Gradually, weekend by weekend, little by little, Johanna moved in with Salo, bringing bits and pieces from her dismal little Skidmore room and nothing at all from her childhood home but a wedding photograph of her grandparents, Rose and Lou. Gradually, her weekends on Third Avenue extended on either end—Friday to Sunday, Thursday to Monday—until she was only going back to Saratoga for unmissable classes or exams. (She also ended up switching her major to child psychology, which in time would afford her not the slightest insight into any of her children, at least not when it mattered.) About the painting that dominated her boyfriend’s living room she said nothing at first because—incredibly—it didn’t make much of an impression on her, but as she watched the way he looked at it and began to understand the real estate it occupied in his head, she did make a sincere effort. Our mother obviously recognized that it wasn’t some roughshod picture he’d picked up from one of those street markets in Soho, or a piece of student work he’d bought off an art major at Cornell. A complicated purchase had been involved, and real money spent, and the thing had actually been shipped from Europe. But that only deepened her lack of understanding.
No one had ever taught him how to look at art. Not his parents—if, indeed, they knew themselves—and not the early-morning survey course at Cornell, which in any case ended with Nude Descending the Stair. But this—the 1970s—was a time when the wish of an ordinary person to buy a picture matched up easily with the wish of a gallery or auction house to sell a picture, and nobody cared to complicate that transaction. The advent of art advisors was still a decade off (not that that mattered to our father, who would later take special pleasure in sending them packing), and the only collectors attracting much attention were the people buying Pollock and his circle, which meant that Salo could wander into Christie’s or Sotheby’s, get himself a paddle, and walk out with one of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings, or a slab painting by Hans Hoffman, both things he actually did before the 1970s ended. It was at an absurdly low-key auction that he first encountered Franz Kline and Agnes Martin, and in Andrew Crispo’s gallery, while Crispo himself was in the back lavishing attention on a Swiss collector, Salo wrote a check for a large work by Ed Ruscha. He brought the picture home to Third Avenue, tied to the roof rack of an accommodating cab.
“So, what do we know about this artist?” our mother asked him one day as they sat on the couch. The painting was in the place a television would be in anyone else’s apartment.
He gave her the basics, and our mother listened, but it was a struggle for her to sustain an interest in someone who scribbled in crayon on a background of what was apparently house paint, not even proper oil paint. And actually, Salo himself wasn’t all that interested in the life or opinions of that painter, just as he would not, in the future, be very interested in the biography of any artist he collected. He knew their stories, in general, and he knew their stated concerns, but he didn’t let anything interfere with how a work of art made him feel. Never once, in all the years of his collecting life, did he set out to acquire a work by so-and-so because he felt his collection ought to include a so-and-so, or because someone had told him so-and-so’s work would one day be worth a fortune. He wasn’t concerned with acquiring a fortune. He already had a fortune.
Usually, no one even spoke to our father when he went to Castelli’s or Pace or even Marlborough on Fifty-Seventh (where he’d once sought help acquiring the Twombly), or when he wandered through the showrooms at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in his weekend wardrobe of chinos and old sweaters, head down, hands stuffed in his pockets. It helped that the artists he found himself drawn to were not well-known, not highly valued, and not considered at all likely to become either of those things. And while he never set out to reject the fashions of the art world or the “guidance” of its critics, he saw no reason to pay attention to them, either.
At first, no individual work provoked in him the magnitude of feeling he had experienced in Krefeld, but he discovered, as he looked, that he was beginning to understand the ideas refracting among these paintings. Then, nearly a year after the Twombly, he found himself returning more than once to look at another square painting, a vertically divided field of gray and different gray, so deceptively simple and endlessly complex, by another painter no one had ever heard of. That became his second purchase, and he put it in the bedroom of the rental, above a brown laminated bureau he had bought on the furniture floor at Bloomingdale’s. He could tell that this one didn’t just baffle Johanna; this one she actively disliked. But she didn’t say a word. His third purchase, when it was delivered, proved too large to get through the door of the apartment, and the super had to be bribed to remove the doorframe. Once inside, only the wall the Twombly was leaning against would be big enough, so the Twombly went to the bedroom. The exposure of that damaged Sheetrock necessitated another bribe for the super, and a delay for the wall to be patched, and—for the first time—a visit from a professional art installer. Not one of the people involved in this process—auction delivery men, superintendent, professional hangers—looked at these three pictures with anything but open disdain.
“What do you think of this one?” he asked our mother.
She was sitting on the Jennifer convertible, looking at the new painting with a certain dismay. It was large, a mustard color with a thin vertical greenish stripe on the left edge and a crosshatch of lines at the top. It clashed horribly with the sofa, which was a light blue flower print, and with the shag rug, which was also blue, but a different blue.
“What is it supposed to be?” she asked.
“His home. He lives in Los Angeles.”
“And those are … streets?”
So that—the sharing of it, with her, the woman he already assumed he was going to marry—was obviously not going to happen. But then again, our father wasn’t sure he wanted to share it. It relieved him not to share it.
One thing Salo really did like about Johanna was the fact that she didn’t care much about the acquisition in general. Our mother had never been a shopper and she didn’t start then; she wore jeans and Fair Isle sweaters, tall brown Frye boots on her feet, and for dressy occasions there were a couple of wrap dresses that made her already small waist nearly disappear. She had no wish to experience the downtown clubs, CBGB, already legendary for its iconoclastic bands (and filth), or later the game-changing Palladium and Studio 54. She seemed happy at home with a book or watching one of the new cable channels, Cinemax or Home Box Office, or going out with her Skidmore friends who were beginning to drift south to Manhattan. She gamely went along when there was a museum he wanted to visit, but he waited until she was back in Saratoga to do what he had begun to think of as his real investigations. She did not seem to have a comparable interest, let alone passion; or rather, he understood that the chief interest of her life was himself: his comfort, his entertainment, his absolution. Salo had not asked for this, but suddenly he had it, and he could not seem to make himself feel anything about it. Sometimes he wondered who he might have become if his Jeep hadn’t hit that rock and sent the four of them tumbling through space, but he could never quite see this theoretical version of himself. That person was as much a stranger to himself as the actual person, the tumbling person, he knew himself to be.