Ryan Lewis Merritt

Excerpted from:

THE OPENING

by Ryan Lewis Merritt

Paul Grossman stood in the lobby outside the gallery, watching people shifting toward the open doors and disappearing just as their eyes turned to the walls.

He turned back toward the front entrance and glanced at the exit sign before veering to his left and the covered table cluttered with bottles of water and wine. He slowly extended his plastic cup across the red-papered surface.

“Pour,” he said. “Please.”

He kept his eyes down, avoiding the young girl’s eyes. Her small hand reached out to accept the cup.

“Nervous?” she said.

He could hear a smile in her voice.

“No, just thirsty.”

“Well, I can help you with that.”

She handed him the cup back dangerously full. He leaned forward and carefully brought his lips to its edge, as if sipping scalding hot chocolate.

“I can probably help you with your nervousness, too, if you let me,” she said.

“I’m not nervous, I told you.”

“Of course you’re not. That’s the third glass of wine you’ve had and you’ve been here… five minutes?”

“Cup.”

“What?”

“Cup of wine. Big difference.”

He finished the rest of the tepid, watery Chardonnay and shook the empty cup at her before tossing the weightless plastic into a large bin at the table’s end.

“Here if you need me,” she said.

“Thank you, Julia,” he said as he turned back toward the gallery’s entrance, where the swarm of people had nearly doubled.

It was beginning.

Even if he hadn’t already been nervous, Julia Fink had given him something else to feel unsettled about, and he felt the burn of her eyes on his back as he edged toward the end of the long lines of people. Each time he saw her outside of class made every subsequent encounter more charged and awkward. There were moments when he forgot that he was her professor, and that was bad.

He hid himself behind the shifting pillars of people the best he could and kept his eyes down, avoiding Julia’s open stare and the clearing sights of the gallery walls ahead.

He had declined the gallery director’s invitation to preview the show the night before and was suddenly regretting his decision, herding behind everyone else, funneling into the brightly lit unknown. It had been weeks since he had dropped off his work, all of which had been completed in a rushed few months, and he suddenly realized that he had placed himself in a very strange position, almost as if he were about to evaluate his entire life within the next few minutes.

He felt a swift, dull clap on his shoulder and he looked up. He heard a man’s laugh behind him and turned around to find Ed Bellmer, Dean of Arts and Humanities, pale eyes and mouth pinched together in a broad smile.

“Congratulations,” Bellmer said.

Grossman raised his eyebrows as if in confusion.

“Terrific crowd,” Bellmer said. “This must be very exciting for you.”

Grossman nodded.

“Where’s Liz?” Bellmer asked.

Grossman could see Bellmer’s own wife, Karen, a few feet away, talking to a small group of women, and a sharp, confused jealousy swelled and passed as he looked back to Bellmer’s composed face.

“Hang gliding,” Grossman said.  

Bellmer nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing.

“Oh?” Bellmer said.

“Yeah. Guess it’s an ideal night for it?” Grossman said with a shrug.

“It’s fifteen degrees outside.”

Grossman shrugged again, upturning his palms. Bellmer looked down at the floor and shook his head, frowning, and Grossman couldn’t tell if his pity was for the stupidity of the lie or for the freshly transparent dysfunction of his marriage.

He had decided to try a more exotic fiction for his wife’s whereabouts that night, for whatever reason. Maybe because he was tired of having to lie. Maybe because her absence actually bothered him this time. He supposed he had always thought that if the occasion were important enough, it would surmount everything else. He didn’t like finding out that that wasn’t true, discovering the final falseness of what had existed only in his head, not in any conversation between them. He couldn’t think of a more important personal moment in his recent life. She knew about it, and she wasn’t there.

He smiled slightly and turned back toward the gallery doors and the slowly moving strings of people. There were students, parents, community members, many of whom he didn’t know. He had maintained a static social circle in the two years since his arrival at the college, mostly confined to his fellow adjuncts and the two people behind him, none of whom he considered close friends. He showed up when he was invited and spoke when he was spoken to, and that was it. They kept inviting him and he kept coming, in the beginning with Liz and now almost always by himself.

“Very excited to see what’s inside,” Bellmer said behind him, squeezing Grossman’s shoulder and leaning forward a little too closely. “I knew we’d get you to show eventually.”

“Well.”

“This could be the start of something good for you. I really believe it.”

Grossman nearly scoffed at the dean’s statement, which could be read as either patronizing, genuine, or tremendously naïve, but he remembered that Bellmer knew almost nothing about him, given Grossman’s history of subtly lying to him about nearly everything, from his marriage to his past. Bellmer had the framework right, but none of the meat, and Grossman didn’t mind it being that way. Given what Grossman had provided, he supposed it was possible that Bellmer thought this was his first show.

Grossman caught himself looking in Julia’s direction and their eyes met. She smiled and reached down for a wine bottle, cradled it gently in the crook of her arm and winked at him. She was odd, and did not appreciate the social barriers that, for good reason, separate instructor and student. She was also uncannily attractive, with wide, animated eyes and a relentlessly impish edge to her expressions. The moment they met he felt immediately distracted and knew that his attention would likely be divided for the duration of the semester.

He was thankful for the momentary distraction, however, as he reached the edge of the gallery’s entrance, where two more of his students stood busily greeting and ushering the endless procession. He knew he would see more of them inside, as the show had gained a growing degree of buzz around campus, through no efforts of his own. He would like to think that the reason for the buzz had something to do with him, that the strange reverse world of students now critiquing their instructor would give their future classes and discussions a much-needed charge. But the days leading up to the show had been filled with murmur of the potential participation of Vaughn Smith, a Los Angeles-based alumnus of the college whose large-scale works had been gaining wide attention across the country. According to the school newspaper, Smith’s first East Coast show had been two nights before, in Chelsea, and he was scheduled to make a brief appearance at the college that night. The article, which had mentioned the current show featuring “faculty member Paul Grossman,” added that a few of Smith’s recent works would make the short journey north to appear in the main gallery, and that several local news media stations would carry coverage.

Grossman stepped past his students at the door with a slight, awkward nod and entered the cavernous gallery, which was, improbably, filled to near capacity. Above the packed bodies and shifting heads of hundreds of people he saw the tops and corners of expansive black canvases, reaching nearly fifteen feet up the wall. The rumble of voices he had heard outside now resounded as a rolling sea of white noise, its sustained pitch almost unbearable.

Grossman broke free from the block of people gathered at the west wall and began to weave and push between the crowd’s members, working across to the other side of the gallery. He kept an eye on the wall as he moved, seeing an unbroken series of the huge black canvases emerge in the changing gaps between people.

Just as he reached a clearing in the path, he collided blindly into the backs of a few stationary people and suddenly found himself in the midst of their small circle.

“Professor Grossman,” one of them said.

He turned toward the deep voice and saw the six-foot-five frame of Tommy Wu, one of his lesser students, flanked by his considerably shorter parents.

“So sorry,” Grossman murmured to each of them in quick succession. His voice cracked behind a block of air in his throat and his eyes began to water.

“Quite an entrance!” said Tommy’s mother, and she unleashed a torrent of nervous laughter that knifed above the room’s swirling noise.

“Quite a show,” Tommy’s father said to Grossman in a much milder tone.

Grossman tried to smile.

“We are very glad to know that Thomas is in the hands of such artistry,” Tommy’s father continued. The phrase sounded remarkably polished, and he smiled confidently at the end of it.

“Very lovely paintings,” his mother said. “Very…big?”

“Mom,” Tommy said quickly.

Tommy’s parents stared at Grossman, waiting for a response, smiling anxiously. Grossman started to tell them that none of the paintings behind him were his, but he stopped himself, smiled, and bowed his head.

“Very nice to see you,” Grossman said, continuing toward the far end of the gallery. He patted Tommy on the shoulder and his student clapped him on the back.

“Sorry, man,” he heard Tommy say as he moved away, but when Grossman turned back, a line of crossing people blocked his view.

Grossman turned back around and saw a large crush of people clotting the immediate path to the far side of the gallery. He squeezed closer to the display wall, ping-ponging between shoulders, and suddenly found himself spit out in front of one of the big black canvases.

Its dimensions of roughly ten-by-ten seemed to match those of its neighbors, and as he pushed closer, he picked up traces of pale violet emerging from the huge black expanse of the square. A grid of miniature houses bordering the sea lay nearly buried beneath the heavy wash of black, everything just at the very edge of perception, like viewing things through a tornado at dusk.

The same landscape reappeared in the next canvas, the underlying tones shading closer to red. He continued along in front of the first line of viewers and suddenly found himself at the end of the series. The final black square showed only the bare seaside landscape, plainly swept with leaning waves of tall, blue-tinged wheat.

Grossman moved free of the gathered crowd and emerged into a clear, brightly lit area at the gallery’s eastern end. He glanced across the open space and spotted his paintings cluttered in a dense mosaic on the opposite wall. They looked tiny in comparison to Smith’s canvases, and their vibrant colors seemed jarring to the eye, almost offensive. “Immature” was the word that kept ringing painfully in his head, and he suddenly could not look at them any longer. His eyes flicked left and he saw a large standing sign, black on white, blaring “PAUL GROSSMAN: Recent Paintings,” and he turned and moved quickly toward the exit.

“Thought I might see you again,” Julia said as she calmly poured Grossman another drink.

“Thank you,” he said, and sloshed about a third of the full cup on the tablecloth, the floor, and his shoes as he brought it toward his mouth.

“You okay? You look a little…”

Grossman nodded quickly.

“Not good with crowds,” he breathed.

“You want to take a walk? Or something?”           

Grossman looked down at her and exhaled. Their eyes met and she tipped her head forward and smiled wryly.

“Can’t. No. Sorry,” he blurted.

She slowly leaned her head back, nodding, staring, still smiling.

“Thank you, I mean.”

“Let me know,” she said.

He turned and walked back out into the lobby’s main area, moving around the fringe of the thinning crowd waiting to enter the gallery. He stopped and stood still for a moment, looking down at his empty plastic cup. He exhaled and continued toward a set of bathrooms at the far end of the lobby. He passed a standing sign and quickly stopped and doubled back. The handwritten sign read “GROSSMAN EXHIBITION CONTINUES” with an arrow bending northeast. He followed the path and saw another sign pointing straight ahead to an open set of double doors at the end of a long, narrow hallway.