the mustache?”). There was the striking woman photographer from New Jersey who often dropped by the gallery looking for Renee and Dennis, who were never in. There was the older photographer who liked to tell me stories about his island youth or whisper shocking suggestions into my ear. I indulged him because he told good stories, because he was ancient, and because his photographs were of the highest elegance. He got Dennis to take a few pictures of us together that night and in one, I am laughing nervously.

I saw Henryk head outside with a cigarette between his fingers, and then I lost him for a while. A portion of my brain was out on the sidewalk until he returned to my sight. Who was he looking at? Who was he talking to?

A sleek black town car pulled up and caused some stir among the gallery-goers closest to the glass doors. The man who poured himself out of the back seat and stumbled in our direction was recognizable from Sonya’s pictures. He lurched into the room and moved towards Sonya in a way that seemed to deny the many bodies who mingled between them. I was trying to read his mood, but his eyes seemed vacant and unaware. A bull in a china shop? More like a zombie in a dollhouse. Before he’d arrived, the place had seemed expansive with Sonya’s generous entourage entering one by one. Now the gallery felt scaled for a miniature world, one George Johnson didn’t fit into. I was almost relieved when two of the artists in the room took him roughly by the arm and led him back outside. Sonya followed close behind, the anxiety on her face now turned to fury. We could hear her start to berate him on the sidewalk, but they were moving down the block and the sound of her voice soon faded under the murmur of the traffic.  

Henryk came back inside, cigarette smell clinging to his coat. The funny smile on his lips made me feel like he had a secret I was no longer part of. He slid his cup across my reception desk for another drink, downed half of it, and stretched his arm out for more. How could a man so full of charm on Grand Street be so wordless on Mercer?, I wondered. As I turned to unveil a new wheel of brie, Henryk slipped away to a photograph he hadn’t yet studied. Shipyard workers on the docks of Dakar.

After fifteen minutes (was I counting?), Sonya returned to the gallery alone. Once inside, she greeted her favorite uptown art critic with an embrace and a beaming smile, but I saw her in the split second before she was back on this side of the glass doors. I saw her jaw stiff, her mouth turned down, her forehead furrowed. I saw her with her eyeliner, only slightly streaked.

Karen Lillis was born in Washington, D.C. during the Vietnam War and has lived in Virginia, New York, Austin, Paris, and Pittsburgh. A bookseller, writer, and photographer, she is the author of four books of fiction and most recently two books of photography, including Pittsburgh When I’m Hungry (2024). She has written for Art Papers, The Austin Chronicle, Big News, Blink Ink, The Brooklyn Rail, Keyhole Magazine, New Art Examiner, New York Nights, Pop City, Pulse/Berlin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. She was a 2014 recipient of the Acker Award for Avant Garde Excellence in Fiction. Her fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her article on the independent presses of Pittsburgh was a finalist for a Golden Quill Press Award. You can find her feminist micro-store, Karen’s Book Row, inside of Caliban Books.

This month’s articles are produced with support from the Frick Pittsburgh in conjunction with their landmark exhibition The Scandinavian Home: Landscape and Lore. Get cozy as the seasons change with David and Susan Warner’s collection of paintings, tapestries, and sculptures from around the Nordic region. Tickets now on sale.