The young gallerist lifted the phone. “Hello,” the voice on the other end said. “This is Ed Wyche.” The young gallerist did not believe the voice. Why would the premier artist of the Hampshire School, arguably the most famous figurative American painter of the second half of the twentieth century, be calling her gallery? “Can I help you?” said the young gallerist. The voice, soft, meticulous, explained that he was about to embark on a series of landscapes—this alone was news almost too hot to handle—and that he needed someone to show him around the city. “I have lived in a barn for many years,” Wyche said. “But why me?” the young gallerist said. “As life would have it,” Wyche said, “my ex-wife Joanna is dating your ex-husband Phillip.” The young gallerist laughed. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Wyche exhaled playfully. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said, “but okay.” They set a time for Monday. She barely slept all weekend. She told no one. Wyche was on time, looking just as he looked in his pictures in textbooks, as expected visually as he was unexpected aurally. He had no driver. He drove himself. She took over from there, took him to the warehouse districts with its vivid decrepit facades and cavernous laboratories of optimism, the near-belt exurbs ("nice house," he said over and over again, enlarging the irony), the aging downtown with its glass-and-steel Ozymandiases. In the passenger seat, Wyche kept careful notes, sketched nothing, asked short questions that showed his shyness. At the end of the day, he bought her dinner. “No landscapes were ever made, but we were married the following summer,” she liked to say, but the truth is that more than forty landscapes were made and Wyche only spoke to her on the telephone a single time more.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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