The Eye of the Beholder

Daedalia: Chapter 13

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly chronicled the whiplash of Daedalia’s sudden success, including the money, the secrecy, and the way it left her both proud and invisible. Across a few entries she admitted how lonely she felt without Lefty, how much she wanted him to see her, and how the work was starting to exhaust her even as Daedalia’s myth kept growing.

In September 1993, Kelly disappeared after completing a trio of canvases that would be the centerpiece for Daedalia’s New York City debut at the Wider Still gallery in SoHo the following month.

When Lefty showed up at her place on a Thursday, Kelly was not home. Two days earlier, they’d had another in a long series of arguments about the future of Daedalia. The three canvases were arranged along the wall opposite the front door. Lefty saw them the moment he stepped inside, his hand still on the key.

He gazed into them from where he stood, frozen in the doorway, on the threshold between his best-laid plans and the reality that couldn’t be bent to them. The boundary between the trio of canvases and the room that contained them dissolved. His nose filled with the scent of old timbers baking in the sun, and the acrid tang of coal soot rose in his throat. He was standing in the open, the air ionized by the tumbling rush of whitewater far below.

The experience transcended his visual perception. It was as if the images slipped straight through the ocular nerve, bypassing the silent, unreliable interpreter in his brain that made sense of light, and descended deep into the soft center of him, where they manifested into a hollow foreboding sensation he had all but forgotten from his teenage years. His eyes pricked with tears. He swallowed and took two steps closer. When he did, the canvases emerged again, filled edge to edge with the meticulous result of Kelly’s labor. He felt the floor beneath him again and the stifling stillness of the empty house.

He turned away from the canvases to survey the room. Even before he saw the note on her desk, he knew she was really gone. Dust particles swirled in the shaft of sunlight that beamed down on her desk where he found the note and one of her favorite pens. He sat heavily in her chair and picked up the page torn from one of her notebooks.

Dear Lefty,

I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore. The other night you didn’t seem to hear me at all. I know you don’t understand. The work takes something out of me. It’s not like I have a bottomless well. I know you think this thing is just getting started, but it got away from me and I can’t do it anymore. I’m grateful to you for all your help and mostly for believing in me, but I need some time to figure out who I am. I’m sorry.

Kelly

I can only imagine what Lefty felt after reading that note. He was probably angry, but then he would have been disappointed in himself for being angry. Mostly, I think he was worried, and that worry would plague him for the year and a half it would take for him to hear from her again.

He looked in her bedroom and saw that her closet was empty. The chest of drawers was empty. All of her art supplies remained. He wondered if she had even bothered to take one of her favorite sketchpads, or a couple of pens, but he doubted it. He had pushed her too hard and understood too late that he had done to her what his father had done to him every day of his childhood after it was discovered that Lefty had a powerful arm and a level of control that far exceeded his gangly twelve-year-old body.

Lefty’s punishment was to have to carry on the charade of Daedalia by himself. Contracts had been signed and promises made. There was no one he could call to see if Kelly was okay. She had no friends that he knew of and he was certain she would never reach out to her mother.

He tried to think of the positives. She had plenty of money. She was very young and she needed time to be young. He tried to picture her walking on a beach in Bali or sitting on a bench in the Louvre eating a sandwich. He hoped that’s what she was doing. He hoped she would come back to him in a couple of months fully recharged with stories to tell, but he didn’t expect her to.

She had abandoned him in their moment of triumph. He had cracked the fucking code, broken into the bank vault that only one in ten million artists ever would while they were still living, and like a petulant child she just said, “Not for me.”

He traveled to New York to oversee preparations for Daedalia’s opening there. Greta had continued to be a big help as he navigated into deeper waters. It was she who helped him stage a bidding war between the top galleries in New York, ensuring that Daedalia’s opening would secure the highest profile with the most marketing dollars. It was she who had coached him to be as hard, aloof, and obtuse as possible in his dealings.

These things didn’t come easy for a man whose wiring and genteel Southern disposition demanded he do everything in his power to be liked and put others at ease. She helped him understand that he could play a character. So he did, and he convinced himself he was doing it for Kelly. He believed she would come back, and when she did, he wanted to have a worldwide audience clamoring to see her work. He also had bills to pay.

He spent the week before the opening pushing to make sure everything was perfect. In a year, he had learned a lot about staging and theatrics. Being an untrained outsider gave him an unmatched ability to disrupt conventional thinking.

Upon walking into the gallery on Broome Street, he immediately insisted the space wouldn’t do unless they made a lot of changes. The large front windows would have to be papered over. The walls would have to be painted black. The tracks of lights that lit the room like a football stadium would have to be turned off and replaced with tiny, focused spots. The space had to be dark.

What had been a happy accident borne out of necessity in the little warehouse where he staged Daedalia’s first show had become the only way he would stage the work for the first decade of her career. The darkness created a nocturnal, dreamy state for the viewer and threw the small pieces into dramatic focus.

Kelly had disappeared before they could come up with a name for the show, so he had been forced to do it on his own. The afternoon before the pieces had to be packed and shipped, he spread them all out across the living room and kitchen of her little house just as he and Kelly had done that first time in his studio apartment. He drank orange juice out of the half-empty carton she had left in her fridge and wandered from piece to piece, allowing himself to fall into each one.

Unlike her first couple of series, which were mostly a collection of random ideas unified by her technique, these were operating on a different plane. They were in communication with each other. Where one ended, the next began. She had numbered them on the backs, but he could have sequenced them without any help because they told a story. He wasn’t sure he could have articulated it to anyone else, but it was there, etched into his heart with all the precision of her meticulous pen strokes.

On the sidewalk across the street from the gallery, he stood for a while staring at the words he had written on the envelope he shipped with the paintings two weeks prior. Now they were printed in elegant white lettering across the blacked-out glass of the gallery’s front window.

What We Leave Behind
by the artist Daedalia

He shivered in the October chill, wishing he had brought a camera. He took a deep breath, crossed the street, and stepped up to the door in front of a line of people queued around the block. The doorman nodded and let him in.

It was not a typical gallery show in the city. He hadn’t allowed it to be. It wasn’t filled with people chatting over champagne flutes and canapés. Only ten guests were admitted at a time and each had been required to make a reservation.

The gallery owners, a skeletal couple with the austere names of Hela and Sherman Kirn, had been more than a little rankled about being told how to run their business by this hick and had gone so far as to have him sign a contract stating that he would cover the loss if they sold less than twenty-five percent of the works on opening night.

He signed it, but not without extracting a promise that the owners would not permit their usual patrons privileged access. They would have to wait in the cold like everyone else. Hela and Sherman were certain the evening would be a disaster.

When he stepped into the space and the door closed behind him, shutting out the chill and the honk and murmur of the city, Lefty had what he has described as a religious experience. From his vantage point, he could see each of the nineteen pieces he had selected for the show. None of them was large enough to comprehend, much less decipher, from a distance.

But standing there by the door, he witnessed the emergence of something much greater as he moved toward the center of the gallery. The pieces weren’t just thematically connected. They were a single, living organism, not unlike a stand of aspen trees or an octopus with its thinking appendages furling and unfurling, flattening, shifting as it changed in dimension, color, and texture.

“You’re here. Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice broke with emotion. “How did she know so much about our lives? Is this some kind of stunt?”

He hadn’t heard the gallery owner approach. When he turned slowly to face Hela Kirn, the sharp planes of her face had softened and her eyes shimmered with tears. He felt a discomfort, like the wrongness of putting on a well-worn T-shirt backwards. When he tried to speak, words wouldn’t come. Tears streamed down his face as they had that first time he looked at Kelly’s notebook.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, his eyes drifting back to the middle piece of the triptych displayed prominently on the center back wall. “These pieces, they’re not your story.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you see it? This is her story… and mine.”

The gallery owner’s face drained of color and she stared at him blankly before turning to follow his gaze at the triptych. “That’s our child. That’s our Melanie.”

Lefty stared at the figure in the center panel that only just emerged at this distance and experienced an echo of the feeling that had overwhelmed him a few weeks prior when he had first seen the pieces. In the half dozen times he had looked at the collection, handled the pieces in preparation for this show, he had never seen this, had never been far enough away.

Up close, the works were a bending, twisting labyrinth of flora and fauna interrupted by landmarks, crypts, statues, an overgrown garden shed collapsing into decay. The figure he saw was himself at fifteen, standing on the old train trestle that spanned the gorge off Route 9. The angle of his head, the slackness of his posture, the lump of his bat bag and helmet on the track beside him, it was all there.

He brushed past her and moved closer, hoping to see what this woman saw, but the singular subject exploded into a trillion tiny strokes like the dust particles floating in the air of her empty living room a few weeks prior.

“I won’t sell any of these pieces,” he said, barely audible.

“I beg your pardon?” She moved up behind him.

“You can let them in, but no one’s buying anything tonight.”

He turned to face her, ready for a fight.

“I agree,” she said. “They must not be separated. Not yet.”

Many times I have heard this story and I’m still not sure I believe a word of it, though I want to, more than anything. The collection has never been staged in its entirety since that first showing. For the week it lasted, it breathed in that room off Broome Street and then it was sold off in pieces. The elite collectors of the New York scene, and those who had traveled in from London, Paris, and Prague, had to wait in the cold for hours like teenagers queuing to buy concert tickets. The bidding war was unprecedented for a new and unknown artist.

But no one who saw the work could leave without at least trying to take it home, where they were certain it belonged.

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