WHAT ABOUT A COUPLE of wall washes here for the Predella panels?”
“Too dark. You’ll get glare.”
“Not if we keep the wattage down. Maybe a row of forty-watt fluorescents with UV filters, say.”
“It’s got to be soft. I want the overall feeling of this room soft.”
“It’ll be like goose down. Trust me, Mr. Manship.”
“I do,” Manship said, full of misgivings. “Just so there’s no glare.”
They moved on into a larger gallery, their footsteps clattering loudly in the vast silences of the empty museum. Manship led the way, followed by a hyperkinetic young man with a light meter bobbing around his neck and scribbling notations on a clipboard. Esteemed as a genius in that rarefied world of lighting designers, he was never referred to by anything other than his surname—Frettobaldi. His professional cards, embossed on rich creamy matte, advertised to the world, “Frettobaldi—the Leonardo of lighting.”
“No doubt you’ll want track rails in here,” Frettobaldi said, entering the gallery, twirling slowly around and around, his light meter held above him like the torch of liberty. “Four, at least, I’d judge. One for each wall. Ten units per track.” He resumed scribbling on his clipboard.
“Ten? My God. This isn’t a night game at the stadium. We don’t want to send people home with night blindness.”
Frettobaldi had a much-publicized reputation for fulminations. He took himself seriously and expected others to behave in kind. He had a volcanic temper. He did not take well to opposition. But the Metropolitan was a big commission, and prestigious, so that in this instance, some rarely exercised streak of practicality in the “Leonardo of lighting” urged accommodation.
They moved on to the next gallery.
“This is the western side of the building, am I right, Mr. Manship?” Frettobaldi strode toward the huge panoramic windows, thrusting his light meter up into inaccessible corners. Outside could be seen the skyline of Central Park West floating dreamlike above the treetops of the park.
“I have a lot of early things planned for this room. Drawings, sketches,” Manship attempted to explain. “They’re pale, faded, very fragile. You’re going to wash them out even more if you use tracks. Just give us some plain filaments here. No ultraviolet, please.”
“Too hot. Too hot, Mr. Manship. You said yourself the stuff is old. You use filaments here, you’re going to melt the stuff, for Christ sake.”
It was always this way with Frettobaldi. Manship had lit many shows with him. First came the intimidation, the naked assertion of will. When that didn’t work, Frettobaldi reverted to tantrums and then fierce sulks. But in the end, when the job was done, the show mounted and lit, Manship was glad to have suffered the ordeal.
“Can you give me a spot for Pallas and the Centaur?” Manship tactfully changed the subject as they turned into another gallery. “I really want to knock eyes out with this.”
Frettobaldi planted himself before the painting, tilting his head this way and that, studying it from every conceivable angle. “This is a big item, Mr. Manship, something you want to play big. What I see here is high-focus lighting, something with a lens system—something you can throw a cool beam with a hundred feet. Maybe a hundred and fifty. I can light that baby like a marquee. Pow. Pow. Pow.”
Frettobaldi jabbed the air with a fist to demonstrate the dazzling effects he would achieve. It was hard for Manship to tell Frettobaldi he didn’t want quite so much pow, pow, pow.
“I wouldn’t care to see anything too …” Manship began his cautious defense.
Mercifully, like salvation itself, a slimly elegant young woman had poked a head of close-cropped ginger hair into the gallery. “Oh, there you are.”
It was Emily Taverner, his assistant, fresh out of graduate school, full of that brusque, self-assured efficiency of the young overachiever, accustomed to the constant fawning of parents and professors.
“I’ve got Dr. Yampolski down in your office, Mark.”
“Good. Tell him I’ll be right along.”
Almost apologetically, he turned back to Frettobaldi. “Can we continue a little later? This old buck in my office was one of my teachers at the Institute. He’s proofreading catalog galleys and he’s running late.”
“I’m running late, too.” Frettobaldi glanced at his watch and fumed.
“Give me twenty minutes,” Manship said. “I’ll get rid of him.”
Even as he said it, he knew he was lying.
“Alec. Nice to see you again.”
The professor, seated in a deeply cushioned wing chair, made a faint nod and mumbled something by way of greeting. He was a tiny, compact man in his late sixties, with a meticulously barbered beard and rough pawlike hands more suited to a bricklayer than a world-renowned art historian. A trim cane of malacca with an ivory-knobbed head leaning against his knee lent an air of old-world panache.
Manship squandered about five minutes on obligatory chitchat—gossip from the gallery and auction-house worlds, news about mutual friends with whom he’d collided on his recent travels to secure paintings for the show. “You’ve got the Lemmi frescoes, I hear.” Yampolski beamed.
“Yes, indeed.”
“And I take it you found my Centurion where I told you?”
“Indeed I did, Professor. Just where you said it would be.” Manship smiled feebly. He hadn’t the heart to tell the old man the fate of the painting. Before Yampolski could spin more problems, Manship steered him to the prickly business of deadlines past. Shortly, the air between them sparked with tension.
“But I never—”
“Alec, you did. You promised those galley proofs.”
“You’ve no need to tell me what I promised. I know what I promised. But you misled me.”
“You did know that the printer’s deadline for all catalog copy was the second week in August,” Manship chided gently.
“Of course I knew, dear boy. But I also told you I was taking the last two weeks in August to go to the shore, did I not?”
“You did, Alec. You certainly did. But you also assured me that wouldn’t interfere with the deadline.”
Yampolski’s face reddened. The rooster wattles quivered beneath his trimly bearded chin. “But you promised me a few weeks’ grace. You said a few weeks would be no problem.”
“Perfectly true. I did promise that, I grant you. But we’re a bit beyond the grace period now, Alec. We’re talking three weeks here.”
Shortly past noon, Manship was up on the second floor, signing shipping orders and taking delivery on a truckful of paintings just arrived from Torelli in Florence.
By 2:00 P.M., the hangers had arrived and had to be dealt with. Just as he’d started down to join them, Emily Taverner buzzed him on an intercom to tell him that The New York Times was on the phone, trying to arrange passes for a sneak preview before opening night. Not to mention, she went on breathlessly, the fact that his desk was strewn with “call back” slips from colleagues, friends, gallery owners, proprietors of top auction houses—everyone who imagined they were owed a favor from him—all trying to wheedle not only opening-night tickets to the exhibit but also to the black-tie midnight dinner to be held on the museum’s rooftop as well.
Emily Taverner went on to report that a Mr. Leonard Rackholm, a local real estate tycoon who donated up to a quarter of a million dollars to the museum annually, had asked for twelve more tickets, in addition to the customary two he’d already been sent for himself and his wife. It was an outrageous request, but with benefactors in the category of Mr. Rackholm, one tended to pay somewhat greater attention.
Somewhere near 4:00 P.M., Manship was seated at the desk in his office, talking with the caterer confirming last-minute details for the affair. A sleek Greek gentleman with a lofty attitude, Mr. Tsacrios had brought along with him a stack of menus, photographs of past extravaganzas, and a portfolio of testimonials from all manner of luminaries—celebrities, statesmen, politicians, and social lions he’d managed to please in the long course of his career. “People who matter,” Mr. Tsacrios proclaimed importantly.
With him came a badly rattled, overworked assistant who had carried in a precariously balanced tower of cardboard boxes containing, as the great man said, a variety of samples for Mr. Manship’s personal “delectation.”
Smile never wavering, Mr. Tsacrios unveiled each of his creations with a flourish. “Brie en croute,” he trumpeted, “Minis caspianis,” then offered Manship morsels of each.
“And, of course, the wine.” He flourished a leather-bound book thick as a telephone directory. “You’ll want a white for the crab. Nothing too big or overpowering, mind you. May I suggest the Chablis. And then something red and positively sinful for the lamb.”
By the time they’d settled on wines and chosen the silver and china patterns, Manship’s head was spinning.