When he turned twenty-one, two months before leaving college, he was given access to his trust, and within days he had enlisted the help of the Marlborough gallery to make the purchase from Galleria Sperone in Turin (for an amount that would forever strike him as absurd). Four months later the crate arrived, and when the movers pried it open and went away, he nearly ran after them, terrified to be left in charge of this object and stunned that they—that anyone—actually trusted him to be its caretaker. Even in such an uninspired setting, it had lost not the tiniest fragment of its power.
The setting in question was the perfectly ordinary apartment Salo had rented, in a white brick building on Third Avenue, just your basic young professional one-bedroom with Sheetrock walls, a Jennifer Convertibles sofa he’d bought right off the floor of the shop, a glass and chrome coffee table, and a couple of chairs from Habitat. Now it was all that plus an iconic artwork by an American master that would one day be worth seventy million dollars. Our father had first attempted to hang the Twombly from a lonely nail he’d inexpertly hammered in (off-center and too low), but the weight of the picture promptly tore the nail and a chunk of Sheetrock out of the wall and the picture fell forward, with Salo barely managing to catch it before it hit the coffee table. (One of us, on learning this detail, would not soon recover from it.) After that, the picture remained on the floor, leaning against the wall and just covering the missing chunk. Salo, quite obviously, had no particular interest in beautiful spaces, let alone furnishings, not even furnishings that might conceivably be more comfortable than the ones he had, and he barely used the kitchen. Every corner in his neighborhood had a Korean grocer, and every Korean grocer had a salad bar, so after work he went there and spooned some hot dish into his plastic tray, then he went back to the apartment and sat on his convertible sofa and ate off his lap with a plastic fork, barely taking his eyes off the painting. That’s how he spent his first year at Wurttemberg.
The following summer, when our parents met (re-met) at that wedding on the Vineyard, he saw, before anything else, that Johanna Hirsch was a person in Mandy Bernstein’s mold. Not quite as attractive, maybe, and not quite as smart, but strangely just as loving toward him, as if he were some great prize to be won. He’d been holding on to the rail as the rehearsal dinner wound down, possibly a little drunk and wondering what it would be like to live here, on the island, when suddenly this person was standing next to him and calling him back to those first appalling days: the somber shaking of hands, the enfolding by strangers who vibrated as they held you, the smells of grief. But she knew what he’d done, and she was here anyway. Something inside him slipped into place: not love, not a sudden recognition of his own terrible loneliness, not even desire. Only he thought, looking at her, noting the obvious nervousness as she spoke and understanding that she wanted, for some unfathomable reason, his good opinion: Why not? Here was a pretty, amiable girl who seemed to have decided, apparently on the spot, that the redress of his great personal tragedy—for the record, not his own cosmic view of the matter—ought to be her purpose in life, or at least its priority.
That fall, Johanna returned to Skidmore for her sophomore year and Salo continued to work downtown alongside his father. He didn’t dislike what he was doing and he wasn’t bad at it. He could sense in the other employees, many of whom had been with Wurttemberg for decades, a collective relief that he appeared to be dutiful in his attitude toward the company, competent as he familiarized himself with a century and a half of holdings, and even creative as he began to put together deals of his own. On the weekends our mother came down on the train and stayed with him, something she was less than forthcoming about with her own parents. Salo hadn’t slept with anyone since the Dutch art student he’d been with that day in Germany, when he first saw the Twombly. He’d known it was absurd to be a young man, in the 1970s (when even women were shrugging off old ideas about promiscuity), and living like an ascetic in some religious order, but he’d felt incapable of crossing that abyss. Johanna took charge of the whole thing, somehow, meaning that he was not required to do anything but be accommodating. And once they were having sex (in other words, almost immediately) he was relieved to discover that his body remembered how to do this strange, animal thing, and also how to like it. It comforted him to sleep all night and wake up next to Johanna. He had never actually done that, not even with Mandy Bernstein.
Mainly they kept to themselves, going to museums or movies, sometimes meeting Johanna’s older sister Debbie and Debbie’s boyfriend (later fiancé, later husband) Bruce Krieger at Maxwell’s Plum or P. J. Clarke’s. Debbie was a dynamo in shoulder pads who power-walked to work in running shoes, listening to music on a Walkman. She and Bruce had embarked upon big careers and were obviously on their way to being very well-off. (Salo could see that his family’s archaic little firm, deliberately shrouded from the public gaze, was somehow suspect to them.) A few times Johanna’s brother Bobby came in with whoever thought of herself as his girlfriend that week, and the four of them went out somewhere and struggled to find things to talk about. Bobby was already buying and selling strip malls and commercial spaces, sometimes—through a series of probably illegal holding companies—to himself. He spoke proudly of having been thrown out of boarding school for selling weed to his schoolmates (he had only been caught, he informed them, because he’d cut some preppy’s purchase with pencil shavings), but by some suspicious alchemy he already lived in a huge New Jersey house, full of glittery things that attested to his success. Bobby did tend to thump our father on the back whenever they said hello or good-bye, but it was really to his credit that, despite being “in the same racket,” he never once asked Salo for anything, or tried to sell him so much as a garden shed.