The Genius by Jesse Kellerman Page B

legend. The family of eleven; the arrival in New York, literally on a Greyhound bus; the handbag counter at Saks; the banker buying a birthday present for his wife, leaving also with Marilyn’s phone number; the affair; the divorce; the remarriage; the charity balls; the museum boards; the swelling collection; Warhol and Basquiat and disco and cocaine; the second divorce, rancorous as a Balkan blood feud; the jaw-dropping settlement; and the Marilyn Wooten Gallery, opening night, July 9, 1979. I was seven years old.
    However random or fortuitous this chain of events might seem, I have always envisioned her planning it all out—on the Greyhound, perhaps, rocketing eastward, perhaps written down in a little Gatsbyesque composition book. MY VERY OWN TEN-STEP PLAN FOR SELF-BETTERMENT, FAME, AND FORTUNE.
    She found the similarities between selling art and selling handbags to far exceed the differences. And she could sell. The house in the Hamptons, the flats in Rome and London—those she bought with her own money, alimony be damned.
    Everyone knows her; she has run with or over everyone in her path. She called Clement Greenberg, the most prominent American critic of the twentieth century, an insufferable asshole to his face. She was the first to show Matthew Barney, whom she still refers to as “the Boy.” She has capitalized on our culture’s penchant for recycling, buying up unfashionable work and then creating, through sheer force of will and charisma, a revival whose profits accrue largely to her. She sells artwork that she does not own, on the assurance that she will own it sooner or later—a practice that got her banned from the auction houses for a time. Again and again people pronounce her dead. Always she ascends, phoenix triumphant in her tailored suit, gimlet in hand, to say
Not quite yit, honey
.
    We met at an opening. At the time, I was working the floor for the woman who would leave her gallery to me. I had moved in the art world for a few years by that point, and though I certainly knew who Marilyn was, I had never spoken to her before. I saw her eyeing me through the bottom of her wineglass, and then, in defiance of her own tipsiness, making a beeline for me, wearing her Acquisition Smile.
    “You’re the only straight man in this room I haven’t fucked or fired.”
    An auspicious beginning.
    People used to describe me as having tamed her, which was ludicrous. We simply met at the right time, and the connection proved so expedient, pleasant, and intellectually invigorating that neither of us had any reason to call it off. She is a talker; I am a nodder. We both sold, albeit in very different ways; and though we were both control freaks, we maintained our own private lives, which prevented us from clashing. And although she would never admit it, I think the Muller name plucked a chord of awe inside her. In the pantheon of Old American Money, I might not rate very high, but to Marilyn “My Father was an Industrial Mechanic” Wooten, I must have looked like John Jacob Astor.
    It also helped that we had no expectations of fidelity. That was the unspoken rule. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
     
     
    “LEAVE IT TO YOU,” she said, forking her roasted-pepper-and-goat-cheese napoleon, “to find the one who can actually
draw
. I thought that was the whole point of outsider art, that it looked like shit.”
    “Who said it was outsider art.”
    “You have to call it something.”
    “I don’t see why.”
    “Because people like their hands held.”
    “I think I’ll let them dangle a bit.”
    “You’re really lousing this up, you know that?”
    “I’m not doing it for the money.”
    “ ‘I’m not doing it for the money.’ ” She sat back, wiping her mouth. Marilyn eats like an ex-convict: hunched over, in perpetual fear that her food will be taken away, and when she pauses it’s not with satiety but with relief. Eight siblings and you learn to protect yourself. “You’ll never get over your love of