Sometimes, when you’re in love with an artist, it can be hard to see that it’s not about you at all. You get lost in the attention, the deep, soulful gazes and the probing regard. And then, gradually, you come to realize that you’re not so much a woman as you are a statue. A statue on a pedestal that he chiseled and posed, a foreshortened figure that he sees only through a single squinted eye. When you’re in love with an artist, you’re no longer you, exactly, but a loving and generous Everywoman who will weave your life into a crafty plinth for his work.
And it doesn’t even matter if you’re an artist, too. You could have a whole room—a small one, but a whole room nonetheless—at the Whitney Biennial. Your gallery in Berlin could be paranoid enough about your potential defection to a rival that you’d have to fake an eccentric demand for weekly shipments of special-order, octopus-shaped Haribo gummies just so they’d stop asking you what they could do to make you happy; your dealer in New York could be fending off a waiting list filled with scores of discerning millionaires and you could be a permanent fixture on both the Artforum party pages and NewYorkSocialDiary.com, but your beautiful boyfriend with his perpetually dirty fingernails could still be so obsessed with the politics of his own creation that he would take all of that in with an absentminded kiss and ask you again and then again and then a fifteenth time if you heard the difference between nearly identical sound loops on the track accompanying his latest installation.
And then he could leave you. After making you his art object, making your love for him his symbol and subject, after presenting you with a heavy, hand-hammered gold band set on the inside with an uncut black diamond so that only the lump of it, sheathed in gold, could be seen when you wore it—a ring that got its own miniprofile in Vogue—after all that, he could still make your life into a Page Six blind item by leaving you for a jewelry-designing mattress heiress named Sabrina, with unattractive knees and a maddening sheaf of corn-silk hair. And yes, yes, it could be the same jewelry-designing mattress heiress who made your gorgeous, heartbreaking, stupid, human rights disaster of a ring.
None of it surprised Saina anymore. She was twenty-eight and she had turned unshockable. So when the phone rang and she picked it up and found her father in tears, her heart stayed put.
“It is over,” choked her father, coughing to cover the angry wobble in his voice.
“What’s over?” she asked.
“Our whole life.”
Saina looked around the room. My life was already over, she thought. She was washed up, tossed out, ruined and ridiculed and exiled from the magic island of Manhattan. What could be more over than that?
“Baba, don’t be so dramatic. What’s going on?”
“We are leaving.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is over. I lost it. Oh Jiejie, I lost it.”
“What?” asked Saina, her heart now quickening. “What did you lose? Tell me. You have to tell me. You can’t just not talk about it like . . . like everything.”
Saina’s father’s words came out in a rush, the breaking of a giant dam.
“All. Baba lost all. Wan le. You understand what that mean? Everything over.”
“The stores. You just mean the stores, right? That’s what you lost? We talked about that already.” Was he starting to forget things? He was too young for Alzheimer’s.
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. Now we come to New York.”
Her father’s English sounded more broken than usual. Not that he’d ever bothered to perfect it in the first place—the rules of grammar were beneath him, bylaws for a silly club that he had no intention of joining. Why should he spend any energy on English, he’d explained once, when soon the whole world would be speaking Chinese? Now, though, he sounded like a sweet-’n’-sour-chicken delivery boy who’d missed out on America and instead taken up residence in a new country called Chinatown.
“What do you mean you’re coming to New York?”
“We have no home, Jiejie. We come live with you now.”
“The house? But why was that tied up with everything else? I just . . . Baba, I don’t understand. How could there be nothing left? What about your savings? What about your other clients?”
There was a long, humid silence. Finally, he spoke again. “Daddy make a mistake. I think that if I can just hold on for long enough, then everything is okay again. So I just throw it all in, like throwing in a hole.”
“Oh. Daddy. I’m sorry.”
“No point in sorry now.”
“Okay.” What should she do? What could she do?
“How long it take to drive across country? Maybe eight day? Ten day?” He sounded small. Wounded.